zompist bboard

Do any Brits here use "palaver" to mean a fuss, a kerfuffle, essentially? The dictionary definition is more along the lines of idle chatter but I have heard this word once or twice used in a situation where it seemed "kerfuffle" would be an appropriate synonym. Does this word have that meaning for ...

Syrian Arabic and lots of other Arabic dialects.

P.S. daughter languages? I thought Arabic linguists say that the Arabic dialects are sister languages of CA. That is my personal hot take on the situation of the Colloquial Arabics vis-a-vis CA and MSA. I am not convinced of the "dialect" argument anymore. I think Nooj was referring to the fact tha...

To answer your title question: no. The common perception that the so-called "classical" languages are more complicated/difficult comes from the general trend in Indo-European and in Arabic towards morphological simplification. This isn't even that true of Arabic - verbally most Arabic dialects have...

The colon (or slightly modified colon) is used for geminate consonants as well as long vowels. You could also write the consonant twice if that makes sense.

Do you guys know of any language that has adpositions (and I mean true, particle-like adpositions, not verb-like things), and that allows placing the adpositional phrase before a noun modified by it? That is, such a language would allow things such as, literally, word by word, "of hers a doll" (mea...

Äynu has borrowed pronouns, numbers and lots of other vocabulary from Persian, even though it's a Turkic language spoken in China. Unfortunately, almost no research has been done on it that I know of (or at least none that is freely available online except very little bits of information here and t...

It looks to me like the diminutive - yn/en was simply extended to a singulative meaning and applied to a number of collectives, but you're right that some of these collectives appear to have originally been singular in meaning. Plant is apparently cognate with English 'plant' (how weird is that?) an...

I started toying with my oldest conlang's grammar, and I decided to scrap all of the noun cases and just two "states", which basically end up being the nominative and oblique cases, as I'm making the "construct" state used anytime there is a preposition, number, or genitive construction with the no...

Ik zou denken , dat jullie daarbeneden * een hoop van linguïsten hebben , ** die met de talen van de Aboriginals *** werken.[/b] I would have thought you'd have lots of linguists down there working on Aboriginal languages. Sind alle Aboriginalsprachen nicht fast ausgestorben? Aren't all Aboriginal ...

Yes. IIRC there was originally something along the lines of -o -a on most masc and feminine nouns but the former was lost before the latter, leaving only feminine nouns (at least in general) with vocalic terminations.

linguoboy wrote:Ich hab Polnisch nicht zu schwer gefunden. Ich hab's einmal gelernt und danach alles vergessen.
Ches i moni'n anodd i ddysgu Pwyleg. Un tro ddysges i hi a chwedyn anghofies i hi i gyd.
I didn't find Polish that hard. I learned it once and then forgot it all.

works like english

I'm with kuroda here - 'you might have broken it' has a possible counterfactual reading, but it feels a bit odd (at least without surrounding dialogue). I can't rule out that I use it, but 'could' definitely feels like the more likely option without context. I certainly wouldn't use 'may' in this se...

As previously mentioned, it's useful to distinguish between derivational and inflectional morphology (even though the boundary can be a little fuzzy in some cases, particularly when dealing with deverbals/verbal forms that occupy a non-verbal grammatical role, such as gerunds, agent nouns, "-able" ...

Whilst I agree that derivational morphology, high-register terminology and words for new concepts or objects are probably more likely to be borrowed, it is much less true to say that other stuff is 'highly unlikely' to be borrowed. It's true that it's relatively rare for something like pronouns to b...

I have no idea how to transcribe the intonation, but you have a few errors. Plain statement: Mae'r ci'n rhedeg o g wmpas y gath. Plain statement with emphasis: Y ci sy'n rhedeg o g wmpas y gath./Y gath mae'r ci'n rhedeg o i ch wmpas. This third one sounds a bit weird to me, but we stress y ci and y ...

hello everybody time for some welsh bombs I would say with some confidence that in Welsh, no native Welsh speaker merges /D v/ or /T f/. It's certainly not at all common. They might do it in their dialect of English , but it would sound very strange in Welsh. It's much more likely that Gulliver's ow...

Aros, ydy'n ddim yn "そうだね"? Wait, it's not "sou da ne" ? the imperative form is arhosa . We form negative questions with the negative form of the verb, not the interrogative, so I would say tydy o ddim yn...? But here this feels a bit funny. I feel like we might need to fiddle around with the word ...

what typos

Since that paper was published (in 1924) scholarly opinion has moved far away from the Goidelic survival hypothesis. What do you mean by 'Goidelic survival hypothesis'? It sounds like a theory that some areas had remained Q-Celtic, rather than being Q-Celtic because of an invasion from Ireland. I'm...

I feel like just a voiced/voiceless is unlikely to be the consonant mutation. Welsh for example has a radical (base) form (e.g. /p t k b d g/), a soft form (e.g. /b d g v ð ∅/), a nasal form (e.g. /m̥ n̥ ŋ̊ m n ŋ/) and an aspirate form (e.g. /f θ x/). Generally, I would say that for a consonant mut...

The Welsh dialect survey (Cardiff, 2000) is actually a book I own and llyfr is one of the words it covers, so I had a gander. According to this, the distribution is: Monosyllabic /ɬᵻvr/ in the North-West and North-East. Bisyllabic /ɬᵻvr̩/ in the Midlands. Bisyllabic /ɬəvɪr̩/ (mostly in Ceredigion) ...

Going off Wiki, it's basically something like ['ɬɔɨ̯.gɨr~'ɬɔɨ̯.gr̩]. The former seems about right. I don't think it's an [E] in the second syllable, it's either 1 or @ or I (probably depending on accent). Obviously it would be possible to pronounce it as one syllable, and I think it may well have b...

Two syllables - something like (I am not very good at phonetics) [KoEgEr].

Fan'ma mae gynnon ni broblem wahanol: mae'n rhy oer tu allan ac y n y stod y nosau. Here we've got a different problem: it's too cold outside and during the nights. Caeth y geiriadur Cymraeg ar lein r o'n i'n defnyddio ei ddileu 'da llaw. Dw i wedi siomi. :( Also my online Welsh dictionary which I'...