zompist bboard

I seem to recall there's a conditional thing about Latin turning s -> r, where an /r/ present in the word from before can block this except the blocking can further be undone. (And I want to know the full thing.) I seem to recall having read a military or fleet-based analogy for this somewhere, mayb...

To what extent are the etymologies of the names of the gods of Ancient Egyptian known? To what extent is this just good guesses? And finally, where can I find more information on it? If you trust Wikipedia, the articles on each god seem to have details on their etymologies. It seems like overall th...

As far as I know, we're pretty certain on the consonants but we can only guess at vowels based on how words descended into Demotic and Coptic, or were borrowed into other languages like Hebrew or Greek. It's too bad; if we could figure out the vowels, we do actually have a very good corpus of mater...

Anyone got a source to recommend with regard to the phonotax of Old Irish? Modern Irish is welcome as well.

To what extent are the etymologies of the names of the gods of Ancient Egyptian known? To what extent is this just good guesses?

And finally, where can I find more information on it?

Of course a community of illiterate people that don't even have TVs to watch can't be influenced by foreigners that are in other countries. There's no way they'd try to sound foreign and not getting it quite right. Of course not. Viktor, see how this is a sarcastic summary of the flaws of your under...

It appears to me that there's quite a clear relationship between linguistic reconstruction and some kind of information-theory maths. Clearly there could be defined a function rec(mutter, moder, mother, moeder, móðir, móðir, muter, mither, mader, (whatever it is in gothic)) which spits out *mōdēr, t...

Other directionals than "up" can have the same function: I drank it down. I handed it over. I tried it out. I spit it out. And this kind of distinction is also encoded with some prepositions: I shot at him, I shot him. That's different - that's just transitivity. [Demoting the object to an indirect...

Wikipedia says Finnish does something like this. And it gives use of Nom and Acc as means to show this. Two of the sentences are "I shot the bear [and hit tho did not kill it]" and "I shot the bear [and hit and killed it]" NOM and ACC are not the cases you're looking for. ACC and PART are. (ACC, th...

jmcd: What you say is true. I concede your point, although idioms are an exception to normal usage. Perhaps if I'd said 'approximate'... If I look up 'dog' in an English-French dictionary, I'll find 'chien'. If I then say 'chien' to a French monoglot, they will know that I mean 'dog'. That is suffi...

I'm not even sure what's being argued here anymore. I guess ashmoonfruit you're basically trying to say that cultural knowledge (rules of social interaction, history, taboos, famous people, humour, etc.) that can be most easily acquired through human interaction is important to language use and is ...

Sure, technically, replacing one word for another would be a code, not a cipher. Not important. A conlang that just switches English words for made-up words would be 'just a code', yes - but I don't that as a reason why someone shouldn't do that, if that's what they want to do - or even that doing ...

Your conclusion is faulty - if it were adequate, you wouldn't be learning more words while doing it, you'd be satisfied with your vocab.

I dreamt a few days ago I had the ability to morph my face's shape through some weird movement of facial musculature at will. I wasn't very good at it though, and I was going to change my face to look like my brother's temporarily for some reason I don't recall but it was probably obvious in the dre...

One unusual phoneme would be /d/ (where this is an arbitrary symbol for the phoneme), consisting at least of the allophones , [d], [g], and maybe even [G].

Well, ayyud didn't exactly say which is the one in the novel, so it could be any of the two, Miekko. I've seen people get freaked when an acquaintance of mine accidentally (don't ask me how) spoke in a manner similar to throat singing, in the sense his voice seemed to amplify two harmonics (is that...

I don't quite see how you'd find a reasonable way of relating "two dissonant unisons" to "tuvan throat song". Tuvan throat singing occurs when, using some techniques that are pretty cool, you amplify the amplitude of multiples of the fundamental. Dissonant unisons happen when the overtones - that al...

I've actually once heard two girls singing in unison in a way that sounded dissonant. It was quite strange.

Even when unison, there can be differences in the distribution of energy at different frequencies. Voices aren't things that in usual use have harmonic overtones.

clawgrip wrote: And your opponent is in the same room (i.e. a community igloo).

How does this differ from proper rap battles?

It's called tact. This thing called tact is surprisingly often used as an excuse not to have to think or learn or even invest any kind of intellectual integrity into what one's writing though. That's something we like to rid ourselves of here, and tact is often collateral damage - mostly because it...

It's often assumed that the PIE word for hundred is derived from the word for ten, since they have two consonants in common. Not much of a commonality, but similar things exist ... e.g. the Germanic word for thousand is derived from the Germanic word for hundred. If this were true it wouldnt be a n...

In Finnish, numbers normally inflect as singulars, and take singular nouns - although under some circumstances, they can go plural. These include: - with plurale tantum nouns (nouns that lack singular forms) - some combinations of determiners where one of them is a number can cause the number and no...

I think the alleged Utah NORTH/START reversal ("barn in a born") is also actually a merger. Eh? Haven't heard that one, and I'm in the next state north... It's mentioned in The Mother Tongue by Bill Bryson. We all know that that book is notoriously unreliable, but there might be something to it. So...

sirdanilot wrote:lo and behold I dropped the 'ist' off of Americanist, making my speech utterly incomprehensible

lo and behold you also appended I before PA, making it confusing and wrong! (Think about it - American International ... should give you a clue there's something wrong!)