zompist bboard

That's pretty much the exact condition for Verner's Law, except initial consonants resisted Verner's Law, so it's definitely plausible.

They sound grammatical to me.

I'm not sure why the length & strength words didn't change, and English did change but the spelling has stuck. I wonder if they might not have changed because the alternative pronunciations /lEnT strEnT/ were usual then, and the modern forms have more recently got the /g/ back through analogy with ...

http://www.gmi.org/products/gis/wlms/sa ... s/huffman/

Very detailed maps of languages and their locations. Covers some areas, like China, where the Ethnologue doesn't have a proper map.

Thank you for doing this. I have some knowledge of French, but mostly from school, and you learn practically nothing about pronunciation from that.

A grammar of Oogami, a dialect of the Ryukyuan language Miyako. In French.

It's very frequent where I live to drop 'to' in 'going to' where it is a non-auxiliary verb: for instance yesterday I found myself saying 'Are you goin' Carmel College?'. I think this might be restricted to when the object is a proper noun, but I'm not sure. I have no idea how widespread this is, th...

What does the underdot in Puthe < ̣sku> 'after' represent?

I find it best to represent my vowels on several different charts: Short monophthongs Long monophthongs With /i/ glide With /u/ glide i----ʉ---. i----ʉ---. ---------. ---------. \ ɪ ʊ | \ | \ ɪ | \ ɨ | \ | \ | \ | \ | \ ə | \ ɔ e ɔ \ ɵ | ɛ | \ ɜ | \ | \ | \ | \ | \ | \ | a---ɒ ----ɑ a---' a---' Only...

Are you sure the GA vowel is historically long? I'm not so sure, given that /ɑː/ did not exist in vowel systems on either side of the Atlantic when the US was first being settled (as far as I know). Actually, it did exist in both vowel systems; at least in the cases of 'father', where ME /a:/ resis...

<osvruníbu>, literally 'softener', in Adehyam.

Next word: flea

I did some comparison of Almean languages a while ago, too, but never really found any good evidence. Here's some other possible cognates though: Wede:i <na:i> 'bird' and OS <nals> 'fly, bird' Wede:i <tok> 'blue' and OS <toş> 'blue' Wede:i <mai> 'wheat' and OS <maki> 'wheat' Wede:i <mo:mo> 'young' a...

I don't know if this has been posted before, but here's a grammar of Tlingit: http://www2.hawaii.edu/~crippen/papers/tlingit-gram.pdf. There's also a message board for the language here, though it's pretty empty at the moment.

I think for the most part, words with <ea> (or long <e>) in the spelling accurately reflect Middle English /ɛː/, whether its modern standard value is with /iː/ or /ei/; at least, I don't know any obvious exceptions. If in doubt, you can go to a website like http://www.etymonline.com and look at the ...

for example, from modern-day Germanic data you'd end up backdating a change such as *ŋg :> ŋ / _# quite farther back than it actually occur'd (possibly even all the way to PG, but for all I kno there's some obscure Dalecarlian dialect that doesn't have it). If I'm understanding you correctly then y...

Okay, this is useful information, particularly because it indicates that the /t/ > /d/ in congratulate is something that happened in North America and not something inherited from dialects in the British Isles. On a somewhat off-topic note, it is interesting that you have /nd/ > /ŋ/ or /ŋɡ/ (I cann...

Okay, this is useful information, particularly because it indicates that the /t/ > /d/ in congratulate is something that happened in North America and not something inherited from dialects in the British Isles. On a somewhat off-topic note, it is interesting that you have /nd/ > /ŋ/ or /ŋɡ/ (I cann...

And some Anatolian sound changes. This is all according to Melchert, from a paper I found somewhere on the Internet (I don't remember the URL). The languages covered are Hittite, Palaic, Luwian, Lycian and Lydian. EDIT: Found it: http://www.unc.edu/~melchert/anathistphon.pdf. C = consonant V = vowel...

Here's some of the most important Old English > Modern English sound changes. I've got most of this information from various Wikipedia articles, so it may be a little unreliable or incomplete. C = consonant V = vowel iy > y (/iy/ is the phoneme represented by <ie>) Vː > V / _CC or any larger cluster...

there are still many browsers which don't have the right fonts for IPA, e.g. The phone I'm on now. X-Sampa is more accessible.

Russian has /v/ for 'in', and probably more like that. And French has /l/ as an definite article before words beginning in a vowel. Many Northern English dialects have /ʔ/ for 'the'. So it's certainly possible, but I don't know any examples with non-function words.

Wendoth:
baḍeiuwį 'battle' + dimunitive

Next word: trial

Ah, thank you. So do you know if this is more prevalent in the US? I doubt it's more prevalent in the US. I know I always pronounce them with /S/, and most British speakers go even further with yod-coalescence than Americans, turning /tj dj/ into /tS dZ/, while the /j/ is simply dropped in most Ame...

"deodorant" [ˈdjəʊ̯̯ˌɾɵ˞̃ʔ], "obvious" [ˈɑbvjəs], etc. Also, the /t/ in at least "thirteen" and "fourteen" is geminated: /TVrtin/ [ˈθɵ˞ʔˌtʰin] (or something like that; hell, it might even be ejective [ˈθɵ˞ʔˌtʼːin] for all I know) etc. You pronounce the b in 'obvious'? I didn't know anyone did that....

I pronounce trap and bath both with an [a], but heart with an [ɑ], so it's not. I think what it probably is is that I have the trap-bath merger, pronouncing both with an [a], but [a] was allophonically [ɑ] before [r]. The loss of [r] led to the appearance of [ɑ] as a separate phoneme. Oh, yeah; I m...