Zompist Bboard Again

His wife confirms he’s still alive: https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/noam-chomskys-wife-denies-reports-of-his-death-in-wake-of-stroke/ This has happened at least once before in the last week, and I believe he is very ill in hospital, so I guess people are just repeatedly jumping the gun.

According to the New Statesman, so maybe it's true this time: https://www.newstatesman.com/ideas/2024/06/the-noam-chomsky-i-knew This links to a ‘Not Found’ page for me. Can’t find any corroboration anywhere else. It was working 30 mins ago! Seems like maybe the obituaries were premature again...

Mine's no longer active (or at least not shared), but I did write one in Haskell. It was pretty cool writing my own featural/phonemic regex engine in a functional language. I still think that mine is/was really good, but the great problem with SCAs is that while everyone thinks theirs does it best,...

Mine's no longer active (or at least not shared), but I did write one in Haskell. It was pretty cool writing my own featural/phonemic regex engine in a functional language.

According to the New Statesman, so maybe it's true this time:

https://www.newstatesman.com/ideas/2024 ... sky-i-knew

Problem is, I haven't found a word generator I've been fully satisfied with using. Mostly because I haven't been able to get any to properly fit these constraints: "first and second radicals must not be identical in POA" "second and third radicals must not be non-identical in voicing...

First attempt at translating something (The King and the God) into the on-off reworking / project of the last few months: Native orthography Piru ngikur, kuodeûh nguod. Tzin ritzmi thuthuga na kuodeûh. Tzetzuk na ngeata kuoduar thedmek. Dit 'uq mab thi hiunge naûg: "Tzeb sin thopalh leada!'' Du...

Fed some conlangs to ChatGPT and asked it to analyse them. It was eerily correct. I fed it a sample of something recent (a translation of The King and the God)... it did guess it was a conlang without me even asking, but its analysis of the grammar was quite wrong. I'm not sure if it misunderstood ...

bradrn wrote: ↑Thu Feb 15, 2024 6:25 pm

chris_notts wrote: ↑Thu Feb 15, 2024 1:04 pm Coastal Marind is Papuan but not closely related to Yimas as far as I know, so it may be an areal feature?

I doubt it — Marind is in the south, Yimas is in the northeast. There’s a big mountain range between the two.

Oops! Still odd that the two cases I know of are both Papuan though.

https://chrisintheweeds.com/2024/01/24/non-recursive-nps/ "In any case, one interesting thing about Yimas is that it has two kinds of noun phrase structure, a tightly integrated but non-recursive structure, and a much looser, more appositional structure." I just noticed that my Coastal Ma...

https://chrisintheweeds.com/2024/01/24/non-recursive-nps/ "In any case, one interesting thing about Yimas is that it has two kinds of noun phrase structure, a tightly integrated but non-recursive structure, and a much looser, more appositional structure." Interesting, thanks! I must have ...

https://chrisintheweeds.com/2024/01/24/ ... rsive-nps/

"In any case, one interesting thing about Yimas is that it has two kinds of noun phrase structure, a tightly integrated but non-recursive structure, and a much looser, more appositional structure."

It looks like you chose to write the preverb and the following verb as one - was that specifically to reflect the pronunciation differences due to boundary effects in the orthography? Wordhood is a little bit hard to define for this language. I might write something more about it later. (Or you cou...

Bradrn posting about this triggered me to post about an orthographic dilemma I've been pondering. I won’t be focussing much on phonology here, but it is worth noting that the preverb as a unit is somewhat distinct from the verb complex proper. For instance, hiatus avoidance does not apply at the end...

I won’t be focussing much on phonology here, but it is worth noting that the preverb as a unit is somewhat distinct from the verb complex proper. For instance, hiatus avoidance does not apply at the end of a preverb: e.g. to-asan ‘it fell’. Similarly, when they contain more than a single subject ma...

Here's a PDF by the same guy (although not the same paper) where the numbers look a bit dubious:

https://core.ac.uk/reader/230317740

But even though I had my doubts, I thought it was interesting partly because I can also see how the proposed mechanism is vaguely plausible (preferences for location of sentence or phrasal stress correlating with word level structures), and because my current conlanging project has both initial stre...

How many languages is he considering, and how strict is his definition of initial and final stress? WALS gives stress data for 502 languages, of which just 143 (28%) have stress on the first or last syllable. That strikes me as a pretty low N. If just moving the "Altaic" languages around ...

I've just been flicking through "The Study of Stress and Word Accent", and there's a chapter that makes the claim that stress location and branching order is correlated. The initial data they have seems to suggest a weakish but statistically significant correlation, but Tokizaki argues tha...

At least in German the standard analysis of these cases in most frameworks of theoretical phonology seems to be that these consonants are ambisyllabic, i.e. they belong to both syllables. I find this baffling; it sounds much easuer to give up on the fictional closed syllable restriction on lax vowe...