zompist bboard

I've heard of linguists plugging Linear B's phonetic values into Linear A, but I was under the impression that that resulted in unreadable gibberish. I meant said unreadable gibberish hasn't been published anywhere, but turns out I was wrong . Somehow, I hadn't been able to find that before even th...

I don't know and couldn't find anything about it having been deciphered (only this , but it's been debunked already), but I'm so glad you made a thread about it because the Voynich manuscript is one of the most interesting things ever and I'd almost forgotten about its existence. Once upon a time, f...

Finnish can do that with every colour, although it's rare for a lot of colours and there's sometimes no clear difference between it happening passively or it being caused by something/someone actively except in context. It's not always literal, either. One example is "ruskistaa" and "ruskistua" from...

Then there is real versus reel , which are homophones for me as [ʁʷi(ː)ɯ̯]. How can any dialect/accent/whatever of English in the US have [ʁ]? Is there so much French influence in the northern states? Anyway, I pronunce "real" and "real" differently, something like [ɾiə̯ɫ~ɾiə̯l] and [ɹ̠ɪə̯ɫ~ɹ̠ɪə̯l]...

"Botting" and "bodding" aren't really words Well, "botting" could mean doing whatever bots do. Then again, with that logic, "fishing" would mean acting like a fish, so... :P Bodding, on the other hand, I have no idea. I was thinking of one of the most annoyingly cute-sounding words ever to describe...

If I said [boːɾiŋ], would the average American really think I was saying "botting" or "bodding" or something else rather than "boring"?

Speaking of IPA, does anyone know of a better version of the English-International keyboard? One that has all the Latin letter variants? I'm not satisfied with just á à ä â ã å æ, I'd like to see ă ā ą as well if there is enough room? Also for consonants. I'm tired of having like 10 different keybo...

I just returned from a trip to Louisville, Kentucky, and now I'm wondering if I'll sound pretentious if I pronounce Louisville as natives do, something like /luː.ə.vɚ/ or /luːvɚ/ Wait, are Louisville and Louvre homophones in that dialect? The only time I've ever heard Americans (or maybe even Engli...

pronouns to be borrowed into languages Äynu has borrowed pronouns, numbers and lots of other vocabulary from Persian, even though it's a Turkic language spoken in China. Unfortunately, almost no research has been done on it that I know of (or at least none that is freely available online except ver...

[Insert inappropriate remark about Mandarin]

hyperbole as /hʌɪˈpəːbəli/ which, to me, just sounds wrong. My pronunciation of English tends to be pretty bad, so maybe this is as well, but I've always pronounced "hyperbole" something like [hɑi̯pʰəɹboʊ̯ɫ̪~hɑi̯pʰɛɾbɔu̯ɫ̪] at least in my head. I know the English /r/ is never supposed to be [ɾ], ex...

Why not just download the free Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator and assign all the IPA characters to whichever keys you want yourself? That's what I've done, although I still use pickers like these as well because sometimes I forget which key combination I've assigned a character to (for example, s...

In my latest random mess, the first word two words were oeg'g [ɞɣə̆ˠɣ] and xam'y [t̪͡ɬ̪ɑ̃m̚ə̃j], respectively meaning "a person who dedicates their whole life to guarding a field of potatoes" and "a nice, cooling breeze on a summer night". Make of that what you will.

Languages are tools, not works. Applying restrictions on a constructed language for a work of fiction is like applying restrictions on the making of a saw, a hammer and nails for the purpose of making a chair. If nobody made the saw, the hammer or the nails, nobody would make the chair and all the p...

Like others said, it's hard to tell from a recording especially since the recording doesn't have any other sounds to compare it to as the mic's quality has a huge impact on how sounds get picked up, but after trying to do the same sound myself a few times and listening to your recording, I think it ...

Since this is somewhat related to the topic, I figured I'd post in this thread about this. I was reading about the Pericú who lived in southern Baja California in Mexico and how they had more advanced seafaring technology than their neighbouring tribes and spoke a language isolate. Apparently both t...

A Japanese friend of mine likes to fuck with people in just about any way he can, including language. I've never met him in person and I'm actually pretty sure I'd get really annoyed quickly if I did, but it's incredible how he comes up with some really deep symbolic stuff and neologisms out of lite...

So, I just read that Mandarin 可愛 and Japanese 可愛い is a coincidence. Like, really? I mean, seriously?

And "open-mindedness" is not an excuse for ignorance and stupidity. In order for one to truly open their mind, they have to accept that it's not their responsibility to judge the ignorance and stupidity of others or to educate those who prefer to stay ignorant and stupid, because one man's ignoranc...

Regarding Siberia: no, it was barren. As in, completely, utterly uninhabitable. Same as Europe. We do know that it wasn't a green a verdant land that only recently got cold, because we have science. As far as I know, no one's saying that it was always inhabitable before suddenly getting cold recent...

I feel stupid asking this, but what's TM&T? Turkic, Mongolic, and Tungusic. Oh, duh. It's obvious now that you said it. :P Dunno about the other stuff, but the god/spirit part of Wakantanka is the "wakan" bit. "Tȟaŋka" just means "big"; it comes from Proto-Siouan *ihtąka. Interesting. I sure didn't...

All this in an area where you'd think there'd be simplicity: barren and uninhabitable until relative recently, and a series of coherent climatological bands that ought to encourage big huge language families covering the whole area, just like Uralic did to the west. To be honest, "barren and uninha...

Vijay... VIJAY? :o You didn't know I was here? Now I'm honestly wondering what brought you here. :D Google, lol. I don't personally buy this at all, but there was a guy a while back who wrote a paper arguing that the Miwok languages (and possibly related languages in central California) are not onl...

Vijay wrote:

Vlürch wrote:_{is there?}

One of the 24 remaining native speakers almost all of whom are above 50 and most of whom are in their 70s and apparently speak a simplified form of the language? I don't think so.

Vijay... VIJAY? But yeah, it's unfortunately seriously unlikely...

I recall reading one anthropologist who posited ancient contact between the Haida and Siberian peoples from Kamchatka. I wouldn't rule it out--the Haida were the premier canoe-builders of the Pacific Northwest, master craftsmen from a region of master craftsmen. Mmh... If the Haida came from Northe...