Zompist Bboard Again

I have no expertise in Welsh, but on the linguistics subreddit I've seen some discussions among Celticists expressing concern that Welsh, despite its relative vitality, is starting to suffer from the same disease that's afflicting Irish; that is, English-native learners of Welsh, who never fully acq...

Today I was imagining a language in the vein of Brahui or Albanian, or perhaps Romani or Ossetian, in that it would be either an isolate (or an "isolate within the family"), or geographically far-removed from the rest of its family, having been exposed to many layers of loanwords and profo...

It was brought to my attention by a post on the Reddit linguistics subforum that several more resources are now available for Iau , the Lakes Plain language of New Guinea with six phonemic consonants, eight phonemic vowel qualities, and eight phonemic tones that has been the object of wonderment for...

A random English thing: A while ago I told my friend about an opera I recently listened to, Koanga (1896) by Frederick Delius. When I said the name of the opera, based on how I had read it in my head, I intended it to be /koʊˈɑŋgə/, with the first syllable adapting a foreign "cardinal o", ...

I always assumed it was called Indo-Aryan to disambiguate it from the other languages of India, not to disambiguate it from Iranian. We have the languages of India, the "Indic" languages, primarily consisting of Dravidian and... the other one. The Indo-European one. Indian Indo-European? I...

Not a real scholarly observation to make here, more of a gripe, but I've been looking at a lot of PIE etyma lately due to the class I'm teaching, and I feel like the reconstructed PIE roots without at least two consonants (with solidly regular reflexes in multiple branches) are kind of fake... The n...

This is quite interesting. It's kind of similar to a project I have in which only five syntactic relations exist (two of them kinda marginal) but more ambitious. I think it would be interesting to see what kind of grammatical constructions would emerge in a framework like this. I agree about the pho...

I hope this isn't against board etiquette, but in case anyone is interested, I'm running a "typological voting game" on the CBB where we're gradually building a sketch grammar by voting on features from the World Atlas of Language structures. If anyone has an account over there, feel free ...

For a little bit now, after reading about allocutive agreement in Beja ("a morphological feature in which the gender of an addressee is marked overtly in an utterance using fully grammaticalized markers even if the addressee is not referred to in the utterance"), I've speculated about a la...

I love this! Great data visualization. I did a study on "Canadian raising" e.g. rider [ɹaɪɾɚ] vs. writer [ɹʌɪɾɚ] in some American English speakers and found some similar patterns, i.e. that the difference between the two was exaggerated in primary-stressed syllables and "dampened"...

"Bookcase" is a different word than "book case". They aren't stressed the same. (Also, do folks really have [kː] in this word, as Wiktionary shows? It's just [kʰ] IMD.) Yes, for me it has a geminated stop just like in "black cat" (but with only one primary word stress)...

I've often been suspicious of those claims about Japanese, as they seem to confuse etymology for morphosyntax. E.g. ぼく boku comes from Ch. 僕 'servant' (Tang *bhuk). But it doesn't mean 'servant' when used as a pronoun— quite the opposite, it's an informal-to-rude male pronoun. And what do the no-pr...

I'm not sure, but I think that's less about the fact that [ɪh] in particular is rare and more about the fact that intervocalic [h] is fairly uncommon in English.

Just another badly-done hoax. On Reddit /r/linguistics was nearly duped by several of them over the past few months, including one called Luxun. Irikad was posted to the subreddit sometime last year I think. There's also that Focurc guy, who writes (possibly a garbled version of) Scots in an exotic ...

My American English idiolect seems to have a phonological hapax, or, uh, a phonological dis . For me, historic /ʊl/, /ʌl/, and /oʊl/ all merge to something like [ol] - thus pull and pole ; bull and bowl ; hull and hole ; gull and goal ; mull and mole ; cull and coal are all homophonous pairs. Except...

So Icelandic, Faroese, Greek, Latvian, and Lithuanian are the only modern IE languages to preserve the IE nominative singular -s, right? And the latter three are the only ones to preserve it as /s/? Curious that these are basically on the fringes of Europe (or at least IE-speaking Europe, with the B...

the much stronger claim that complexity in one part of a language will always be perfectly counterweighed by simplicity in another part. There is no such claim. Yes, there absolutely is, and it surprises me that you would claim there isn't. It forms a regular part of the conventional spiel given to...

That seems to be in the mama category. I can add Northern Thai mam mam 'din-dins'. Perhaps so, but I don't see how that necessarily excludes them from being imitative at the same time. i wouldn't rule out cats being fairly new when these names were given. And the first four could all have a common ...

'That's nonsense! People might have onomatopoeic words for a concept as universal and independent of location and technology as "rain" at a point in their history when they're just evolving language and coming up with words for things for the first time, but not many thousands of years af...

Parallel to Pama-Nyungan, Indo-European could be renamed the Manu-Guman languages, after two of the most common words for "human" in the family (or specifically the Sanskrit and Gothic reflexes of the ancestral etyma).