zompist bboard

[θæŋk]

before I crack it over your head. It should be "on" your head. "Over my head" there's just thin air. That'd be "above my head". "Over" here means "spread across", more or less. Considering the context that came up in, that was obviously a joke. I'd actually wanted to say the same thing as Kath (and...

I agree with Aly there.

"him" has to refer to someone in the context, so forcing it to refer to Chomsky is jarring. And if Chomsky is the person in the context, then repeating his name sounds stilted.

Those are all fine and none of them are the same as the Chomsky example.

jal wrote:

linguoboy wrote:before I crack it over your head.

It should be "on" your head. "Over my head" there's just thin air.


JAL

That'd be "above my head". "Over" here means "spread across", more or less.

Only Zomp's fifth example doesn't work for me. His first and second are absolutely fine.

Richard W wrote:If one is only interested in reconstructing linguistic family trees, that is a fair point.

What else would you be interested in? Moreover, given this is a thread about reconstructing linguistic family trees, why shouldn't we only be interested in it?

Vijay wrote:maybe nothing I say makes sense and I'm typing practical gibberish half of the time that's on the level of insane as Time Cube, without even realising it.

This... isn't the case? Like, I don't even know how to respond to this.

Vlürch wrote:Well, I'm not a scientist and am technically mentally ill, so anything I say should of course be rejected automatically.

What the actual fuck? Nobody said this! Moreover, I also fit that description.

No, I'd be more likely to call it a biscuit tin if it were rectangular. Cookie tin is just what immediately came to mind.

alynnidalar wrote:What was the logic behind destroying the landing cards?

Perhaps May knew that if they were conveniently gone, it'd be a lot easier to get rid of the Windfall generation in the future. Unless that's too cynical, even for her.

I'm curious about the assymetry between ʰp > x and ʰt > θ in _[C#]. Any particular reason?

What's garden pathy here?

A cookie tin. Even if there are no cookies.

Clearly you wrote this while still sleeping.

It's flowers for the death of a burglar in Hither Green

More or less, yes, though I thought this was generally understood, since verbs preserve the distribution between accented e-grade and unaccented zero-grade particularly well, e.g. *h₁ésti < *h₁ásti vs. *h₁sénti < *h₁asánti

Ah, I see. In my framework, those schwas are from the original underlying vowels, so *CawC > *CəwC > *CuːC > *CuC

For one thing, why do syllabified sonorants yield long vowels, not short vowels? Where do they yield long vowels? What are some instances of *o not from ablaut that are said to not operate under Brugmann's Law? Just *pótis? This is an excellent question, and I wish I had an answer for you. Unfortun...

I'm not sure I understand. The whole point is that ablaut only acted on the original low vowels. In principle, every instance of /aː/ is susceptible to being shortened to /a/ because ablaut was just that widespread.

This paper deals with the reflexes of PIIr. *az (and *až), and explicitly denies mediation through a diphthong, since we never find e.g. ai < *āz, but rather ā with simple loss of the fricative, which indicates compensatory lengthening as the source of the long vowels instead. While the paper is ag...

It seems bizarre that the only time /a:/ would show up is in the ablaut system. Nah, not really, given that it's largely only detectable because of ablaut. It's like saying "it seems bizarre that we can only internally distinguish Germanic *e and *i in Gothic on the basis of their ablaut alternants...

Fine. So we agree that *o probably was rounded in post-Anatolian PIE (PIE3), though with pre-Anatolian PIE (PIE2) the matter is less certain. I feel, however, that when a language has three open vowels with different degrees of backness, the backmost is likely to acquire rounding soon, in order to ...

I still do not understand Kath's scepticism against *o having been rounded in PIE3 I've already conceded that *o (probably) was rounded by late PIE, just not early/pre-PIE. it turned an adjacent open front vowel into an open back vowel. IMO this is unwarranted - the frontness of *e is clearly secon...