zompist bboard

Drydic: rural people tend *not* to use their rural dialects with non-locals; they'll usually switch to an approximation of "Standard" most familiar to them, which, in absence of TV etc., is basically the dialect of the nearest urban center (more-less). But even if rural dialects were imported intact...

It really doesn't matter in the slightest which dialect you pick. Consider: many modern dialectical features have only been around 50 years, or a century. Few dialectical features go back more than a couple of centuries. You're talking about a language spoken three thousand years from now. Even ass...

Brandrinn: however, our human system hasn't degraded to one hermaphrodite sex, "given enough time". Nevertheless, empirically you (and Salmoneus) are right. Systems of multiple sexes with little differentiation are mostly found among single-celled organisms and fungi, where they coexist with asexual...

yeah I don't know what you would call it. The genes are always there, but it's maybe epigenetically determined? Or maybe completely random? As a conworld concept though one could decide to have it either way. If I understood it correctly: basically, you have two copies of genome; one is copied to y...

Kereb: Tetrahymena are rare among single-celled organisms in having two nuclei. The germline nucleus, like testes and ovaries in humans, contains the genetic information that will be passed on to offspring. The somatic nucleus holds the ‘working copy’ of the organism’s genome, which governs the cell...

However, a couple whose genotypes are AA and BB may never have any progeny of the C gender, or am I missing something? This means that some subpopulations can have a degraded sex system (without loss of fertility), and that sex ratio can unpredictably drift towards the extinction of one gender. I'd ...

Supposing the sexes are genetically determined, "stability" means that the progeny of each individual will ultimately include all the sexes. Ideally, this must be achieved without involvement of any genetic markers which that individual and that individual's mate don't have together. Non-ideally, th...

Drydic: Urban dialects are more important because they are natural sources of compromise realizations; rural dialects were too diverse to survive a mass migration. It's not just Ireland.Travis mentioned Scotland; N. England and Scotland have lots of dialects whose typical realizations are narrower t...

I mentioned Ireland. To quote Wikipedia : The /aɪ/ in "night" may be pronounced in a wide variety of ways, e.g. [əɪ], [ɔɪ], [ʌɪ] and [ɑɪ], the latter two being the most common in middle class speech, the former two, in popular speech. And specifically on Dublin: /aɪ/ as in price: Traditionally this ...

And do you have proof that it didn't finish moving to aI and then partially shifted back (no, parts of Ireland retaining əI is not proof)? Note: Occam's Razor does not count as proof, however sensible it is. No. As I said, it's just a possibility which needs a separate set of arguments to be ruled ...

Drydic Guy wrote:And you say əI is the most conservative value why?

Great Vowel Shift.

Around 1700, [əɪ̯] was still a possible realization in the prestige lects of Britain. In many places (e. g. in Ireland) it survived well into the 20th century. So...

The most conservative case is /aɪ̯/ in all cases, and /əɪ̯/ is always the progressive case; rather, we have four layers of sound changes, all of which changed historical /aɪ̯/ to /əɪ̯/, i.e. before fortis obstruents (classical Canadian Raising), before /r/ (before breaking of coda /r/ into /ər/ aft...

No, most words with historical /d/ have /aɪ̯/ except in the cases I delineated before, which are more narrow in range than the range of Canadian Raising in general (i.e. /əɪ̯/ in spider is found more narrowly, and /əɪ̯/ in idle is found even more narrowly). Aha. Then the simplest (although also lea...

OK, an attempt at an intermediary summary. It looks like common words with historical /d/ have /əɪ̯/ at least in the dialects most familiar to both Travis and Nortaneous - *except* when there is an obvious connection to related forms with a coda /d/ ( rider etc.); on the other hand, there seems to b...

Salmoneus, it would be helpful if you'd labeled the items in your list with numbers or somesuch. OK, I'll do that boring and passive-aggressive job for you: (1) memory: where a change has taken place within the speaker's lifetime, they may remember how they used to say it, or at least may remember t...

I think Radius meant words with flapped /t ~ d/, for words where these weren't neutralized aren't problematic in terms of sound changes conditioned by (non-audible) underlying distinctions. Perhaps a few other words like vital can be relevant here, too, for their relation to forms with unambiguous /...

Nortaneous wrote:Spelling pronunciation isn't telepathic transmission.

Yep. The question is, then, how they can be distinguished from the rest.

To give an example: the raising of /aI/ to /VI/ in some north american dialects has taken place AFTER the neutralisation of the intervocalic T-D contrast that conditions that change! On the surface level, there's just a flap, but speakers are able to recognise the underlying phoneme and raise or no...

A dialogue quoted from another thread : To give an example: the raising of /aI/ to /VI/ in some north american dialects has taken place AFTER the neutralisation of the intervocalic T-D contrast that conditions that change! On the surface level, there's just a flap, but speakers are able to recognise...

AFAIK, it clearly shows that the vowel was different from short- o , but I don't know of any Romance material showing unambiguously that it was different from long- u . Any pointers? The evidence suggests that the vowel reflexes of Classical - um and - us were distinct from that of - os (accusative...

I don't know what actually happened... but it's possible for it to have been a 'long vowel' for the purposes of scansion but 'underlyingly' a short vowel followed by a consonant for the purposes of sound change. That is, a long vowel could have been an allophone of a VN sequence when final, but not...

<...> it sounds like unnecessary complication to postulate i → ɪ → i for short iota or a → ʌ → a for short alpha just for symmetry. It's entirely plausible that only the mid vowels ever developed a quality split between short and long. By a similar logic, postulating [e] -> [ɛ] for <ε> and [o] -> [...

<...> the mid-high long vowels <ει ου> became high /i: u:/, and then the length contrast got lost, leaving /i e E a O o u y/ <ι,ει ε η α ω ο ου υ>. But I could be wrong... However, later on <η> merged with <ι=ει> in /i/. I think there's no pronounced statement on whether <ε ο> were mid-high or mid-...

No, /ʃ/ still goes in the same column with /tʃ/. Not being a segment, [ç] has no bearing on the question <...> Well, it certainly makes our consonant table look tidier and more systematic; you need less columns and rows to capture the contrasts we make. <...> Damn. I suspected this, but I hoped it ...

Hardly idiotic in phonemic transcription, considering that /p t c k/ is our stop system. Disagreement about the /c/ part boils down to tradition, and squeamishness about phoneme symbols not matching their associated phones, neither of which change the basic facts about our language. Facts? It's an ...