Zompist Bboard Again

I’ve no stats on this. However, are you sure it isn’t a case of a contraction “y’all” of unidiomatic “you all” spreading? I happily parse it as such; “you both” is a common enough collocation for me. There’s also a usage of “y’all” as an undifferentiated synonym of “you”.

It shall be a good day for a birthday, though this year I’m stuck as an in-patient in hospital just to get things done more quickly.

(1) Is there a symbol to use in morpheme transcriptions to indicate a morpheme break? I've seen the hash symbol ('#') used. It's frequently needed in precise phonemic level transcriptions, simply because morpheme boundaries can affect the realisation of allophones, just as syllable boundaries ('$')...

This on Wikipedia (we all know the quality of Wikipedia's linguistics articles :roll: ) claims that reduction of final clusters such as /st/, /sk/, /nd/, and /ft/ is found in AAVE, Caribbean English, and Local Dublin English, as if it did not occur in other English varieties. However, I am familiar...

And on another note, I had a notable misunderstanding with my daughter today. I told her by text that I would be picking her up "by the parent pickup line", as I was parked in the parent pickup line. However, she understood it to mean that I was parked near the parent pickup line, and she...

An excellent example of this that people seem to overlook (even though it is so obvious) is the spread of Latin, and from it Romance -- Romans for the most part did not replace the populations around the Mediterranean, in Gaul, and in Dacia but their language most definitely did. Actually, I've see...

Linguoboy wrote: ↑Sat Feb 01, 2025 8:50 pm There's a reason why widows like me gravitate toward other widows; other folks just don't understand.

Insensitive linguistic query: Why 'widow' rather than 'widower'?

Perhaps not easily but feasibly. The first airplanes struggled to stay airborne for more than a minute but after one decade aerospace engineers were turning out machines capable of dogfighting. Today even the worst airplane can outfly even the fastest and strongest birds as easily as humans outwit ...

Should non-Americancs for whom it is relevant start unilaterally replacing "AUS/CAN/UK/US Eyes Only" by "AUS/CAN/UK Eyes Only" on the basis that the US is now an enemy of our stout Canadian allies and our feeble Danish allies?

And over time, speakers may innovate analogical forms that get rid of the ambiguity; e.g., in Standard literary Russian pal'tó "coat" is indeclinable (it's a loan from French paletot ), but in colloquial Russian you'll find the declined plural pól'ta (as if from an underlying singular pol...

I don't understand what difference therapy would make. My feelings are the result of objective verifiable problems with the world that would still exist regardless of what therapists told me. Furthermore I question whether making peace with those problems would even be a good thing. It seems horrib...

I wonder if any languages preserve titles, add a particle or affix indicating verbatim quotation, and then append case markers. Japanese maybe? Many languages have quotative markers, but I’m not aware of any which case-mark them. Pali has a following quotative marker, and for inflection suffixes a ...

There's the case of Stiffkey, which locals pronounce with /ɪf/ rather than /uː/ or other variants based on the first morpheme being a word stew.

Michelson-Morley is a set of data points, unless you’re willing to accept that the ether happens.to move with the Earth.

zompist wrote: ↑Tue Dec 24, 2024 6:58 am Also, are you under the impression that special relativity was a matter of fitting equations to data? There was no data. All the supporting data came *after* the theory.

The Michelson-Morley experiment and the Fitzgerald-Lorentz contraction came before. What you say is true of general relativity.

I think it pertinent that although I normally syncopate federal, I don’t syncopate federality. This keeps affrication in the adjective optional.

Raphael wrote: ↑Sun Dec 22, 2024 4:15 am

WeepingElf wrote: ↑Sun Dec 22, 2024 3:28 am
But the words are related. Different, yes, but related, and the flying toy is named after the mythological beast.

Well, my question is how that came to be.

From digging around, it seems that the earliest European kites were ‘dragon kites’, but I can’t find a good account.

I too have had the wrong vowel in this word, but in my case /eI/ (XSAMPA) through interference from Latin ve:lum.

Is ‘phonemic vowel length’ a well-defined term? One definition might be that long v. short is a pervasive contrast. Another seems to be that it distinguish at least one pair. My, British, English seems to be in the latter category, with the low yield contrast of bed and baird amongst morphemes. Even...

Darren wrote: ↑Tue Dec 17, 2024 2:35 pm Except presumably in lexicalised cases like half/halves?

A good example of the rule not working for <lf> is shelf/shelves. On the other hand, introspection says it works (for me) for health and wealth. It also works for monosyllabic ordinals like tenth.