zompist bboard

I get the impression that it is the same for all game animals - do hunters not also do the same for grouse and partridge? Yeah, that's how I understood it as well. Also consider that "deer" once was the general term for all large game, rather than specifically the medium antlered type we now associ...

Yeah, "starving" still definitely can mean "dying from lack of food", just like "boiling", "freezing", "on fire", and the like can still have their literal sense in spite of expressions like "It's boiling/freezing in this room" and "less habanero next time, dude, my mouth is on fire over here".

Sound change. Which sound changes are unidirectional like the semantic treadmills? Also, "hell", "damn", and "fuck" are still not polite speech. I never said "fuck" was polite, but rather that its forms had replaced "hell" and "damn" in a lot of phrases, because those two, while not nice things to ...

I suspect most of you are familiar with what Stephen Pinker calls the "euphemism treadmill", whereby words that start out as euphemisms become themselves impolite through their association with something deemed undesirable. (For example, "toilet" started out as a euphemism but now, at least in the U...

It addition, to me it suggests that "large articles" are perceived as a unified class of things, the way we can talk about "big cats" or "little people" while keeping the size adjective directly before the noun instead of separating them with the usual sorts of adjectives that come between size and ...

What's innovative about, "I'm a sad guy standing here today"?

I don't think that analysis is correct at all. I have never seen a native speaker make most of the lolcat mistakes unless doing so intentionally, and I've never seen my ESL students produce fragments quite like the doge. There is actually some deeper analysis of this very comparison. In any case, t...

I don't think that analysis is correct at all. I have never seen a native speaker make most of the lolcat mistakes unless doing so intentionally, and I've never seen my ESL students produce fragments quite like the doge. There is actually some deeper analysis of this very comparison. In any case, th...

But would you accept "you can definitely see you" as grammatical, Nessari? I'm sure people would say that phrase around here, though not as a complete sentence. "You can see you have been defeated." is definitely grammatical to me. "You can see you are about to run out of time." "You can see you wi...

if they approximate RP with General American, that is to say a pan-British accent that only breaks into regional accents among ethnic minorities, dwellers in large cities, and hicks at the margins of Great Britain. I really don't think that's how most Americans perceive our own variety of accents, ...

if they approximate RP with General American, that is to say a pan-British accent that only breaks into regional accents among ethnic minorities, dwellers in large cities, and hicks at the margins of Great Britain. I really don't think that's how most Americans perceive our own variety of accents, ...

Okay, so bad example. Point is there are plenty of -p words that would be hard to irregularize because there aren't similar-sounding irregular verbs to start with. Ones that likewise have /o/ as the vowel:
rope, hope, dope, mope, cope, soap, etc.

I wonder if words ending in clusters/single stops that would result in a larger cluster from -d are more likely to be spontaneously given a new past tense form. Like, Chagen's example scrape ends in p and pt is a little bit difficult to say so would this change be more likely as opposed to a word l...

I have this in some of those words, as well as hide (animal skin) vs. hide (and seek). I've heard of it in liar/lyre, but don't naturally pronounce it there unless I concentrate.

Ah right, West Country. And indeed, I initially thought Hagrid's accent must be from a part of England near Scotland, on account of rhoticity.

Xephyr is correct that we mostly have no way to get a handle one what the differences are or where they're from. But I think it's fair to characterize them, together, as forming an overall British accent. I don't know what features unite them, but there's clearly something - because British-ness is...

Yeah, everyone knows three times is sufficient, anyway: Once for the whole paragraph or similarly-sized block of text, once for just the sentence with the objectionable material, and once for just the objectionable material itself.

I'd have to find the pictures I took to be sure, but I vaguely remember Spanish consistently being longer than English translations on the informational signs at Teotihuacán. (Nahuatl was longer than both, by a large margin.) The thing about English's telegraphic headline and signage style is a good...

The problem with most public signs in my experience is that they were usually translated by people more familiar with one of the languages than the other. I'm pretty sure that Spanish, like English, has a more concise way of expressing the idea that the system of intercommunication for passengers is...

Does that really fit with the connotation of poor whites, though?

You have a source for that? It isn't among the explanations etymonline gives.

ObsequiousNewt wrote:

Basilius wrote:But "humans are lobe-finned fish" should be valid, with this logic (and still sounds wrong to me).

Also, somebody rename this thread, please. Confusingly, it's still named "English as Fusion of French and Anglic".

That is what the thread was originally about...

Are thread topics paraphyletic?

The Google Books preview seems to include the Anglo-Norman part of that case study.

pay attention to how vice / similar crapshack brahmin internet outlets use the word. better yet, 'lily-white' found an example. see http://www.slate.com/blogs/outward/2013/10/22/two_trans_guys_have_a_son_are_they_raising_him_gender_neutral.html everyone in this story appears to be White (with the a...