The New ZBB Quote Thread

[bradrn]

I'm posting this mainly because it got me thinking about how someone who doesn't know much about linguistics might interpret it:

I’ve never been entirely sure about the precise quality of my /r/s, but I’m pretty sure they are labialised, yes.

Er, and how might they interpret it? I’m almost afraid to ask…

[Raphael]

Er, and how might they interpret it? I’m almost afraid to ask…

My first guess is that they won't really interpret it at all, because they'll have no idea what it's about.

[Zju]

A good start, but too many consonants. How about:

/k/
/ɣ/
/m n ŋ/

With progressive rhoticity triggered by vowels turning /ɣ m n ŋ/ into [ʀ mbʙ ndr ɴɢʀ], and blocked by /k/.

Gleb, is that you?

[bradrn]

[…] the longest monomorphemic word attested so far is the ideophone /kiɑkɑɸikɑiɑkɑɸɑkɑ/ which (quite aptly) describes a rapid unintentional movement involving frequent impacts (for instance a small child being dropped into an industrial tumble-drier).

Suffice to say humans are technologically more advanced than Mitsiefa people and fairly similar physiologically (except Mitsiefa people have sixteen heads with a hundred bulbous green eyes each, forty-foot-long poisoned tentacles and the ability to teleport through miles of solid rock and spark hydrogen fusion in their stomachs).

[Raphael]

If our work doesn't get banned in Florida, we're doing something wrong.

[Man in Space]

britification
[ɰᵝa̠ʔa̠ɕi]
Watashi
"I"

T-stopping equals BRITIFICATION.

foxcatdog, you won this round of the Sound Change Game on the very first reply.

[bradrn]

Having read the article, I now understand the headline, but it stills sounds weird to me that, when someone first killed a cat and then later a human being, the headline about them starts out by calling them a "cat killer".

I have brought your wrong priorities to the attention of our feline overlords. They will pay you a visit.

[Raphael]

R. M. W. Dixon once quipped about incomprehensible grammars that in many of them, the theoretical framework needed to understand them will probably be extinct long before the language described is.

[Raphael]

Fascinatingly, the Egyptian–Coptic volume I happen to have open right now notes that ‘I stick to the very old appellation Pseudo-Participle, because [… it is] completely void of any semantic or syntactic meaning, which has its advantages too’.

[bradrn]

Many good quotes in that thread bewailing the state of linguistic terminology:

Andrew's Nahuatl grammar/textbook is the kind of enthusiastic oddness that just makes me happy, honestly. Unlike Egyptological grammar (or conventional/traditional Japanese, for that matter), which just comes across to me as grim solipsism in old pickle juice.

[Man in Space]

From the Glebst of gleb thread:

I like ##, the ghost phoneme: 0000u0uuuuuu101uuu0uu0u00uuuu0

[hwhatting]

do as the vikings did and supplement vitamin D with cod. if you start getting ideas about raiding monasteries, consult your GP again.

[Man in Space]

Also, rickets were very common.

Actually, "rickets" is singular; I can't imagine what a single "ricket" would be.

A small rick.

Yes, one ricket can't kill you, but don't underestimate a rick. It'll never give you up, never gonna say goodbye.

[Man in Space]

Seriously, what part of [ˌɑ̃ːʁ̃ˤɯːp̚ˈpʰɑːmʁ̩ˤ(ː)] is hard to understand?

Aarghoop Paamrrgh?

The way you spelled that makes me think [ˌɑːʁˤɡuʔpˈpʰãːmʁ̩ˤːk].

This is peak ZBB. It was either going to be something like this or Nortaneous summoning Cthulhu in the Romanization Challenge Thread thanks to one of his romanization schemes. I love it. This is one of those things that is such a niche discussion that I would never be able to explain to my friends.

[WeepingElf]

Nort, are you deliberately trying to summon Cthulhu?

T'kwga th'Khiw, tuwthow, yw'h m'yighyigh cticth tati quglqugl nh'tayw'h ti. Cticth tati ghn'gon tayw'h. Pa n'afh cticth fh'glak ti, wge ne'h, nh'mmtefw'nyuih, tom nh'mmtefw'nyuih on fifyh, nh'foy m'tefw'nyuih pa p'nenh, nh'qogl. Nh'qogl f'togh tak'he fw'nyuih toq. Tak'he fw'nyuih toq ph'tak'he wguth ph'nn'ghmoy fhe hen hye'h. Glheptog ti nh'ggmoy.

Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn.

[bradrn]

I'm trying to figure out how cat spirits might speak a variation of Middle Chinese.

How could cat-like spirits speak any language but Miao?

[bradrn]

Antepenultimate stress is something which a lot of theories have trouble with.

Yeah, there's a reason they call this phenomenon "stress" I suppose.

[Raphael]

Any sentence, or word, can start to sound dubious if you stare at it too long.

[Man in Space]

If you're orbiting a black hole, avoid the plunging region:

https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/17/world/bl ... index.html

Responsible black hole owners will put up warning tape, but this is not always present.

Standards have really deteriorated since we were young, haven't they?

[bradrn]

The more remote a place was, the less translation was done— e.g. Ivan the Terrible should have been translated John the Awesome.