zompist bboard

Eddy the Great wrote:That certainly puts some strict limits on the possible affixes.

No, they change to fit the vowel harmony (Hungarian, this time):

olvas (read) -> olvasok (I read)
k?r (ask) -> k?rek (I ask)
s?t (bake) -> s?t?k (I bake)

I think it might be interesting and useful to gather together several types of vowel harmony, with examples. E.g. tense/lax, as in Igbo; front/back, as in Finnish; high/low, as in I don't know what; and any others I may have missed. The other one mentioned so far that's not in your list is rounded/...

Hi, Mark! I'm Joe User, and I may or may not be a real person. How do you think the board will work? What do you mean? "How do you think the board will work?" I think it has been running for 3 years. Check the date; that was a while ago. And stop ripping on Joe User! He's one of my favorite members!

A common grammar change is for particles to attach to words; that's often how case endings originate. Kind of the opposite can occur when endings wear down over time which makes the language more isolating, e.g. Latin to the modern Romance langs. As for additions, I think I'll make a list of those E...

If it's English sound changes you want, there's some here.

I heard people thought that evil spirits could enter your body when you sneezed, so they said "bless you".

It develops just like other sandhi; certain combinations of sounds (tones, in this case) are more difficult to say than others, so they change.

In a completely unrelated manner, I just came across Pirah?, in which women use /h/ where men use /s/.

I'm extremely lucky. I've had gross, nasty colds/mild fevers several times in the past few years, but I've never had the flu before, and it's been like 5 years since I last threw up... Likewise (it's like that Seinfeld ... :wink: ); I must have a good immune system or something, as I rarely get sic...

Agglutination in Spanish? What would make you think that? That seems to be what con quesa asked about: even if Spanish is agglutinating Huh? I'm learning Spanish, and it seems to me that it's almost entirely inflicting or isolating. The only agguginative affixes I can think of are the various dimun...

Huh? I'm learning Spanish, and it seems to me that it's almost entirely inflicting or isolating. The only agguginative affixes I can think of are the various dimunitive suffixes, and the -ba- in some forms of the imperfect tense. What other agguginative characteristics does Spanish have? Isn't that...

Hmm... should I do this or research PACs for Government? Not a hard decision, really... :roll: I suppose Basque is the non-IE lang I know the most about (not much, really). I think the verbal system is particularly cool; a very few verbs use synthetic forms, but most require an auxiliary that encod...

According to Wikipedia (here), modern Serbo-Croatian (Serbian/Croatian/Bosnian) does have a "melodic accent", apparently involving falling and rising tones related to stressed syllables; the same term is used to describe (in more detail) the intonation patterns of Swedish and Norwegian. Yeah, I rem...

Eddy the Great wrote:Slavonic langs are tonal?

Modern Slavic languages aren't.

I don't know much about this, but:

The LCK wrote:One way tones can originate is for voiced consonants to induce the next vowel to be pronounced in a low pitch.

Glenn Kempf wrote:Ah, for the days of the Xurnese xaleza, when bold knights with steely discipline and unflinching honor truly ruled the battlefield...

Oh, xaleza... I finally get it![/i]

I think this is because you saved it as a complete web page (I assume you have IE?). If you save it as HTML only, it should work.