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When writing essay etc. I overuse "however" as the first word of sentences.

Tximist wrote:

Echobeats wrote:

Skomakar'n wrote:My pronunciation might not make that <e> very laudable, but I'd definitely prefer using it in the spelling.

Laudable?

Hehe. He means audible. English ain't easy...

I worked that out – I was just being pernickety I guess.

finlay wrote:That's weird.... but then, for us it's the nearest Foreign Country and the most common second language. Of course most of our population is also monolingual, so it's not that much better.

Some people in Ireland might beg to differ.

Of course, where I grew up, France was closer than London...

The thing in Icelandic is called a-umlaut IIRC. As Linguoboy said, umlaut is essentially a process that may turn into vowel harmony, since both are kind of an assimilation process. [EDIT] Wikipedia calls it u-mutation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanic_umlaut#U-mutation_in_Faroese_and_Icelandic...

Do you pronounce the subjunction "att" that way as well - is "hur visste du att ..." pronounced with [ɔ] ? If so, k, then you're right, otherwise, I bet it's a grammatical change more than a sound change. Cf. Norwegian, which spells these two words differently: å and at . (Half the time they spell ...

A B foo-bar : A does foo to B B A foo-baz : B does foo to A You've varied two things in the source language (word order and verbal affix) but only one in the translation (semantic roles of A and B). Why isn't the second one B A foo-bar ? Is it gender agreement? If so, which noun does agreement foll...

Australian English (at least written Australian English) seems to go with the Americans on this. E.g. at the end of the recent Sydney Test the big screen read "England wins the Ashes 3-1"; for me that would have to be "win". NZ English is the same – my Kiwi wife is gradually, after more than four y...

Speaking of that, why are things such as "Parliament" treated as a plural object? Parliament is a singular entity, so it should accept a singular verb... that's one thing that confused me about British English. It's a question of semantic vs syntactic agreement. "Parliament" is grammatically singul...

See here for verbs with a valency of 13.

dinnae wrote:Please note that word-finally all sounds are unvoiced, in all of the Dutch dialects.

All consonant sounds, surely. Unless you've been keeping some voiceless vowels secret from the world .

Jacqui wrote:Ooookay.

Um... Lol?

Yeah, I wasn't going to say any more, but Viktor apparently took it a little too far...

Assuming that that is Jacqui, she would stand a very good chance, with two caveats: Firstly, according to her posts here, she's 16 (is that too young? I don't know) More importantly she lives not in Australia but in the East Midlands :P Lots of contestants on that show are 16. It's modelling . They...

Very odd indeed. If I remember correctly, both <de> and <dem> are pronounced [d{] in "country" Romsdal, and [dEm:] in Molde. I would be surprised if they make a distinction between nominative and accusative at all, is I guess what I'm trying to say. I don't actually know what they say for 3P.NOM an...

(and <ni> is "I", like in older Swedish, and modern Danish). At first I thought you meant that ni was the 1S.NOM pronoun in Västgötska. Very confusing use of angle brackets and quotation marks there. Would I be right to say that they're from eastern Norway? The people I had in mind are from Molde o...

Jacqui wrote:

Just out of curiosity, have you ever thought of trying out for this TV show? You wouldn't be out of place there.

OK, so my knowledge of Norwegian dialects sucks. I guess I should stop hanging out with such prescriptivist Norwegians...

Åge Kruger wrote:

Echobeats wrote:For 2 og 3, flytt til Norge. Der sier alle /brø:/, /di:/ og /dem/.

Ikke alle. Kjæresten min sir /br2d dei dei/. Jeg tror litt videre inland sir de /br2D/.

Jeg burde si, "Der er det normalt å si..."

I'm in a reactionary mood today, and have decided to start speaking Swedish the way they did in the good old days. I'm not talking about any sort of viking age Swedish, just a few choice reversions a couple of centuries back. The problem is of course that I have no idea what that actually sounded l...

Sound sequences aren't simply evaluated on a binary choice of "allowed" or "not allowed", but also on probability. Anyone familiar with African names knows that certain combinations are much more probable in Niger-Congo languages than they are in English, even if they fall within the realms of the p...

Gaelic has done the same thing, except I get the impression this is older. an "the" seo "here" sin "there" an X seo "this X" an Y sin "that Y" anseo "this" (standalone) ansin "that" (standalone) Perhaps you're thinking of Welsh? Because in Goidelic languages, sin and seo are demonstratives, e.g. "S...

Swedish has innovated den här and den där , which literally mean "the here" and "the there" ( den originally itself meant "that", but it's been weakened to a definite article used when an element precedes the noun within the DP, such as an adjective). The equivalents den her and den der are not used...

Slovene is da bomb!

At the risk of self-promotion, I thought a few of you might agree that this deserves a mention. I've taken the liberty of editing in some context. Strange Phrase or Words From Conlangs I'll go first with a very recent creation of mine: Tułakarumanngittaaluyuna [tuɬakaɢumaŋ:ita:lujuna] I cannot hear ...

I learned proto-World while I was away last year and travelled back in time to visit the Klêpeci family of Eoqaaniam. It's really a very nice language, though I was surprised to learn that early human languages went for more than 100,000 years before they developed any fricatives. Cool. Which conti...

I've found knowing Latin and Greek invaluable because they've pervaded our culture so much, and you suddenly find yourself understanding so many things you previously never even thought about. Also, when I was a schoolkid learning Classics was the closest thing to learning linguistics. As you're no ...