zompist bboard

I remember trying to read David Crystal's book on language death and endangered languages. The problem was that at my absolute best I can barely care about language death in a detached intellectual way - for whatever reason, I'm just incapable of feeling that it's an emergency. I don't want to say t...

How do you handle postpositions when something is northeast of an object?

Same thing with other similar constructions: "I shoulda caught all 400 billion Pokemon by now!" -- okay *"We shoulda the shipment in by next Friday" -- not okay. I'd never thought of that one! However, British English does sometimes allow the contraction of mainverbal "have" as well, though I'm not...

I'm not sure about sound changes, but I think it's fairly common for frequent words and constructions to be reduced in irregular ways. Very common morphemes tend to be short, and new function words and constructions which aren't are likely to be worn down by changes which aren't general. I guess a ...

TomHChappell wrote:I don't know if that answers your question; is English a natlang?

My new signature.

English h/ng are by no means impossible as allophones; we just have no evidence that they have a common origin, and native speaker intuition certainly considers them separate. Which kind of is the point of allophones, right? stuff that, to the speakers, sounds kind of the same ? But, if I'm followi...

Or let me try a different way to ask this question - how different can two sounds be and yet still have some language consider them allophones? I know what allophones are, and that different languages will see certain sounds as the same, etc. But for example, the alveolar tap [ɾ] is considered an al...

This doesn't rule out the possibility of ambiguity or hybrid genres, however. Plenty of science fiction addresses moral questions that technically lie outside of science. Similarly, nothing stops a fantasy writer from examining the effects of magic on society and portraying a realistic ecology. Act...

What I never understood about the awesome first name Ransom is that when it was popular, in the late 19th century, the noun of the same name also existed. The noun doesn't exactly have the best meaning (it's not like the name Gaylord which has changed meaning over time), why would Victorians feel c...

Soap wrote:gsandi's site is http://www.tundria.com/Linguistics/pie-phonology.shtml btw.

Wait - Proto-PIE might have been ergative? How does that realignment happen?

Also, will it make things too complex for some racists' brains learning that Illich-Svitych was an ethnic Ukrainian, and Dolgopolsky is a pureblooded Jew and Israeli? Seriously, a discussion of PIE laryngeals is turning into a flamewar? Now I've seen everything. I am shocked that someone could have...

Basilius wrote:Also, will it make things too complex for some racists' brains learning that Illich-Svitych was an ethnic Ukrainian, and Dolgopolsky is a pureblooded Jew and Israeli?

Seriously, a discussion of PIE laryngeals is turning into a flamewar? Now I've seen everything.

Sjal wrote:Okay, you've said your piece on Esperanto. Can we move on now? I specifically asked for this not to become a flame war about Esperanto.

Conlang Entropy - all conlang discussions will eventually become Esperanto flamewars.

In Esperanto's defense, it was the first conlang I ever came across. I remember being blown away that someone would try and build an entire language . It was like when Napster came out, and I started "discovering" bands that weren't that hard to hear about - Smashing Pumpkins and Pearl Jam, and then...

The main idea as far as I can tell, once you strip away the jargon, is that it's easier to learn a new language in a small immersive group, focused on practicing a limited vocabulary, rather than in a large classroom, rote memorizing lists of words and trying to pick up the written language simultan...

MadBrain wrote:"I looked at him in the eye" sounds like valid English to me.

Really? And "I stared him in the forehead" only works for me because it is clearly similar to "I looked him in the eye" - it sounds like something done for comic effect, and without that analogy, wouldn't work.