Zompist Bboard Again

My guesses (without running any trials on the website): Arabic English Esperanto German Indonesian? Italian Japanese Latin? Lithuanian? Latin Russian Tagalog? (Putting them in alphabetical order was a bit of a giveaway…) Correct :) It's interesting that you considered ********* for #8. A language d...

Markovia is by far the most multilingual nation in the continent. Everyone speaks at least a dozen languages. It is said that the average Markovian can reach native-like fluency in any language in a day. The claim that every Markovian is a polyglot is a lie. Markovian languages are actually just gib...

I sent a complaint to my ebook store yesterday, and got an email reply today. Now I wonder whether I should be happy I got such a quick reply, or angry that the company is making their customer support people work on a Sunday. Maybe they have their customer support team in a country where Sunday is...

I don’t understand your argument here. It is parallel to a sentence like: I can read. That is, your sentence is a statement of ability (i.e. dynamic modality), rather than singling out a specific event, though the distinction gets quite blurred in the past tense. Indeed. "I can see the ship ap...

Hello/goodbye
Italian ciao /ˈt͡ʃa.o/
Vietnamese chào [t͡ɕaːw˨˩]

Hello
Estonian tere /ˈtere/
Ancient Greek χαῖρε /ˈçe.re/

Finnish moi /ˈmoi̯/
German moin /mɔːɪn/

This one might be a stretch:
Port/harbour
German Hafen /ˈhaːfn̩/
Korean 해항 [ˈhɛ(ː)ɦa̠ŋ]

I came across the following striking comment in Haspelmath’s (in my opinion excellent) paper The indeterminacy of word segmentation and the nature of morphology and syntax ( https://doi.org/10.1515/flin.2011.002 , highlighting not in original): […] can we define the morphosyntactic word as a ‘maxim...

The paper mentions this about uninterruptibility: As Mel’čuk (1993: 173–174) notes, the semantic relations must remain intact if one applies this test, because otherwise almost any string of morphs could be shown to be interruptible. Another requirement is that one must be sure that the interrupting...

In Tagalog, "very beautiful and very kind" can be translated as "napakaganda at napakabait" or "napakaganda at bait". The prefix napaka can modify a word it's not attached to. Although perhaps one could argue that napaka should be a word on its own.

I would like to share a project of mine: palasimi . It's a website with graphs of colexified concepts, similar to those in CLICS and A Conlanger's Thesaurus. It doesn't quite have as much linguistic information as CLICS, but every concept in palasimi is annotated with a short description, which I ho...

Between Tagalog and Spanish: - the infamous puto mamon - siguro (maybe) vs. seguro (sure/certain) - almusal (breakfast) vs. almorzar (lunch) Recently, I learned that English dinner can also be a midday meal. It can be traced to Old French disner (lunch). I wonder how common it is words for mealtimes...

My attempt: Text 1: - alam: known/knowledge - poste: after - mi: me/I - wakte: time - tapat: should/in front of/loyal/confide - wa: and - fahima: understand - omnis: all/every - iksakte: exactly Text 2: - piskos: fish - polus: sticks - kon: with - cigke: five/fifteen/fifty - mikros: small/tiny - pos...