Zompist Bboard Again

Given similar conditions, as in land species in an atmosphere close to earth, it's harder to find ideas for really different manipulators though; tentacles are great underwater; trunks maybe? Non-avian maniraptorans could have developed hands, but they would not have been erect, but would have had ...

There's also the frictionless approximant [ð̞], particularly post-vocally. I think that may be particularly prone to merger with [v].

One oddity in length marking systems is the old 'Precise System' for simultaneously transliterating and transcribing Thai. (I'm not sure that it was ever completely worked out ) It used the 26-letter Roman alphabet plus Vietnamese horned letters plus diacritics, with quality-distinguishing diacritic...

This feels a bit forced to me, to be honest, though, and I'm not comfortable with phonemic analyses that are radically different for language varieties that are fundamentally crossintelligible. As distinct analyses are quite possible for the same speech variety, I think they must be regarded as an ...

Just to confirm, macrons signify long vowels, so "cāk" would be pronounce the same as cake, right? Macrons can signify long vowels, yes. The <a> is cake is an /ei/, not /a:/. But length marks can persist despite vast changes in phonology, especially if an old system of length contrasts is...

it's funny how, when freedom of expression is curtailed, everyone imagine what they want about the clues they imagine they'll find wherever they want... curtailed? Yes. Saying that certain posters should be killed is almost certainly prohibited and perhaps even illegal, and then it becomes a questi...

I think my parents (for whom this is very much not their first rodeo) are advising caution about extrapolating from the results of these local elections to a general election. Local elections are frequently used to cast protest votes against the government regardless of colour, and there are defini...

rotting bones wrote: ↑Mon May 05, 2025 4:32 am These days, kids who read Steinbeck in school think the working class protagonists are stupid and deserve the bad stuff that happens to them.

Linguistic sidetrack: Is read present or past tense? Both make sense. I wonder if I only paused at this sentence because they are pronounced differently.

I mean this nicely, but why does xxx seem to end all their sentences with an ellipsis? It's not important but if anyone can tell, I'd like to know. As a rightist in a den of lefties, he's probably frightened of getting his head bitten off. He was suspended recently, so a little nervousness is not u...

The coffee-making test bothers me. I fear I would fail it. Even an instant coffee-making test might be hard. Some of us seem quite good at failing the Turing test. Horses as transport have niche rôles for policing and for hunting with dogs across fenced land. Of course, humans being reduced to niche...

For me, Meyer and liar , though the first is barely part of my active vocabulary, may surface as two syllables and therefore differ from mire and lyre , which are also infrequent words, possibly rare enough not to surface with monophthongs ([æː]). I'm not sure if the monophthongisations count as a r...

zompist wrote: ↑Wed Apr 16, 2025 3:53 pm I was just looking at a Hausa grammar, and learned that "he" is shī. (And pronouns do have a gender distinction.)

Can you think of other words like this? That is, language pairs where roughly the same phonetic word has opposite meanings.

And Welsh for 'she' is hi.

Glass Half Baked wrote: ↑Mon Apr 14, 2025 7:42 pm Another possibility would be to just go to the Wiktionary page on Latin lemmas and copy-pasting the alphabetical list one page at a time.

It doesn't meet the requirement. Wiktionary page titles don't show vowel length, unlike say Pali pages.

Does anyone have any specific sound changes that they remember occurring in their own speech that were not merely growing out of "little-kid-speak" Yes. As I was proceeding from Pump Court to North Court at about the age of 21 I realised I had changed the English nucleus from [jʊə] to [jɜ...

Ryusenshi wrote: ↑Sat Mar 15, 2025 10:14 am I caught myself saying piece of shits instead of pieces of shit. Has anyone heard that from native speakers?

I've caught myself doing the same sort of thing with similar univerbated phrases, but this phrase isn't in my active vocabulary.

I often heard it the claim that the Greek of the Gospels is, in fact, pretty bad Greek and obviously non-native. I'd love to know enough Greek to be able to see that for myself! I don't know Greek either, but from what I've heard, it depends on which one: Mark is the most obviously non-native, whil...

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...