Zompist Bboard Again

1. There is also "all die Bücher" 2. Theoretically, there should be a sentence *"Was entspricht das Wort?", but this doesn't work, maybe because "was" cannot be marked for the dative case. If you make the question about animate entities it kind of works: "Wem entsp...

I think the most natural option for me would be the following for the last two sentences.

Manchmal fahr ich am Fluss Fahrrad.

Ich zog meine Turnschuhe an, um am Fluss zu joggen.

Maybe the right vowel system for a starfish alien conlang.

I would say in emails and on the internet, I never capitalize 'du', etc.

What do you call /ji/ → /iː/? It's meant to be a regular synchronic sound change in some of my noun declensions when the /j/ follows a consonant (the /j/ is in the stem with the consonant before it, the /i/ is in the case marker), but I swear the general sound change along with /wu/ → /uː/ is commo...

Is it because it contains more than a short vowel before the glottal stop?

I’ve never heard of this terminology before. Could you give a source? On the other hand, I do know that a ‘checked’ syllable is one ending with a stop (in SE Asian linguistics, especially Sinitic), so perhaps ‘smooth’ refers to a syllable not ending in a stop. (Oh, and there’s a typo in the title.)...

Papua Indonesian is similar in that it has existential copula ada but no real predicative copula. The existential copula is usually not used for locations though. Ada orang di depan pintu. EXIST person at front door. There is someone at the door. Sa di rumah. 1SG at home I am at home. Anjing sendiri...

As for German, this is a hotly debated topic. Concerning your specific question, some people use frau (note the lack of a capital letter).

Also, I think lively/lebhaft vs. dry/trocken keeps the metaphor under the assumption that it's from leaves of a tree or something were dry is the opposite of lively.
Fesselnd, unterhaltsam and kurzweilig might also work in German.

How about thinking of phonemes as sets of allophones, like we do for living languages? Maybe more than one answer is accurate?

Isn't it less plausible simply because (non-contextual) fortition is less common crosslinguistically?

I notice there's a bit of an oddity with semantics in two seemingly-synonymous phrases: "I had an unfair shot." implies the unfairness works for the speaker. but "I didn't have a fair shot." implies the unfairness works against the speaker. Is there a term for this? Or at least,...

Yes, and there are some lexical differences between the audio and the subtitle, as you might have noticed.

Try listening to "upin&ipin" (e.g. here) vs. the Indonesian dub of Doraemon (e.g. here). I did not do any measurements, but impressionistically there is a stronger prasal stress and more utterance final rising in the former than the latter.

I can only speak for the Indonesian side here. Standard Indonesian (SI) is similar enough to Standard Malay to allow Indonesians to read Malay texts (apart from a few false friends that cause a lot of laughter). The well-known children cartoon 'Upin dan ipin' which uses some kind of standardized col...

Not really sure if there is a clear natlang precedent, but an applicative could also add an experiencer. "It blues me" would mean something like "It looks blue to me" or "I see it being blue."

You should have a look at Bantu tone languages. All have H (and L), a lot have additional HL and some allow LH. Alternatively, you could look at West African tone languages in general.

And Medieval Korean lost vowel harmony! Man, those Europeans really got around. You're being ironic, but Richard W's post is unironic and serious... You're all ignoring the null hypothesis, or "pulling a Taskubilos." There are three ways that a non-European language exposed to European la...

And Medieval Korean lost vowel harmony! Man, those Europeans really got around. You're being ironic, but Richard W's post is unironic and serious... Also serious is Arabic gaining a high use of a preposition meaning "by X" with passive verbs (من قبل min qabli X, literally "from befor...