zompist bboard

I noticed this merger a lot on American TV shows. I particularly remember on Star Trek Enterprise, T'Pol was always talking about the Volcans.

Nice list, but a small correction to the last one:

Here's the stele in question:
http://cdn-ak.f.st-hatena.com/images/fo ... 045742.jpg

The phoneme /ɬ/ in Toisanese was always strange to me. My friend's grandmother spoke this language, and although I understand neither Toisanese nor Cantonese, whenever I heard her say words with this sound, they very much stood out to me. It seems it occurs in other Yue dialects/languages as well, t...

Please give some samples of written words or a sentence in the script. If it's hard to scan you can do it in ms paint or something.

It's definitely not tone - japanese people are as confused by chinese pronunciation as we are. I think it's overhyped, as there are not that many minimal pairs, and pronouncing it the wrong isn't going to impede pronunciation. like i don't see how it's that different from having an elusive stress s...

Coming Out as a Member of the Royal Family Wasn't Easy for Him

I have something I have to tell you...I'm royalty.

Why is there a velar nasal in the first syllable of the first pronunciation of concomitant ? I've never heard a dialect that assimilates nasals across syllables; I don't, anyway. Outside of careful and deliberate speech, you almost certainly also assimilate it. People regularly assimilate nasals no...

There's also Filipino and Filipina. I suppose you're right in that the less familiar people are with these things, the more likely they are to default to the masculine -o form. Still, this is definitely an unusual phonemenon: gender agreement that only occurs on a couple words in the entire language...

Fiancé vs. fiancée just resembles French gender agreement patterns, which is confusing the issue. Having words for both fiancé and fiancée is no more gender agreement than having words for husband and wife, man and woman, etc., i.e. in none of these cases is there any grammatical agreement of any k...

Yes, the long vowels in the Japonic section are consistently marked with macrons except for juu, which is the main reason I went with it. Of course "ku" does occur even by itself, so it could remain, but it should be subordinate.

Fiancé vs. fiancée just resembles French gender agreement patterns, which is confusing the issue. Having words for both fiancé and fiancée is no more gender agreement than having words for husband and wife, man and woman, etc., i.e. in none of these cases is there any grammatical agreement of any ki...

For Japanese, you should change the following:

ku → kyū
juu → jū

ku is a variant form of kyū that only occurs in limited contexts, and juu should have the macron because that's standard Hepburn Romanization.

There are a number of other "or" phrases in Japanese that are longer: mata wa , arui wa , moshiku wa , and soretomo . They mostly all have overlapping meanings that are variously used to contrast opposites or phrases with similar syntactic or semantic phrasing, or in questions. Identical phrasing: ....

Thanks. That explains the origin of that point very clearly, and also highlights why it is written improperly. It shouldn't be "only one gerund" (non-finite nominal), it should be "only one converb" (non-finite subordinated verb). Even so, these are still kind of two points. A language with only one...

The Atlantic Ocean is often called "the pond" as in the expression "across the pond", though I am not so sure I would call this poetic.

In Japanese, generally the negative of one of the locational copulas is used, and it is subordinated in various ways: There is a specific verb for "leave without; leave behind", so that is not a good example: 友達を取り残した。 Tomodachi o torinokoshita. friend ACC leave.behind-PST I left without my friend. ...

Point taken, although I feel I should point out that Pretty Woman actually won an Oscar and was the breakout film for one of the most bankable stars of the next couple decades, things the other two cannot claim (granted, Sleepless in Seattle does star Tom Hanks, one of the most bankable stars ever, ...

Certainly not, but I do think it's the movie (and song) that increases Google hits, meaning that using Google to test the frequency of the term in other contexts will give you an out of proportion result, since Google does not differentiate them.

I think you also need to keep in mind societal factors, namely that, regardless of the adjectives used, you're probably going to find more results describing the appearance of women than of men. So pretty/handsome/beautiful may not be the best test words.

Japanese is exactly the same, using the question particle ka, except you can drop the last one in the sequence, i.e. X ka Y (ka).

Zaarin wrote:without resorting to the extremely overused Terra Nova

How about calling it Newfoundland!

(Terre-Neuve in French)

That would be great, Planet Newfoundland.

Can you provide a brief overview?

In your case, you're right to suspect them. Any business that misplaces a jacket after its owner has confirmed ownership by phone is either unbelievably incompetent or has thieving staff members.

I'm quite sure they're saying that they kept your stuff for a month and then threw it out because you didn't claim it within that month. They apologize, but there's nothing they can do about it now. I don't think it's rude to respond in Japanese if you want to; after all, the customer is always righ...