Zompist Bboard Again

vlad wrote: ↑Sun Feb 18, 2024 9:17 am

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• Chinese (Mandarin): Teresa Teng - 月亮代表我的心 (24.1 million)

I think the biggest lesson of this bullet point is that the Chinese internet doesn't use Spotify. (And possibly that Cantonese-speakers use it more than Mandarin-speakers.)

Possibly! But once you have an excellent transcription system and a large body of works using it, why change it? It's a lot easier to learn the important differences than to reissue all that work. Hm, that makes sense. To me Americanist transcription is much better for use as the basis of an orthog...

Is there any merit to the idea that American linguists were resistant to adopting the IPA in part because they associated it with prescriptivist speech departments? From Wikipedia : The hostility derives ultimately from the existence, in most American universities, of Speech Departments, which we do...

See also the popular warning/exhortation "hurt people hurt people".

Most Amazonian languages are polysynthetic (except for Macro-Jê). I’m not sure about Andean languages. But an agglutinative language with ~3 morphemes/verb seems more similar to the surrounding languages than the typical SAE language would be. Yeah, exactly -- I read your original post as contestin...

This, on the other hand, I don’t believe. ‘me-lo-comi’ is about average for most non-Eurasian languages in general and most South American languages in particular. Aren't many of those languages (especially in South America) considered polysynthetic? I wouldn't go so far as to say that Spanish is p...

I'm not sure about running herds of geese across the open plains, but keeping flocks to forage in the fens seems reasonable enough. Use them on land that's marginal because it's wet, rather than because it's dry. I suppose they'd compete with pigs, cattle, and water buffalo, and with drainage and fl...

True but all these languages you listed except for abkhaz (which has voiced stops instead) have tenuis stops according to the wikipedia phonologies you posted (and some have even more). Tzeltal, a Mayan language, contrasts aspirated and ejective stops and affricates. Though /p'/ is only realised as...

Alright, I know this is very much a necropost at this point, but I have a longstanding sorta-naturalistic conlang that does something like this: lexical items are marked as the heads of phrases by lengthening their primary-stressed vowel. Secondary-stressed vowels in subordinated words also become d...