zompist bboard

Dewrad wrote:

Ulrike Meinhof wrote:

Dewrad wrote:Occitan

If you can do into Occitan, I'm willing to try translating from it. It will be a challenge, but that's the whole point, isn't it.

Would you be willing to up the ante and try Old Occitan?

Hell, why not. Old Occitan it is.

Dewrad wrote:Occitan

If you can do into Occitan, I'm willing to try translating from it. It will be a challenge, but that's the whole point, isn't it.

So from Occitan, to any of Swedish, French and English.

Renaçido wrote:Ulrike, did you get "lutin" by looking up "elf" at the online English-French wordreference dictionary?

Yes.

Looks like Autronesian alignment with word order taking the role of the case markers. I don't think it exists, but don't take my word for it.

But then again, [bøːnɛr] (bönor) and [bøːnɛr] (böner) both work since the tonal accent distinguishes them. No, it doesn't. Unless you have a very strange dialect, both are grave accent. I probably should have written "Since tonal accent could distinguish them". I don't even pronounce bönor as [bøːn...

*Ceresz wrote:But then again, [bøːnɛr] (bönor) and [bøːnɛr] (böner) both work since the tonal accent distinguishes them.

No, it doesn't. Unless you have a very strange dialect, both are grave accent.

3) I have read on a few pages other than Wikipedia that at least in the spoken languages there are some plurals of words from English that have their plural in -s (one example is fan pl fans), but that speakers are unsure what the definite form is for those plurals. What happens if you want to say ...

Excuse me, but I used to think that first puprose of conlangs is to have fun. This is what I am doing with KAPMAN. I said: "without deep immersion into linguistics". If all you want to do is have mindless fun without thinking about how human languages actually function, then there's no way to criti...

Good points! I was never really satisfied by the quite arbitrary criteria for distinguishing complements and adjuncts either. I'll remember this.

On the other hand, I , you , a dollar and that it does are all arguments of bet because they are inherent parts of the act of betting. That makes bet a semantically tetravalent verb. Some of the arguments are omissible, so it can alternate between being either mono-, bi-, tri- or tetravalent syntac...

There's a difference between "can take 4 arguments" and "requires 4 arguments." You can add as many optional arguments as you like with prepositional phrases such as "[that] it does". 1(I) went 2(in my car) 3(from my house) 4(to the store) 5(with the baby) 6(to buy milk) 7(for the other baby) etc e...

Qwynegold wrote:['ust]

Where are you originally from?

Qwynegold wrote:ʊ

How do you pronounce "ost"?

Noriega wrote:After something like 20 years of learning English, I still have problems fitting [θ ð] into running speech. With these becomes "wit deez" etc.

I have that problem with [v w], which is pretty embarrassing.

I've never bothered to learn the way-back-in-the-throat sounds, I can't comfortably and confidently make a uvular trill and I'm not sure how to do coarticulated kp and gb, but other than that I think I can do most consonants. The back unrounded vowels are tricky.

The combination Irish/Chinese/Semitic sounds cool. Looking forward to seeing more of it.

At root, most things seem to me distinguishable by location (including inside and out), orientation, and movement in space and time, basic activity, state of matter, what it belongs to, what its usual cause is, whether it is universally representative or merely an instance, logical operations (and,...

When I've realized that the situation even exists, it's usually not too hard to come up with something interesting. The annoying part is that there's things like this everywhere, but you only rarely notice the complexity. Read as many grammars as possible. Really, it helps a shit load. Yeah. I'm be...

If it weren't for your location, I'd think you were in my class or something. Are you by any chance using a book by a guy called Saeed? Actually not. What's the course you're taking? We had a guest lecture on this and related subjects with Maria Koptjevskaja-Tamm, who you've probably never heard of...

An interesting question was raised during the lecture, by the way: it is well known that locative prepositions and particles tend to grammaticalize from body parts, such as "head" for "on, above, up", or "foot" for "down, below". How does the way languages split up the lexical domain of body parts p...

The most daunting realization I had during that lecture was that this is only one single lexical field, but these kind of distinctions exist for every possible thing you can think of. Not calquing your native language to some extent is more or less impossible, or else you'll never get your language...

The most daunting realization I had during that lecture was that this is only one single lexical field, but these kind of distinctions exist for every possible thing you can think of. Not calquing your native language to some extent is more or less impossible, or else you'll never get your language ...

This is scary. I just came back from a lecture on this, with the bottle floating as the major example. If it weren't for your location, I'd think you were in my class or something.

Miekko wrote:Even monolingually Swedish kids in monolingually Swedish villages close to Vaasa have recently had a tendency of rendering "varför" as /v{f2r

/v{rf2r/ is a common pronunciation in Stockholm too, I think primarily among young people. I don't think anyone has it exclusively though.

Oh dear. The king of all phoneme inventory threads. The end is nigh. Indeed. What's the deal with phonology? It's pretty uninteresting in my opinion. Especially a phoneme inventory. A phoneme inventory is to a conlang what the cover art is to an album. Curiously, I've never seen a single "Post your...