Zompist Bboard Again

The only time bare "nice" has an ironic meaning for me is when people say it with A Tone, or in text messages if it's ended with a period. (Formal writing of course uses different rules.)

Vanilla and chocolate.

The problem I have is - exactly what happens? Take vowel deletion: if I have (say) 5 vowels, that makes 25 vowel pairs; which vowel gets deleted? What sort of rules have languages used to resolve this situation? (e.g. always delete first vowel, always delete second vowel, etc.) The same happens wit...

Thank you. That's perfect, and I'm really happy to hear about this. I didn't want to try and puzzle out what else to do with those.

I have already looked and haven't found anything, but I don't want to assume it's impossible for this to exist. So are there any languages in which long prenasalized stops exist, even arguably? If not, are there languages with long voiced stops? If not again, what would be the closest I could reason...

If we REALLY wanted to get into headline-ese, that "and" after "seized" could be replaced with a comma instead as well as the other changes. Or for modern headlines it should probably read like this: "Italian authorities order the ship be seized AND YOU WON'T BELIEVE WHAT H...

If we REALLY wanted to get into headline-ese, that "and" after "seized" could be replaced with a comma instead as well as the other changes.

... But it’s normally better to have some other factor coming into play for the feminine form to become a diminutive, ... Akangka was saying the reverse, diminutive > feminine. I'm assuming what is meant is that the language started with no masculine-feminine distinction grammatically, but did have...

I'm working from Old Japanese and I want to add more nasal sounds and fricatives mostly from prenasalized and unvoiced stops, respectively, to make it sound more "cat-like". But I don't want it to all sound the same once I've done this. Is there a way to derive new stops from other things...

I'm working from Old Japanese and I want to add more nasal sounds and fricatives mostly from prenasalized and unvoiced stops, respectively, to make it sound more "cat-like". But I don't want it to all sound the same once I've done this. Is there a way to derive new stops from other things?...

Another example is "oregano", which I'm sure I've heard TV-Americans pronounce with stress on the second syllable. Non-TV-Americans pronounce it that way too. ;) However, that is where the Spanish stress falls. You mean there are people who DON'T stress it on the second syllable? :P I mea...

So friends and I were having a discussion about a dream. My friend dreamed that their very toothy character was a dentist. In response, I wrote: "If you have enough teeth, they make you a dentist by default." I realized that there was some ambiguity between whether the teeth themselves mad...

To me, all bathrooms are restrooms but not all restrooms are bathrooms. But in the moment, I might use them interchangeably as long as someone understands I need to take care of certain biological functions. But I agree that a bathroom proper has a place to bathe; A restroom does not.

Whether male or female, I still think of Charlie as more of a nickname. I don't know how I'd feel meeting someone with the actual given name "Charlie"; I'd assume it was short for something

I'm pretty sure adhoratory mood is a linguistics term and not something that I made up, but google literally told me it doesn't exist and I can't seem to 100% remember what it means.

Dunno if this would go better in linguistics since it deals with realism based on natlangs, but it is for a conlang so: How realistic would it be for a language to go from SOV to VSO, possibly by fronting the verb for some kind of emphasis? What other parts of grammar would be likely to change early...

There can be up to two "accented" syllables in a word, 1 fall and 1 rise though they don't have to come in that order. I've been denoting a rise with <'> and a fall with <,> after the affected syllables, but I don't know if that's intuitive to just me or if there's a better way. Why not m...

Trying to figure out how to note tone changes in my language Nyango* since it's not exactly like Japanese pitch accent but I'm not sure it would be a normal tone language either. (Maybe I'm wrong on that latter point.) There can be up to two "accented" syllables in a word, 1 fall and 1 ris...

What are some things that you would find acceptable in a conlang in a book or other fiction, but not in a standalone conlang? This could be too much similarity to English (or whatever language the conlanger is writing in), in story things that might affect the language ("This sub group actively...

Yiuel Raumbesrairc wrote: ↑Sat Dec 29, 2018 9:56 am

linguistcat wrote: ↑Fri Dec 14, 2018 5:45 pm Does anyone happen to know what verbs could be used in Classical Japanese for moving the capital? ...

遷す（うつす） would be the word you are looking for. The link provided explicitly gives 都を遷す as an example.

This link provides a short explanation of the kanji used.

Thank you so much!