Zompist Bboard Again

Plenty of Indo-European languages (Romance, Greek) lost /h/ twice, first (probably) as a laryngeal and then secondly from some other source (*s, *gʰ). But yes, sound change has no memory. I think there's also at least one Austronesian language that underwent the *t > k shift twice.

Baked a pumpkin pie for a get-together of linguists this evening--had to bring the pumpkin from home, as you can't get it canned on this side of the Atlantic (at least not in Vienna). I made a couple of modifications to the recipe: - because you can't get packed dark brown sugar in Austria like you ...

So... Bolivia? If I understand correctly, Morales has continued to be popular with the public, but the constitutional gymnastics required to allow him to evade term limits and the accusations of fraud in the most recent election led to the military crypto-coup that forced him to resign. In the imme...

Suppletion in adjective degree is very, very common, unsurprisingly. There are a handful of African languages that use stem suppletion to mark plurals, though I can't remember any names off the top of my head. It kind of depends on what you mean by suppletion, because sometimes suppletion is just re...

Vijay wrote: ↑Sat Nov 09, 2019 1:32 pm Year and a half?! Here, at home, I think I've had like two computer mice over my entire life.

I carry my laptop bag with me everywhere. They get bonked from time to time.

I just treat computer mice as recurring medium-term expenses...about every year and a half, I have to get a new one. They're only like twenty bucks, anyways.

Vijay wrote: ↑Fri Nov 08, 2019 9:13 am

dhok wrote: ↑Fri Nov 08, 2019 3:11 amBut how was he communicating with them? Putonghua?

I would think so. That's generally how Chinese people communicate with each other if they speak different dialects IME.

These days, yes! But in 1970, in a not-particularly-developed corner of Jiangxi?

I have a question about the mutual intelligibility of the dialects. I recently finished Ezra Vogel's (excellent) biography of Deng Xiaoping, who was a native speaker of Sichuanese Mandarin and spoke Mandarin with a strong Sichuan accent all his life. During the Cultural Revolution, Deng was purged a...

(an example of a cognitive-quirk constraint: the way humans operate in the world seems to mandate or at least very strongly encourage physical objects in the world acting as arguments and physical actions as predicates. Sensory attributes like "green" or "tasty" seem to be up fo...

One alternate history I saw a couple years ago was predicated on Carthage winning the Punic Wars, and engaging in small-scale colonization of northeastern Brazil and the US. I think the real variable here is time--how many centuries do the Americas have to prepare?--plus a colonizing/contacting powe...

Measles, it's worth noting, doesn't seem to have really jumped to humans (to the point of becoming endemic) until about 1100-1200 AD.

Of course, that can be move back a few centuries.

Wow, thanks so much, dhok! Okay, maybe this job is not a great idea then, though I'm not going to write it off immediately. Don't--I mean, OK, if you're sure, but I would advise you to write it off. There are thousands of kindergarten jobs that pay probably double what you are looking at. Kindergar...

Sorry for not posting earlier. I was in Chengdu for seven months in the spring and summer of '18, so I've gone through the system. The first and most important thing is to make sure you are legal . You will need a 120-hour TEFL certificate (there are some decent options online, though from June 2020...

The Chomskyans propose all sorts of rather baroque tree structures for most syntax. What I'm saying is that I'm not sure most syntactic constructions have anything other than what they say on the tin. ma doesn't need to be assigned to any sort of question node; it's just there, derived mechanically ...

So this is not really a thought about Chinese, but it is one inspired by Chinese. The lack of inflectional morphology in Mandarin (or any variety of modern Chinese, really) means that L2 learners spend most of their "grammar" time learning syntactic transformations. IIRC this is basically ...

The bot seems to half-translate Latin and then run with the translation: Quo usque tandem abutere, Catilina, patientia nostra? Quam diu etiam furor iste tuus nos eludet? Quem ad finem sese effrenata iactabit audacia? The question posed this time is much like the one sent in the beginning: Why do you...

Min Nan (Teochew dialect) Initials /p pʰ b t tʰ ts tsʰ k kʰ g/ /m n ŋ/ /s dz~z h̃ h/ /l/ Zero is also a permissible initial. Finals (really medial + final) /a ja wa/ /ã jã wã/ /aʔ jaʔ waʔ/ /am jam wam/ /aŋ jaŋ waŋ/ /ap jap wap/ /ak jak wak/ /e we ẽ wẽ eʔ weʔ eŋ ek/ /o jo jõ oʔ joʔ oŋ joŋ ok jok/ /ɨ...

The industrial revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race. But I think that most of the problems are much more complex—and much harder to solve—than that… For example there are some areas that I think are very promising. I can't remember an area in which it has been har...

cedh wrote: ↑Sun Oct 27, 2019 3:11 am Interesting!

dhok wrote: ↑Sat Oct 26, 2019 8:54 am b) I am not good at memorizing German separable verbs; they all run together.

A side note: the prefixes ge-, be- and ver- are not separable.

Correct, of course. I should have said "prefixed verbs" generally.

lol That use of radicals is so cute. Let me guess: - You use 宀 mián, the roof of 家 jiā 'house', for German an- by thinking of the roof as a contraction of the character 安 'safe', pronounced ān in Mandarin. - You use 口 kǒu 'mouth' for German ge- because of PIE *ǵebʰ- (or *ǵeP-) 'mouth'. - You use 土 ...