Woo, I can haz been quoted!
Search found 183 matches
- Mon Aug 16, 2010 4:29 am
- Forum: None of the above
- Topic: The Official ZBB Quote Thread
- Replies: 2878
- Views: 637245
- Mon Aug 16, 2010 4:09 am
- Forum: L&L Museum
- Topic: Most difficult aspect of your native language for foreigners
- Replies: 128
- Views: 55845
A native Japanese speaker told me once that the thing she had a hard time with was learning the 4 or so different uses of have + VERB, although I forget how she explained what those four uses as taught to her were . I would imagine they'd be: 1. Perfect tense: I have done it 2. Deontic ("have to" =...
- Mon Aug 16, 2010 3:23 am
- Forum: Languages & Linguistics
- Topic: Icelandic
- Replies: 20
- Views: 4610
Colloquial Icelandic is supposed to be pretty good +1. I love the Routledge Colloquial series, because while remaining practically orientated, they don't treat grammar as a dirty word. Also, here is a very good online Icelandic dictionary from the University of Wisconsin. Use "headword only" for Ic...
- Sun Aug 15, 2010 4:59 pm
- Forum: L&L Museum
- Topic: Most difficult aspect of your native language for foreigners
- Replies: 128
- Views: 55845
Also, str- . That must be hell. Nah. Icelandic and Swedish dialects have strj-. You're overgeneralizing here. German has /ʃtr/ and /ʃpr/ too, and for speakers of Germanic languages this probably doesn't seem so difficult or unusual. Russian (and probably most other Slavic languages) have this clust...
- Sun Aug 15, 2010 4:43 am
- Forum: L&L Museum
- Topic: The Suppletion Thread
- Replies: 81
- Views: 34235
"He went home" originally was a proper answer for "Whither (i.e. which way) did he go?". It was not originally a proper answer for "Where (i.e to what place) did he go?" Is this really how the distinction between "where" and "whither" worked? In the related Swedish, which retains the contrast (at l...
- Sat Aug 14, 2010 12:32 pm
- Forum: L&L Museum
- Topic: Most difficult aspect of your native language for foreigners
- Replies: 128
- Views: 55845
:( German is more fun with cases and full gender distinction. Otherwise, what stops it being Dutch? :P *ducks* Anyway, I'm also interested - what happened to gender in English? The case system, as we know, was declining even before 1066, and early Middle English retains dodgy case declensions that ...
- Sat Aug 14, 2010 10:35 am
- Forum: L&L Museum
- Topic: Most difficult aspect of your native language for foreigners
- Replies: 128
- Views: 55845
:( German is more fun with cases and full gender distinction. Otherwise, what stops it being Dutch? :P *ducks* Anyway, I'm also interested - what happened to gender in English? The case system, as we know, was declining even before 1066, and early Middle English retains dodgy case declensions that ...
- Fri Aug 13, 2010 12:30 pm
- Forum: L&L Museum
- Topic: The Suppletion Thread
- Replies: 81
- Views: 34235
Anyway, wiki-what? wikipedia? because that's not called "Wiki". Or I don't particularly like it when people do call it that... +1. A wiki is a kind of website, of which wikipedia is the best-known. Mithun's Languages of North America (p. 85) gives some examples of roots that supplete based on numbe...
- Thu Aug 12, 2010 5:10 am
- Forum: L&L Museum
- Topic: The Suppletion Thread
- Replies: 81
- Views: 34235
- Thu Aug 12, 2010 4:41 am
- Forum: L&L Museum
- Topic: The Suppletion Thread
- Replies: 81
- Views: 34235
Actually the case of cows/cattle/whatever is different than for the other animals, because we have a bit of a lexical gap. Specifically there's no gender-neutral way to refer to a single member of the species. "Cattle" is plural-only, *one cattle is simply ungrammatical. My wife (a New Zealander) i...
- Mon Aug 09, 2010 4:28 pm
- Forum: L&L Museum
- Topic: Inuktitut lessons
- Replies: 4
- Views: 4611
Does anyone else picture Mr. Burns going "Asukuluk!"? I wonder if they've ever translated the Simpsons into Inuktitut? Also, here's a sample sentence to tempt the rest of you. It's nice and short, only two words. Kiinaujakkuvimmiinngaarlunga niuvirviralaamuurniaqqunga. When I leave the bank I will ...
- Mon Aug 09, 2010 11:43 am
- Forum: None of the above
- Topic: Restrictive use of IPA...
- Replies: 67
- Views: 16305
Unicode doesn't work very well on the board *didn't. Most stuff should work now I think, as long as you have fonts supporting the characters and a browser that automatically replaces characters if Verdana doesn't have them. Chrome doesn't do this :( does firefox / opera ? I often find that the more...
