Zompist Bboard Again

The first thing that comes to mind is that the Old English infinitive ended in /ɑn/ rather than the /æn/ expected from Anglo-Frisian brightening through the influence of this vowel. Do you happen to known of any sources for this idea besides Wikipedia? Unfortunately Wikipedia does not cite any sour...

About Ossetian cases Are Ossetian genitive and dative descended from PIE cases or a separate creation? The dative is certainly a separate creation, there is no PIE dative in *-n . The genitive doesn't look PIE, either. Looking at the table in Wikipedia , I have the impression that all Ossetian case...

I always understood coarticulations as phones with multiple simultaneous articulations at different POA, such as the [kp] and [gb] found in many Niger-Congo languages. I think the term coarticulation is used in multiple, but related, ways. It can refer to the doubly articulated consonants you menti...

The German Civil Code, as a classic example of German over-meticulousness and extreme obsessive-compulsiveness, has more than 2000 sections dealing with all kinds of matters. And because it is so extremely meticulous, among its more than 2000 sections, there are four sections (961, 962, 963, 964) t...

I made a conlang Yorwicks, a descendant of Old Norse that survives to the present day in the Vale of Pickering (maybe some day I'll finish and publish it here). One thing I ultimately noticed is that if you use the right sound changes and grammatical developments you can basically make Yorwicks ind...

Also, see this Language log post, which is from 2012, so not in response to the 2014 monograph per se, but Faarlund’s claims had received some media attention before that. https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=4351 This extract strikes me as interesting: Parallel but independent innovations in c...

There was some discussion at the time. Here’s a response by Kristin Bech and George Walkden: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/nordic-journal-of-linguistics/article/english-is-still-a-west-germanic-language/FFF1593D4EC6A2E7D9671595509F0815 Also, here’s some back-and-forth between Faarlund and ...

This may sound silly, but I am still somewhat confused about how the perfective aspect works. If the perfective marks verbs as completed and considered in their entirety, does that mean it generally implies past occurrence even in languages without grammatical tense marking? What about future-tense...

I myself have noticed that /kw/ and /gw/ for me are [kʷw̥~kʷw] and [kʷw~ɡʷw] respectively for me, i.e. they have a clear semivowel component but the plosive component is also labialized, but this is such a phonetic detail I rarely bother to mark it in transcriptions. That makes sense. A fun exercis...

Speaking of typology, my understanding is that a system with voiced fricatives contrasting with voiced stops but not with voiceless fricatives at the same point of articulation is very rare, although maybe not unattested. This is from WALS: Approximately another third (33.4%) of the languages survey...

You might as well try to say /uu/ and /wu/ are the same. Well, of course they aren’t! However, in narrow transcription, [uu] and [wu] are the same, for precisely the same reason that [ii] and [ji] are the same. I think it's true that there is no well-defined (and generally agreed-upon) language-ind...

i'd expect that if this happened, it would soon resolve itself back to having stress on the stem, or towards a stressless language (Ive seen French described as stressless). Stressing the least grammatically salient part of a word is unnatural. imagine if in english we said "THE crew OF four H...

Did Proto Norse keep the strong initial stres of Proto Germanic? AFAIK, yes. Was it the reason behind phonological changes between Proto Norse and Old Norse? What is the difference between strong initial stress and regular initial stress? Is it just that with a 'strong' stress, the stressed syllabl...

How is pitch accent indicated in IPA? IIRC, for Swedish people use either acute/grave accent on the stressed syllable, or they precede the word with 1 / 2 . For Japanese people often use the downstep symbol after the accented syllable. There are many alternative ways. For Swedish I have also seen t...

The idea that some types of scenarios are prototypically used with the perfective or imperfective, based on their actionality, is of course not incompatible with the idea that the perfective and imperfective have some sort of prototypical semantics that's not related to the actionality of the scenar...

Does anyone else here pronounce initial /kw ɡw/ in English as [kʷʰ ɡʷ~kʷ], i.e. not as two distinct segments but as a single labialized consonant? I'm pretty sure my /kw/ is phonetically [kʷʰ] — it's articulated very quickly, like two sounds superposed on top of each-other, or with only a very brie...

This thread is, or was originally, about understanding perfective aspect, so I was hoping that I might be able to contribute something on this subject. However, I don't think it's possible to understand aspect without understanding actionality, so I'm going to start with this subject. Something abou...

You and others have given examples where the exact same action is described as telic or atelic, which suggests at the least that telicity involves the speaker taking a viewpoint. This can easily be conditioned by the language involved. To put it succinctly: If you ask whether or not the sentence &q...

Can I ask a related, but tangential question? Telicity is often defined in terms of presenting an action as being complete, and perfective verbs carry the meaning of completeness (or boundedness). I'm struggling to see the difference - although there obviously is one. Telicity can be marked by diff...

Icelandic retained -s in the copula well into the second millennium: ek em, þú est, hann/hún/þat es… The Sagas were mostly written in the 1300s and some of them have these forms vs. the -r forms. At least according to Jackson Crawford, the 2sg form *est is actually not attested in Old Icelandic man...