zompist bboard

I have a nice Americanized /bər.ʒwa/, with a syllabic r in the first syllable.

Weird. That's the way it was written in the Rosetta Stone program I downloaded... and that's also the way Google Translate presents it. Silly programmers, trying to sound fancy with their Russian colors :P It's nothing that out of the ordinary. You can say in English, for instance, "That is person ...

Ack, so many posts, so many things to say... Whence the Slavic tendency to say "in me X" for "I have X"? afaik this phenomenon occurs in all branches, being most obvious (to me) in Russian and documented but archaic/dialectal in South Slavic. The phenomenon is generally considered to be a Uralic sub...

Is that suffix used at all in English? I can't find anything conclusive; "Sybarite" gives a few Google hits, but that's all I could find. The suffix -ite is actually extremely common in English; the weird thing is it's actually not that commonly used for Greek placenames. It seems to be especially ...

Soap wrote:Even so, it's nearly certain than Punjabi and the Slavic languages' tones are innovations and not inherited from Sanskrit/Proto-Slavic.

Nitpick: Slavic languages' tonal/pitch systems were in fact inherited from Proto-Slavic; however, Proto-Slavic did not inherit its system from PIE.

roninbodhisattva wrote:Language Contact with Victor Friedman and Lenore Grenoble.

That means you were quite literally in the very same classroom as me.

roninbodhisattva wrote:

Mecislau wrote:University of Chicago.

Weird, I was just at the prospective grad student visit there a couple weeks ago.

D'you sit in on any classes?

Somewhat related, was the Modern Hebrew system with resumptive pronouns a response to the breakdown of more specific relative conjunctions? I vaguely remember Hebrew doing all sorts of weird stuff with pronouns (fusing them to prepositions, for instance) so I don't really know what conclusion can b...

Just as a question: where do you go? University of Chicago. My professor loves it, even tho he discovers mistakes in it all the time. After all, if it's for statistical purposes, the odd mistake is no big deal. And sometimes it's understandable that things look a little odd. For example, I think it...

Not directly related:

I find it interesting how attitudes vary towards WALS. Your professors seem to be encouraging it, whereas mine are fervently against it (and, well, I have to agree with them at least in the fact that I've noticed numerous mistakes or vagueries in it).

What's your take on resumptive pronouns? It's only in very formal Irish that I see constructions like "Sin í an bhean lenar labhair mé" ("That is the woman with whom I spoke"). What most people write and say these days is "Sin í an bhean ar labhair mé léi" ("That is the woman that I spoke with her"...

This is not a harangue about "to which..." vs. "which... to", though it is looking at it descriptively. Basically, in all languages save English I know of (there I go again!) that have adpositions (A) and relative pronouns (R), we've got a system where the preposition and the pronoun are right next...

It's not quite the same thing, but in Russian, if the object of a preposition is a quantified noun, the the being quantified can jump to either side of the preposition and quantifier: через сто лет čerez sto let within hundred.ACC year.GEN.PL "within a hundred years" лет через сто let čerez sto year...

ӇЫ + ӃАӇИ + ӇАЙӃ


(page from a Nivkh children's book)

1a. Descriptive predicates* - the weather is warm // погода тёпло 1b. Inalienable nominative predicates** - my boyfriend is American // мой друг - американец 1c. Alienable nominative predicates** - she's a teacher // она учительницой. Erm, two out of those three sentences aren't grammatical. With 1...

Copulae in Russian are actually extremely problematic, mostly due to the fact that there are so many potential ways to express them. Russian certainly has far more than just four ways of expressing being... 1) Собака животное. This sounds a little off to me (though it might just be me). In this sort...

Polish does (they are used in the inflection of certain foreign names, e.g. Rabelais, gen. Rabelais'go, Clarke, gen. Clarke'a). They are also misused probably as often as in English. The issue here was using apostrophes to mark palatalization, not apostrophes for other uses. If were were talking ab...

Mashmakhan, you didn't answer a good question mentioned earlier. I'll elaborate on it here... Let's first look at your original statement: Does anyone use them to indicate palatization in consonants? The Slavic languages are real-life languages that do so, so I don't see why someone couldn't get awa...

Does anyone use them to indicate palatization in consonants? The Slavic languages are real-life languages that do so, so I don't see why someone couldn't get away with this for a conlang as well. What? No they don't. Apostrophes are only found in Slavicists' transcriptions of Slavic languages. (Yes...

Is this video Russian or Ukrainian? The singer is Ukrainian but with Ukraine you can never know. I've had names of his songs translate in and out of each and so I've never been able to figure out. Oh, it's Verka Serdyuchka. There's no mistaking him... The song's in Russian. PS: What does Чита дрита...

1. Competing systems. I created this version because all of existing transcriptions are innacurate. How so? They can suit basic tasks, but not for lossless rendition of spelling of words and orthography details. For example, former head of Israeli Izhak Rabin. If you transliterate it Ichak, it will...

It's basically just a definite direct object circumpositional marker. Where anything that is not a definite direct object does not require it. Much like the French ne...pas, the negative circumpositional marker, where anything not negative doesn't require it. It's a simple as that. As far as the or...

I've only ever come across конланг kónlang or искусственный язык iskússtvennyj jazýk in Russian, the former obviously being an English loan, the latter meaning "artificial language". I prefer the latter, personally. For other terms, loanwords sound weird. Here you'd just use normal Russian formation...

"Fair enough". Definitely that.

Also "whereas", which I use in speech far too much. I suspect that's interference from Russian, though, where "а" ("whereas") is a basic conjunction just like "и" (and) or "но" (but).

1) I used ş only because š is already mapped to ш. Oh, whoops. When you said you were using a more Turkic style orthography I just assumed ş was /ʃ/ without actually looking at what the word was... 5) ё for э was my first thought and I couldn't think about nothing more fitting, although for native ...