zompist bboard

I've noticed that me and my friends have taken to dropping the copula in some sentences of the form "[noun] is so [adj] right now". So things like "food so good right now", "weather so awful right now", etc. It started online, but we say it out loud now and it doesn't sound off or anything.

Even as a native speaker, I get my /ɹ/ and my /w/ mixed up sometimes when speaking very quickly because my /ɹ/ is heavily labialized. It varies as to which it goes to, but usually I end up with [w] everywhere.

Yes, but what about the whole number one most watched Youtube video? 800 million views? Even though it's not very possible to compare to pre-Youtube times, I would argue that gives Gangnam Style a higher popularity than other foreign top 100 songs in the past. Even if it did have a demonstrably hig...

Of course, there are myriad other options, but the key point here is the context it's read in. "Yoyo" could mean "he", but it would be strange to start off with a sentence like "He is John" - much more logical that it's a demonstrative. Perhaps "yoyo" does mean "boy", and the language puts adjectiv...

How is "Yoyo John aba"any more likely to say "this is John" (how do you even know such a structure exists in the first place?) than "I am John" or even "Hello John", or "John is a boy" or... Context? It's easy to come to the conclusion that "aba" serves as a copular. The other ambiguities resolve b...

I hate them. Hate. All vocab should be introduced in context so you have at least some chance of getting the right answer yourself (which makes you remember it better). What do you need vocab lists for anyway, when like every textbook I've ever seen also has a glossary/dictionary section at the bac...

Nobody else says "spacewalk"?

Lô Borges - Não Foi Nada

incredible album. can't stop listening to this brazilian stuff

I can't do it while I'm sick, and I'm still pretty ill , you know. *I can't do it while I'm sick, and I'm still pretty sick , you know. It might just be me, but these sentences sound equally off to me. I would probably say something like "I can't do it, I'm still pretty sick". I can't really imagin...

Are there any cases of Indo-European neuter merging with the feminine, rather than the masculine? Because I know of feminines merging with masculines (common gender), and masculines merging with neuters (Western Romance masculine) and all three merging (Persian everything gender), but I've never he...

Native American languages, they don't sound like they have much for intonation patterns but the words are kind of nice like with Japanese. Seems like a pretty huge generalization. Good: Japanese Lakota Inuktitut Bad: English w/ Boston accent (I don't know what bothers me so much about it. I like th...

Driving. not rush hour driving, but road driving, often helps me feel better. It makes me feel like the whole world is open and out there, waiting, and that perspective makes whatever bothers me seem less terrible. This. I like taking walks as well, but driving around for hours (particularly at nig...

Does anybody use the word "sensical" as a back formation from "nonsensical"? It seemed so natural to me until a few of my friends gave me puzzled looks when I used it. I've met some other people who had no problem with it, but a lot of people tell me it sounds wrong, and I was surprised to find out ...

finlay wrote:Also, what about trying "I go and be responsible" in the past tense? I'm wanting to say "I went and be'd reponsible".

I'd probably try to get around that by saying something along the lines of "I had to go and be responsible".

Nortaneous wrote:i [go] be responsible and mow my lawn, and...

ahhh, that would explain it.

This might be obvious to other people but I'm trying to figure out what you meant with it. At first it seemed totally wrong as far as anything I'd ever say, but then I realized I can imagine at least one context in which I'd say that verbatim. In the second sentence, do you mean "miss" as in "not se...

It's pretty established in English that plural is used for any number that is not one. Consider the following sentences: *There were 20 renewals, 2 new sign-ups, and 0 cancellation. *Hey, there is no cup left in the cup dispenser! We have to pluralize 'cancellation' and 'cup' because, despite being...

I've been trying hard for a while now to be able to process unaspirated stops separately from aspirated stops, but, as a monolingual English speaker, I was finding it nearly impossible to hear the difference, or to pronounce an initial unaspirated stop at will. This was frustrating, but I figured wi...

I was tentatively planning on dividing it into witness, quotative (which forms a hearsay when used with the dubitative mood), inferential, and a fourth evidential mainly relegated to the telling of traditional stories; is that last one plausible? I'm considering just dropping it and using the quota...

Okay, that makes more sense. So if, for example, I was to have one evidential which always applied to storytelling, then it is likely that every single verb in the story would be inflected for that evidentiality, because the whole story comes from the same source. A verb within the story could be i...

I just checked a Quechua story which I was creating a full glossed translation for, and yep, pretty much every line contains an evidential. (An exception is direct quotes within the text.) Yeah, this is the sort of system I was aiming for. I expect I'll keep it this way for the sake of complexity, ...

So if, for example, I was to have one evidential which always applied to storytelling, then it is likely that every single verb in the story would be inflected for that evidentiality, because the whole story comes from the same source. Ah, but must it? One reason that I have not experimented much w...

Okay, that makes more sense. So if, for example, I was to have one evidential which always applied to storytelling, then it is likely that every single verb in the story would be inflected for that evidentiality, because the whole story comes from the same source. A verb within the story could be in...

So I understand the basic ideas behind both, and I'm told that they are completely distinct. However, in trying to incorporate them into my baby conlang, I''m finding myself confused about the distinction. Doesn't a mood reflect the speaker's attitude towards what is being said (please correct that ...

What's wrong with "the 20-year old"? It should be "20 year old." What's wrong with "from Helsinki"? With cities I prefer "of" and with countries "from." What's wrong with "per cent of all the phone and text message votes"? Percent is one word. And the rest is awkward. I'd say, "percent of phone and...