zompist bboard

Travis: decoupled from examples half your words don't make sense. :P Well, a lot of the underlying logic behind what I stated there is rather hard to understand as a whole, because it tends to involve edge cases where the typical rules one would assume of English phonology really do not work, or ma...

Meh, couldn't be bothered to look it up. Also it's weird when you write it like that, with a long marker. It's, like, unstressed and can't be long... :? I think that;s a matter of definition. Wikipedia says it "may" have been a boomerang change, /ī/ to /ĭ/ to /ī/, which went all the way in the USA ...

IIRC final /I/ is the archaic pronunciation, "happy-tensing" of final /I/ to /i:/ is a phenomenon of the last 250 years in various dialects. Meh, couldn't be bothered to look it up. Also it's weird when you write it like that, with a long marker. It's, like, unstressed and can't be long... :? I thi...

I noticed my mum inflecting <frysa> (to freeze) as both <fr> and <fryste> in the same conversation today. Both are allowed, but it's weird to swap all the time. That really is not that weird, at least compared to English dialects, which in general have a wide range of variation when it comes to the...

"ready to go" [ʁʷɛːɪ̯kːɘʊ], pretty sure there's some sort of weird creaky voice thing involved also also, most of my family has /ˌoʊˈhaɪə/ for "Ohio" and /warʃɪndən/ for "Washington" Talking about creaky voice, i have noticed that a common realization of coda fortis plosive glottalization is creaky...

It's very easy to be a millionaire there. On the other hand, it's trumped by my cousin's visit to Zimbabwe last year when she brought back a 100 trillion dollar note... it was a dirty pun. I was aware Zimbabwe's got crazy inflation... but 100 trillion dollars ? hell! 100 trillion? What'll that buy ...

I myself would still think that one would be better off judging Skomakar'n by, say, his opinions on Swedish dialects (and how he seemingly would rather speak a Norwegian dialect) than by his eyeshadow and hair. On the other hand, I cannot say that I am a fan of that kind of hair or any kind of eyesh...

What system could produce more and better archers than the system of Western Europe? 1492 was only 77 years after Agincourt. Mind you that, at Agincourt, it is strongly suspected that the real thing that did in the French was not the English and Welsh's arrows (a lot of the longbowmen were actually...

I would probably say that modern Israeli Hebrew is a Semitic language, albeit one with quite significant Indo-European substratum influence. As to whether it is a conlang or not, well, that is an exercise for the reader.

Is this necessary here?

the noun-adposition order is still attested and is still preserved in frozen forms in ... formal/archaic English. Could you provide an example, please? Preferably one that is neither 1. an actual postposition (we do have a few floating around) nor 2. a noun fronted within its PP for pragmatic effec...

There are plenty of examples, after all. Most early attested IE languages had SOV dominant order, and almost a unanimous preference for prepositions. They all had suffixed noun case, of course, but the point is still valid. My understanding is that PIE did not have adpositions, but had adverbs that...

You know that in the Victorian Black Country life expectancy fell below 18 years? For fuck's sake, the working class had living conditions a lot worse then than now. Less than 18 years? How did they even survive to reproduce Life expectancies are usually heavily skewed by infant mortality when infa...

Lust by KMFDM (which is mostly in German).

"isn't", "doesn't" :> [Idn=?], [dVdn=?] also "of them" :> [Vb_dF=] or [Vbm] or something along those general lines, so this is probably representative of some sort of rule and not just random change of those two words. it seems to be limited to grammatical words, though. ... ...? also, what's inter...

You have /ai/ in "I'll"? I thought that was almost always /O/. For me at least, in everyday speech I'll is [ˈâːɯ̯] (which is not homophonic with historical /aʊ̯/ for me, which is [ɑ̆ɔ̯̆]~[ɑɔ̯]~[ɑ̝̆ŏ̯]~[ɑ̝o̯]), while in careful speech I'll is [ˈae̯ɯ(ː)] Also, I don't think I have as extensive a sy...

I would go further and say that it is a usual part of everyday North American English as a whole, and that the marked case is the lack of it rather than the presence of it.

Yeah, [aU~n@U@42fVgiz tAg@mbaU?]. That could get even worse, too. "I don't know what the fuck he's talking about"? ˈaɛ̯ə̃ˌnːoː wʌ d̪əˈfʌʔk çiːz ˈtʰakʰn̩ ʔbæoʔ :mrgreen: [ˈaː õn ˈnoː ˈwʌʔt̚ d̥ə ˈfʌʔk iːsʲ ˈtʰɒkn̩ː ˈb̥ɑ̟̆ŏ̯ʔ] I think that this sort of thing is really atypical for English as a whole...

(1) Je m'en vais à l'école : (a) /Z9ma~vAalekOl/ (b) /Zma~vAaEkOl/ (c) /Zma~vE::kOl/ ...how do you even pull words out of that? Have you seen close transcriptions of casual English? It's just as complex, if not worse. Words are messy in natural speech, without clear boundaries and with lots of feat...

I would not say that English's being an atypical Germanic language has anything to do with contact with Celtic languages. Sure, the use of progressive may have something to do with contact with Brythonic, but that is about the end of it, and even that is sort of doubtful. If one looks at Middle Engl...

And even in the case of Europe, do not forget that there are IE languages with pitch accentuation, even though such tends to be overlooked more than more overt phonemic tone per se.

You guys are talking about relatively minor phonological changes, though. I mean was THC really talking about the loss of /W/ or Canadian Raising when he mentioned the "major changes" that have happened to English since 1990? I sure hope not! But as I said, what else is there, really? Some new voca...

You guys are talking about relatively minor phonological changes, though. I mean was THC really talking about the loss of /W/ or Canadian Raising when he mentioned the "major changes" that have happened to English since 1990? I sure hope not! But as I said, what else is there, really? Some new voca...

Probably the smallest level on which I can think of changes occurring in English dialects is on a scale of two or three generations - that is, on a scale of at least sixty years or so (going by the approximate length of time between I was born and my maternal grandmother was born). Shorter than tha...

The differences in American English between 1980 and 2010 are IMO major; and I'd hazard a guess that most people would say so. What sort of changes could you possibly be thinking of? Some new vocabulary to refer to computer-related things? Because that's pretty much all I can think of. There's been...