zompist bboard

Not the best example, but:

Les Misérables wrote:I dreamed a dream in time gone by

Cf. the intransitive use "I dreamt that I was a fish".

I do believe I have hit the motherlode: an online suppletion database. I should have known the Surrey Morphology Group would have something good. They used to send their lecturers to teach at Cambridge because we didn't have any morphologists.

Народ (lit. "nation") is often used as a collective plural (сколько народа здесь! "(look) how many people are here!", сколько народу живет в этом городе? "how many people live in this city?") Does this really count as suppletion or is it just an idiom? If we allow this, we have to count French mond...

Honorific forms of certain verbs are suppletive... the honorific form of taberu (to eat) is meshiagaru rather than ** o-tabe-ni naru . I could see that happening in English, or indeed any language, as eating is so bound up with manners. My inferiors might scoff or chow down while my superiors dine ...

bricka wrote:Or "I am for liberty, you are a faction", from a book on the Roman Empire.

What's the third person? "He is a terrorist"?

Let's not forget emotive conjugation I am firm, You are obstinate, He is a pig-headed fool. I am righteously indignant, you are annoyed, he is making a fuss over nothing. I have reconsidered the matter, you have changed your mind, he has gone back on his word. I have an independent mind, you are ecc...

Post your favourite examples of suppletion here. fero "I bear" tuli "I bore/have borne" latum "having been borne" φέρω pherō "I bear" οἴσω oisō "I will bear" ἤνεγκα ēnengka "I bore" ἐνήνοχα enēnokha "I have borne" человек chelovek "person" люди lyudi "people" Non-IE languages especially welcome.

However, British English does sometimes allow the contraction of mainverbal "have" as well, though I'm not clear on the specific restrictions. But things like "I've a new cat" are allowed in at least some British dialects. It's grammatical for me, but sounds formal and slightly old fashioned. On th...

TomHChappell wrote:I don't know if that answers your question; is English a natlang?

Of course not – everyone knows it was invented by Basque monks.

Fur has [z] as an allophone of /j/ Fixed. [] stand for allophones/phonetic transcriptions, // for phonemes. Thanks. :oops: I've had non-phonetician lecturers, like a psycholinguistic one recently, whose disciplines overlap with phonetics, and whenever it comes up they just have to sheepishly admit ...

It is actually the most hideous thing I have ever seen in my lifetime. I thought this thread was about very cute animals. :| It is about very cute animals. Jar Jar has personally written to people who've put hideous things up and implored them to take them down. I know because he asked me to get ri...

Joecool wrote:

otterfiles

best word ever

Thankee!

OK, otterphiles... are you ready for the cutest picture in the history of the world, ever™?












Don't say I didn't warn you.











Here it is.


BABY TARSIER + FINGER + BABY TARSIER + FINGER

Yours, Tim.

hwhatting wrote:"it's the genitivus stupiditatis"

Stultorum estis!

Genitive Adjunct of Place : The consuls are located in Rome -- Consules Romae versabantur Actually, that one is a locative , which happens to be identical to the genitive/dative in the first declension. If that were a masculine singular town, say, the ending would be -o , not -i , and if it were a ...

Trask saith: A central characteristic of Basque syntax is the use of -ko phrases. A -ko phrase may be constructed from virtually any adverbial, regardless of its internal structure, by suffixing -ko to it; this suffix induces certain phonological changes, notably the loss of the locative case-suffi...

I wonder if Janko will contribute...

Gosh, you sure know how to make an amateur feel welcome on the board, but ce le vie. =P I wasn't blaming you in the slightest for not knowing that the Gaelic languages are all Q-Celtic, or how to speak French, but I did presume you'd want to know what was correct, so I was simply telling you. We're...

Wow, lot's of responses. Yes, I meant Proto Celtic , not P-Celtic (which I've always heard refered to as P-Gaelic, hence the confusion). Whoever you've heard using the term "P-Gaelic" is very confused, because the Goidelic or Gaelic group and the Q -Celtic group are the same thing . ce le vie. C'es...

It really does just look like an otter somehow got a duck's beak glued to it's head. If they'd been discovered near a university town they'd have been dismissed as a student prank for years. They did dismiss it as a prank for years. :) Haaaaaaaaaaa :D The platypus is the best argument against Theis...

OK ? can you tell me further what the default word order is for a sentence like that? Then I might be able to have a go. I suspect there's something like topic-fronting going on. Oh, and what does s- mean?

Yours, Tim.

But what about when they DO cross? Surely you can't claim that they actually used a different sentence just to avoid having evidence that conflicts with the arbitrary 'straight lines are good' theory of linguistics? Lines aren't present in people's speech. They're drawn by syntacticians. "You can't...

There's also something called 'utt?mmande dominans' - dunno the English name - where every dominated node also is the daughter of the dominating node, so none of the daughters have daughters of their own. What's the English name? Pass. What does att utt?mma mean anyway? My favourite online Swedish ...

There's also something called 'utt?mmande dominans' - dunno the English name - where every dominated node also is the daughter of the dominating node, so none of the daughters have daughters of their own. What's the English name? Pass. What does att utt?mma mean anyway? My favourite online Swedish ...

Miekko wrote:these I should look up some more formal definitions of:
c-command

domination

A node c-commands its sister and all its sister's daughters.

A node dominates all the nodes below it on the tree (so its daughters, its daughter's daughters, etc.)