Zompist Bboard Again

Is there a good term for free morphemes such as Japanese ka in karateka , which means "expert, practitioner" but only when preceded by an appropriate word such as karate ? Or would the fact that the meaning is contextual make ka a bound morpheme? It s eems to function like English -ist, bu...

Yes definitely, e.g. Deborah > Debra, not *Debor.

Never Trumper John Podhoretz Calls for School Bombing, Deletes Twitter

It was nice while it lasted, but today ... Twitter is gone.

Arguably there is a difference between "compare-able" and the well known adjective comparable , but I'd always use the prescribed pronunciation for both senses if I had an audience. https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/comparable lists both pronuncs... I'd give sense III a good chance of using...

Is in "capitalist", in the English language, someone who politically supports capitalism, or someone who practices capitalism by running a business? Either, or both, depending on which axe you have to grind. You can also equivocate between the two, if you need a bad argument. https://www....

Actually even a regular alveolar flap might work, as long as there's *something * there that affects the vowel quaity, perhaps by lengthening. aX uX ----> ai au isnt that different from English's Great Vowel Shift, after all, where the determining factor was length.

I've been relying on a sound change that I'm not sure about, thought it'd be worth asking here. It's ur → au̯ with the r in coda. I'm imagining something like ur → ɨrʷ → əu̯ → au̯ ---with rounding shifting off of the vowel and onto the coda. Does that seem plausible? (There's a parallel ar → ai̯ th...

The macrons appear perfectly on mobile though, at least on my phone, which uses a sans serif font.

Are you changing things because you've made mistakes, or because you've thought of better ideas? If the former, yes, conlanging is a lot of work, but you'll get there, because eventually all the mistakes will be fixed. If the latter..... having more than one conlang might help. After all, what if tw...

But it *is* English, going back at least to 1949: https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/leggo Honey, how long until you're ready? "Go ahead & start the car." 𝑀𝑜𝑟𝑒 𝑙𝑖𝑘𝑒 𝑔𝑜 𝑎ℎ𝑒𝑎𝑑 & 𝑐𝑟𝑎𝑐𝑘 𝑎 𝑏𝑒𝑒𝑟 "Just need to pick out shoes!" 𝑇𝑖𝑚𝑒 𝑡𝑜 𝑟𝑒𝑤𝑎𝑡𝑐ℎ 𝐺𝑜𝑇 "How cold is it going to be?&...

Sometimes poetry bends the rules, e.g. https://i.imgur.com/1dlR1Yy.png ... I think "leggo"is actually aphesis for "let go of", since it's either used in isolation or directly followed by the noun phrase.

The stressed vowel sounds right, and I think all Americans will have that too. (Whether it's CAUGHT or COT will vary.) The final vowel is wrong, perhaps a hypercorrection to do with scientific plurals like theses

you mean if the noun phrases are present but not the case morphemes? In that case, they wouldn't be noun phrases; I guess you could say the case marking is fused with the noun marking, or something. So you can't really say that one case is more marked than the other. yes, thanks. I think it's unrea...

It seems sneeze and snore may be orthographic loans, a sort of spelling pronunciation, where an /f/ was read as /s/ because the letter shapes are similar. In some other English dialects, I think fn>n, and perhaps these dialects reborrowed an /s/ because of the well established spelling.

Someone acting silly will often stumble around as though they were blind, only seeing things as they bump into them or are otherwise surprised. I didn't really need to provide that detailed of an etymology, since the speakers perceive that morpheme as an indivisible unit, but I didn't want to just t...

Polish miś "teddy bear", and other senses. Probably the various definitions there are all related but Wiktionary is grouping them as if they are separate words that just happen to be spelled the same.

Poswa: pupola "watch; small portable clock" pupomi "wristwatch" More likely than not, the second word would take over completely if watches were in common use, since if watches exist, portable clocks almost certainly do as well. There is also pupotša for a wall clock or something...

Pabappa . I wonder how much of my trouble grasping the glosses comes from my ignorance about Poswa, and how much from the fact it's supposed to be baby talk :) One particular question: the morpheme glossed TR in bamambabo , I'm curious what exactly it does. Is it some kind of applicative? Does it h...

There's still the phrase "venture capitalist", right ? Showing that context can matter.

I thought they were both /beis/ due to early childhood overcorrection but in 2nd grade another kid embarrassed me and I never made that mistake again.