zompist bboard

Tasak Nos: Puttering along on the grammar. TCs like this are helpful for working out details! John wants to eat. Zan natak teme kes Zan-∅ nat-k tem-e kes-∅ John-NOM eat-GER instance-ACC want-IND John wants to eat [once]. This is grammatically ambiguous; it could be read "I want John to eat" as well,...

see: giraffes Thank you . I was beginning to think that I would have to argue both sides of this issue by myself, since the others seem content to give assertions without supporting argument or evidence, or one-word replies which barely even qualify as assertions. Now then: Giraffes are the excepti...

candrodor wrote:Hada is feminine with feminine adjectival agreement

This is right; the same thing happens in French with e.g. "mon amie intelligente."

Torco wrote:

hito wrote:Such as? What could overrule the problem of falling over, breaking half your bones, and dying?

Starving

So you're saying that animals evolve to be taller because food evolves to be taller? It's a circular argument. Care to try again? Perhaps with more than one word?

brandrinn wrote:It's entirely possible, if they were reacting to a cocktail of evolutionary pressures, some of which rewarded spindly-ness.

Such as? What could overrule the problem of falling over, breaking half your bones, and dying?

vecfaranti wrote:What...?

http://www.zompist.com/incatena.html

It's not always obvious here when he posts something new there.

Also: This feels like it belongs in the Almea forum, but it's not about Almea.

There's plenty of material about how tone might develop -- tonogenesis -- but what about how it's lost? For example, polytonic Greek turning into modern stress-accented Greek. It's surprisingly hard to find descriptions of this process in general terms; for that matter, descriptions of what, precise...

In a vacuum: The horse that raced past the barn fell. The man who is whistling *pause and prosody reset* tunes pianos. The cotton *prosody jump* clothing is made of *pause* grows in Mississippi. The old *pause and prosody reset* man the boats. The author wrote *speech quotes (they're like fingerquot...

The planetary body could be more dense than Earth, which would affect the gravity directly without being mitigated by the planet's radius. Surface air pressure would be higher. (I'm horrible at gas/fluid dynamics, but I think it would be lower at high altitudes; you could simply put more atmospheric...

I could do something, but the last text was rather long and I can be very slow-moving. Well... I'll try at least. I could go to/from English, Bad English, Japanese, and French (though I sound like a textbook and/or a 19th century Parisian gentleman). I'm also willing to try Latin. I hesitate to offe...

The language spoken in them has nothing to do with any living variety of the language spoken by real people in the real world. The same could be said of anime for Japan, or Donald Duck cartoons for America. Somehow this is not surprising to me. Primetime TV in America isn't as abnormal as cartoons,...

the second phoneme in the word "spit" could be either /p/ or /b/. Yes, if there's no way to tell, both ways are equally true. We choose /p/ here because it's "always been like that" back through OE, and the suddenly deciding it's actually /b/ would violate the principle of least surprise. (But what...

Are there situations where the presence or absence of distinguishing minimal pairs doesn't clear this up? For instance, in Japanese: [ta] た (田 'rice paddy') -- /ta/ is simple enough [tɕi] ち (血 'blood') -- this is in the /t/ column of kana, so maybe it's /ti/, and /t/ has an allophone before /i/? [tɕ...

Although /ɸ/ did tend to become ∅ intervocalically by way of labialization, this wasn't always the case before the high vowel /i/: kahi , zehi , gouhi , ahiru , kihin , etc. Thanks for the examples, I could only think of ahiru and afureru at the time. Would it be reasonable to say that: p > ɸ ɸ > ç...

Wiki also says "Japanese is generally agglutinative, but expresses fusion in otōto (弟 younger brother), from oto+hito (originally oto+pito)." That's no longer productive, and is a result of regular sound changes: p > f [ɸ] f > ∅ / V_V f > h / not before u oV > ou ou > ō / not across morpheme bounda...

I assume you already followed the links to hiragana there. That was historical; in modern Japanese there are still word choice and structural differences between gender-associated speech styles.

Nortaneous wrote:in Maryland

But Kereb's in Canada, the only things that are cheap there are trees, snow, and moose. (This concludes the daily Canada joke that is a condition of USAnian citizenship.)

Yeah, I figured it might be fancy-schmancy bread, but even if it's in bags the number for milk seemed crazy.

Kereb wrote:- a loaf of bread at a bakery
four dollars

- 1 liter of milk
three dollars

I heard the loonie hit parity with USD recently, so did it suddenly drop to CAD 4 = USD 1? Or do you have to import the wheat and cows from Kansas and pay 400% tariff?

It's USD 0.80~1.00 for both those, down here.

Gas is $3.25/gallon here right now, but I remember when $1.50/gallon was considered highway robbery. :( (On the plus side, I don't drive anymore.) Something else you might want to add is a gallon of milk ($4 in the gas station, probably a bit less in the grocery store). Back in my day, gas was arou...

a big mac -- USD 4.00 or so, plus tax, but eww McDonalds a liter and a half of mineral water -- distilled water is $1/gal = $0.264/litre = 0.396/one-and-a-half-litre, though I only use that for chemistry a simple ballpen -- all my pens are about 7 years old, and none are "simple" two liter cocacola...

Fanu wrote:I've got a proto-language with a series of palatalised consonants and I want the daughter languages to lose them.
So, any nice ideas what to do with /xʲ/ and /ŋʲ/?

What's wrong with [x] and [ŋ]?

Or V i / Cʲ_ and then ʲ ∅ ... or just ʲ i

(Yes, it's boring.)

the huge class of words with antepenultimate stress (e.g. adequate, abstinent, balcony, democracy, habitual, machinery, impoverish, educate, efficiency, amity, photography). Can't these be analyzed as initial or secondary stress? How about some longer words, with at least five syllables? (And no, t...

Ah yes, good point. That raises another thought: how finely divided are English adjectives? "Two" can't be used in the same way as "old" or "blue", but all three can be called adjectives still. Perhaps some constructs are possible only with certain semantic classes of adjective: consider "drive some...

I agree that there's some kind of resultative construction in general, however it only seems to apply in certain cases, some more of which are she shouted herself red in the face and he made her angry/sad/crazy/happy . I hypothesize that we have here an ambiguous grammatical construct that applies d...

You're conflating different constructions. "Freeze solid," "wash clean," and "kill dead" are intensified verbs: the phrase is grammatical without the intensification, and means the same thing. "It froze," "he washed it," "he killed her." "Paint sthg. blue" is also an optional argument, but not an in...