zompist bboard

Yes, you are never truly over anything before you can reduce it into humour. It's an added plus if you are able to do macabre jokes.

@zompist: Thanks.

Vijay wrote:Advanced tongue root?

I imagine it might sometimes be reasonable to talk about those as well under the labels of tenseness.

I've skimmed bits of Vox Graeca now and then but a condensed account of the evidence by someone well informed would be nice. I'm not that interested on phonetics myself that I'd realistically take time to read a whole pile of books just to answer a single question like this. If you know of page numb...

I'm assuming the tense/lax contrast is used to mean something more than simply a distinction in length and height. Since we don't have native speakers of Ancient Greek or Latin around any more, we can't do close studies of their pronunciation. What's the reason then to assume that some other paramet...

Wouldn't just plain deletion n > ∅ in fast speech or unstressed environments work fine? I don't see any particular need for intermediate stages there, especially in the context of common grammatical words like articles.

and there are labial-palatal affricates /pcʰ pc bɟ bɟ°/. ° is the convention for devoiced plosives, but they could just as well be written /pcɦ/.) That's pretty cool. Reminds me of Hmong's "bilabial lateral" series. I also remember some Bantu langugage had /pʃ bʒ/ onsets with few or no clusters per...

I could have sworn that there were even more examples for that one. I know Nenets also had the same change; e.g. in the word "nenets" The full list of documented outcomes of Proto Samoyedic vowel initial words is ŋ- in Nganasan, ŋ- before back vowels and ɲ- before front vowels in Nenets (Tundra and...

Probably because Spain is a common tourist destination and it's easy for French speakers? How come there isn't then any similar feeling in other countries where people like to escape grey winters in mass to the Spanish beaches? I'd rather bet on a relic from the times of Spanish rule in the Low Cou...

They key point is, IMO, the observation that language-family diversity correlates inversely to the age of human settlement. "Spread zones" get populated first; and since the geographic conditions have not changed, they then get progressively re-populated or at least reconquered, leading to modern-d...

My problem with the similar papers by Everett ( 1 , 2 ) has been a lack in the rigour of the statistical and data handling practices. I'd say that interpreting the correlations is premature if you can't be sure about the power of the methods or that the data are handled properly. I can't say much fo...

The Moon is actually slightly colourful which you can see if you take a picture of it and pull the colour saturation up. You can see an example here . The different colours show areas with different geology. In reality the lunar soil is quite dull in colour. I think the reason for this was that it's...

Do different shades of colour have their own names? I.e. blood and rose (the nearest I could get to rose-red, but you get the idea); leaf and apple etc. I'd be surprised if that level of accuracy would have much standardisation unless you start to give names for synthetic pigments. In Iatmul, for e...

Some Finnish dialects have j from earlier ð, though someone said that it only happens in certain environments, making it a mere allophone. I think the the /j/ and /v/ as weak grades of /t/ (like vejän - vetää in place of standard vedän - vetää , "pull.SG1" - "pull.SG3") don't represent direct desce...

Good work. The fortis-lenis contrast for both voiced and voiceless stops as well as for nasals sounds like diachronic hand waving above all else when there isn't enough evidence to posit a more naturalistic interpretation of the proto-language phonology. But as long as you give all the sources you'v...

Apparently, Elamite seems to be a better candidate for the nearest known kin of Dravidian, and that doesn't show a "Dravidian-Australian"-type consonant inventory at all! Even more so, the phonological consistency across Australia shows that it's been actively maintained through language contact. I...

If there is some concrete connection between Pama Nyungan and Dravidian, it's unlikely that there weren't any other languages within this same areal or genetic group. Such group could have been spread quite far in the south Asia and there's no pressing linguistic reason why Pama Nyungan would have t...

You could try height harmony where the presence of /a/ prefers [o] over for /o/ or the presence of /i/ over [o] for it. Then contract some of the syllables containing /a/ or /i/ away for example through Vh/ri > Vi > V or Vh/ra > Va > V and the [o ~ u] allophony turns phonetic.

Actually length contrast is quite widespread in Australia: http://i.imgur.com/biJoGF4.png Not that it matters too much one way or the other. Length is easy enough to loose and reinvent and both /a e i o u/ and /a i u/ are too common systems to show relatedness. A relation between Dravidian and the A...

Guys, please talk about hard drinks, it's the boozy thread. I do approve of mate but I'm not aware of any recipe mixing it with alcohol. Does anybody happen to know if there exists some variant of mate toddy?

That's entirely possible. My personal experience doesn't include Japanese, especially when sung. It's evidently very language dependent how length gets processed. By the way, can you point out any evidence that aesthetics is a driving force in the replacement of geminates by vowel lengthening in Jap...

I don't think it's good to think about singing at all at this stage. Songs have rhythm which messes with phonemic length and can collapse a whole lot of oppositions that exist in plain spoken language. Similarly I wouldn't expect it to be helpful to worry too much about singing when studying a tonal...

Ostrobothnian What? Care to elaborate? I think being a linguist is very hard if you only know one language. Only really if you work in the field. Comparative linguistics also benefits from a passive knowledge of your core target languages, but for example for lexical comparisons you just need to kn...

Mongolic does have its problems. I would have had some good examples from Chakhar Mongolian but I don't think people would feel happy going after specific dialects. Plus, the material is produced by a native speaker of said idiom but instead of adapting any practical standard uses a wholly linguisti...

Even is right.

Getting closer but still not correct.