zompist bboard

I never seen this *Və sequence before (aside of course from reading your excellent work on Frathwiki). Is this *ə what older uralic literature used to label as *x which was conceived to probably be somekind of laryngeal sound? It's not just older Uralic literature; I'm pretty sure it's still the mo...

Finnish: jäädä = to stay; to leave. I'm having trouble thinking of a context where 'to leave' would be an appropriate translation. Although I can think of one specialized context in which it would kind of work as its own opposite: Hän jäi bussiin. 3SG stay.PST.3SG bus-ILL ?"He/she stayed on the bus...

Matter and antimatter have the exact same gravity and act exactly the same on it. Go and learn. Antimatter does not repel other antimatter? Precisely to the same extent as matter repels other matter; ie. an antimatter ball over an antimatter floor will behave exactly like a matter ball over a matte...

Mornche Geddick wrote:It's still masculine in Portuguese: o dia, bom dia.

And in Spanish as well, which is probably why the question was asked in the first place... After all, there's nothing terribly curious about Spanish nouns ending in -a being feminine.

Somewhat more securely, early Proto-Finnic must've gone thru a stage where it had /ɑ æ e i o u y/ + /eː iː oː uː/ for a while. OTOH, fairly soon afterwards new long vowels /ɑː æː øː yː/ arose, bringing things back on the side of "more long vowels than short". IIRC, that system is thought to to have...

Zetod - Kats Sõsart. (Although this version appears to be a bit different from the one on the album, which was what I was actually listening to.)

hevven /hju:@n/? Yeah, just like savvy is pronounced /sO:i/… That being said, I'm not such a huge fan of using <vv> in English myself. "You guys" is obviously too long to last I wouldn't be so sure. Plenty of languages have two-syllable pronouns; some have even longer ones. There may be some tenden...

Yous! No e! for heaven's sake, i don't understand why this spelling has persisted! One guess I can come up with is a that monosyllabic English words don't tend to end in -ous , so maybe the -e is added to make the word appear more familiar somehow. Since it's a pronoun, people might not be as consc...

IME, it helps a lot. However, the price you pay is that, if you ever have to use learning materials or take courses intended for those less in the know, you risk getting really frustrated.

I actually took Parpola's Sumerian course a couple of years back, and he had a habit of suggesting Finnish cognates for some of the Sumerian words we encountered. At first I thought that would be interesting, but soon it became all to clear that he hadn't really even tried to establish systematic so...

The whole issue of how to properly say "conlang" in Finnish has only been raised twice that I know of. The first was on the ZBB in a thread planning the Finnmeet back in 2005, when someone made the mistake of using the term "conlang" in a message otherwise written in Finnish, and Jar Jar threatened ...

Matt wrote:

Astraios wrote:

sirdanilot wrote:Luckily, voiceless vowels are very rare (only in some african languages) so the problem doesn't occur as far as I know.

And Cheyenne.

And Cayuga, and Tohono O'odham. Probably more.

Japanese.

muuttua/bunch of other verbs + noun in the -ksi case The most important in said bunch of other verbs being tulla "to come". Indeed tulla + [TRANSLATIVE] is, I believe, the usual dictionary translation for "to become". I think muuttua + [TRANSLATIVE] more closely matches English "to change/turn (int...

My girlfriend has some funny pronunciation going on too. She pronounces <skev> as [ske:v] and <varmt> as [vAmt`]. She's from the archipelago, though, haha. Aside from these words, she barely speaks the dialect, though. Her parents are from the mainland, even though she grew up on the island. "Varmt...

4) "Standard" Swedish does distinguish between all of them - it may be that it's actually a spelling pronunciation, but none the less. My understanding is that the spelling is based on dialects which do distinguish -er and -or as /Er/ and /Or/ - although the modern pronunciation where -or becomes /...

I've never bothered to learn the way-back-in-the-throat sounds Me neither; I can pronounce [χ] and [ħ] quite confidently, but other than those, uvulars are tricky to get right at least in fast speech and anything further back than that I can't be arsed to even try (well, with the rather obvious exc...

This is what we've told him: as an L2, you can't make mistakes like that. As an L1, you have a bit more leeway, but you look like a dick if you're doing something like that to make a point. As an L2 trying to make a point, you look like a double-dick. Who's "we"? Personally, I don't get it. I mean,...

Why only one vote for <ï>? It does make sense to have front rounded: ü ö back unrounded: ï ë Handy yes, but inverse marking seems ideologically somewhat suspect. In Soviet Russia, inversion marks YOU? Sort of like if Polish and Hungarian had a baby that used <ś z s ź> for /s z ɕ ʑ/… Sort of, but no...

Corrected text: Vo obraščeniji meždu soboj oni byli delikatny i ostorožny [...], i kogda nužno bylo komu-nibud' skazat' čto-libo neprijatnoje, to ono govorilos' ne prjamo, a namëkami ili v tret'jem lice. On another note, why won't people write Russian this way in Latin script all the time (as oppos...

ı --A nightmare. Just what were the Turks thinking? While you're at it, why not use j for /ʤ/ and dotless j for /ʒ/ too? Actually, that does make some sense, certainly more than <c ç> for /dʒ tʃ/ Indeed, <c> for /dZ/ makes baby Satan cry. <ı> for /M/ on the other hand, isn't that bad; 'twas about t...

also, "tällainen" sometimes gets harmonized for me Yeah, in that particular word the harmonized pronunciation is actually quite common, I think. However, do we actually know how recent this innovation is? AFAICT, both variants could well have been in existence for quite a while now. Also, there's t...

also, "tällainen" sometimes gets harmonized for me Yeah, in that particular word the harmonized pronunciation is actually quite common, I think. However, do we actually know how recent this innovation is? AFAICT, both variants could well have been in existence for quite a while now. Also, there's t...

Fucking laptop touchpad killed the browser and ate my reply. :evil: This new one is going to be shorter, since I can't be arsed to re-write the whole thing. Sorry. Anyway, the answer is no, not really. Vowel harmony is no longer an absolute all-encompassing rule even within Finnish (there are loanwo...

Nancy Blackett wrote:When you can show me an example of a cube with nine vertices, I'll consider a C9 system

How's that different from having a triangle with five or a square with seventeen

Definitely no more changes now unless they're mistakes or typos. Well, you're still referring to "Lappish" which, as has been pointed out, isn't a language, but rather (an outdated and at present somewhat politically incorrect name for) a whole group of languages, which, incidentally, feature a who...