Search found 447 matches

by gach
Tue Mar 06, 2018 3:55 pm
Forum: None of the above
Topic: Venting thread that still excludes eddy (2)
Replies: 2639
Views: 301586

Re: Venting thread that still excludes eddy

May I enquire as to which form these junk emails take? I've deleted all mine, but usually they follow a form much like Dear Dr. ..., Based on your recent publication "...", we would encourage you to submit a manuscript to our new Journal of ... We provide full peer review and competitive prices. Su...
by gach
Wed Jan 10, 2018 12:50 pm
Forum: Languages & Linguistics
Topic: Prescriptivism strikes back
Replies: 10
Views: 3237

Re: Prescriptivism strikes back

how on earth can I defend colloquial language to a woman brought up in a prescriptive environment of my grandfather You don't, you just speak it. The cultural connotations of the various speech registers of different languages are a complex matter, but I'd assume that as a native speaker of your ow...
by gach
Wed Jan 03, 2018 8:31 am
Forum: None of the above
Topic: Non-Biblical religious/spiritual literature
Replies: 21
Views: 9254

Re: Non-Biblical religious/spiritual literature

Not sure if it counts: Kalevala (1954 Harvard translation by Francis Peabody Magoun) I don't see why not, given that I counted the Metamorphoses ! :) Though in itself it's a quite late work that represents only one interpretation of the old mythology. A couple of percent of the the lines are due to...
by gach
Sun Dec 17, 2017 7:15 pm
Forum: Languages & Linguistics
Topic: Internet slang dating: is IIRC a somehow aging abbreviation?
Replies: 26
Views: 8360

Re: Internet slang dating: is IIRC a somehow aging abbreviat

Oh, I must have seen it repeatedly, it just doesn't register. The point is that amongst my friends it never features in a sincere lighthearted way (if at all) and thus hasn't developed that association to me. It's not a million miles away from someone saying sincerely "Thanks a lot!" and the only th...
by gach
Sun Dec 17, 2017 4:57 pm
Forum: Languages & Linguistics
Topic: Internet slang dating: is IIRC a somehow aging abbreviation?
Replies: 26
Views: 8360

Re: Internet slang dating: is IIRC a somehow aging abbreviat

Vijay wrote:
gach wrote:"tirsk".
dafuq
A perfectly common Finnish ideophone for snickering. Here's an example from the wild:

http://comics.wata.fi/fingerpori/finger ... 8-2015.jpg

Part of the delight of using these is that they have personality that acronyms can very rarely achieve.
by gach
Sun Dec 17, 2017 3:44 pm
Forum: Languages & Linguistics
Topic: Internet slang dating: is IIRC a somehow aging abbreviation?
Replies: 26
Views: 8360

Re: Internet slang dating: is IIRC a somehow aging abbreviat

I have to say that I have never experienced myself an era when "lol" would have been used in a neutral or positive way in my social circles. Already around the turn of the millennium we used to mock it as something that was used only by teens with poor taste (we on the other hand were the teens with...
by gach
Tue Dec 12, 2017 2:55 am
Forum: Conlangery & Conworlds
Topic: Telpahke Scratchpad: Alignment - what the hell have I done?
Replies: 14
Views: 4940

Re: Telpahke Scratchpad: Alignment - what the hell have I do

Dewrad wrote:@gach I'll get back to you on the majority of that, but thank you for the food for thought.
No problem. Getting your mind around information structure can get confusing so I'm happy if I can make it any clearer.
by gach
Sun Dec 10, 2017 11:21 am
Forum: Conlangery & Conworlds
Topic: Telpahke Scratchpad: Alignment - what the hell have I done?
Replies: 14
Views: 4940

Re: Telpahke Scratchpad: Alignment - what the hell have I do

- your "prominent argument" also seems strange to me - you use "topic-like" as a synonym, but in your examples you appear to instead be identifying it with focus, not topic. The topic is old information, not emphasised new information. To continue on this point, the underlined prominent arguments a...
by gach
Mon Dec 04, 2017 9:14 pm
Forum: None of the above
Topic: Pop music genres - help?
Replies: 53
Views: 21870

Re: Pop music genres - help?

I'm not sure "continues local traditions" really makes sense as a definition of either 'world' or 'folk'. After all, everything everywhere continues traditions, and by definition those traditions are local to wherever they are. On the other hand, 'folk music' in the usual sense is mostly a mid-20th...
by gach
Mon Dec 04, 2017 6:47 pm
Forum: None of the above
Topic: Pop music genres - help?
Replies: 53
Views: 21870

Re: Pop music genres - help?

Disagree: Look through the Grammy nominations and at least half of what you see is mainstream popular music from parts of the world the USA doesn't particularly care about. Maybe so. I haven't ever found music awards particularly interesting nor worth viewing them as authorities, so I can't comment...
by gach
Mon Dec 04, 2017 5:21 pm
Forum: None of the above
Topic: Pop music genres - help?
Replies: 53
Views: 21870

Re: Pop music genres - help?

It's at least true that people classify music intuitively through tropes and prototypes. If you are asked if a band or a piece of music counts as pop or rock, the typical way to answer the question is to compare it to other bands that are accepted to fall into these genres and see if it sounds simil...
by gach
Tue Nov 21, 2017 4:07 pm
Forum: Languages & Linguistics
Topic: Geology and Sound Change
Replies: 14
Views: 4127

Re: Geology and Sound Change

Sure, but the original question was regarding "an area’s geography", which more conventionally refers to terrain, not climate. Sure, the question covers a couple of largely unrelated issues that have different answers. I had the climactic aspect of the question on my mind because of the papers that...
by gach
Tue Nov 21, 2017 2:41 pm
Forum: None of the above
Topic: Happy Things Thread
Replies: 969
Views: 370398

Re: Happy Things Thread

That's both a good and bad thing. Hopefully the deadline for re-submission isn't too close... Luckily a resubmission deadline is something I've never encountered in astronomical journals. That means that as long as you keep yourself and your co-authors disciplined, you can take a bit of time to thi...
by gach
Tue Nov 21, 2017 1:19 pm
Forum: Languages & Linguistics
Topic: Geology and Sound Change
Replies: 14
Views: 4127

Re: Geology and Sound Change

Nichols has also done some work purporting to show that mountainous regions (like the Caucasus) tend to become "relic areas" where more complex languages pile up (and become even more complex) while simpler ones spread out over the lowlands (and become more simple in the process). She claims to hav...
by gach
Tue Nov 21, 2017 9:43 am
Forum: Languages & Linguistics
Topic: Geology and Sound Change
Replies: 14
Views: 4127

Re: Geology and Sound Change

There have been these couple of papers claiming geographic causes for the distribution of ejectives and tonal languages: Evidence for Direct Geographic Influences on Linguistic Sounds: The Case of Ejectives Climate, vocal folds, and tonal languages: Connecting the physiological and geographic dots I...
by gach
Tue Nov 21, 2017 8:58 am
Forum: None of the above
Topic: Happy Things Thread
Replies: 969
Views: 370398

Re: Happy Things Thread

Sounds like a perfectly reasonable referee round then, a bit of work but nothing out of the ordinary. We are currently having a maybe too swift referee round with a paper that we submitted about a month ago. Against everyone's expectations the referee report came back in only two weeks. We'd expecte...
by gach
Thu Oct 26, 2017 7:05 am
Forum: Languages & Linguistics
Topic: Phonemes which are found in <5 languages or so
Replies: 54
Views: 14232

Re: Phonemes which are found in <5 languages or so

low semivowel somewhere in the weird part of Asia, I forget where, Sangtam maybe? There's the low glide in Marphali and perhaps in many other languages of the area, if you follow the references. However, isn't this essentially an uvulo-pharyngeal approximant? In that case it doesn't sound different...
by gach
Sun Oct 22, 2017 4:41 pm
Forum: Languages & Linguistics
Topic: Phonemes which are found in <5 languages or so
Replies: 54
Views: 14232

Re: Phonemes which are found in <5 languages or so

On a sufficiently abstract level, that's true, but on a more concrete level, it seems to me that using specific descriptions like "close-mid" to describe what are actually true mid vowels, or "open front" to describe what is actually an open central vowel, and showing the phonemes in the correspond...
by gach
Fri Oct 20, 2017 10:13 am
Forum: Languages & Linguistics
Topic: Phonemes which are found in <5 languages or so
Replies: 54
Views: 14232

Re: Phonemes which are found in <5 languages or so

There are a lot of issues with Phoible. A classic one is reporting the Finnish palatal glide as /e̯/. I have no idea.
by gach
Fri Oct 20, 2017 8:47 am
Forum: Languages & Linguistics
Topic: Phonemes which are found in <5 languages or so
Replies: 54
Views: 14232

Re: Phonemes which are found in <5 languages or so

That list highlights how we should rather be looking at distinguishing features than narrow phonetic notation when in search for rare phonemes. How is /kʘ/ for example different from a plain bilabial click or how relevant is the stress mark in /'ay/? I'm quite sure that there are many more languages...
by gach
Fri Oct 20, 2017 8:16 am
Forum: None of the above
Topic: A Very Brief Explanation of the British Election
Replies: 323
Views: 93400

Re: A Very Brief Explanation of the British Election

I'd still suggest to make all the major purchases you are thinking of doing from Britain before the deadline comes, unless you are up for paying import duties. The way things are going I can't be too hopeful that we'll have a sensible trade agreement by April 2019.
by gach
Tue Oct 17, 2017 5:08 am
Forum: None of the above
Topic: The upcoming (September 24) German federal election
Replies: 101
Views: 44394

Re: The upcoming (September 24) German federal election

keep small town residents in their small towns WHAT? As opposed to letting the smaller towns wither away as jobs, people, and services move to larger cities. It's an admirable goal but has a couple of problems: - It's a bloody hard task to achieve, not the least with a policy maker's toolkit. - It'...
by gach
Tue Oct 10, 2017 3:33 pm
Forum: Languages & Linguistics
Topic: Cultural approaches to handbooks
Replies: 17
Views: 4225

Re: Cultural approaches to handbooks

Zompist, didn't you once write about how academics love to start their books by defining their subject at length, and how, in your opinion, readers might as well skip to chapter 2, where authors tend to forget their own definitions and actually start to talk about things? Some authors do get carrie...
by gach
Sun Oct 08, 2017 11:49 am
Forum: Languages & Linguistics
Topic: Phonemes which are found in <5 languages or so
Replies: 54
Views: 14232

Re: Phonemes which are found in <5 languages or so

Vijay wrote:Don't most of the languages in that region sound a lot like American English, especially regarding the rhotic?
They do a bit. Aspirated stops and rhotic approximants aren't exactly rare in the area surrounding the Himalayas. Mongsen Ao's /ʉ/ is a nice addition to that.
by gach
Sun Oct 08, 2017 7:48 am
Forum: Languages & Linguistics
Topic: Phonemes which are found in <5 languages or so
Replies: 54
Views: 14232

Re: Phonemes which are found in <5 languages or so

And some time ago this recording was posted somewhere of a Himalayan (I think) language that sounds a lot like American English, especially regarding the /r/. I can't seem to find the recording right now. That would be Mongsen Ao, fascinatingly closely related to Sangtam which has the dental-labial...