zompist bboard

Many mute people can't speak because they can't hear and haven't been able to acquire language in a non-signing community, but have an otherwise completely function articulatory apparatus. Some deaf people do learn to speak, but it seems to be highly dependent on their environments active efforts to...

According to this article researchers reviewing Everett's data have found that there may actually be recursion in Pirahã and that it is marked by a tone different in the particle transcribed as "sai" by Everett, but which seems to be either sai or saí depending on whether it works as a nominalizer o...

I've never seen the h- version in Mexico, and I've certainly never heard anything other than [xalar] - in high or low registers.

The j orthography is from the late 1990'es severaL centuries after colonial spanish S became x. As Nebula says colonial orthographies did not use j for x. The reason x is used for S in the modern orthography is because it is the only letter that has traditionally been used for S in spanish based ort...

We've found two suppletive verbs in Acazulco Otomí: to give and to go. To give has a root undi "to give" in all the persons where the recipient is expressed by a suffix that starts with k or k' it is suppleted for the root nda. So we have di unga "I give to him" but di ndak'i "I give it to you. The ...

Speaking of Spanish, how has it influenced this language? What kinds of loanwords did it take? Did it adopt some foreign phonemes too? Well, spanish has very few phonemes compared to Otomi, but one change that might be related to contact ifluence is the tendency to fricativize the voiced stops in v...

It is one of the things that we will be lokking into,ç when we get back. The last revision of protootomian phonology is from 1965. I am sure that all of the new information uncovered since then can tell us something new about that. The previous consensus is that proto otomi had a fortis lenis contra...

Actually awhile ago I posted my notes from my first fieldtrip in this thread http://www.spinnoff.com/zbb/viewtopic.p ... t=acazulco You could browse that while we keep gathering and processing more info.

Yes - High, low and rising. More details to come.

Also, why Otomi? It has ~20,000 speakers. You forgot a zero there, Otomi has around 200,000 when you combine all varieties. Never the less those 200,000 speakers comprise five to ten mutually unintelligible varieties. The particular variety we are studying is almost completely unstudied hitherto an...

Just to make a note that the first ZBB fieldtrip has now officially commenced with my self and Rory doing fieldwork on Acazulco Otomí in Central Mexico. We met sunday in Mexico city and started work in Acazulco yesterday - we are already finding lots of interesting stuff in this strange languages. W...

And anyway areal influence wasn't evena possibility with Ritwan as they several thousand miles away from the closest other Algonquian languages. It was precisely areal influence that Michelson blamed for the similarities of Ritwan and Algonquian (and it was generally assumed that Wiyot and Yurok fo...

Your point about areal influences being "slapdash" and not resulting in a large number of consistent morphological correspondences is unfounded I think. Can you think of a case where areal influence has resulted in a large number of consistent morphological correspondences? Where, essentially, a la...

Sapir connected Wiyot and Yurok to Algonquian in 1913[1] based largely on morphological similarity and very few similar elements; only the basic prefixes look obviously connected between the three Algic branches. But their morphologies are so consistently alike that evoking areal influence is a rea...

Mixed languages are of course not conlangs. They are completely natural languages. They are natural languages because all languages are mixed to one degree or the other. Being a mixed language is the natural state of a language. Some language are just called "mixed" because the circumstances of thei...

My personal view is this: Language is an inseparable part of culture. Culture being understood as a semiotic system internalized through lived experience. Culture as a whole has an immense influence on thought. Therefore language also has such an influence. Since I believe that language is essential...

Its only dislocation if the place in which the NP is found in a place where it does not normally appear. That means that if your language obliugatorily have all NPs that aren't direct arguments of the verb last - then that is not dislocation. As far as I know dislocation is generally characterized b...

As far as I know right dislocation in most languages is associated with focus and/or afterthought pragmatic status.

It has a lot of breadth but not a lot of depth - there is an example sentance of most kinds of morphology, but only one of each.

Payne: Describing Morphosyntax?

Maybe it just doesn't. WHy would you want to talk about owning the weather anyway?

Synnejysk (southern Jutish): ɑː æ uː ɔ ɛ ø i ɛ ɔ "I am out on the island in the river"

He has an argument: you haven't shown anything to be false. You have stated that you believe in a ludicrously improbable etymology instead of the commonly accepted one. As clozie says "showing" would include presenting some kind of compelling evidence that all of a sudden would make your bold hypoth...

AFAIK, this word is only attested in Celtic, Germanic and Latin (probably a Gaulish loanword), so it's most probably a substrate loanword, not a native word. When was any Tungus-Manchu language a substrate in Western Europe? There're some traces of an Altaic substrate in NW Europe. Really, how inte...

Unfortunately, some of the these PIE-PU correspondences might reflect cross-borrowings (usually from IE into PU) and even (substrate) loanwords from a third party. That's always a danger. That's why it's important to establish regular correspondences (something you've been loathe to do). I'm affrai...