Zompist Bboard Again

I remember doing a lot of /! !ʷ ! !ʷ/ clicking when I was a child. Onomatopoeia for a clock, I suppose. But it doesn't seem that far from there to glottalised sounds.

I wish I still had the information on Ptokan from that time. It no longer exists, and there won't be another language with that name until I hurry up and make it.

I keep forgetting that it tends to be "Ich habe Hunger" in German. That is, "I have hunger" in constrast to English's "I am hungry".

How are the fricatives in Basque/Euskara pronounced? Or, which of <s> and <z> is most similar to the <s> in your English idiolect?

Diba reminds me either of Falafel from Kevin Sorbo's Hercules , or the cabbage merchant from Avatar: the Last Airbender . Mostly the former. Oddly enough I've never heard of the former, although I am certainly familiar with the latter. In this case, Most Multitudinous Diba is practically a cut-and-...

"Coca-Cola" is still in use as the formal name for the drink usually called Coke however Pepsi is rarely referred to as "Pepsi-Cola" in speech or writing anymore. Is this because "coke" has multiple meanings whereas "Pepsi" can only refer to one thing? The la...

Diba reminds me either of Falafel from Kevin Sorbo's Hercules, or the cabbage merchant from Avatar: the Last Airbender. Mostly the former.

You have truly honoured this mere mortal with your words, oh Lord High Knower of Things. My only regret is that this human tongue would burn in holy fire were it to attempt to speak but a syllable of this language.

My internal lexicon has 'Cf:' as "compare wif [sic with]" instead of "confer".

I can agree to disagree. Cf. Italian plurals like biscotti and spaghetti . I think pretty much the entire populace is "learned" enough to know that Italian nouns have mandatory singular and plural forms. However, unless they've specifically studied Italian, they don't know what the actual ...

matrix - matrices I had mathematics lecturers refer to two indices, one indice /ˈɪndəsi/; and two minima, one minima. I think I've also heard the same for nuclei. - Learnèd irregular plurals (crisis - crises, cherub - cherubim/cherubs, one ninja - three ninja/ninjas). For a lot of these there's a s...

Space60 wrote: ↑Fri Jun 14, 2019 9:00 am ...alveolar trolls...

These trolls are under the bridge of the nose.

English. Oh, sure, only on participles, and only for intransitives (for transitives it's a distinction in voice), but the difference between "the breaking mug" and "the broken mug" is when the breaking takes/took place. To me, the breaking mug is either meaningless/ungrammatical...

English. Oh, sure, only on participles, and only for intransitives (for transitives it's a distinction in voice), but the difference between "the breaking mug" and "the broken mug" is when the breaking takes/took place. To me, the breaking mug is either meaningless/ungrammatical...

I thought High Lulani might have something like this, so I searched my dictionary for self or reflexive. Turns out I did originally, but I repurposed that word to be "third person topic pronoun" long ago without actually updating the dictionary. Oops.

Still better than Hoshi Sato's linguobabble on Enterprise , though. I remember for a while, the Talk page of the Wikipedia article on the Klingon language was full of discussion as to whether Archer's explanation of "polygutteral dialects based on an adaptive syntax" should be included in...

I wasn't sure what log-jam was, and Nortaneous's translation was no help because I'd never heard of oakum either. A day of learning!

Deciduous and coniferous. One means that a plant loses its leaves regularly, and the other just means it's part of a taxonomic group characterized by the production of cones. The actual antonym of deciduous is "evergreen." Dromedary and Bactrian. Until we engineer an n +1-humped camel. Ac...

hetim biqesbuwa kesh parurum tree-PL DAT-week-ACC few bloom-TENT-3pl The trees will flower in a few weeks. kuwebti ki bisinwa gashti expel-PASS -2sg if DAT-exam-ACC cheat-2sg If you cheat on an exam, you will be expelled. What does the double dative-accusative marking signify? kudanla biqar giyek y...

In my grammar write-up, I want to distinguish between derivational suffixes that change word class and those that don't, similar to but distinct from the derivational/inflectional dichotomy. So I'm looking for nice little labels. Would transclass(ic) / cisclass(ic) work, if I gave an explanation? Or...