zompist bboard

I've seen someone say that Hungary has explicit quantifier raising. That's like no raising, though a bit different...

French varieties in places like Quebec and Belgium seem to maintain the distinction between /a/ and /ɑ/. Does this imply that, in verb conjugation, 3sg and 2sg are distinct in the future tense as well as wherever 3sg ends in -a and 2sg ends in -as? Likewise, /ɛː/ and /ɛ/ is said to be distinguished ...

Axiem wrote:Can you provide an example word? I'm struggling a little to come up with an example, myself.

Sorry -- added.

A not insignificant number of English dialects pronounce what is /juː/ in RP and GA as some form of /iu/ -- such as /ɪu/ or /iːw/. Question: what indefinite singular article do speakers of these dialects use before words beginning with such diphthong in their dialect? Is it "a" as other dialects use...

As others have mentioned, nasal vowels don’t have to come from VN specifically, but nasality in vowels often originates from assimilation to other nasal segments (which can also include preceding or nearby nasal consonants, or other nasal vowels). This is the general pattern I see, but the set of l...

And speaking of Old Latin -- I suspect that Spanish is actually descended from Old Latin rather than Classical Latin. If you go here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Latin and scroll down to the verb declension, you'll understand what I'm talking about: Spanish has fuimos, fuisteis , just like Old...

Some do pronounce the vowel in zhi chi shi ri with some roundedness, but in any case the vowel is definitely not [y] or .

1. It can also mean "therefore" here. 2. 以 can also mean "so as to/in order to" "by which means", etc. 4.It means something like "equally/both/samely called" to me. So basically what you understood as. By the way, I once read something that said the 常's here were originally 恒, only later changed to ...

A theory I'm aware of is that Vietnamese converts Early Middle Chinese labial consonants followed by a non-chongniu medial (i.e. those which have a chongniu counterpart) to alveolar, due to strong palatalization. So, that would mean the EMC sequence Pj- with /i/ or /e/ as the main vowel is palataliz...

Ping shang qu ru are just names in the sense that people labeled the four tones in MC with four Chinese characters having the respective tones. So the tone "ping" or "leveling" is called "ping" or "leveling" simply because the corresponding character had this tone in MC. Of course you can argue that...

Middle Tatrìny kónnga [ˈkɔ́ŋːa] > Early Middle Hieron kóńńa [ˈkɔŋːa] > Modern Central Hieron kôa [ˈkuːa]/ kôqa [ˈkuːɰa] Middle Tatrìny tánnahu [ˈtánːahu] > Early Middle Hieron tánnahu [ˈtanːahu] > Modern Central Hieron tánnahu [ˈtanaʔʉ] Middle Tatrìny kóttu [ˈkɔ́tːu] > Early Middle Hieron kóttu [ˈkɔ...

Japanese is said to have borrowed /-j-/ and /-w-/ under the influence of Old/Middle Chinese loans. I mean Japanese, originally with only a syllable structure (C)V, C being absent only possible at the beginning of morphemes, borrowed the syllable structure CjV and KwV, K being restricted to velars. A...

Huh interesting. I've never heard someone say e.g. 五十 in a number larger than 100. The 十 is not said. Even in "150" it's just 一百五 (vs. 105 is 一百零五). Maybe I have to listen harder haha. Well on that we are the same...一百五十 (one hundred five) is used, but we also use this form a lot (colloquially? in ...

(Also, numbers are deceptively complex in English; There's different ways to read the same number depending on whether it's an amount or a year. For example, how does one read 1998? If it's a year: "nineteen ninety-eight", if it's an amount: "one-thousand nine-hundred ninety-eight". For a Chinese s...

This one may seem pretty basic, but is tsch ever pronounced separately (i.e. stop-fricative -t-sch- instead of affricate -tsch-)? Yes, tsch may stand for a cluster /tʃ/ rather than an affricate /t͡ʃ/ when there's a morpheme boundary between the two sounds, for example in compounds like Rotschimmelk...

Well in the case of Standardized Mandarinandarin jqx I personally tend to think them as neutralized form before high-front approximants (I analyze i u y as syllabic approximants and actually I find forgetting the idea that a syllable must have main vowel really explains more things in Mandarin in a ...

This one may seem pretty basic, but is tsch ever pronounced separately (i.e. stop-fricative -t-sch- instead of affricate -tsch-)?

^ Actually when Greek had lost its length distinction and merged historical long e into i (i.e.η>ι) I think the system was already established. That is, since a late period of Koine Greek probably. Slightly before that there were two e's with distinction in height, and a bit more earlier the length ...

In my Mandarin speech (and my family's), /ar/ > [ᴀˤʴ] while /air//anr/ > [ɐ ˞ ɻ]. Edit: Now I'm pretty sure that the rhotic part of /ar/ includes both radical and postalveolar, not alveolar as shown by IPA. A previously mistaken IPA expression is fixed and labelled red. All of the "alveolar" /ɹ/ mea...

"program" "progress" as /ˈprʊ-/ (though progress probably just a shortened proh-gress, with [o]), mass(ive) and classic(al) with trap-bath split, laugh as luff Distinguish /oʊr/ /uːr/ /ɔːr/ Distinguish unstressed a/e (/ə/) i (/ɨ/) and o/u as well as unstressed ar/er/ir and or/ur (roundness) Distingu...

Wow...A language without these is really curious to me. I've imagined for many times how would one sound/feel when speaking one. But just to be a little uncreative...my source is of course incomplete. *(t)ʂ(ʰ)u > (t)ʂ(ʰ)wu > (t)ʂ(ʰ)ʋu > (p)f(ʰ)u (Still effective when /u/ is a semivowel, in which cas...

I don't think japanese ever actually lost p though. It still shows up in geminates and after n True. Before Japanese regained /p/ from Chinese and other loanwords, however, [p] could reasonably be regarded as an allophone of /ɸ/. (I think the re-phonemicization of [p] happened before the [ɸ] > [h] ...

I'll keep updating Ah I mistook the thread I was writing for...and gave some expectable features for you. Well, I'm terribly sorry for that. Perhaps providing the background would be better but it would be too lengthy. A syllable in Chinese languages are composed of an initial (initial consonant) a...

Are there any natlangs with >8 tones? Though there are three tone clusters that can occur on roots, and I don't know why they aren't counted as separate tones in Iau... Dananshan Hmong also has eight, but I can't think of any with nine or more. Many Chinese languages do. (If we only count original ...