zompist bboard

mèþru wrote:Also, Bolton's been voted out of his leadership of UKIP.

And do we care? UKIP is the only problem which actually will go away if we ignore it, they'll just implode or fade into irrelevance.

- Arvo Part belongs to a genre known as 'holy minimalism' or the like; there, he's joined by Henryk Gorecki and John Tavener (not to be confused with John Taverner, another composer born hundreds of years earlier), as well as a host of less known composers, many from eastern europe and the baltic -...

Not all verbs will I assign gender to. For example linking verbs like is or looks will not be assigned gender because they are used to link the subject to the action verb or to adjectives and adverbs. OK, firstly verbs don't have "gender", because that is a feature of nouns. They can agree with the...

I certainly support Labour over the Conservatives. I just don't want Corbyn in charge of foreign policy. War is a bad thing, but that doesn't mean you make peace with terrorism and dictatorships. OK, but by that logic you should equally dislike Theresa May for her continuing support of the Saudis (...

I keep wondering why people keep inventing reasons to hate George Soros, Jeremy Corbyn, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump when there are legitimate ones. Wow, do you really think Jeremy Corbyn falls into the same category as the other three? I simply don't see it; you can argue about the efficacy in...

Indeed, the sound changes make perfect sense in the sense that they're rebalancing a wildly unnatural inventory; having front-rounded and back-unrounded close vowels but not front-unrounded and back-rounded is highly unnatural. As sound changes go though they are by no means the most radical you cou...

And all that wisdom in the etymology of all the 262 morphemes... Tell me more, minimalist-senpai. Don't say that you'll only encourage him. (The Dama language has an answer to every question). But does it know why kids love the taste of Cinnamon Toast Crunch? Does it know why the answer to the grea...

Travis B. wrote:

Salmoneus wrote:Oh good. Here we go again...

Can we say that again...?

Yes, it's happening, I swear this guy's a troll.

Wait, so if we assume a traditional reconstruction of stop series with breathy stops, could we explain the missing voiceless aspirates by saying they spirantized into laryngeals? This isn't necessarily an explanation for all laryngeals in all positions, but it might perhaps at least act as a source ...

So as per last term I think my week 5 is happening in week 3. Again. Thankfully this time I think I'm on top of the work, unless I have an essay due which I haven't noticed yet in which case I am royally fucked.

Also, what was that Austronesian language that has breathy voiced stops? (Or is there more than one?) That's Kelabit and possibly one or two of its immediate sisters, but the situation there isn't really comparable, because there those are true voiced aspirates, with a voiced stop which becomes voi...

Really? You think that reconstruction's on firm enough ground to serve as an adequate counterexample? While you may be utterly infatuated with the glottalic theory, it's diachronically simpler for at least the final phase of PIE to have in fact had breathy-voiced stops in at least some dialects. Al...

https://lateralfricative.wordpress.com/

Also

Astraios wrote:Most IE languages don’t have voiced aspirates, but PIE is reconstructed with them (or something very like them).

Really? You think that reconstruction's on firm enough ground to serve as an adequate counterexample?

Voiceless vowels almost always occur adjacent to voiceless consonants, and that's what conditions them, not the absence of stress, status as an epenthetic vowel or similar. So instead of turning the glottal stop into a voiced velar fricative (*kaɣʲ.ka), a voiceless one (*kaxʲ.ka) might cause the fo...

For quite some time now I have been fidgeting with coda glottal stops in my language. These arise mainly from coda plosives in the proto-language, but I decided they should be simplified even more. So lets hypothesize a word *katkat (possibly a reduplicated action verb). This became *kaʔ.kah, but I...

Ironically though, I always think of Mozart as the unelaborate one, between the complexities of Bach and the prolixities of Beethoven... Frankly that's my view too; I struggle to see the emotion and intensity in Mozart whereas with Bach and Beethoven it's so obvious it's almost in-your-face, and th...

Firstly, there are far too many gaps in the data to really say anything conclusive. Second the idea that Greek "balsam" must necessarily represent a lateral fricative is stupid: it's cognate with Arabic /basam/ "pleasantness", a correspondence which gives Proto-Semitic *š rather that *ś, so it shoul...

Loss of lateralization for [ɬ] is very realistic - it happened in much of Semitic Well that does depend on whether you actually think that Proto-Semitic should be reconstructed with laterals in the first place, which I don't. But apart from that, yeah, loss of lateralisation is realistic (see also ...

The /y œ/ and long vowels were influences from a nearby Svan dialect. I can see why they might be only a dialectal feature, but they seem to me to be likely developments in some Abkhaz dialect. Actually thinking about it yeah they probably are, and I've now thought of a source for them, so they can...

Halmahera actually would just use Ternate Malay. I mean the area of New Guinea. Some of Asmat–Kamoro languages, for example, lack voicing distinctions. The area where they live was already a place of trade between them and the peoples of Maluku. That's more reasonable, yes. Although even then Asmat...

Also, some Papuan languages lack a voicing distinction. Yes, but not necessarily the ones in the immediate contact area (which btw I'm assuming is Halmahera since you're going off of Ternate Malay), nor do the other languages you're proposing as major sources of influence lack it either. My source ...

Never mind, it's because of Philippine influence. Where's the Philipine influence coming from though? Are you saying there's enough of a Filipino presence on Ternate and adjacent islands in ATL to pull the languages in that direction? If so then why is the stop voicing contrast lost? Also I have st...

guêlin /ɡeˈlɪ̃/ is the name of the language spoken by the descendants of the Irish settlers in France, as well as their name for the Irish ethnicity. The people and language are generally called gueline in French, but irlandais is often used in formal contexts. What would the people and language be...

I like the look of Basa Basar, but why do you have a change /e o/ > /i u/ when the vast majority of languages of New Guinea have mid vowels? Aside from that I don't really have much else to say; I have neither the history nor conworlding chops to really comment (which is why I threw this out into th...

I don't listen to classical music because I don't like violins. Firstly, a lot if not most classical music does not involve violins (I mean in Bach's output the number of pieces with any kind of string parts are in a minority, most of his stuff is keyboard like harpsichord and organ). Secondly, I'm...