Zompist Bboard Again

In English, treating various large corporate bodies as plural, like the police, the government, or a large corporation is common: Facebook assured me that their intentions are good, the police say that they are effective at fighting crime, etc. You're not wrong. Treating a corporate body acting in ...

I'm not sure if it's because I'm used to staring at my own conlangs, which have a strong tendency to be CV(C) and really short on anterior fricatives, but your language has a very distinctive flavor to it. (Meant as a compliment.)

No, it is definitely in Biblical Hebrew. Or at least in Hebrew by the time niqqud started to appear. Yeah, the collapse of the stressed diphthongs was a northern Canaanite feature (including possibly northern Ancient Hebrew -- IIRC there are spellings like <bt> instead of <byt> in some northern ost...

You sure about that /ʃ/ in pre-modern Hebrew? Or are you using Aramaic even for Yerushalayim? The Amarna letters suggest /ʃ/, and Rabbinic literature consistently connected the name with שָׁלוֹם. *shrug* Though this does raise an interesting question of my own. Is the -ayim a modern reconstruction?...

In sound changes, are names of things or entities considered sacred more resistant to sound change than other words, or is there no difference? Are there sometimes "irregular" sound changes that are really just unusual sound change rules for names of things or entities considered sacred? ...

NB the Achaemenid kings continued [...] to pass on their religious rites in Avestan. Just as a note— I don't think we actually know this. I've been reading histories of Persia, and it's remarkable how much we don't know! We know that Darius was devoted to Ahuramazda— but it's not even certain that ...

Part of the thing with Aramaic was that it was actually the main administrative lingua-franca of the Achaemenid Persian Empire, I think mainly because the ruling Persians didn't want their language to be spoken widely by the common people. The Persians didn't care about keeping their language a sec...

Perhaps it's a British thing? I've only heard Teddy as a diminutive of Theodore and indeed associate it overwhelmingly with a certain President Roosevelt. Ted Kennedy, though. Also Ted Cruz. Unless there's a general Edward > Ted, but Theodore > Teddy rule? I didn't say TR was the only "Ted(dy)...

Perhaps it's a British thing? I've only heard Teddy as a diminutive of Theodore and indeed associate it overwhelmingly with a certain President Roosevelt. Personally if my name were Theodore I'd prefer "Theo" as a diminutive, and if my name were Edward or Edmund I'd be quite insistent on t...

@Raphael, your name etymologies are fine. Theophoric names are extremely coming (the bulk of Semitic names are of this type, and they were also common in Germanic: Gott fried, God iva < God gifu, Thor ketill, etc.). Names meaning specifically "gift of god" or "blessed by god" are...

Nominative is a proparoxytone for me; I simply delete the first unstressed /ɪ/. Same goes for abominable , interesting , irritable [*], miserable , and veritable and for caricature in rapid speech. In literature , I sporadically drop the /ə/, i.e. [ˈlɪɾɚtʃɚ] (and not "/ˈlɪ.tə.tʃɚ/", given...

For me it's syntax. I love building vocabulary--it's fun, honestly--and I can even manage with morphology, but then I sit down to use the conlang and find I have no clue how sentences are supposed to work in the language.

Very true. However, that's an understandable mistake because the letters look exactly the same. Also, note that n with a long right leg comes up as a selling error, whereas eta doesn't. For the record, the same is true of other pairs of Greek letters and Latinate variants thereof. They look differe...

I like <ň> for /ŋ/. <ñ> is also fine. <ƞ> looks nice. <ņ> would be cool if the cedilla connected to either one of the "legs", but it doesn't (at least in any font that I know, and if it does in some stylistic font, it's basically irrelevant), so it's generally not what I'd use even if eve...

Gr a y is just obscenely ugly. May, day, bay, lay, play, say, ray, way...etc Those must be hideous, huh. No, they're fine, especially since a bey, ney, and Rey are completely different things from a bay, nay, or ray. :p It's not <ay> that's ugly; it's <ay> specifically in the color between black an...

Of course it was a bad idea! It's caused the whole of the US to spell lots of words correctly , which is very irritating to read... Fixed it for you. Besides, the only reason British spellings remain relevant in the largely homogenized English speaking world is their prevalence in major population ...

Pabappa wrote: ↑Sat Dec 15, 2018 8:31 pm https://www.etymonline.com/word/gaol

Yeah, all of the changes were pretty superficial. The only British-American spelling difference that's ever caused me trouble is draught . I went years not realizing it was the same as draft , thinking it was pronounced the same as drought . Ah, yes, that's another one, though I pronounced it to rh...

Probably the only challenging spelling for Americans is manoeuvre. Otherwise I can safely say that Americans have no trouble with -re, -our, or even -ae- spellings. I don't see where the alleged wall is.

I only know of this occurring to ejective fricatives (see Semitic). I've seen people cite this for implosives, but I'm not familiar enough with any language family with implosives to say myself. Osage reflects Siouan *t’ as ts’, and Wintu has qx’ but no q’ or qx, suggesting it affricated. Apparentl...