Zompist Bboard Again

I can't help on resources, but if you're only having 500 glyphs, you'd be looking at a really tiny number of words - 'common words' are far more numerous than we tend to assume. On the project I'm working on at the moment, I've got probably over 300 words and I haven't strayed far away from "no...

Damnit, only one person away from being the first to mention vershaerfung! Yes, Verschaerfung is a thing in the alps - iirc it also applies in some Germanic dialects, as well as Romance ones. /j/, and sometimes /w/ > /G/, /g/ or /k/ before consonants. And those glides in turn are often created by vo...

Yes, we've played this before. Generally, the rule is that your questions are only in the form of giving something to be translated, and the answer is the translation. Although of course you can use shortcut questions (like, finding out a bunch of words, and then asking if any of the rest of the sen...

That's fine, but I feel that the facts that *h2 did not split into three There's also no evidence that the velar stops split into three, other than that you'd like them to have done so in order to give you a route to your preferred, Uralic-friendly vowel inventory. and that velar stops do not (cons...

Modern fiction for manly men tends to be concentrated in certain genres, like noir or hard SF. I don't read those much so I rarely come across it. The main claimant to his mantle seems to be Cormac McCarthy. I read one book by him and that was enough. Which book? The one with the horses in it. Well...

Maybe nobody else will understand why the Pathetique on a clavichord is so fantastic. Your first reaction will probably be that it sounds weird and ugly. But if you have a spare half an hour, listen to the whole thing! He's got some serious pickups on that machine! (Which, in my opinion at least, r...

Question: what is the third-largest party in British politics? [hang on, we already did this back on the old board, didn't we? well, never mind...] Well, it might depend how you define a party's size. Let's go with something simple and objective: which is party has the third-highest number of seats...

I feel it's important in Wales at least. They hold 1/6 of an assembly where the majority is 31-29 and have only two less seats than the Conservatives. a) with all respect to the Welsh, Wales has a population only slightly over three million - slightly bigger than greater manchester or the west midl...

I'd like to hear an analysis on Plaid Cymru's leadership election, especially as my mother closely identifies with them according to Political Compass (she thinks Welsh and Scottish independence are stupid ideas and thinks of herself as centrist, so lol) Plaid Cymru exist, still, I'm told. EDIT: to...

If you told someone about Proto-Germanic (and most of its descendents), they wouldn't believe you. "So, verbs follow one of approximately twenty-six conjugational patterns, not counting the irregular ones. There's only two basic paradigms of inflectional endings, though those show consonant gra...

I don't read a lot of modern fiction because a lot of it is influenced by Hemmingway's style (which I loathe--prose should be beautiful, not composed of hijacked newspaper headlines--give me Tolkien or Le Guin or Austen any day), but having recently forayed into fiction published in my lifetime, he...

I've detailed eight strong verb classes! Only another eight or so to go!
...and then only five or so weak verb classes, probably.

...seriously, Germanic, what is wrong with you!?

It wouldn't have occured to me to pronounce either 'Phoenix' or 'Phoenician' with /o/, as the spelling so clearly indicates /i/. Do Americans really say /fonIks/ (for the bird or the city (or the person)), or do you just have the /o/ in the adjective form? Personally, I have /fi:'ni:Sn/, phonemicall...

@Sal Your correctness and rudeness are at an unsatisfactory perfect balance I accept that my first two paragraphs were overly frustrated in tone, for which I apologise; in my defence, they were rude in response to rudeness, and sometimes there doesn't seem to be any recourse short of urgent, honest...

I do not avoid passive voice. I suggest rewording the question to "why is the passive voice avoided?" Note Pullum's point that "the passive voice is bad" has effectively become true by definition, because any prose that anyone considered bad is by definition considered to be in &...

No, I don't have a citation for that '95%' - I don't even know how you'd operationalise these terms for a rigorous study. It was impressionistic, a way of saying 'not universal, but close to it'. The point being that even without explicit numerical values, stating that something is "close to u...

I think that Proto-Dravidian was spoken by a peoples neighbouring and likely trading with the Indus Valley Civilisation. I think that the population of the civilisation originally spoke an unrelated language (probably related to either Burushaski or Nihali) and may have continued to do so in later ...

No, I don't have a citation for that '95%' - I don't even know how you'd operationalise these terms for a rigorous study. It was impressionistic, a way of saying 'not universal, but close to it'. And since people seem to be drawing an unintended binary out of it - either there's 100% population repl...

some correlation between linguistic and genetic affinities is to be expected, Alas, language shifts happen often enough to weaken such correlation almost beyond significance. With respect, that's nonsense. Language shifts not at least significantly motivated by demic expansion occur occasionally . ...

Pabappa wrote: ↑Sat Oct 06, 2018 11:27 am Crazy quilt means you mix different fabrics together, I think.

But isn't that inherent to being a quilt?

Pronounced with stress on the first word.

Huh! OK.