Zompist Bboard Again

how realistic does pr > ʙ̥ seem? Hm, I mean I might buy it, but with some caveats. Firstly bilabial trills are fairly uncommon, but we do have attestations from across the world, notably in parts of Oceanic, West Africa and even Tibeto Burman, with most cases showing a very limited distribution to ...

It's possible, but the Western Romance and Celtic changes happen way too late to make me think they're related to an older substratum; the shared Western Romance and Celtic changes in fact make most sense in light of the Western Roman Empire covering old Celtic territory. The shift happened as more...

I think the reason the idea of using informal pronouns to address God sounds odd to Modern English speakers is because the traditional forms of the liturgy in English have always used "thou", all the way from when English first acquired the t/v-distinction, through the time "thou"...

Moose-tache wrote: ↑Tue May 21, 2019 11:42 am

Jonlang wrote: ↑Tue May 21, 2019 5:11 am

Moose-tache wrote: ↑Tue May 21, 2019 1:10 am This is England, though. Shouldn't people be throwing crocks of jellied eels and handfuls of Stilton?

Scotland isn't England. Only England is England.

TIL Newcastle is in Scotland.

To much of the south it might as well be.

Well now we have a promise that she will go after the fourth vote if it happens. Looks like we're doomed to Bozza for PM.

What would it profit a politician to characterize an electoral defeat negatively? Everyone shits on Teresa May for saying all the stupid things she has no choice but to say. Of course she has to pretend the Conservative Party represents "strong and stable" leadership. Of course she has to...

Not to be confused with the natlang Sakha

From Schiffman's "Grammar of Spoken Tamil" (a nice book btw, it's on the grammar pile).

Sal's outlined the good reasons the two-track system makes sense for a traditional society. One thing I'd add: a lot depends on how frequent wars are. If they're nearly constant, or take place every 20 years, it's OK to let the aristocrats run them: they'll get actual experience, and the really awf...

Pedant wrote: ↑Thu Apr 18, 2019 5:56 pmAnyway, plantperson, why do you ask? What’s your game plan?

pretty sure this must be a joke, they're called plantperson for crying out loud

That's not true. Although all other Mura languages are now extinct, it's not true that there's no data to compare. There's a small amount of lexical data from at least one related language, Bohura, and I've seen mention of 'word lists' for it that I haven't been able to find myself. But a word-list...

bbbosborne wrote: ↑Fri Apr 12, 2019 11:54 pm are there any known sound changes about piraha?

No because there's no other language to compare it to, and no earlier records of the language before the modern day.

Well, Kabardian, you might like Vertical Vowel System. However, in all other languages that have it, they also have extensive palatalization and/or labialization. However, aside from labiovelar and labiouvular, I don't see anything in your consonant inventory. Actually NWC's not so bad, the worst o...

Looking at some of the other cases, there's even more weirdness going on with this category. Firstly there's some notably erroneous data points - Warao in particular is especially bad, since the source they cite doesn't actually show it's patient only agreement for several reasons. Firstly, it looks...

I would love to see a Comparative Grammar for the simple reason that Quechuan is under-appreciated as a family, as opposed to the Cusco standard which is taken as representative of the whole family.

Well, this is kind of what the term "morphosyntax" is on about. In an entirely morphosyntactic grammar, you might choose, rather than have a specific section devoted to "syntax" in its entirety, you might instead have chapters discussing "nominal morphosyntax", where ea...

I'm liking what I see so far, glad you're sharing this with us.

Pabappa wrote: ↑Sat Mar 30, 2019 5:41 pm

Frislander wrote: ↑Sat Mar 30, 2019 10:54 am *karu, *kərawə "fire, pyre"
*nešə, *nəšekə "coastal island, often from erosion"

> *nešəkaru, *nešəkərawə "lighthouse" (anachronistic)

Do those commas mark alternate forms, or is it a paradigm like in Latin?

singular, plural

Next: lighthouse Proto-Frislandic/Proto-Frislandian *karu, *kərawə "fire, pyre" *nešə, *nəšekə "coastal island, often from erosion" > *nešəkaru, *nešəkərawə "lighthouse" (anachronistic) Next: monkey, primate --- Also sidenote but I would love to see more on this "...

I hate to sound like a broken record here but AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA...