Search found 124 matches
- Thu Feb 26, 2015 10:52 pm
- Forum: Languages & Linguistics
- Topic: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread
- Replies: 2225
- Views: 475897
Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread
@ linguofreak: can you give a full table with all the equivalents in tradtional notation? Perhaps it's just me, but I don't fully understand which constituents of your system give which results in the traditional reconstruction. Phonetic P T K Q W S [p] [t] [k] [q] [qʷ] Z [b] [d] [g] [ɢ] [ɢʷ] F [f]...
- Wed Feb 25, 2015 1:01 am
- Forum: Languages & Linguistics
- Topic: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread
- Replies: 2225
- Views: 475897
Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread
Anybody want to poke holes in this? Correct me if I'm misunderstanding what you're proposing. But the core idea seems to be that PIE had a nice symmetrical system of four series based on two contrasts: plosive–fricative and voiceless–voiced. In particular, the proposal seems to be that the voiced a...
- Mon Feb 23, 2015 12:22 pm
- Forum: Languages & Linguistics
- Topic: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread
- Replies: 2225
- Views: 475897
Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread
and then into voiced aspirates. I was thinking more along the lines of "the voiced aspirates never existed as such, but were really fricatives". So instead of a final step where the non-laryngeal fricatives become voiced aspirates, in cases where traditional reconstructions have "the voiced aspirat...
- Mon Feb 23, 2015 9:53 am
- Forum: Languages & Linguistics
- Topic: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread
- Replies: 2225
- Views: 475897
Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread
One of the flaws, I think, with that theory is that you need to come up with a good explanation for why most of the voiceless fricatives disappeared but the voiced fricatives survived and even hardened into stops in most branches of the family. Recall that I leave open whether L = F and A=V, or L=V...
- Mon Feb 23, 2015 3:04 am
- Forum: Languages & Linguistics
- Topic: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread
- Replies: 2225
- Views: 475897
Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread
Making the system symmetrical shouldn't be a goal of linguistic analysis. Besides, you have no scientific method to prove it, as it seems to be unfalsifiable. Are you talking about the reconstruction in general, or the presence/absence of PL specifically? As for the reconstruction in general, I hav...
- Sun Feb 22, 2015 10:49 pm
- Forum: Languages & Linguistics
- Topic: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread
- Replies: 2225
- Views: 475897
Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread
I thought up an interesting potential reconstruction of the PIE obstruents: To start with, I'm using a notation in which I use one letter to label a point of articulation and another to notate a manner of articulation. I assume a fairly traditional reconstruction of the points of articulation: labia...
Re: Incatena
Did you look at the date on the last post? The thread had been dead for over a year.
- Fri Nov 09, 2012 11:06 pm
- Forum: Languages & Linguistics
- Topic: Phonological features* you dislike...
- Replies: 79
- Views: 14637
Re: Phonological features* you dislike...
The practice of using "an" with words beginning with H's that the speaker doesn't drop, e.g, /{n hIstorIk ivEnt/, rather than /@ hIstorIk ivEnt/ or /{n IstorIk ivEnt/.
- Fri Sep 21, 2012 5:53 pm
- Forum: None of the above
- Topic: Linguistic Quackery Thread, take 2
- Replies: 812
- Views: 212598
Re: Linguistic Quackery Thread, take 2
Here's a bit of quackery I thought up on my own (of course, it's debatable if it can be called "quackery" if it's not proposed seriously in the first place): The word for every animal can be traced back to an onomatopoeia representing its call. Thus, some group of sound changes must exist that chang...
- Wed Aug 22, 2012 4:37 am
- Forum: None of the above
- Topic: Linguistic Quackery Thread, take 2
- Replies: 812
- Views: 212598
Re: Linguistic Quackery Thread, take 2
And she said "No, I'm looking for something shorter; Latin!" This is a fairly common error, and excusable for those who never took LING 101, given the massive number of Latinate loanwords in English. and then she said "Yes, Latin is the mother of both English and Spanish, they just have different f...
- Mon Aug 13, 2012 6:47 pm
- Forum: Languages & Linguistics
- Topic: Parlor Game: The Unknown Language Genie
- Replies: 72
- Views: 12653
Re: Parlor Game: The Unknown Language Genie
Because Google can grant you a grammar of 1000 CE English. A * complete * grammar and lexicon of 1000 AD English? Absolutely *no* knowledge about that has been lost in the past millenium? IMHO, it would be worth asking for, but fairly far down the list, given that even more information has been los...
- Sun Aug 05, 2012 3:00 pm
- Forum: Languages & Linguistics
- Topic: Parlor Game: The Unknown Language Genie
- Replies: 72
- Views: 12653
Re: Parlor Game: The Unknown Language Genie
Why do people keep putting strong claims in my mouth when I merely talk about possibilities? Sal did the same thing in another thread. I never said it must be the case. I said it was unlikely to be otherwise. I know it's a lot easier for you to be right about something when other people say more co...
- Sat Aug 04, 2012 12:26 pm
- Forum: Languages & Linguistics
- Topic: Parlor Game: The Unknown Language Genie
- Replies: 72
- Views: 12653
Re: Parlor Game: The Unknown Language Genie
Well yeah, but that's entirely speculation. Of course, so is stating that the basal split could've occurred very early on in the development of language, so fair enough. But, the point is that Brandrinn's assertion that it MUST have occurred a good deal later is untenable. As far as what can be pro...
