zompist bboard

From the perspective of someone who knows nothing about music: for me, "song" can mean any piece of music. Of course I mostly associate it with a piece with singing.

Thomas Payne's Describing Morphosyntax is excellent for learning some of the different morphosyntactic strategies and categories that can be found in various languages. I'm less well-equipped to suggest books on contemporary theories--most recent introductory textbooks will probably have some helpfu...

What you're asking about is basically grammaticalization -- the evolution of lexical words into grammatical markers, and separate grammatical markers into bound grammatical morphemes (clitics and affixes). So I'd suggest searching with that keyword (as well as its variants, grammaticization , gramma...

To some extent I think English is becoming more homogeneous because of TV and Internet. How many bits of "American" vocabulary and pronunciations patterns have I adopted because of the media and pop culture? Probably more than my parents, and them, more than their parents. Modern media is facilitat...

I vaguely recall reading a paper (I think written or co-written by Johanna Nichols) that argued that different types of society had different grammatical features. It didn't say anything Wholfian, though, but claimed (and this is all from memory, it could be all different than I remember) that 1) l...

Almea is blessed; while Earth was dominated by Christianity, Erelae society is basically founded on 4 distinct religions that exclude pretty much each other : Endajué, Paganism, Eled'at and Jippirasti. Because of that, there is no unity in the Erelaean sphere; Christian factions could hate each oth...

Pirahã... well, I've always been skeptical about that. At uni a few of us found a paper by Everett and had a look through, and found that it was very contradictory. In fact an example sentence was used that glossed a word as "two", which sort of refutes their whole point. Well, in the numbers/maths...

Drydic Guy wrote:Whoreson is an utterly awesome insult and leaves its targets dazed and staggering.

totally

The short answer to your question is no, there are not. This, basically. Besides, why would a hunter gatherer society place any less of an importance on animals than an agricultural society? Hunter gatherers depend on animals to survive too (or at least they believe they do, even in cases where fro...

Whoreson. I wish it were still a common insult. Though I guess the rarity and quaintness is part of what makes it a good word?

Thanks to pthag for bringing this gem to my attention: http://originofalphabet.quora.com/Females-are-all-over-language "Prostitute" has the word "tit" in it ... Words that begin with "pro" are all active. A "proton" is positive: it is the unit that signifies position on the periodic table. "Proto" i...

Proto-Algonquian > Menominee From Hockett, C. F. (1981). “The Phonological History of Menominee.” Anthropological Linguistics 23 (2): 51-87; and Miner, Kenneth L. (1979). “Theoretical Implications of the Great Menominee Vowel Shift.” Kansas Working Papers in Linguistics 4 (1): 7-25. The two papers ...

This is very interesting, thanks for doing this. (I am happy to see that Hikóómayíi seems to be much more WALSy than CALSy).

Why on earth are natlangs listed on CALS? That doesn't make any sense :\

KathAveara wrote:Allowing all verbs other than the copula to take exactly one argument. This argument can be used by any number of verbs.

But that's...nothing at all like the system baradsoron has described...

I am a little disappointed no one ever brought up Algonquian languages! They have a pervasive animate/inanimate distinction, proximate/obviative distinction, and direct/inverse alignment. In my experience other languages and families described as having direct/inverse alignment and/or a proximate/ob...

linguoboy wrote:Heard someone the other day say "flea" for "flea market", i.e. "It's one of the best fleas around."

I totally approve of this development and am going to start using it whenever possible, because it sounds hilarious.

Plus, what would we do without this beautiful example of an inflectional suffix reanalyzed as a clitic? Doesn't English -'s come from the Old English genitive singular? Yes, it's one of the few famous examples (afaik--maybe it's just one of the most-cited examples, idk) of affix > clitic developmen...

He gave me a book, I was given a book by him. No "a book was given to me". Well, that means your language would be quite the outlier among natlangs. As I said, you'll find passives for the direct object "a book (kiss, handshake, gift) was given" much more frequently in natlangs than passives for th...

Do you mean that passives use a fifth set of pronominal markers? Or is the "passive" set the same as one of the four other sets? In either case, in terms of plausibility, I'd say this sounds quite unlikely though not totally impossible. There's only a small handful of natural languages that are even...

In English I've only seen this when one is going for a 'retarded' effect ( u mad?) or in this special 'adjoined' clause type (she rushed at him, her hair dishevelled.) In normal spoken English this actually isn't uncommon at all with questions. "You mad?" is very natural (in fact, I'm sure I say it...

so is anything happening with this or what

ol bofosh wrote:Okay, latest speculation on my weird /r/: I have a [ʋʷ] sort of thing going on, along with [ɹˤ]. [ʋ] is lost in my posh accent and also in the intrusive-r.
Compare:
thawing [ˈθɔː.ɹʷˤɪ̈ŋ]
boring [ˈbɔː.ʋɹʷˤɪ̈ŋ]
At least until the next best idea comes along.

Surely you mean [ˈb̥ɔ̝ː.ʋɹʷˤɪ̈̃ŋ]???

I know it's a few months later, but I just saw this and should point out that Jeff mentioned once (and a look at a Cheyenne dictionary confirms) that this isn't the correct form of Cheyenne "winter." (I'm assuming you took the tidbit from McWhorter -- I remember it being in one of his books.) The ac...

Risla wrote:Gida'an; Listed on the online dictionary as "remove it (using something)," and I used it there for "delete it" because I couldn't figure out any better words.

Oh, whoops, in my notes I write am-theme VTIs with final -am for convenience... I forgot that's not the convention!

Drydic Guy wrote:[Er\oUs]

Apparently the "correct" answer is /ˈɪərɒs/ or /ˈɛrɒs/ (meaning /ˈerɑs/ for me). But I don't think I've ever heard it spoken and I wasn't sure until I looked it up just now how it was "supposed" to be pronounced. I probably would have gone with /ˈeros/.