Zompist Bboard Again

Another point is that conlangs' grammars are created consciously and with clear intent, whereas natlangs' grammars just sort of evolve on their own. People don't intentionally fiddle with morphemes and syntax, not with the intention of how their language "should" look like a couple of gene...

Indeed that's it! Regarding the Kartvelian form, it's discussed in another paper by the same author.

Random musing: why do we sing a song, but not drink a dronk? Make up your mind, English!

No, pretty sure it was positted to occur only in front of *l - something with related with the phonetics (and/or phonotactics) of the sonorant cluster [ml] made it likely to change to bl. IIRC there were examples given of ml > (m)bl in other languages. If only I could find the paper, I'd cite them. ...

Dunno if this has been discussed already here, but PIE *Hebl- 'apple' may not be a loanword at all, and instead just be a metastethised form of *meHlom. Can't track down the paper from academia.edu I originally read that in, but the gist is that an intermediate form *Heml- underwent ml → bl. Also, a...

Right, begining of the Old English period , not language. It's not like the ol' Angles went to bed one night speaking Proto-Germanic and woke up the next morning speaking Old English. "English", "Old English" and "Proto-Germanic" are all labels we arbitrarily tack on a ...

[kx] > [cɕ] / V[+front]_ ['œcɕ] diórhe "(to a woman of higher rank than oneself) Mrs., Ms.; (with titles of office) madam; (of judges, justices) your honour" Palatalisation: ['ɟʝe.cɕæ̥] gaiciah "(to a woman of higher rank than oneself) Mrs., Ms.; (with titles of office) madam; (of jud...

doctor shark wrote: ↑Wed May 01, 2024 11:33 am Here I was hoping unemployment would be a bit more vacation-like. Guess not!

Welcome to the club

I was linked to this impressively accessible grammar of West Greenlandic: https://oqa.dk/assets/aitwg2ED.pdf . It’s a little eccentric in its presentation, but then again West Greenlandic is a little eccentric too, so it works well. From just reading the first few pages this seems much more "f...

Darren wrote: ↑Mon Apr 22, 2024 6:29 am Actually English phonotactics are almost identical to those of Latin, you just have to add some more sC onsets, a few more RC codas and then a indiscriminate post-coda /s~z θ t~d/. Suck it, Catholics.

Ah, the strengths of English.

Who gets to say what's acceptable and what is correct?

I feel like it has to count against loanword hypotheses for 7 that other loanword hypotheses for Indo-European numerals don't seem to hold much water. Blažek reviews them in passing for every numeral and only fails to reject any for 7 because there is no consensus on an internal derivation (the bes...

Alright, I don't know about ancient Egyptian, but apparently Akkadian has sebettum '7.MASC.FREE' and sebūtum '7th.FEM', and both are just a couple of vowel drops away from *septm . Infact, Proto-Slavic - and perhaps Proto-Germanic - rather point to *sebdm , and an alleged pre-form *sebtm nicely acco...

What does a Milwaukee rhotic sound like? Is it close to any of these pronunciations? Searching for "Milwaukee uvular rhotic" turned up nothing of interest.

Just decompose them to a semivowel and a nasal? Nʲ Nʷ → jN wN / V_#
Or if you're feeling rather more rebellious: Nʲ Nʷ → Ni Nu / _#

AI is now taking linguists' jobs, too! A computer science student has managed to decipher the first word on an ancient Roman scroll carbonized by a Mount Vesuvius eruption – with the help of artificial intelligence. For his achievement, the student, 21-year-old Luke Farritor, has won $40,000. But h...

AI is now taking linguists' jobs, too! A computer science student has managed to decipher the first word on an ancient Roman scroll carbonized by a Mount Vesuvius eruption – with the help of artificial intelligence. For his achievement, the student, 21-year-old Luke Farritor, has won $40,000. But he...

Right, that makes sense as to how /jn̩/ would be realised. I was curious to see a spectrogram of it.

Hey zompist, sorry for keeping nagging you, but which one of these is close enough to your idiolect? Maybe e.g. the one by ausg? And is it just me, or does ynarakit pronounce onion as [ɐnjɛ]?

I can't give you references since my PC has died and I am on my phone now, but the Nostraticist literature is full of such comparisons between IE and Afroasiatic. I may be mistaken, but I think I recall hearing it from somewhere rather more reputable - akin to the comparisons of PIE and AA words fo...