Zompist Bboard Again

Depends how you evaluate the attestation in the Book of Wei of a polity named Yamatai in the 3rd century CE. The element tai would not have been characteristic of a native Old Japanese word, but an archaic form of 手 ( te - "hand") might have had a proto-Japonic form */taj/, noting the roo...

The Ming-deng / Mindong language of Min (Chinese) has synchronic consonantal assimilation /t, tʰ, s/ -> /ɾ/ medially after a vowel or /ʔ/ (along with /p, pʰ/ -> /β/, /k, kʰ, h/ -> zero, /ts, tsʰ/ -> /z̞/). I'm not sure how it developed, but missionary works in the 19th c. didn't note this phenomenon...

re: /i/, /u/, perhaps a strange question. but why not treat /j/ /w/ as the consonantal allophones of /i/ /u/, i.e. the other way around? This analysis is also common in languages where /i/ /u/, /j/ /w/ don't contrast and perhaps alternate in some ways.

This must have been discussed here before, but a question for rhotic speakers (esp. NAmE I guess?): do you pronounce what's commonly transcribed as /ɚ/ /ɝ/ as a syllabic consonant?

A follow-up question: if that's possible, does that produce vowelless sentences for English (at least in your variety)?

Romanian has suffixed articles, which kind of reintroduced case to the nouns. Languages which have more case distinctions in pronouns and articles are not uncommon, especially not in Europe. You can see that, for instance, in German, where many nouns no longer distinguish case but the articles stil...

Chinese quan 'power' < 'force(ful)' < 'fist' jue 'chew' > 'live off the revenues' > 'lord'. The first one is possibly true, both reconstructed as *gron in Old Chinese. The second one is likely just coincidence though, in OC they're *zewɢ "chew" and *ʔsewɢ "lord", the initial con...

For negative statements and questions, without resorting to adverbs like 还 hái "yet", my intuition is to use the continuative SFP 呢 ne instead of le , though some others may not share my judgment Yeah, I wonder how that'd fare if we asked native speakers if they'd agree with this use of 呢...

The complex system of number classifiers seems to have been borrowed from Middle Chinese; Japanese also has its own native counter つ that can be used with native numerals to count anything, if I understand right, demonstrating that weird complicated innovations can be borrowed and maintained , espe...

There's no "perfect". A system always gets changed, a nudge here and a push there. Even ignoring phonology: All Chinese languages plus Japanese and Korean have developed a complex system of classifiers, which are usually* mandatory, presumably from historically classifying nouns really oft...

A Mandarin verbal aspect, -过 -guo . It's formally an experiential, but when used alone it means "ever". e.g. nǐ chī -guo fàn ma "Have you ever had a meal?" To ask about a recent experience, which is the more common usage of English perfect, you also need what's sometimes called t...

(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...

(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...

1. As I mentioned, one word I recognized was Tianxia , but the subtitles seemed to translate it as "world"--shouldn't the translation have been "China"? Is Tianxia used more literally to mean "world"? What makes you think it means 'China'? As far as I know, it means 'w...

forgetting politeness level in japanese would be a good way to be rude right? and aren't these just examples of being 'rude'[by western definition of rude] in japanese? That's impolite, though not necessarily insulting. But apart from the examples given above, Japanese literally has a slew of prono...

Strictly speaking, profanity and obscenity are different - indeed, they're opposite. Something is profane when it improperly combines something serious and important (usually something very good or very bad) with something ordinary, in a way that seems to show insufficient respect for the serious t...

生于萨，长于萨，住于加拿大。[Simpl. Chinese] shēng yú sà, zhǎng yú sà, zhù yú jiānádà be.born in El.Salvador, grow.up in El.Salvador, live in Canada 'He was born in El Salvador, grew up in El Salvador, and is living in Canada.' This is admittedly Literary Chinese, as using the preposition 于 yú for location is no...

No idea if anyone said this in the 10+ ppages between your post and my reply, but French has a similar situation, where for "in some country", you use à , plus article, if the country's name is masculine (usually -> au , contracted with the article, e.g. au Japon ; small island countries ...

Nocellphobia?

Or like someone suggested, akineto(phono)phobia.

Does anyone know of a natural language where the grammatical marking of a certain type of oblique object is suppletive based on the number, definiteness, or topicality of the subject of the clause? For example, a language that regularly uses one adposition to mark a certain type of oblique object w...

For reduplicative ablaut, it has the general pattern (back-vowel, front-vowel) whereas the universal says that such ablaut goes (front vowel, back vowel). doesn't Manchu also have this? Speaking of Manchu, it really doesn't make sense for *five out of six* vowels to be back, a colourful array of /u...