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linguofreak

@ 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]...

linguofreak

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...

linguofreak

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...

linguofreak

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...

linguofreak

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...

linguofreak

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...

linguofreak

Did you look at the date on the last post? The thread had been dead for over a year.

linguofreak

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/.

linguofreak

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...

linguofreak

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...

linguofreak

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...

linguofreak

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...

linguofreak

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...

linguofreak

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...

linguofreak

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...

linguofreak

Since Goatface is back I'm bumping this in hope that some of the outstanding bugs can be resolved.

linguofreak

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.

linguofreak

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...

linguofreak

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...

linguofreak

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...

linguofreak

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...

linguofreak

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...

linguofreak

Chibi wrote:
Skomakar'n wrote:English has [ç], though. S:
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.

I have [ç] before both [j] and .

linguofreak

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?

Sounds fine to me.

linguofreak

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...

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