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Also, pretty sure that
French order 4 = Aucun problème !

Also Japanese select 5 should be:

計画は何ですか？ (Keikaku wa nan desu ka?) - what's the plan?

¡Papapishu! wrote:Ran, would you mind adding the pinyin too, for us ilhanziate people?

Done. =)

my attempt at the Japanese ones: orders 0 - covered 1 - ??? 2 - 承知しました。 shouchi shimashita. (Understood! / Certainly!) 3 - covered 4 - covered 5 - covered 6 - covered 7 - covered 8 - covered 9 - covered select 0 - ??? 1 - ??? (oh crap... JLPT only 2 weeks away!) 2 - maybe 用事を言ってください。 youji wo itte k...

The Chinese ones. First Traditional then Simplified, separated by a bar. When only one version is given that means the two are the same. Those are followed by pronunciation in pinyin. Order: 如您所願。 | 如您所愿。 | Ru2 nin2 suo3 yuan4. (As you wish.) 出發！ | 出发！ | Chu1fa1! (Set off!) 當然。 | 当然。 | Dang1ran2. (O...

It can also develop in much the same way as other forms of sandhi, under the umbrella term of "to ease pronunciation". For example, if a low tone is followed by a high tone, either tone could develop into a rising tone, simply because it flows more easily. Not speaking a tonal language, what I'm in...

I have a question... what happens when sound changes occur? Like for example, when consonants palatalize before a front vowel? (ki to chi) Nasals lengthen the previous vowel, then disappears? (ant to a:t) Plosive clusters assimilate to each other, to become long plosives? (pt to tt) Consonants drop ...

Ktuvoki freak me out. They did when I chanced upon zompist's pages as a wee bairn seven years ago and they still do today. There, that's my dark little secret.

Nice drawing, though. I wish I could do heads and faces like that.

Does anyone know if there are any more constructed worlds out there on the web that are of the scale of Almea? I've looked and not been able to find one quite like it. I found a world called Khoras, which has a lot of detail, but very little language stuff, and I don't really like the organization ...

Some suggested that there were gaps in the planes-- in effect the universe was something like a Photoshop document, made of layers cut away in spots so you can see those below. The usual idea was that the sun and stars , which seemed not to follow earthly laws and were never corrupted or replaced, ...

I hate to revive this thread just to ask a question, but: Does anyone know any easily accessible sources that would provide a summary of the (hypothetical) phonology and phonological constraints of any of the proto-languages mentioned above (that is, a chart of the consonant and vowel phonemes beli...

I think it was /eu/, but I'm not sure.

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...

Not quite.... Qin Shi Huang burned all books except for the ones that he felt weren't a threat (i.e. books supporting Legalism, officially sanctioned history, books dealing with medicine, divination, etc). He also buried alive dissident scholars who objected to the burning of books. Many later emper...

Usually it's front vs back, round vs unround, or high vs low. But average people are not linguists, and they dont often follow the rules. For example, notice that /i/ is in both groups. But that was a natlang example, so it looks like real languages don't follow the rules either. In which case, why...

btw Jhex: iirc the Great Vowel Shift went like this for the front vowels:

a: > E: > eI (mate)
E: > e: > i: (meat)
e: > i: (meet)
i: > @i > ai (mite)

Sure. Or you can make it t?l, with a rising-falling tone.

Eddy the Great wrote:How might tone sandhi develop?

Assimilation, dissimilation, metathesis, same as other sound changes.

ran not in had it right, but there's more: tone contour , at least in Chinese, Tibetan, Vietnamese, and most likely other SE Asian languages, developed from the final consonant and the tone register (IE, high pitch or low pitch) from the initial consonant. Given an opposition in voice in a syllable...

I've noticed those changes in Southern pronunciation before, but she transforms her retroflexes as well, zh->z sh->s ch->c, which I've not heard before much. Will a Southern accent do that? I think my Daoism prof does it too, and she learned more in Taiwan and northern mainland than the South, IIRC...

I've noticed the (extremely annoying) female Taiwanese accent before, but I hadn't heard that about mainland female speech before. I bet that's why Anna in my Classical speech talks like that. She's a native speaker from Singpore and ta mama si song Zongguo lai de... (If you can't speak Chinese, th...

Eddy the Great wrote:I didn't think it was that common.

I'm pretty sure that this occurs in every language. I can't give any specific examples for English, but haven't you ever felt that certain speech habits of certain people make them "sound like" a guy or a girl?

Or Beijing Mandarin, where girls and young women often pronounce the alveolopalatal consonants as palatalized alveolar ones. (It gives speech a very "flittering" quality.) This is known as "N?3guo2yin1" - "female national pronunciation" - national pronunciation probably referring to the "national" n...

Late Middle Chinese (~1000) to Old Mandarin (~1300) (Hsueh's Phonology of Old Mandarin) The author uses V1, V2, V3, V4, Vn, Vch, and Vta to represent Late Middle Chinese vowels. I am going to very tentatively assign the values of o, a, ia, e, ?, a(ch) and a(ta) to these vowels. These should be take...

On a somewhat different note, Mark also noted in the LCK that the dialect spoken in a capital city or other centers of culture often changes more quickly, while dialects of outlying areas remain more conservative. The more I read into this matter, the more it seems that all major cities are automat...