zompist bboard

As someone else said, lots of consonants and vowels. You could have 4 places of articulation, for example, /p t k q/. Then you add the optional features of voice, labialization, palatalization, and prenasalization giving you 64 stops (remember it's possible to be both palatalized and labialized). Fr...

I recommend both Szemerenyi and Beekes. Szemerenyi is more detailed and gives more raw data, but is a bit outdated as far as phonology and, to a lesser extent, morphology, goes. Beekes is more modern, but leaves out a lot of data that would be needed to understand why he reconstructs things the way ...

The confusion comes from their choice of *woid. The sequence *dt > *tt underwent different changes in the various languages. Some kept *tt, some changed it to *st and others to *ss. Adding to the confusion is that Latin added -i(s)- for no apparent reason.

When you get right down to it, all mathematics is conmathematics. One idea I've been playing around with is an extension of Riemannian geometry, which works as follows: Let the distance between two points z and y (which are points on some manifold) be the integral of a function L from z to y, where ...

Out of those three, Greenberg's the only one I've heard much about. If the problems with him are limited to that "mass comparison" thing, I don't see what the deal is; mass comparison is just the cognate-collecting phase of the comparative method, and once you've collected the data you can analyze ...

The problem is that 5000 is an arbitrary number. For all we know the limit is 50,000 years. I don't think it's all that arbitrary. Latin is well attested in written sources, and yet we can't reconstruct it perfectly or purely from it's descendants. We can get close to Vulgar Latin, but there is a c...

I don't really understand all the flak that the long-range comparers are getting. Largely because of shoddy work by Ruhlen, Greenberg, and Starostin. It's tainted the field. Also there's the bizarre idea floating around that you can't demonstrate family relationships beyong 8000 years (sometimes th...

I don't really know much about Sumerian but I'm pretty sure that it will never be found to be a Uralic language. Sumerian may be a sister to it though. Alan Bomhard has tentatively included it in the proposed Nostratic macro-family (which includes Uralic). A couple thinkgs make me suspicious of this...

I had a dream that I'd been involved in the murder of several people at some earlier time and that I was about to be found out. The fucked up thing is that when I woke up and was still in a mental fog I didn't know if I had dreamed about killing those people or was just remembering it.

Asking because I'm thinking about incorporating it properly in my conlang. At the moment I've got a rudimentary front/back harmony system, where the final vowel of each word in the protolang elicits all the others to be either front or back in the daughter lang. I'm guessing this isn't very realist...

Oh, I forgot that I had this bookmarked.

Scroll down to the section on Amerind. There's not much there, but it's something.

This also has some resources.

Really hard to tell for me, but my best guess is [kxL\_0ip].

In some (all?) West Germanic languages final z > 0. I'm not sure if that's a general rule or limited to nominative singular.

Proto-Indo-European apparently also had VRs# > V:R (sometimes called Szemereny Lengthening). Loss of syllable final s with compensatory lengthening seems to be pretty common.

Chuma wrote:You might also want to consider what those things that look like crop circles are. (Hint: They're not crop circles.)

I was wondering about those. I was thinking maybe they were determiners. I notice that the cat and whatever that first thing is share a "determiner".

All the animal names end in that -X symbol, except the cat, which suggests it might be a suffix for domesticated animals that are not pets.

The script is clearly written left to right. In the second example are the pictographs of the animals (and torsoless human) part of the script, or a pictographic representation of what the word means? Or are we not privy to this information?

I've been having strange dreams in europe... one of them involved my teeth falling off... another involved me having a panther as a pet. weird I used to have teeth falling out dreams all the time. Then one night while having the dream I realized that I was just dreaming. I haven't have the dream si...

Alright, thanks for telling me about the issue with German; I'll have to look into it more, then. My main point stands, regardless; I'm curious as to what kind of situations and catalysts would bring about these changes. I'm not asking specifically about the grammar changes of German, or Welsh, or ...

Could you guys share some good sauce recipes? Mushroom sauce or something else that goes well with fried/roasted meats. I recently discovered a butter rum sauce (you can use bourbon instead of rum and it's good too). 1/2 cup brown sugar 3 teaspoons flour 1/2 cup water 1/2 teaspoon salt 1 tablespoon...

Of course you could also figure out a way to innovate gender. In Modern English we often refer to inanimate nouns as "she", such as with ships and cars. This won't be gender, in the more technical sense. It could evolve into a full gender system. There's already gender agreement in pronouns. Femini...

Spanish has the word compadre which expresses the relationship between a father and a godfather. Presumably there are similar words involving mothers and godmothers. English doesn't have words for these, but it should.

Google Books is a pretty good resource. You can download old books on Old English, which is your best bet for finding the gender of various nouns. Of course you could also figure out a way to innovate gender. In Modern English we often refer to inanimate nouns as "she", such as with ships and cars.

Is there anywhere where /kw/ (i.e. /k/ + /w/) develops differently from /k_w/ (i.e. labialised /k/)? Yes, but they are few and far between. PIE *kwe:p, *ke:wp "to boil, smoke" Baltic kwapa (*k_w would have given **kapa) PIE *kwotH "to boil, foam" Sansk. kvathate (*k_w would have given **kathate) PI...