zompist bboard

The Hungarian words for the cardinal points are pretty transparent semantically. East and West have to do with what the sun is dong: kelet (east) is related to kelni ( to rise, get up ) nyugat (west) is related to nyugodni ( to rest , but originally to lie down as well) North and South are related t...

Anyone know the changes concerning the Northern Germanic languages? Or where to find them? (Preferably starting at Common Germanic.) Einar Haugen: Scandinavian Language Structures: A Comparative Historical Survey. U of Minnesota Press, 1982. It's all there, in tabulated form. A good, concentrated r...

Various sources mention that sound changes occur unconditionally, that is without regards to the phono-morphological boundaries or grammatical functions, even though I continuously stumble upon counterexamples. For example, at some point both Estonian and North S?mi lost word-final nasals for nomin...

I have some vowel harmony questions. In my conlang, < i > <?> <?> are front vowels, <?> <?> <o> < u > are back, and <?> <a> <e> are neutral. There is front/back harmony, although a neutral vowel can be in either group. Normally, the vowels in a root are in the same group as the final vowel in the r...

What does the wealth of Europe have to do with anything? If I'm a Catalan, it doesn't cost me anything to speak Catalan. I can still get a job with a Spanish company - the local office may be staffed with Catalan-speakers anyway, and even it it isn't, I speak Spanish as well, so where's the problem...

The role of outside "protectors" in these matters is minimal. What matters is that speakers of Catalan in Spain or French in Quebec want to protect their own language, which is surely their political right. I don't see why this bothers you, anyway. If all you want is to live in a unilingual environ...

My mother tongue isn't French, it's Hungarian. Quite a bit more different from English, as it belongs to a different language family (Uralic). Oh, I'm sorry. So how did you come to know French and English? I studied them, then moved to environments where these languages are spoken. I also married a...

I understand your point of view, and even have some sympathy for it. At the same time, efficiency is not the only purpose of mankind - we are not machines. I myself had to learn English, a language I will always speak a little bit less perfectly than native speakers, but so what? I have qualities t...

The point of linguistic diversity is simply that it exists, not that it is a barrier to "cultural diffusion". Many, if not most, people like belonging to the culture they were born into. If you don't like the fact that, say, Swedes prefer to speak Swedish among themselves, that's your business, but...

Do all 1.3 billion Chinese have to learn English? Why, for heaven's sake? If they really did, they would. The very fact of all the excitement and difficulty shows that it's a fad. In a society where the best-paying and most promising jobs indeed go to English speakers (as they increasingly do in Ch...