Search found 90 matches
- Wed May 25, 2011 6:28 am
- Forum: Languages & Linguistics
- Topic: Vowel chain shifts in Non-Indo-European languages
- Replies: 9
- Views: 3918
Re: Vowel chain shifts in Non-Indo-European languages
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...
- Sun May 22, 2011 3:50 pm
- Forum: Languages & Linguistics
- Topic: Words that are their own opposites
- Replies: 107
- Views: 14679
Re: Words that are their own opposites
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...
- Mon May 09, 2011 9:37 am
- Forum: Languages & Linguistics
- Topic: German Questions
- Replies: 32
- Views: 4878
Re: German Questions
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...
- Sat May 07, 2011 11:44 am
- Forum: Languages & Linguistics
- Topic: Quick question on development of Spanish gender
- Replies: 36
- Views: 4976
Re: Quick question on development of Spanish gender
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.Mornche Geddick wrote:It's still masculine in Portuguese: o dia, bom dia.
- Fri Apr 29, 2011 3:03 pm
- Forum: Languages & Linguistics
- Topic: More short vowels than long vowels?
- Replies: 30
- Views: 5338
Re: More short vowels than long vowels?
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...
- Fri Apr 22, 2011 7:48 am
- Forum: None of the above
- Topic: What are you listening to? -- Non-English Edition
- Replies: 1735
- Views: 364512
Re: What are you listening to? -- Non-English Edition
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.)
- Sun Apr 03, 2011 5:49 am
- Forum: Languages & Linguistics
- Topic: You
- Replies: 111
- Views: 18875
Re: You
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...
- Fri Apr 01, 2011 4:13 pm
- Forum: Languages & Linguistics
- Topic: You
- Replies: 111
- Views: 18875
Re: You
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...
- Thu Mar 31, 2011 4:06 am
- Forum: Languages & Linguistics
- Topic: How much does linguistics knowledge help in learning languag
- Replies: 9
- Views: 2134
Re: How much does linguistics knowledge help in learning lan
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.
- Mon Mar 28, 2011 6:04 pm
- Forum: Languages & Linguistics
- Topic: Is Sumerican a Uralic Language?
- Replies: 59
- Views: 15913
Re: Is Sumerican a Uralic Language?
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...
- Fri Mar 25, 2011 6:25 pm
- Forum: Languages & Linguistics
- Topic: Natlang terms for conlangs
- Replies: 29
- Views: 5410
Re: Natlang terms for conlangs
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 ...
- Wed Mar 23, 2011 4:15 am
- Forum: Languages & Linguistics
- Topic: Sounds That You Can/Can't Pronounce Easily
- Replies: 322
- Views: 57013
Re: Sounds That You Can/Can't Pronounce Easily
Japanese.Matt wrote:And Cayuga, and Tohono O'odham. Probably more.Astraios wrote:And Cheyenne.sirdanilot wrote:Luckily, voiceless vowels are very rare (only in some african languages) so the problem doesn't occur as far as I know.
- Sun Mar 13, 2011 11:20 am
- Forum: Languages & Linguistics
- Topic: "become an X"
- Replies: 43
- Views: 6784
Re: "become an X"
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...
- Mon Mar 07, 2011 4:22 pm
- Forum: Languages & Linguistics
- Topic: Sounds That You Can/Can't Pronounce Easily
- Replies: 322
- Views: 57013
Re: Sounds That You Can/Can't Pronounce Easily
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...
- Sun Mar 06, 2011 6:39 am
- Forum: Languages & Linguistics
- Topic: some questions about Swedish declension
- Replies: 42
- Views: 6767
Re: some questions about Swedish declension
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 /...
- Sun Feb 27, 2011 7:41 am
- Forum: Languages & Linguistics
- Topic: Sounds That You Can/Can't Pronounce Easily
- Replies: 322
- Views: 57013
Re: Sounds That You Can/Can't Pronounce Easily
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...
- Fri Feb 25, 2011 9:34 am
- Forum: Languages & Linguistics
- Topic: Fricativ loss
- Replies: 44
- Views: 7794
Re: Fricativ loss
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,...
- Sun Feb 20, 2011 12:00 pm
- Forum: Languages & Linguistics
- Topic: My beef about ɨ/ɯ
- Replies: 62
- Views: 10094
Re: My beef about ɨ/ɯ
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...
- Sat Feb 19, 2011 1:12 pm
- Forum: Languages & Linguistics
- Topic: Translation from Russian needed
- Replies: 31
- Views: 6613
Re: Translation from Russian needed
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...
- Wed Feb 16, 2011 5:17 am
- Forum: Languages & Linguistics
- Topic: My beef about ɨ/ɯ
- Replies: 62
- Views: 10094
Re: My beef about ɨ/ɯ
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...
- Tue Feb 15, 2011 6:23 pm
- Forum: Languages & Linguistics
- Topic: Question for native speakers of Finnish and Hungarian
- Replies: 17
- Views: 3699
Re: Question for native speakers of Finnish and Hungarian
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...
- Tue Feb 15, 2011 8:27 am
- Forum: Languages & Linguistics
- Topic: Question for native speakers of Finnish and Hungarian
- Replies: 17
- Views: 3699
Re: Question for native speakers of Finnish and Hungarian
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...
- Sat Feb 12, 2011 9:32 am
- Forum: Languages & Linguistics
- Topic: Question for native speakers of Finnish and Hungarian
- Replies: 17
- Views: 3699
Re: Question for native speakers of Finnish and Hungarian
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...
- Fri Feb 11, 2011 10:02 am
- Forum: Languages & Linguistics
- Topic: Yonagu by Nancy - vowel systems
- Replies: 76
- Views: 13161
Re: Yonagu by Nancy - vowel systems
How's that different from having a triangle with five or a square with seventeenNancy Blackett wrote:When you can show me an example of a cube with nine vertices, I'll consider a C9 system
- Thu Feb 10, 2011 5:16 pm
- Forum: Languages & Linguistics
- Topic: Yonagu by Nancy - vowel systems
- Replies: 76
- Views: 13161
Re: Yonagu by Nancy - vowel systems
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...