zompist bboard

I think he might have been contrasting Turk's spelling pronunciation i.e. <tu> may suggest /ˈtʃu/, which would contrast with the onset for 'jerk'. Perhaps he thought they sounded the same.

I don't see Polish on there, I wonder if it has these sounds I think everyone missed the low hanging fruit--i.e. almost the entire northwestern caucasian family: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubykh_phonology http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abkhaz_phonology http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abaza_language Se...

durr

To be fair (ha!) the ZBB has made me appreciate just how old certain variations are in the language, and how some things can just recirculate in and out of fashion. The Romance you mentioned, Viktor, certainly has been a viable influence at several points. Just so I add something, google wars gives ...

Pebötecü phonology, because. Consonants: /p b t~ɾ g q ɢ / <p b t k q g> /f r~ð s ts dz tɕ ʑ ɕ x~ç χ/ <f d s c z ć j ś h x> /l m n ŋ~ɴ/ <l m n Vn(-)> Vowels: /i ɯ u/ <i ü u> /ɛ ʌ ɔ/ <e ö o> /æ~a ɑ ɒ / <æ ä a> Syllable structure (C)V 1 (V 2 ) There are two tones but only high is marked with an apostro...

Site with big set of articles in PDF form about names and things.

Novial anybody? ^^Created by a professional linguist, Idist, English philologist and eventual co-developer of interlingua, Otto Jespersen. (Notably a Romance Germanic hybrid...like English.) I fell in love with Novial after finding Jespersen's book outlining its grammar and the reasoning behind tha...

I think putting the definite article after the noun makes it easier to use such a gender system, because then there's less anticipating the gender of the noun that follows the article as it is matching the thematic vowel of the article to the noun's. e.g. Naoti+LV= naoti-li Also, why are there fewer...

Random question: If I have only one phoneme for schwa-schwi, with the default realizations of [ə̝] initially, [ɨ̞] medially, and [ə] morpheme-finally, what should I consider its form as a phoneme? Should I call it /ə/ or /ɪ/? That's when you go neutral and use hearts instead. /♥/ That is a nice ide...

Answer: who cares? Phonemes are just meant to be convenient. Can we call it a grapheme please? Another question masquerading as an answer: What evidence do you have that it is a phoneme? (What evidence do we have that anything is a phoneme? We could just hash everything. (Not that I'm a programmer ...

Novial anybody?
^^Created by a professional linguist, Idist, English philologist and eventual co-developer of interlingua, Otto Jespersen. (Notably a Romance Germanic hybrid...like English.)

Well, actually I think 'pitch accent' is more commonly used for a particular type of whole-word tonal contour. It's used for tone-marked lexical pairs in Swedish which I wondered if this might not be, but I guess it isn't. There's nothing magical about 'protésters'. It's just a plain English word w...

A pitch accent is a stressed syllable with a pitch distinction compared to surrounding stressed or unstressed syllables (depending on your definition). It's probably got another, better, name. I think the stress matters less to the interpretation than the pitch but its hard to say, for example . I a...

Interestingly, <protest> has the same kind of stress shift, but the noun form seems to be overtaking the verb form as the verb form. Denominalization strikes again! I have no idea how old this change is though. I don't know that it really is overtaking the verb form. I think it more likely to be a ...

I think it's more an issue of minority dialect, maybe clerical error.

Interestingly, <protest> has the same kind of stress shift, but the noun form seems to be overtaking the verb form as the verb form. Denominalization strikes again! I have no idea how old this change is though. I don't know that it really is overtaking the verb form. I think it more likely to be a ...

When the verb is in the middle it shows the relationship between the nouns; when the verb is at the end it allows the noun phrases to be separate from the verb phrase. Are there any languages that show the relationship between the nouns (like some sort of transitivity marker between them) but are SOV?

also careful about introducing typologically uncommon sounds like ɬ - we simply wouldn't expect to see that in that area of Europe. the other thing is unconditionally altering t to ʔ - i guess this is based off of those english accents that do this, except that in english it never ever happens init...

lojban also has attitudinals which are just emoticon grunts.

None of these is too bad IMO. I personally like Rusanov's because there are fewer letters, more diacritics, but both diacritics and longer words is undesirable. I favor more graphs as opposed to diacritics as well. Digraphs are okay only occasionally. I think these sort of topics, proposals belong i...

Awesome constructions like "Mi forirontus." "I would left"? The use of -a, -e, -i, -o, -u in various ways turns Esperanto in probably the most insane language ever. Does not make it ununderstable however. People have taken to stacking word endings, e.g. 'Vivuo', the phenomenon of saying 'vivu!' (Li...

I've been studying the language and there are several things about the correlatives that perplex me. A) kio (what), tio (that), kiu (which/who), tiu (that) --these four demonstratives words say nothing about distance; all told, that's probably okay; but IMO they are redundant, and no Esperantist wil...

clawgrip wrote:So, Russian speakers are better than English speakers at identifying an arbitrary colour threshold determined by the Russian language.

This distinction is true of any culture with a taxonomizing tradition. The words make it easier to ask questions, search for data, etc.

If you have an unstable vowel system can you tell how it's going to collapse (roughly)