zompist bboard

Fair enough. The question then becomes if people are willing to assume the unnecessary part of their explanation of the history of their universe actually exists. I'm assuming people in these worlds will at some point have to deal with discussions similar to ours with regard to science/religion. I ...

If this deity is thought to have created the universe as a puzzle, it presumably wouldn't be surprising to its followers that it did so through extremely complex and subtle means. Assuming that the relevant doctrine doesn't say anything highly specific about the creation (say, that it was accomplis...

how does the inhabitants of your conworld deal with conflict between scientific discovery and religious belief? In mine, it never occurs due to the nature of their religion. They believe that the Creator of their world designed it as a sort of puzzle or test, and figuring out the worlds secrets is ...

Haha yeah with a uvular r it is different. Where I come from (Zeeland) a uvular r is called 'brouwen' and it is deemed a speech pathology. I was in Friesland the other day, and apart from being surprised at the actual number of Frisian place and street names, I also heard people speak with an actua...

I do think nr and lr clusters are very hard to pronounce if not impossible but I don't know of languages where they are common. I can also not pronounce [sr] clusters without inserting the Dutch ch sound (or well I can with some effort). Funny you say that, I normally pronounce <schr> clusters as /...

Steek het maar in je reet! I need to know if this is good Dutch, dude. Is that "je" used correctly? Yes, it's the reduced/cliticised/unemphetic/noncontrastive (essentially standard) form of <jouw>, which is a possessive pronoun. <je> could also the noncontrasting form of <jij> (subject 2ps), <jou> ...

It's also possible (and the reconstructed form makes that likely) that it's one of those Frankish loans into Old French, so Old French is used as a witness for the unattested Old Frankish ancestor of the Dutch forms. Right, I hadn't thought of that, silly me. That indeed seems likely. JAL I should'...

Where did you find the proposed link to Old French? I was looking at etymologiebank but there I only see some other proposed etymologies. It's here , though the WNT doesn't mention it. JAL If I read that correctly it means the form is reconstructed based on the Old French words you mentioned, but n...

In (Northern) Dutch, the default word is "kip", which is derived from the obsolete verb "kippen", meaning "to hatch", itself from Old French "eschepir" or "esquepir" with the same meaning. It can be used as a collective for both the male ("haan") and female ("hoen") (as "kippen"), and is used as ma...

Anyone know of a good resource on the morphological use of tone? I understand it's common in various African languages, it's something I'm not familiar with (I mostly know tone in the context of Chinese languages and those they've influenced), and I'm interested in using it. I see I'm a bit late to...

One idea I like is that a sequence of two identical vowels can change into a long vowel with either a rising or a falling tone... Yeah, I was going to mention that too. I think I remember someone on this board once mentioning that to them, the syllabic nasals found in Dutch Low Saxon sound (exactly...

Interesting. I can add that many Dutch dialects lack this diphtongisation too As do some High German dialects, e.g. Alemannic (Breisgau) Wii . In German, the change begins in southern Austria and spreads first north then west, which is why it is found in Swabian but not Swiss German. I'm not sure w...

... arm arm arm ... town tuin zaun What type of matches are you trying to find btw? I see you have included some cognate pairs with different meanings (eg town, tuin, Zaun) but also translations of non-cognate words (eg lake, meer, See). Is any language more closely related to either of the other l...

Herr Dunkel wrote:I'm not sure I've read this correctly (plus it's late) but if I have... are you people seriously proposing that /h ŋ/ are actually one phoneme?

I didn't have the impression anyone here is trying to argue they are.

but doesn't behind the singers have both intervocalic /h/ and /ŋ/ Eh, /h/ is unambiguously the onset of the second syllable, while /ŋ/ wants to be the coda of the first syllable, causing it to geminate. So, for me /h/ and /ŋ/ are still in complimentary distribution (as /h/ can't ever be geminated) ...

In my language, I normally devoice word initial /v/ to [f], but in veeeery careful speech I would say [v] and thus distinguish it from /f/.
Also I normally vocalise coda /l/. If someone mishears it I will however pronounce it [ɫ]. The vocalised /l/ very nearly merges with postvocalic /ʋ/.

I'd like to hear that one, cause the sound coming out of my mouth when I try it doesn't sound very convincing at all.

I do think I read an article once on this topic. I don't remember too well... What I did find after some googling was a book chapter named: On the reconstruction of 'proto-world' word order. that you can find on google scholar. They claim that OV -> VO is a "more common and natural" change than the ...

...[ɬ] (though I think having this sound implies having [l] already)... Tlingit has /ɬ/ and several other laterals but no lateral approximants. Wel, then this would work in at least one natlang. Wikipedia suggests [l] is present in that language as an allophone of /n/ in the speech of some older sp...

What sort of sounds can [l] come from? You'd probably be safe deriving it from a rhotic, [n], [d] (maybe not too likely), or, obviously [ɬ] (though I think having this sound implies having [l] already). I reckon [ð] would work. But others probably have some examples to back their claims up, and I d...

Watch http://youtu.be/-Uj96kKzmVY?t=4m38s . She says "awesome" twice. What's the first vowel in each one? Is it [A] and then [O]? Or is it something else? Also, does 'awe(some)' normally have [O] in General American? (My dialect merges /A/ and /O/, so I find it very hard to tell the difference betw...

If I succeeded at all in saying what I want to say, yes, it's all allophonic. That's what I started saying, be it in a not too forceful way. I then went on saying, that if you don't want to accept the allophony thing you're suggesting (and I'm not not accepting it) then you cant set up one of them ...

I'm just saying that if you really want to see [ʃ] as a phoneme in Dutch, you'll have to set up your definitions in such a way that it will automatically also include [tʃ]. No, as I said above, you don't. You can limit /ʃ/ to words like "Sjaak" en "John" (/sjOn/) (which is arguable, because borrowi...

Analysing Dutch as having S is not entirely uncontroversial though. I would think it's quite controversial, and honoustly haven't seen a serious attempt to defend it. Dutch has [ʃ], but it is clearly the allophonic representation of /sj/, word initial in borrowings (mostly names like Sjaak from Jac...

araceli wrote:Dutch, German, many Scandinavian languages, Portuguese...

Analysing Dutch as having S is not entirely uncontroversial though. And if you do analyse it as such, I don't see how you could not also claim it has tS.