zompist bboard

Another cutesy anecdote from the real world: "Security" comes from the Latin expression "sine cura", "without care" (thus also probably related to "whore", altho that connection would apparently be older than Latin). Got a citation for that one? EtymOnline says se is a semantic extension of the ref...

The suffix -ite is actually extremely common in English; the weird thing is it's actually not that commonly used for Greek placenames. It seems to be especially productive with city names (though not all cities), as well as for many cities, ethnicities, and other groups of the Middle East (where it...

cybrxkhan wrote:If a language has ejectives, and somehow loses them, what would the ejectives usually turn into?

Thanks in advance.

Implosives or modal voiced consonants are both possible, as are just plain voiceless.

But let's create a fully new language without deep immersion in linguistics. Introduce KAPMAN. This language has only five letters and simple grammatics. You cannot have language without linguistics, any more than you can have a tank without a military-industrial complex backing its creation and di...

Guitarplayer wrote:Why is everyone so keen on replacing <th> with <þ> and <ð>?

Because the two sounds are almost phonemic, and (more so for þorn than eð) they were discarded from the language for reasons which are no longer relevant.

My surname is originally a place name, but it's so heavily disguised by sound change and myriad variant spellings that I decided to translate it "naively" and smush the pieces together.

Tomao Pavelei Irzovendi. (Including my middle name as an extra nom, Tomao Vulkežë Pavelei Irzovendi.)

Nortaneous wrote:HȺ GÍZ LEȾ RÍT IṈLIŚ WIŦ EN ECSTENĆEN EV ŦE SENĆOŦEN URŦAGREFI

W̲ET E FECIṈ GRȺT ÍDIYE

U GOD W̲ET HEV Í DEN

It even has the lower-case s for the third-person singular ending. It's genius!

Tcru, wic iz wai ai wónt bi siriusli yúzing enithing obnogzus lík dhis in publik. Why do English spelling reforms insist on fixing things that aren't broken? In this short sentence alone we've got murdering the vowels without warrant (manhandling English into a continental vowel system DOESN'T WORK...

As for /ɨ ʉ/, I quite like using the IPA symbols for these, but unfortunately there's no capital version of either. U+0197 CAPITAL LETTER I WITH STROKE (Ɨ) and U+0244 CAPITAL LETTER U BAR (Ʉ), both from the Latin Extended-B block (which has capital letter variants for quite a few IPA glyphs). You'r...

What annoys me is there's a precomposed <ş> for /ʃ/ but no precomposed <z̧> for /ʒ/. (I do my conlanging in Notepad, and monospace fonts don't always get along with combining diacritics for some reason.)

明日 /asu/ or /asita/ Isn't that more exactly: /asɯ/ and /aɕita/? He's using Nihon-shiki (as is standard in Japonic linguistics today) as a phonemic transcription. Phonemically, Japanese's compressed unrounded high back vowel constitutes the /u/ in its five-vowel system /i e a o u/. (You don't go for...

770 logographs isn't that many?

Ran a quick spellcheck, because I know I eyeballed a typo and then promptly forgot about it because I saw a phoneme or a butterfly or something. "This practice in turn may be overriden for reasons of typological ease" should be overridden . "Where the name of language X appears in connection with vo...

Oh, alright, I might as well. m p b θ ð n t d ɬ ɮ r ɲ ʂ ʐ j k g kʷ gʷ w χ ʁ i u e o a ɑ (/ʂ ʐ/ are apical postalveolar, never subapical; /r/ is in free variation between [r] and [ɾ].) I've got allophony and stress rules, but you don't get to see them because you insisted on only asking for phoneme i...

Lordshrew wrote:Mrgsabian:

Code: Select all

t kxː
d gɣː

i y

First thought: ooh, minimalist. I assume the name is an exonym.
Second thought: Wait, is this a joke?
Third thought: No, it's too almost-vaguely-bizarro-plausible to be a joke.

some Australian language might be useful as a "pure" 3-vowel example. Arabic, Aleut, Inuit all have a length contrast (as does Sanskrit for which you do remark on this), and Quechua has noticable allophonic variants near uvulars, so they're really kinda 3+3 vowel systems. Auslangs generally have a ...

su_liam wrote:Pedantic?

The citation standards seem a little high.

This is Eddy we're talking about, if you don't demand he justify everything he'll manage to slip another excuse not to broaden his horizons through your fingers.

I suppose by "underwear" I meant clothing that doesn't cover most of the body. [circular definition] I really don't know if your point about Heian women's fashion is really relevant since I somehow doubt [weasel words] the majority of peasant women worked in such impractically heavy clothing as you...

I can make it work if I add an implied second clause, something like the horse raced past the barn fell (but the horse raced over the hill kept going).

Well, yes. I wasn't sure how to describe the phenomenon you described succinctly, so I went with an inaccurate blanket term. (On the other hand, based on the text you seem to infer patriarchy from the Obenzayet reflex of *ɣīra and not a lot else... )

I decided to re-read the page on Proto-Eastern, and I noticed something. The page opines that *mīdor "mother", *pīdor "father" and *sādor "sister" derive from adding a kinship suffix *-dor to babytalk, and conjectures an underlying **bādor for *baredū "brother". Upon second inspection I saw somethin...

This tells me that I've got a mismatch in the number of elements in the Initial and Final. Dividing the actual transformation line into two (one covering @SHORT, one covering @LONG) doesn't work. What am I doing wrong?

What happened in Latin to initial GN ? Are there any native Latin words beginning with GN which left descendants in the Romance languages, or is my only data point the non-native name GNAEVS (from Etruscan Cneve )? Are there any Latin words which aren't derived forms where an H is surrounded by diff...

Soap wrote:Maybe they say it with /t/ in Britain

"Kindergarten" is an exclusively American concept - the UK has nurseries or preschools. If I used the word at all it'd be a spelling pronunciation.

Sounds like a good idea.