- Mon Aug 09, 2010 11:22 am
- Forum: L&L Museum
- Topic: Inuktitut lessons
- Replies: 4
- Views: 4611
Inuktitut lessons
I thought some of you might be interested in this link: http://www.tusaalanga.ca/lesson/lessons
All dialogues and vocabulary items come with a sound file. Another useful feature is that you can see an alphabetical list of suffixes by clicking the "Grammar" tab.
Asukuluk!
Excellent!
All dialogues and vocabulary items come with a sound file. Another useful feature is that you can see an alphabetical list of suffixes by clicking the "Grammar" tab.
Asukuluk!
Excellent!
- Fri Aug 06, 2010 1:22 pm
- Forum: L&L Museum
- Topic: Vowelless words
- Replies: 40
- Views: 30772
This leads to the question, how minimal can we make a syntactic word? Are there syntactic words which only surface as suprasegmental features? Certainly there are morphemes like that (even in natlangs, I gather), but I don't know of any clitics like that. (Actually, Ndak Ta's copula has an essentia...
- Fri Aug 06, 2010 9:43 am
- Forum: L&L Museum
- Topic: Vowelless words
- Replies: 40
- Views: 30772
Yeah, I think the way I phrased it was inherently contradictory. Sorry :D For what it's worth, this has been extremely helpful to me: /fp'/ is indeed a possible preposition. So, that's cool. Something can, of course, be a syntactic word without being a phonological word. The general term for this i...
- Fri Aug 06, 2010 7:53 am
- Forum: L&L Museum
- Topic: Vowelless words
- Replies: 40
- Views: 30772
I think the problem here is that when you start talking about words like [p] or [sxs], the concept of a syllable pretty much becomes useless. So the only way to answer the question without attacking its premises is to talk about syllabic consonants such as nasals and approximants, which (as has now ...
- Fri Aug 06, 2010 5:37 am
- Forum: Conlangery & Conworlds
- Topic: Lexicon Building
- Replies: 4308
- Views: 784398
next: mammal hiyalnogarwo ńnarańii greegii = (of the) 'family' of dugongs and bats. {those are the only two species of mammals they knew of, prior to the arrival of missionaries} Does this mean that the missionaries brought horses, dogs etc. with them, or that your conpeople are e.g. reptilian and ...
- Fri Aug 06, 2010 3:11 am
- Forum: L&L Museum
- Topic: The Suppletion Thread
- Replies: 81
- Views: 34235
smärre is possible, though. Is that plural only, like små , or can you have en smärre hund ? Traditionally, only plural. In modern Swedish it has developed a slightly different meaning, 'unimportant, negligible, minor', and can't really be considered a comparative of liten at all, but a different l...
- Fri Aug 06, 2010 3:03 am
- Forum: L&L Museum
- Topic: Vowelless words
- Replies: 40
- Views: 30772
The UCLA phonetics archive does have a recording of some of the vowelless words from Nuxálk/Bella Coola, but I didn't find the sound quality very good: http://archive.phonetics.ucla.edu/Language/BLC/blc.html That guy should work in sound effects for TV and radio. Unless, as I can't help suspecting,...
- Thu Aug 05, 2010 7:18 am
- Forum: L&L Museum
- Topic: The Suppletion Thread
- Replies: 81
- Views: 34235
- Thu Aug 05, 2010 5:47 am
- Forum: L&L Museum
- Topic: The Suppletion Thread
- Replies: 81
- Views: 34235
- Thu Aug 05, 2010 2:49 am
- Forum: L&L Museum
- Topic: The Suppletion Thread
- Replies: 81
- Views: 34235
Icelandic: [snip] mær, meyjar (virgin, virgins) [snip] konur, kvenna (women, women's) sjór, sævar/sjávar/sjóvar (sea, sea's) I would not really call these suppletion , in that they do not appear to actually come from distinct roots , but rather just cases of sound change having manifested itself so...
- Wed Aug 04, 2010 5:58 pm
- Forum: Languages & Linguistics
- Topic: Multiple conjugations for a verb-stem?
- Replies: 21
- Views: 6147
English also has a well-known process of "systematic regularisation" with what might be called "rederived" verbs. The classic example is a bit of American baseball terminology: fly (v.) -> fly ball -> fly (v.) "The batter flied out to center." (I.e. The batter hit a fly ball to center field which w...
- Wed Aug 04, 2010 7:43 am
- Forum: L&L Museum
- Topic: The Suppletion Thread
- Replies: 81
- Views: 34235
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. Put that in the L&L Museum's "Resources" thread, pleas...
- Wed Aug 04, 2010 4:30 am
- Forum: L&L Museum
- Topic: resources
- Replies: 722
- Views: 306986
A database of suppletion in languages from all across the world, from the Surrey Morphology Group at the University of Surrey.
Also following TomHChappell's advice to post this here.
Also following TomHChappell's advice to post this here.