zompist bboard

It was first imported from Chinese, along with diphthongs and geminate consonants, and later ones popped up from reduction of syllables with nasal or voiced labial consonants (Onbin) The board hates non-ASCII characters in the URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_grammar#Euphonic_changes_(音便_...

Just watched this clip on NCVS and I must say that I can't really nail the accent. The congresswoman's speech especially sounds no different from the broadcaster English to my ears. Is the Rochester girl's (the 2nd speaker) "dancing" an example of NCVS? That's the only one that sounds clearly "wrong...

I can't come up with a serious one, but plenty jocular ones like "CCCP", "Fappu Nottep", and "Cyka Blyat".

In Chinese, a compound of "Cousin-Nephew/Niece" is used, but the actual component differs depending on whether it's an agnatic cousin (agnatic - 堂 tang2 / otherwise - 表 biao3), the gender of the cousin (male - 姪 or 侄 zhi2 / female - 甥 sheng1), and the gender of the said person (male - ø / female - 女...

Staying on the topic of rhotics: how about /ɚ/ and /ɝ/?

zompist wrote:But after that it's all wordy transcriptions— e.g. Xībānyá 'Spain', Mòxīgē 'Mexico'.

Not really. 西 Xī and 墨 Mò are used as abbreviations and adjectives. E.g. 美墨戰爭 "Mexican-American War", 美西戰爭 "Spanish-American War".

The languages that are dying today are in that state due to past actions. Sure, the last speakers may die peaceful deaths surrounded by loved ones or whatever, but how do you think there came to be so few speakers in the first place? By being a historically small ethnic group, or being lukewarm abo...

Aren't we talking about endangered languages -now- ? Militant removal of languages is incredibly rare nowadays compared to merely half a century ago, yet languages are still dying undramatic deaths, and a lot more are on life support through external intervention.

Um, do you have to be so dramatic? Once most people stopped being eternal land-bound peasants and started moving around, they tend to pick up languages/(dialects/accents) that are more "prestigious", either due to political dominance, employment opportunities, and/or economic rationales, or even the...

I have once encountered the argument that in a universe with any number of spatial dimensions other than three, atoms and planetary systems would be unstable because there won't be an inverse square law (e.g., in 4D, you have inverse cube instead), and thus life as we know it couldn't exist. But I ...

Might be worth getting a copy of Universe Sandbox 2 on Steam and building a model of your system in it. Universe Sandbox has a command (I think it's the 'C' button) that lets you stand on the surface of a planet and view the rest of the system in its sky, watching the sun rise and fall and the plan...

1: At 0:49 this line occurs: 鬼が出るか蛇が出るか　頭上掲げるは唯一無二の魂　地獄の話 oni ga deru ka ja ga deru ka zujou kakageru wa yuiitsumuni no tamashi jigoku no hanashi The translator listed this line as " What’s next? Oni? Snakes? Hanging high in the air, a one-of-a-kind soul, the story of hell! ". Jisho/Rikaichan list ...

Is it known when the length distinction and diphthongs arose? I'm thinking maybe that the diphthongs monophthongized first in some dialect, then when other dialects developed long-omicron and long-epsilon phonemes, they picked up the conveniently available omicron-iota and epsilon-iota digraphs, but...

You're right, I was thinking in a left-to-right order, not distance-from-head, which indeed makes more sense.

Just an anecdote: the archetypical head-final language, Japanese, is little-endian(smallest number last) in both its native and Sinitic numeral systems.

There's */raʔ/ > /lɵy/ from Old Chinese to Cantonese, in the same general direction, even though not exactly the same.

mèþru wrote:Greek was not used in an official capacity. The rulers used Latin and Old French..

Of course, so they would have to romanize the names of the towns and people they rule, right?

How was medieval Greek romanized by their contemporaries? Specifically, in the Latin Empire and its fiefdoms? Did they continue to impose the Roman system, transcribe in an ad hoc manner, or had another standard based on contemporary Greek pronunciation?

Random thoughts: maybe /s/ for sand is reminiscent of the sound of sand's friction, while /z/ for star is the buzzing vibration for star's twinkling? Maybe?

OMG I have to share this clip about how various ancient languages supposively sounded like: https://youtu.be/50By01L7uzY PIE didn't sound consonant-heavy at all, like I had expected. Middle Egyptian sounds kinda nice somehow. Not as harsh as Semitic languages. But Old Chinese is hilarious! :-D What...

Frislander wrote:EDIT: Can we all agree now that unfettered capitalism is the devil's haemorrhoid

Using the power of the government to restrict other's means to make profit (not just for-profit use in this case though) in a way that is not violence or thievery is the antithesis of capitalism, no?

As a native, it sounds okay, and has real-life equivalent: Novaya Zemlya is Xīn dì dăo (lit. New land island) in Chinese. However, dì is not exactly English "earth", it's more "land", "soil", or "surface" and less "planet" or "planet Earth".

Middle Chinese tones conditioned whether a consonant is aspirated after devoicing, though the tones aren't really lost.
http://www.frathwiki.com/Chinese_sound_ ... ces#Onsets

This sort of thing is pretty common. People's ideas about the rules that they themselves follow can be incorrect. One example from a linguist (I forget who): some informant claimed that he never used "any more" in a positive sense ("Every time we leave the house anymore, I play [this] game"), and c...

In my opinion, the presence or absence of a yod between tɕ and another vowel is merely stylistic in phonetic transliteration and represents the same sound, for example, : Here's Mandarin [t͡ɕi̯a] from Forvo: http://forvo.com/search/掐/ And Japanese [t͡ɕa]: http://forvo.com/search/茶/ The two words ar...