zompist bboard

Mitian looks like a plausible grouping, yes. Within Mitian, there appears to be a fairly clear division between a "Euro-Siberian" group (including IE, Uralic, Yukaghir, Chukotko-Kamchatkan, and Eskimo-Aleut) and an "Altaic" group (including Turkic, Mongolic, and Tungusic). The latter one might not ...

Indo-Uralic seems like a good excersize. I'm a follower of WeepingElf's "Mitian" grouping (IE, Uralic, Chukchi-Kamchatkan, Eskimo-Aleut, and Altaic. I myself also include Etruscan and Kartvelian), so-called because of 1st person pronouns and inflections with /m/ (usually becoming /b/ in the eastern...

Possibly the two key facts: 1. The theory proposes that the Burushaski are Phrygian, and that the Phrygians were in turn immigrants from Macedonia. 2. The guy proposing this theory is... Macedonian. Oh that good old-fashioned Balkan nationalism at work again. #2 means this crap can be dismissed out...

I call BS on this. Armenian is a close relative of Phrygian and Burushaski is NOTHING like Armenian.

I was reading up on the diachronics of French on Wiki, and I ran into this: Some sound changes are attested. The sound changes /ps/ → /χs/ and /pt/ → /χt/ appears in a pottery inscription from la Graufesenque (1st cent. a.d.) where the word paraxsidi is written for paropsides.[9] Similarly, the deve...

I likewise was never taught about the subjunctive in school, but find its use natural in cases like this, and use it myself. As for the two sentences: I insisted that they be locked up. The speaker is insisting that someone ought to be locked up (presumably because they are not). I insisted that th...

Is /T/ and/or /D/ becoming /l/ attested? I'm using it for English > Mekoshan.

While reading a thread over at ConlangBB I realized that when /r/ precedes a schwa or schwi (as in "to record") it is realized as [ʐ], or even [ɖ]!!!

Herra Ratatoskr wrote:I've written up the first draft of the rules of default word order. Is anything in this too unclear? It's easy to miss putting something down when it's been in your head for so long.

Looks good, thanks!

This thread has really fallen off the wagon...

New: Grandma and grammar. Also pawn and porn. [ˈɡ̥ɹˤæmə] and [ˈɡ̥ɹˤæmɚ] [pʰan] and [pʰɔɹˤn̠] What dialect is this? He is from Minnesota, and happens to be both cot - caught -merged and to have shifted all three of historical /ɑː/, /ɒ/, and /ɔː/ to [a]. (Contrast how I, from southeastern Wisconsin, ...

Sorry buuut American > British English. Nope, only for singing. Singing sounds bad in British accents. Well, I have to concede that spoken Brittish may not be so bad compared to Obama. God... I felt I knew no English after hearing him. Obama = General American speaker par excellence , like an Ameri...

Astraios wrote:

TaylorS wrote:Why all the hate for AmE???

You speak too slowly and have annoying vowels and rhotacism.

A Brit whining about annoying vowels? You guys have /Q/...

Vuvgangujunga wrote:

TaylorS wrote: Chinese

Yes, a WRITTEN LANGUAGE sounds terrible. I don't like the sound of Cuneiform, myself.

Sorry, Mr. Nitpick, MANDARIN.

Though all the other Chinese languages I've heard sound similarly annoying.

Why all the hate for AmE???

Good:
Bantu Langs (prenasalized stops FTW!!!)
Hawaiian
Irish

Bad:
Danish (sounds like a throat disorder)
Chinese
Somali

From http://linguistlist.org/issues/23/23-2693.html The complete and entire archive of the journal Language and Linguistics in Melanesia (and its predecessor Kivung) is now available online at www.langlxmelanesia.com ! We hope that this invaluable resource will be welcomed by researchers and studen...

treegod wrote:New:
Grandma and grammar.
Also pawn and porn.

[ˈɡ̥ɹˤæmə] and [ˈɡ̥ɹˤæmɚ]
[pʰan] and [pʰɔɹˤn̠]

Oh, quick question: Does West Saxon have V2 world order? Does it have the SOV word order in subordinate clauses like German?

Damn, this thread just turned three years old, and it's been almost a year since I've updated it. :o I guess it's time for an update, if anyone was still interested in the lang. I've been rebuilding the site for it (not much visual change, but the structure of the grammar has been tweaked), and hav...

I have realized that in my normal speech "to swim" has become a fully regular weak verb; swim-swimmed.

I call the "gonna" future the Intentional Mood . because generally it implies not only futurity but also some degree of volition on part of the subject of the sentence, though there are exceptions like "I'm going to be a dad", as mentioned above. The fact that there is a common exception in which n...

Why didn't I noticed this thread before? LMAO!!! Tense is typically used to describe when a verb occurred in time, and aspect usually describes the quality of a verb in time. But sometimes the distinction isn't clear-cut. Oh, god, he's gonna pull out some obscure language with, like, two living spe...

Why didn't I noticed this thread before? LMAO!!! Tense is typically used to describe when a verb occurred in time, and aspect usually describes the quality of a verb in time. But sometimes the distinction isn't clear-cut. Oh, god, he's gonna pull out some obscure language with, like, two living spea...

I agree insofar, as the aspect distinction was originally a distinction on the level of root eanings - some roots were inherently perfective (those later formed root aorists), others imperfective (they formed root presents). Then there were different means to derive other spects - reduplication, su...

The "Classical" model of PIE assumed that the augment was PIE because anything attested both in Indo-Aryan and in Greek must have been PIE. But there's absolutely no evidence that any IE subfamily outside the Graeco-Aryan cluster (which would include Armenian and Phrygian) ever had the augment. On ...