zompist bboard

Wow, I had to return to the first page to cleanse my palette of all the troll-face. I will say I'm amazed at the amount of certitude some people have here, in favor of or against linguistic claims. But then, what do I know? I guess I know the fine structure constant to within 0.32 parts per billion....

This is "Our policy e ffects the situation". It's rare usages like these (yes, it's a verb, but it's not the same verb as "affect", which means something like making a change in something else rather than "cause" from scratch) that can trip people up. (as quoth xkcd) Ughn, yeah... I did do that, di...

Yeah, I mean, cool but meh. Like others have said: if natlangs are succint... And honestly, those suggestions often feel like trying to swat a fly with a hammer. "No dummy pronouns" really? Venetian has double-reletivizers and dummy pronouns, and it was once a lingua franca. "No agreement" <.< So, t...

heheh... somehow I've never broken up petition into peti-tion <.< It seems more obvious now. "petitieve modaliteit," eh? I'm pretty sure modaliteit is more a cognate with modality than voice... just going out on a limb there. Good to se it exists somewhere, anyway. Although, it's interestingly diffe...

Not to be confused with "repetitive," Google! >.< [+fists, +air] I was studying an Ida'an grammar and came across this out of the blue: Petitives are formed by attaching the discontinuous affix məkə(k)- -i- to a stem 4 . ... 4 If the first vowel of the root is /i/ this infix is inaudible. The infix ...

Would "affect" vs "effect" count? I don't think they're antonyms, but maybe someone else knows better. I mean, the usual use of "affect" isn't an antonym of "effect" at all however. However, there's also the less-used "Our policy affects the situation," where it means "to cause," which is in a way ...

The problem with prosody is that we have no good way of discussing it. As far as I know there's no good technical terminology to describe different kinds of prosody. I don't even think I've read a scientific paper on prosody. It tends to get glossed over even though it is a very salient feature of ...

And while we're suggesting more topics: how to do focus (even though it's an open research question IIRC) and prosody. Those are really hard to find good, detailed info on.

And while I'm posting, you forgot my favorite (reported) Japanese ideophone: muramura

I generally come up with words as needed, though it can be a real pain. The plan is eventually (after the specific conlang has been tested well enough) that I'll figure out NSM in the lang, then move on to stuff like the Swaedish list, kinship lists, names and food lists. So, it's pretty much a hybr...

I did notice today when I said /θæŋks/ as [tæŋks], not to be confused with [t h æŋks], those things that move around with massive guns. After some more experiments, I may be able to put down /θ/ > [t] / #_ in my list of ideo-allophones. Is it really alveolar, or is it interdental? Unmistakably alve...

And there's no variation between speakers, ever, and all IPA symbols are cast into stone and don't allow any leeway, especially not when transcribing phonemes. I dunno what you guys are all up in arms about... If we consider that you might want to compare two languages, you might hope that the assu...

I have the /ts/ prefix, but my /tʃ dʒ/ is just fine and stable. Well, except that I do them postalveolar, but until recently I thought that was the norm I did notice today when I said /θæŋks/ as [tæŋks], not to be confused with [t h æŋks], those things that move around with massive guns. After some ...

Apico-uvulars? *tries* damnit, all that comes out is some sort of awkward click consonant A click? Now that's.... weird . But now that I try it, yeah okay... -.^ can you do an apical uvular trill? :P Hmmm, now that you mention it, I can get a apico-velar trill easily enough, but an apico-uvular... ...

It really isn't weird in a Europeanoid language varieties with a single rhotic phoneme; the same applies with /l/ representing any single lateral phoneme as well in Europeanoid language varieties. Yeah, I know, but I just don't think about ɰ as a rhotic. Especially not when that's used (by me, now ...

Oh, so it's actually just [ɰ]? Yeah, I suppose... it's just looks fucking weird to write /r/ > [ɰ] Besides, it just feels like it has tons of secondary articulation, so I'm hesitant to adopt anything. I can do a velar trill. Post a recording? I have no idea what that would even sound like. Also, th...

Sorry, I'm just too lazy to go get the right symbol, so I'm using /r/ as in a generic rhotic. I actually do it as a velar approximant. Normal for my dialect is an alveolar approximant. As far as I can tell, though it's not like I've taken data, the only exceptions are after an alveolar stop, so that...

Hmm, even here in the Houston area I hear quotatives. "Like" is more common than "go" and way more common than "be all", tho. Hmm, in Atlanta, you hear "be all" all the time, even among white speakers. Usually, though it introduces a quote the speaker think is stupid. I almost never hear "go", thou...

Or, you know, hyperbole. With no purpose and no relation to the discussion? Foe'd. I do like how the discussion has gone totally off the rails thanks to a discussion about how some people use hyperbole and some people can't understand it. And by "like", what I mean is "why does this happen so often...

Usually and probably do not constitute strong enough an assertion for you to know bwah bwah And then there are people who drop all the weasel words, expecting you to pick up on it, because that's a reasonable, practical epistemology. OTOH, if you really like hardcore skepticism in all contexts... :...

The most important point I see is that the stress-factor was not present. This would seem to imply that, given the means and opportunity to expand, the population would feel no psychological pressure to do so, which flies in the face of a privacy-organ-style hypothesis.

Yeah, that was extremely helpful. I'll have to think about my applicatives, though. The thing with this lang is that its verbs have a static number of arguments, and voice is the only way to change it. Replacing arguments of a transitive verb with dummy pronouns only lasts so long before it gets tir...

So, I'd really like to use circumstantial voice in my latest lang, but I'm not sure about its particular structure. As I have it now, it really just moves an oblique to subject and leaves the normal object(s) alone: I ate the pie with a fork -> A fork was eaten the pie with. So, it this actually rea...

Yeah, that's what I was thinking, too, yet for all that the Wikipedia page seems to imply no one thought of it until Galileo... Of course, I'm thinking also that you don't necessarily need a pendulum to keep uniform time in a clockwork apparatus. If I'm guessing right, the way a clock works is that...

That said, I'm going to do some research on pendulums and with my very, very, very limited knowledge of math and science see if there's any way I might push up the discovery of the pendulum a bit--even if not by my primitive culture... Wait... maybe it's just me, but a pendulum seems obvious... I m...

yeah, there was a discussion, almost a year ago, btu in the meantime, I've found the interesting Universal 738: Hierarchy of Property Concepts: Human Propensity > Physical Property > Dimension / Colour > Value / Age / Form > Material / Gender When languages encode these types of property concepts by...