zompist bboard

I'm guilty of using 'facebook' as a verb meaning 'to look someone's profile up on Facebook', but without regard to whether they're already included as a friend or not. By extension, it refers to activities associated with the social network: 'to look someone up on Facebook and friend them', 'to post...

French they're never written on capitals either way. This is changing though. In French Canada at least, the trend and official orthographical recommendation is to include accents in capitalized letters, except in acronyms, though it's increasingly becoming more common. The trend is also spreading ...

I remember going to Japan and having a friend ask me how to pronounce 'often' and being baffled at how his teacher (also a Canadian, but I don't know from where) told them to never pronounce it. But then, that teacher also told them they should pronounce 'again' as [@geIn], so I doubt he was from ar...

Someone one a different forum was asking what the inscription/symbols on the following necklace said: http://i.imgur.com/DvtYH.jpg http://i.imgur.com/kHvJK.jpg I already figure it's a South-East Asian language, judging by the style of the script and buddha depiction, and that the eight positional el...

closer [ˈkʰɫoʊ.sɚ]
cuneiform [kʰu.ˈnɛ.i.ˌfɔɹm]

hair [ˈhɛɚ]~[ˈhɛɹ]
her [ˈhɚ]
heir [ˈʔɛɚ]~[ˈʔɛɹ]

[ˌwikʰi'pʰiɾiə] – In English

[wikiped͡ziɔ] – In Canadian French

It would depend on what kind of magazine we're talking about. "Maman à la maison" might be seen as a little too informal for most, so you're far less likely to see it appear in reputable publications than informal ones and things like editorials. In this respect, the nuance isn't quite on par with i...

Femme and homme au foyer are up-to-date terms, displacing the anglicism "housewife" and the expression "maîtresse de maison". In France and Belgium, the term "ménagère" might be more common. The equivalent of "stay-at-home mom" would be "maman à la maison" and by association "papa à la maison" means...

Another important rule to learn in Japanese is that some things are the way they are because "It just sounds better". This is the answer to many questions at all levels of learning Japanese. Even native speakers will answer this way. More than likely this is the reason くる and する are irregular. They...

Well, it isn't so much gibberish as an actual word-formation phenomenon. But some examples of Japanese-English (aka "Japlish" or Wasei-eigo ) would be: Compound innovations: リストアップ risutoappu v. "To make a list" n. "Listing" (< list up) セクハラ sekuhara n. " Sex ual hara ssment" トレパン torepan n. " Trai ...

It's pretty simple, really: they just switch scripts. The Katakana syllabary is mainly used to denote words of foreign origin, and seeing how English is the most prominent source language for loan words, anything that isn't recognized as Japanese slang will be associated with English. In terms of ac...

Do these shifts apply accross the board to all vowels in any environment or do they only occur in certain syllables? The reason I'm asking is because it's been suggested that vowel chain shifts only normally occur in languages that have somekind of a stress accent and especially in languages with v...

Never knew they were called thistles. I would be inclined to just call them 'prickly plants'.

The Kagoshima dialect of southern Japan exhibits a strong level of vowel coalescence that can more or less be summarized in the following table: http://i.imgur.com/KULlG.png So a word like 赤い /akai/ "red" in standard Japanese would thus correspond to /ake/ in the Kagoshima dialect. 今日 /kjo:/ "today"...

I have no idea why your hanzi page hangs in ie8, but I don't think it has anything to do with unicode, since kana are just as much unicode as hanzi/kanji are. There's no Unicode on the kana page though (the flashcards are images). It's baffling... having the debug console up doesn't give any errors...

The verb "to steal" seems to be increasingly used to request permission to take, have, get or even use something where I live. So it's not unusual to hear "Can I steal a chip?" ( Can I have a chip? ), "Can I steal your fries?" ( Can I take some of your fries? ), "Can I steal a pen for a sec?" ( Coul...

Is this actually one of the listed universals, or was it just out of curiosity?

I think a better example than Japanese would be Okinawan, since all mid vowels raised and merged with their high counterparts, while mid long vowels persist as they arise from other sources. So /e/ :> /i/, but /ai/, /ae/ :> /e:/. Although, due to some regional borrowing and exceptions, Okinawan stil...

Okinawan is functionally similar to Japanese: ʔinoo ʔitɕimuɕi yaɴ dog=TOP animal COP "Dogs are animals" ʔinoo naaɴkai wuɴ dog=TOP garden=LOC there_is "The dog is in the garden" naaɴkaiya ʔiɴ nu du wuɴ garden=LOC=TOP dog NOM FOC there_is "There is a dog in the garden" kuree ʔiɴ yaɴ this=TOP dog COP "...

... and where did いる come from anyway, and the いる・ある contrast? There's no widely accepted reconstruction for 居る, though the strong parallel between its two variants をる woru (modern おる oru ) and ゐる wiru (now いる iru ) suggests that the two may be etymologically related. I've seen the former reconstru...

Age: 20 at the time of this posting, 21 in eleven days. Gender: Male Nationality: Canadian Province: Ontario Occupation: Student in Translation Status: Single Native Language: French, English Second Languages: Japanese, Spanish Languages of Interest: Ryukyuan Languages (Okinawan, Amami, etc.), Khme...

It would make more sense to spell it "tweeter", since it derives from the English verb "to tweet", rather than the name itself, "Twitter". It makes a difference in CFr assimilation: [twi:te] vs *[twIte]~*[twIt2r\e].

Some suggestions for resources: University of the Ryukyus Repository - If you're ever looking for anything related to Ryukyuan languages and dialects. (jpn) TEL and HAL Open Archives (fr) OpenDOAR - If you're ever looking for specific repositories, or search within their list (multilingual)

Be careful about using Google to count occurrences, cuz once you click the second page, it'll say 146,000 results. But if you click the fourth, it'll bring you back to the third, and say that only 27 occurrences were found. With the same method, Aquí hay un perro gives 15,700 results on the first pa...

I find linguistic knowledge helpful if I'm more interested in learning about the particular aspects of a language in detail. Then I can simply look online and find academic resources to further my interest. However, I don't actually find it that helpful in terms of learning a language to communicate...