- Sat Aug 04, 2012 1:59 am
- Forum: Languages & Linguistics
- Topic: Parlor Game: The Unknown Language Genie
- Replies: 72
- Views: 12653
Re: Parlor Game: The Unknown Language Genie
Once people had developed Simple Language, what exactly would prevent that population from splitting up and evolving their own separate Slightly-Less-Simple Languages? Nothing. But simple attrition might well lead to only one of those branches surviving long enough to show up in the historical reco...
- Fri Aug 03, 2012 12:30 am
- Forum: Languages & Linguistics
- Topic: Parlor Game: The Unknown Language Genie
- Replies: 72
- Views: 12653
Re: Parlor Game: The Unknown Language Genie
Hmmmm... I might do something like this: First I would select a small language family, or an isolate language. I would then take the most recent common ancestor of that family (Proto-Japonic, say) or the earliest known form of the isolate (Say Aquatanian, the ancestor of Basque) and designate it lan...
- Sat Jul 21, 2012 8:35 pm
- Forum: Conlangery & Conworlds
- Topic: ASCA v0.1.6 - NEW
- Replies: 125
- Views: 33044
Re: ASCA v0.1.6 - NEW
Since Goatface is back I'm bumping this in hope that some of the outstanding bugs can be resolved.
- Mon Dec 12, 2011 4:42 pm
- Forum: Languages & Linguistics
- Topic: Words you love because of their sounds
- Replies: 285
- Views: 38794
Re: Words you love because of their sounds
English:
squirrels /skwrlz/ [skwɚlz]
If you take the /r/ to be a syllabic consonant rather than a rhoticized vowel, the whole word is one consonant cluster.
squirrels /skwrlz/ [skwɚlz]
If you take the /r/ to be a syllabic consonant rather than a rhoticized vowel, the whole word is one consonant cluster.
- Sun Nov 27, 2011 12:34 am
- Forum: Languages & Linguistics
- Topic: How would you diagram this English sentence?
- Replies: 46
- Views: 7355
Re: How would you diagram this English sentence?
There's a fallback position, of course, that a grammar doesn't have to model human linguistic processing— it just has to have tolerably similar outputs. That's fine; we often use approximate-but-wrong models, such as the idea that the surface of a mirror reflects light. I find transformations to be...
- Thu Nov 24, 2011 3:38 am
- Forum: Languages & Linguistics
- Topic: How would you diagram this English sentence?
- Replies: 46
- Views: 7355
Re: How would you diagram this English sentence?
There's a fallback position, of course, that a grammar doesn't have to model human linguistic processing— it just has to have tolerably similar outputs. That's fine; we often use approximate-but-wrong models, such as the idea that the surface of a mirror reflects light. I find transformations to be...
- Mon Nov 21, 2011 1:05 am
- Forum: Languages & Linguistics
- Topic: How would you diagram this English sentence?
- Replies: 46
- Views: 7355
Re: How would you diagram this English sentence?
Since reading Tomasello, I can't take the "this must be a transformation because the analysis is more elegant" argument as seriously. I suspect most transformations are historical artefacts, much like relics of sound change. As Tomasello points out, for instance, English-speaking children tend to l...
- Sun Nov 20, 2011 11:08 pm
- Forum: Languages & Linguistics
- Topic: How would you diagram this English sentence?
- Replies: 46
- Views: 7355
Re: How would you diagram this English sentence?
Except for the fact that *every* sentence has a main clause with an inflected verb, which, except in questions, always resides in the second position, whereas *not* every sentence has a non-inflected verb, or a topic other than the subject, or an infinitival phrase, or a subordinate clause (which yo...
- Fri Nov 18, 2011 4:12 pm
- Forum: Languages & Linguistics
- Topic: How would you diagram this English sentence?
- Replies: 46
- Views: 7355
Re: How would you diagram this English sentence?
Yah, I've never heard of a CP. McCawley simply labels it an S. In my syntax course last fall CP (complementizer phrase) was used to replace S pretty much everywhere, including main clauses, the theory being that subordinate and main clauses should have the same structure, and that since subordinate...
- Thu Nov 17, 2011 4:49 pm
- Forum: Languages & Linguistics
- Topic: Terrible attempts by English speakers at foreign tongues
- Replies: 144
- Views: 21547
Re: Terrible attempts by English speakers at foreign tongues
Chibi wrote:Not [çɛ] though! [ç] is an allophone of /h/ found essentially only before [j] in some dialects...not sure about before ...I personally don't, but I don't know if others do.Skomakar'n wrote:English has [ç], though. S:
I have [ç] before both [j] and .
- Sat Nov 05, 2011 12:02 am
- Forum: Languages & Linguistics
- Topic: Judgment Tests
- Replies: 32
- Views: 5626
Re: Judgment Tests
Sounds fine to me.Antirri wrote:"That's the kind of thing [that] people would find weird if they saw you doing."
Is that bolded bit grammatical for you?
- Fri Nov 04, 2011 11:59 pm
- Forum: Languages & Linguistics
- Topic: Non-rhotic phonemes from non-rhotic origins?
- Replies: 29
- Views: 5175
Re: Non-rhotic phonemes from non-rhotic origins?
So I've been looking around, but I can't seem to find a list of words with the phonemes /ɪə, ɛə, ʊə, ɜː/ that did not result from historic sequences of /ir, er, ur, ɜr/ (ex. id ea , y eah . Is there anyone who can come up with a good list of words that fit this description? While we're at it, is En...