Zompist Bboard Again

hebrew https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D7%90%D7%A0%D7%95%D7%9B%D7%99#Hebrew might have an interesting story, but wiktionary doesnt know what it is. I’m not too good at Hebrew, but I’ve never heard אנוכי being used as a first-person pronoun — only אני. But you’re right in that the given etymology do...

I find this timeline surprising... I know that 6-12 months is what linguists often manage to get funds to stay somewhere, but I've always assumed they just concentrate on collecting data about some particular topics, rather than try to fully learn the language and claim native-like usage (or even n...

I don’t know about how he would learn the language, but you may be interested in the curious case of Narcisse Pelletier . He was abandoned on the Cape York Peninsula in Australia and was found by the Uutaalnganu tribe. He learnt their language and belief system readily, and to such an extent that h...

In reply to Masako, writing is clearly less natural than a beaver dam or bird nest, because beavers build dams and birds build nests instinctively, and every beaver builds a dam and every bird builds a nest, while human writing is not hard-wired and not all humans or human cultures use or have devel...

Congrats! I've actually thought what you've shown of your conscripts so far had a lot of potential so I'm excited to see what you end up with.

Most Mayan languages also had unconditional *ŋ --> x, unconditional *ŋ --> h, or unconditional *ŋ --> n.

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KathTheDragon wrote: ↑Fri Jan 10, 2020 11:09 pm

Whimemsz wrote: ↑Fri Jan 10, 2020 7:33 pmthere's also, e.g., English sporadic x# --> f# as in "laugh".)

That only occurs after historical /w/: lawx > laxʷ > laf

Oh. Hm, yes. Good point! (Anyway the statement about grave consonants often patterning together or turning into one another is still true.)

The Norse may or may not have transmitted any diseases, but there were plenty of cases in OTL of horrifically devastating pandemics that were the result of fairly limited contact. For instance, the epidemic which swept down coastal New England from 1616-1619 and virtually depopulated the region (the...

Yes, [+grave] consonants are labials and velars, which have some acoustic/perceptual similarities and which not infrequently pattern as a single class or easily interchange in phonological rules or sound changes. (A few examples of such sound changes -- Arapahoan *p --> k and Romanian velar --> labi...

That would certainly be possible, since both are [+grave] (and there's precedent for the mirror-image unconditioned sound change *p --> k in Arapahoan, and intervocalic *p --> kʷ in Wichita) and of course in very small consonant inventories like this there's often some pretty large allophonic or fre...

Glad to see this thread continue. A comment on something from last year: In El Salvador it's common to pronounce /ps/ as [ks]: opción [okˈsjoŋ]. (Many people, including me, do only say [opˈsjoŋ] though.) I know someone from Buenos Aires who consistently pronounces "pizza" (in Spanish; I do...

Sure. As already noted, speakers are blind to previous sound changes, so whatever happened before is irrelevant. So all you're asking is "can a language develop dʒ and tʃ and treat them as consonant sequences rather than affricates?" -- to which the answer is yet.