Zompist Bboard Again

I'm deriving a daughter from a protolanguage, and decided to run a set of word/plural pairs through the sound changes to see what happens - and it is a mess ! There's not even one way of making a plural: depending on the word, you variously have no change, the end consonant being changed, or a rand...

WeepingElf wrote: ↑Wed Feb 13, 2019 11:23 am 2. The Etruscans are descendants of the twrš3, another of the "Sea Peoples".

The twrš3 might just have been just ancient descendants of Soviet time travellers.

Besides honourifics there are also pronoun-y uses of pejorative terms: "I asked Charlieᵢ but the jerkᵢ wouldn't help out." A test: if you replaced "jerk" with a non-pronoun-y noun like "doctor," it couldn't corefer with "Charlie." (A pronoun but not a referri...

chris_notts wrote: ↑Mon Feb 11, 2019 12:27 pm

mèþru wrote: ↑Mon Feb 11, 2019 8:24 am US Colleges usually bring such cases to the attention of municipal courts, not their own authorities, because in some places (even whole states), nudity is a crime.

How do people reproduce in those states? Or bathe?

In a bathing cap, duh.

Regarding the special place in hell line, a representative for the British prime minister told reporters, “I think it is a question for Donald Tusk as to whether he considers the use of that kind of language to be helpful.” I think the British prime minister has mistaken Donald Tusk for someone who...

Okay, many thanks to all of you. I had not actually known that active participles existed as a distinct word form in any language.... i had just taken the word "participle" to mean a passive participle. This makes much more sense now. And I see there is a new active participle in modern P...

One thing I have always wondered: how does rhyming work in languages with significant inflection and agreement? Consider a language like Latin where nouns and adjectives agree in number, gender, and case. It seems like rhymes would frequently turn into repeating the same inflectional form in succes...

I've always been a fan of Arabic badr 'full moon' Polish nów /nuv/ “new moon”. The stem of one word for urine in Russian appears to be /s:/, yielding for example /ssu/ for the 1st person present indicative: see https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/ссу#Russian Polish ssać “to suck” has present tense ste...

I once saw the following Runic inscription (probably a band logo) on a T-shirt: ᛏᚻᚢᚱᛁᛋᚨᛉ Apparently, the one who designed this made a mistake. Can you spot it? Of course, the Runic script has a separate letter for /þ/, so the th digraph in the lettering is wrong, Wait, isn't the inscription itself ...

Swedish - what's up with your phonology? You don't get to just invent a new IPA symbol just for your own language! Also what sound is it anyway - saying it is unpronounceable for foreigners is a cop-out that doesn't explain anything! Plus way too many vowels, especially front rounded! I don't think...

I near-shitposted about a "prosodic" reconstruction on Tumblr about a year back , dunno if any of you are thinking about this though. Why do it affect P instead of B? I guess because it's *P that occurs in (almost) complementary distribution with *Bʰ, not *B. Also, I realize it's a near-s...

mèþru wrote: ↑Sat Jan 26, 2019 8:13 am So happy that the Pole, the (now known as anxi) is back! I missed her presence here!

A while back, I learned that it used to be a practise in English to indicate more, uh, complex relations by prefixing "Welsh" to simpler ones - eg a "first cousin once removed" who was a parent's cousin would be a "Welsh aunt" or "Welsh uncle". Yesterday, whi...

Besides Grassman's law, is there any other linguistic reason to suppose Graeco-Aryan? (Yes, I know that it's a terrible argument) The augment and basically the whole verbal system. Also aspirated reflexes of the Dʰ stop series (which is what triggered Grassman's law). But in Greek the deaspirated *...

Polish ił — a type of a finely-grained rock composed of clay minerals, with little non-clay traces, but distinct from clay, formed primarily before the quaternary