Zompist Bboard Again

A headline from the Onion: Bored Iowa Town Trying To Convince Kirsten Gillibrand It Local Tradition To Eat Live Tarantula Granted that it's Headlinese, but that It sounds wrong to me. I don't think it'd work even with full nouns: *Strange Tries to Convince City Bruce Wayne Batman" Hmm, your se...

The general Hebrew pattern is to take the initial consonant of each part of the word/phrase plus /a/ (occasionally /e/), and convert y or w to /i/ or /u/; this is also done with personal names, including their titles, which is why you have רמב״ם Rambam ( R abbi M oshe b en M aymon "Rabbi Moses ...

I'm comfortable saying that a pure change of Ø > k outside of that sort of epenthesis in clusters is impossible, and ditto for any other Ø > obstruent [including nasals] change. The only sort of Ø > consonant change you can have at all is either epenthesis in clusters like that, or epenthesis of a g...

Yeah, debuccalization is extremely common but the reverse essentially never happens. (For glottal stops anyway; [h] can change to a glide or take on some of the features of neighboring vowels so become a fricative at a different POA, and a glide or non-glottal fricative can then undergo fortition to...

It has certainly happened but it's not common, and I'm not aware of any examples where it happened for ALL instances of intervocalic F+S. Juliette Blevins and Andrew Garrett's chapter "The Evolution of Metathesis" in Phonetically Based Phonology (2004) lists several examples of (regular) s...

And you speak which dialect? [and just for the sake of completeness, since I coincidentally included both 'walk' and 'balk' - do you deround 'talk' as well?] I guess I'd have to call it GA. No significant regionalisms that I'm aware of. I have both FATHER-BOTHER and COT-CAUGHT mergers *looks quizzi...

yes

FYI Direct case systems are pretty rare. So what? I wouldn't call that a passive. This is what a direct-inverse language is, so the verb would be said to be in inverse voice when it has an inanimate subject. That's not what direct/inverse languages are, no. Though this has been, or was, a subject o...

(Just a note that the "correct" pronunciation of the grammatical term "ablative" is with stress on the initial syllable, whatever phonological alternations then apply to the word in your particular idiolect) lineage = /'lɪnijɪdʒ/ [which is weird because I'm pretty sure my brain s...

Nice.

Nortaneous wrote: ↑Mon Feb 25, 2019 4:42 pm e i u > ə ɨ ɨ
e > a / _CC#

Presumably these are supposed to be in the opposite order though?

I don't understand what's supposed to be implausible about /pʷ/ > /kʷ/. They're quite similar acoustically and not that different articulatorily, and you accept that the reverse is plausible (this isn't like a debuccalization change where the shift almost always goes in one direction, this is just ...

I want to say that *kw > p occurred somewhere in Chibchan, so it’s attested in the New World too. Yeah, from the posts I quoted it looks like it's also attested in some Zapotecan varieties and in Tlapanec. (And Tohono O'odham, Mayo, Yaqui, and all of Muskogean except Creek come close, with b or bʷ ...

I agree with all of you but one other point I'd note is (at least for me), "provide" is the more natural term to use when the source of the answer is something impersonal, and you're inferring the answer from it, as opposed the answer deriving directly from a human source ("I couldn't...

Then that's just a context-free change of [ b d] > [p t], ordered after the lenition change, so that's reasonable.

ʕ → ŋ is fairly weird, going straight from ɡ → ŋ would be more realistic than the chain you've given