zompist bboard

1. The usual: a detailed description of pronunciation using IPA , that includes a fair description of allophones, even across words. 2. Some discussion about stress . Any good English textbook should have something to say about "hót dóg" versus "hótdog", about "I lóve you" and "I gáve it to yóu", a...

Since Spanish ajeno is aliè -ena in Catalan I suggest to use alien (adj) in English. But "alien money" doesn't meant "other people's money", it means "E.T.'s money"... ;-) Yeah, like this: [imghttp://www.impactlab.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/Alien-Money-382.jpg/img] Bank of Chthulhu, where the m...

It looks a lot like Bislama.

Hi everybody! I finally recorded myself saying the OP sentences with a new mic from Black Friday; I think Radius, Maulrus, Imralu's observations are born out in them. I rerecorded the 2nd example with an alternative voicing on 'sick' that I think works; tell me you haven't heard people say similar t...

Was it really possible to teach them to swear or was that an urban legend? (I would guess the latter because YouTube only has vids of burning furbies.)

Hi guys! I was reading a short story & I realized that the conditional has a colloquial English usage that's kind of remarkable--it's used in relative sense without regard to tense. Old guy talking about the past: "...And I would step back and give him this look, like what are you doing?" Future: "I...

Slavic languages have loose word order, and Polish word order is very free, so that could be a place to start. Informally, I think English word order can be somewhat loose, but obviously would not be attested in texts so often as it would be spoken.

Glad to see a new episode! Will listen soon.

Do you guys mention Jamaican English? Wiki says it has vowel harmony.

Don't name your kid 'charity' or 'chastity' or 'cooper' or 'sir'. My sis likes 'Bet(t)a' and I was like wtf is wrong with you. Name your kid 'alpha' or 'omega' but don't aim for the middle. I also told her you could try "Babar" and shorten it to "Babe" (she'll grow out of and into it). 'Floris' is a...

I dislike European languages that don't include [e E], fine as allophones. Probably showing my English bias. I like at least 7 cardinal vowels. I also found that I like moderate sized consonant inventories, which is the main reason I prefer a ceceo accent in my Spanish...I am also ambivalent towards...

@clawgrip: The objective/subjective distinction is a traditional analysis and supposedly based on native impressions. I read it in a big book at Barnes & Noble I can't remember that compared a lot of other languages. I wish I could remember what it was, it was fairly recent... If you have access to ...

I feel clawgrip is looking too closely at the etymological meaning. John is like six feet tall doesn't mean the same as John is about six feet tall. When it's used like this it feels like it's missing the 1st argument, which would almost certainly be a dummy "it". I think the expression is similar ...

I learn my languages based on how cool I consider them...Oh yeah, but beyond obsessives (sorry, Weeaboos, but that's basically what you are) people who consider language chic actually very rarely learn it. (Did you just call yourself a weeaboo? :P) The girl could have been one of those people who l...

Catalan has perquè (literally "by what") Used to introduce the reason or purpose of the action expressed in the main sentence. As a causal conjunction can be substituted by ja que (literally "now that"). As a final conjunction can be replaced by a fi que (literally "to end that"). Doncs indicates t...

Hey Ollock, you haven't profiled Neoslavonic-Slovianski yet have you? It's a zonal constructed language like the romance (e.g. Interlingua) or the various german ones but it's not that simple a language. It's a collaboration with a lot of vitality behind it though and the presentations are very good...

lol where does it say that. " Some languages, like Chickasaw and Kalaallisut, have the opposite pattern from English: rising for statements and falling with questions...Dialects of British and Irish English vary substantially, with rises on many statements in urban Belfast, and falls on most questio...

"No, thanks"::"No thanks"
What, with"::"What with"

Bolinger's work was great at the time, but it's very outdated now. I'd recommend picking up a copy of Ladd's Intonational Phonology so you can get a handle on some more up-to-date research. I'll check it out; seems pretty cheap too considering textbooks. Though like all of them, I wish it had accom...

Well, then we can say the person, animal or thing is the undergoer or experiencer of something's behavior or some phenomena e.g. the truck blows up on Mythbusters.

An error Japanese learners in particular make is when they talk about going to "watch the cherry blossoms" in spring. You can watch them fall. 'Watch' is for behavior; you watch something expecting some behavior. Looking at someone is not creepy, watching someone might be (except if you're at a caf...

We all know that English has at least one synonym for every word, but I found a surprising use for these while reading Bolinger's Intonation & its Parts . He says that reintroducing a word without using the same form as the antecedent allows more freedom in stressing words in the sentence. He gives ...

^^"Give him what-for," might be an ossified use.

bíí’oxúyoo wrote:And then we have the opposite: the Japanese Paris syndrome.

The French eat it up.

People do learn a bit of language for the cool factor, but it's rarely the language itself that has all the cool. For example, the number of white kids who study Japanese is way higher than the number of white kids who study Korean, despite Korean being the clearly superior language. Why do they do...

@Sal: Don't the British generally use more spelling pronunciations for foreign words than Americans? 'Cause I think you do.