zompist bboard

So I find it weird that they start the sentence with the smallest, trivial almost, details and they go on the part that is the gist of what they're trying to say. I'm a bit late here, I know, but: A question I have heard from Japanese people on more than one occasion is "In English, why do you put ...

Ah,kind of disappointing. No real rush, but I wonder if you could send some of the text that I wrote? I still have all the maps and things that I myself made. Kind of disappointing that this world collapsed. I still work on one of the languages/cultures I made for this.

Except for the vowel in "to" and the first syllable in "banana" I pronounce them all with the PRICE vowel. Of course, due to raising, the actual realization of this vowel varies between ite/iple and banainai, but it is fully allophonic, and the majority of people with raising are not consciously awa...

Eiríkr Útlendi wrote:In some cases, using the wrong pitch results in a completely different word:

like 以外 iꜜgai and 意外 igai!

Also, don't forget 以降 ikō, this is a fairly common and useful one.

It is a little dramatic. Many languages die out because of: 1. armed conflict: this could be conquest that actually kills most of the speakers and forces the rest to hide their knowledge (e.g. |Xam), conflict that causes speakers to flee their homeland and forces them to speak a different language f...

The main three players here are -e, -(a)su, and -(a)r(er)u. -e switches transitivity to the opposite of whatever the base root is. -(a)su (derived from the verb CJ su "to do") creates transitive verbs -(a)r(er)u (derived from the CJ verb ari "to be (somewhere)") creates intransitive verbs. There are...

To throw a wrench into this: In Japanese, gravy is called グレービーソース gurēbī sōsu lit. "gravy sauce". Because gravy is not very well-known in Japan, so the word "sauce" (a common loanword) is added to clarify. Similarly, サルサソース sarusa sōsu "salsa sauce" has "sauce" added so that people know what the he...

Online, I use this one, but there's no English at all since it only does Classical Japanese to modern Japanese, so I'm not sure if it will be helpful to you or not.

Check out this excerpt I took from a newspaper from 1885. It has no small letters and uses hentaigana liberally: http://imgur.com/z5bZMgG.jpg That is: 國安を害するものあらば處するに國典を以て written out in contemporary hiragana orthography you get: こくあんをがいするものあらばしよするにこくてんをもつて In modern hiragana orthography, you get: こ...

I've found some info about sound changes over time from then to Modern Japanese, and there are some things that are difficult to reconstruct if you don't already know that the spelling has been changed to reflect the pronunciation. From about 2 hours of Googling and reading, I saw it mentioned that...

Based on the examples given in the OP, I think the question may have been misunderstood due to unclear phrasing. It seems to me the question is more like "Is there a language that can use an adpositional adjective phrase as regular adjectival phrase?" So the prepositional phrases "of hers" and "for ...

assuming that kirai is an i-adjective is pretty embarrassing! It's an easy mistake to make, since it not only sounds like an i-adjective, it also looks like one (嫌い). It actually derives from the verb 嫌う kirau , "to dislike", which as far as I know only ever appears in the passive (嫌われる kirawareru ...

2: In various Japanese media I've heard people suffix -ra to demonstratives and pronouns only to make plurals (that are always treated as plural, unlike -tachi . I've heard お前ら　 omera 僕ら　 bokura あいつら aitsura 　こいつら koitsura 　君ら kimira 　俺ら orera and I think 我ら warera (but never 私ら watashira or あたしら a...

Yes, I was thinking that...since au is "to the" it is sort of acceptable and sort of not.

to/toward:
a: various Romance
e: Japanese, Korean
i: Welsh, Samoan, Hawaiian
o: ??
u: Serbo-Croatian, Bosnian

Anyone know one for o?

I looked up the etymology of uta/utau, and there seem to be two theories: the first is that it derives from 打ち合う uchiau (Classical 打ち合ふ uchiafu) "exchange blows", the idea being that the song is done in time to physical activity. The second is that it derives from the verb 訴える uttaeru (Classical 訴ふ ...

alice wrote:For that matter, are there any other words which are /i/, /e/, /a/, /o/, and /u/ in various languages?

Japanese:
胃 i stomach
鵜 u cormorant
絵 e picture, へ e to; toward
尾 o tail (not used so much), を o accusative particle

1: According to dictionaries, 絶対 zettai is a na-adjective, even though it ends in -i (and I've heard zettai ni for "absolutely" in Japanese media). However, I swear I have heard in either anime or visual novels characters say zettaku for "absolutely" as if it were a regular i-adjective (as well as ...

I think the line between code-switching and bilingual word play varies from person to person. For example, finlay's acquaintance who inserts 合わせ in the middle of an English sentence seems rather obnoxious to me and I would not do something like that unless I were joking around. But there is no real ...

Do any people here code switch in their day-to-day lives? I do to some extent, and I have a few thoughts on this. First, some reasons for doing it at the word-level: I can only provide anecdotal evidence here, but I find that I will insert Japanese words into English only when the idea is easily exp...

Or you could just partially or completely ignore inflections altogether. It worked for Sumerian. Eventually they started doing rebus writing, i.e. Soap's first suggestion.

It happens all the time in Japanese. Some of the reasons are: - As mentioned above, using these words can be cool or hip, while the native word may sometimes feel stuffy, old-fashioned, traditional, etc. - As a consequence of the above, certain words become established in and/or restricted to specif...

My strong intuition is that the pronunciation doesn't affect the 'an'/'a' choice, presumably because that rule is no longer fully productive. Really? This confuses me as well, unless I'm simply misunderstanding the statement, because for me, the choice between a and an is absolutely based on pronun...

ザ (the) is used in some names like ザ・ダイソウ I'm two months late here, but I feel I should point out that za is a false friend, because although it obviously originates from English "the", it is not actually an article, but rather a true adjective (like 同じ: neither an adjectival verb nor adjectival no...

This prouldn't be a conlang.