zompist bboard

Thinking about it, I do sometimes hear (maybe even say?) either with a schwa for the second vowel. But that's still not a distinction. Thinking hard about it, I think my mother's family say 'programme' with a schwa, and I've heard other people use a schwa in 'program' too. Yes, I noticed a varying ...

Dreamt of eating food. Again. That must be the third time in a week or something. :? As opposed to dreaming of eating non-food? No, as opposed to not dreaming of eating food. :P (Okay, I could have just said eating , but it seemed that the food was actually quite an important part of the dream, sin...

Native English speakers: do you pronounce them differently? (The verb and the noun, I mean.)

I won't say why I'm interested because that would probably affect your responses.

Dreamt of eating food. Again. That must be the third time in a week or something.

Guitarplayer wrote:New photos.

!!!

Can I wallpaper some of these? I think they're absolutely perfect for that role

The first and fourth sentences in the Gamia video sound very Arabic IMO. My brain wanted to interpret them as sth like: ‏*قماء... مرجيفة... ويمر مسّني (*gamāʔ.. marjīfa... waymir massanī...). Huh? No, not at all. :| It even sounds more Native American to me than Arabic. Best not to argue about impr...

Beli Orao wrote:Where does this phrase come from? Does it go back to PIE? There is a cognate in South Slavic languages (c c [ts ts]).

But that's a click too. Actual [ts ts] sounds to me like someone trying to imitate bird chirping, very badly.

bornforwater wrote: ...Someone said it sounds like gaelic/arabic, but I dunno about that. :p

That it does. Arabic... not quite so sure.

Nothing where that's the primary distinguishing feature. You do see productive C1 or C2 gemination in some languages, but always as the result of assimilation. For instance, the addition of the definite article *ha- in Hebrew generally causes gemination of the following consonant (C1), but that's j...

http://jonafras.conlang.org/wp-content/ ... xample.mp3

More on my blog; examples of sentences are spread rather randomly around the WOTD posts, but the dedicated enough will have no problem finding them.

Here in Denmark, most of the Danes I've heard speak English speak it with a very good accent, almost indistinguishable from many native speakers. Same in Sweden (but I didn't notice it as much, probably because I was there only for a few hours!). Likewise, though to a different degree, with the Slo...

sano wrote: next: opportunely; coincidentally; as it happens

High Eolic: núnar "with luck, coincidentally"; from núna "success, victory; luck, coincidence".

Next: twins

The other option is of course that the argument was something completely different, and that my teacher misremembered it (which would not be surprising).

I'll do a quick Google search later if I have time.

Usually things are numbered from 1 upwards on one side and 2 upwards on the other side with odd & even on opposite sides (when streets break that particular pattern it gets very confusing), and the lowest number tends to be at the end closest to the town centre. But that's more of a general Europea...

I think Finlay pretty much covered Edinburgh. I'd just say that I've always found it quite easy to navigate in it, at least in the center and south of it - you can pretty much always see the castle, or Corstorphine Hill, or the Pentlands, or the sea, or Arthur's Seat, or Calton Hill, or that big chi...

Definitely bunk. So the lesson is: never trust a qualified teacher (decidedly not an academic) on matters of formal linguistics. :P Why don't you go ask him for evidence/references then? Never seen that mentioned, can't even imagine how that'd work. To be honest it wasn't actually him who made the ...

Serafín wrote:Definitely bunk.

So the lesson is: never trust a qualified teacher (decidedly not an academic) on matters of formal linguistics.

My great-grandfather was Czech, and he used to bring me loads of Czech books when he visited - really random books about keeping tropical fish, etc. :? I didn't manage to learn any of the language from that though. I still have some of the books lying around at home I think, but I doubt they'd be of...

Our Arabic teacher today said he once attended a talk by a linguist (?) claiming that Arabic indefinite "nunated" endings have had an influence on the development of un/une in French. Is there any evidence for it either way? I'd instinctively distrust any such claims, but maybe there's some proper l...

Thanks for all the replies guys :) It seems coronal approximants aren't quite as rare as I thought they were, but I think it definitely holds true that rhotic approximants seem to be much rarer than semivowels, even though approximants are supposed to be easy to articulate. Azulene, I like your poi...

You probably won't like this question, but do you have links to any of the natlang resources that you drew on? Not because I'm claiming it's implausible, but because I want to see them :P (preferably PDFs if there are any...) As for your own work, I think it's awesome, especially the special male/f...

So is this "just" that the verb ending disambiguates w/r/t the number of a non-expressed argument? So number agreement on the verb isn't "fixed" to refer to a specific slot/argument, but is just understood to cover whatever's missing? (I'm sorry if this sounds a bit thick to all you MS-whizkids, but...

You probably won't like this question, but do you have links to any of the natlang resources that you drew on? Not because I'm claiming it's implausible, but because I want to see them :P (preferably PDFs if there are any...) As for your own work, I think it's awesome, especially the special male/fe...

Fanu wrote:

Cathbad wrote:EDIT: and I don't think it's just ç/c that does this.

Afaik all the stops do that.(?)

Yeah. E.g. dolap-ta vs. ev-de and so on. I can't think of any other stops occurring in suffixes though, although I'm sure there are some (at least k~g).

finlay wrote:Actually, it's just because i've seen bilingual dictionaries marked "Türkçe - İngilizce"

voicing assimilation: -CA suffix alternates both w/r/t harmony and voicing of preceding consonant, if any: Türkçe, ingilizce, Arapça, etc.

EDIT: and I don't think it's just ç/c that does this.