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And yet Greek children pick up the language just fine. Actually, they've made a complete mess of it over the centuries. I think the ten year argument isn't quite right. What can't be learnt in the relevant learning period is simply lost. Complexity is bound by the time available to learn it - and n...

It is distinguished by being more or less an abugida but having different inherent vowels for different groups of consonants based on their historical secondary articulation. That doesn't disqualify it from being an abugida. The Khmer writing system has different two different implicit vowels, but ...

Gulliver wrote:The OED mentions a Chaucer manusript with a mixed form of ON they, OE her, OE em .

The third form is still present in Modern English.

zompist wrote:... numbers are fairly resistant to relexification.

The word for 'one' is relatively unstable.

One possible enhancement, perhaps more appropriate for a philological tool rather than for an artistic tool, would be optional rules. They do seem to be real rather than artificial (cf. English food , good and blood ), and they can be used to handle the indeterminate order of idempotent rules, which...

Why didn't Proto-Semitic /b/ go to /v/ in Arabic if /p/ went to /f/? That does have a sort of answer. While it is perfectly possible to have [p] > [f] as an isolated change, unconditional > [v] won't happen if the language keeps its [d]. (That is why the seemingly missing PIE *b is such a mystery.)...

So these many languages that do have t/d/s are still too few to have an effect on the data? As far as I can tell, each lineage (i.e. family) gets the same weighting. I hope this is the case, because I noticed a whole bunch of Quecha dialects with luziru or similar in the ASJP Database for 'star'. A...

Nobody has said that "you need to rush out and get" a word for star that has /z/ or that people experience "longings" for such a word (most any native English speaker could disprove that straw man with simple introspection). It doesn't work too well with my 'fly' comparison, but we do have z odiaca...

Still, no-one complains when non-arbitrary lexemes are reported in signed languages, so why not spoken languages too? The causal mechanisms are the tough part, though. The problem is that these alleged relationships ARE arbitrary. There's no non-arbitrary connection between a leaf and a lateral app...

Does anyone have access to the actual article? I'm curious how much of an effect they're finding. If the effect is very large it would be a bit surprising that no one's noticed. Plus aren't there lots of obvious exceptions? (E.g. for 'nose' there's Mandarin bízi, Hungarian orr, Hebrew af, Swahili p...

I just read the article. I'm wondering how it is possible for many languages to retain these specific sounds in specific words. Shouldn't sound changes muddle things up completely? It's a statistical trend. Presumably words that don't conform are more likely to be replaced as the bearer of a partic...

The Cornish numbers can be found here with links to all the Celtic languages, even the extinct Cumbric and older forms of Welsh and Irish. The 'Cumbric' forms are, technically, specialist English numbers - the 'sheep-counting' numerals. It's not even certain that they derive from Cumbric. Even if t...

(I mention the sheep-counting numbers on the ethnomathematic page. They're certainly fascinating, but they're a little obscure for the main list.) They're slightly hidden because the opening paragraph tag is missing before 'Celtic'. It might be worth mentioning that they usually go up to 20, and it...

Since that paper was published (in 1924) scholarly opinion has moved far away from the Goidelic survival hypothesis. What do you mean by 'Goidelic survival hypothesis'? It sounds like a theory that some areas had remained Q-Celtic, rather than being Q-Celtic because of an invasion from Ireland. I'm...

Since that paper was published (in 1924) scholarly opinion has moved far away from the Goidelic survival hypothesis. What do you mean by 'Goidelic survival hypothesis'? It sounds like a theory that some areas had remained Q-Celtic, rather than being Q-Celtic because of an invasion from Ireland. I'm...

Sorry, I don't think I phrased my question too well; I realize that these numerals are interesting and unusual. What I mean is basically if you're going to include that, then why not include numbers from other varieties of British English as well? A line may have to be drawn somewhere. For example,...

I can't find any sign of the English sheep-counting numbers of Brythonic origins in the file. But are these any more notable than numbers in any non-standard dialect of English/Anglic variety/whatever indigenous to Britain? So far, all there is there is English and Scots (and that too apparently on...

I was thinking of the height, but on rechecking the sources I see that in height the RP vowel /ɜː/ is midway between IPA [ɛ], [œ] and [ɜ] on one hand and IPA [e], [ø] and [ɘ] on the other. The more typical 'standard' British vowel is at the height of IPA [e], though I now see that J.D, O'Connor give...

Under Welsh there is listed a set for "Cardiganshire". After doing some asking around these are simply Irish numbers written using Welsh orthography and they're not used in Cardiganshire. They were used there around the 17C by Irish workers but everyone there today use the Welsh un - deg. Have you ...

A lot of the answers are a matter of history, and the limited rendering technology available when the list of numbers was initially created. It is an old Internet resource. 2. In Sanskrit, 'six' is ṣáṣ , not * s`as` , and 'eight' is aṣṭa , not * as`ṭá . It's a choice of transcription. The spacing gr...

Travis B. wrote:So if the RP NURSE vowel is actually [ɜ] and not [œ], what is going on with it that makes it sound so different from my own [ɜ]?

IPA [ɜ] (open-mid) should not be confused with RP [ɜ], which is approximately IPA [ɘ] (close-mid).

Bisyllabic /ɬᵻvr̩/ in the Midlands. Bisyllabic /ɬəvɪr̩/ (mostly in Ceredigion) or /ɬɪvɪr̩/ in the South. Doing some more browsing, I found that some dialects (West Pembrokeshire, for example) have largely eliminated the alternation of obscure <y> with clear <y> (and with <w>) ( Iosad p152). How muc...

Thanks, I've got some unlearning to do. For example, I'd learnt llyfr 'book' as [ɬɨvr] (one syllable), whereas it's something like [ɬəvr̩] (two syllables). Another problem with the notion that Welsh spelling specifies the pronunciation. Yeah, it's [ɬəvr̩] or [ɬəvər̩] or even [ɬəvɨr~ɬəvɪr] I think d...

To be fair, if you know syllable restrictions then you know that these clusters cannot appear and you epenthesise them automatically. But there are also some we delete ( colofn /kolo:n/, ffenestr /fEnEst/ etc). That's a big 'if'. There's also the issue of rule ordering, plus the fact that synchroni...

The vowel sound between /g/ and /r/ doesn't really seem to matter but moving from /g/ to /r/ without a vowel seems pretty impossible. It's perfectly possible. Syllabic rhotics are a thing--just ask the Czechs. And stop+liquid codas without syllabic rhotics are also a thing Did someone claim otherwi...