zompist bboard

If there'd be even simple life in the the deeper high pressure layers of a gas giant, it would have to be quite exotic to our standards. The physical conditions and chemistry down there aren't terribly suitable for the development of the carbon based life we are familiar with. You also need to remem...

My instinct is for a topic-first interpretation being the primary one, but as you put it, this naturally leads to a tendency for subject-first word orders. So it's nevertheless a relevant result for strict word order languages.

I can't say exactly for that dialect. The Ob-Ugric vowel history is in general a mess and there's a lot of interdialectal variation. You could for example look at some classic literature on the subject. Here are the four relevant pages from Kálmán's The history of Ob-Ugric languages [PDF] (from Sino...

The thing that's bothering me here is, why analyze that back unrounded vowel as phonemically long, and why on Earth would you have a long phonemic vowel without a short one contrasting with it? I think I could believe that it happens to be phonetically long in this conlang, but that still doesn't m...

Having /ɤ/ as the only back unrounded vowel in the system assumes now that the vowels cling tightly to their narrow IPA labels. I would assume that in a real and balanced system with the vowel values /a e i o u ɤ/ both /a/ and /ɤ/ would be somewhat centralised, /a/ probably ranging from central back...

A quick check on the webpages of various Swedish news outlets confirms that they write "Eurovision" or "Eurovision Song Contest", without an extra article. At least "Eurovision Song Contest" is a direct English quote and only tells us that Swedish articles don't attach to English names. "Eurovision...

The link in question is going to be of little use for most, if not all, readers on this forum because of the typically steep price. My personal preference would be to always include freely accessible copies of the papers to the Academia.edu entries. I like to include both PDFs and links myself and e...

That does sound strange but unfortunately not entirely unexpected. I had my gmail accounts disabled for one year when I had a position on the Canaries. Their justification was simply that "someone has accessed your account from Spain". When I tried to get the confirmation text sent to my phone, that...

Relevant: https://youtu.be/lcDGkuvqqWE?t=18m10s

And if you do end up voting to oust yourselves, we have to keep hearing those same awful words for an even longer while.

I see that all of your noun classes have overt marking on the nouns in all numbers. In hindsight I think this was a mistake. I'm going to rework this so a couple of classes can have zero marking in the singular (at the very least probably Class I), as well as having more allomorphs for the class en...

Since you describe the classification suffixes as a noun class system, I expect that your follow up will include how they are involved in agreement processes. I'd be especially interested to see if some of the classes lack full differentiation in some forms of agreement. I see that all of your noun ...

You can also see a likely semantic specialisation to the opposite direction in Finnic. There's an ancient word for "soul" that you can find across Finno-Ugrian (such as Komi lov , Hungarian lélek ) and is reconstructible to PFU ( *lewli ; Sammallahti). In Komi this specifically refers to a soul that...

Henki = "breath; life; spirit; mood"

Incidentally, I also have my copy of the article that we submitted, which I could also send along once I get back home (it's on my personal computer; not my work computer). Yeah, why not. That would be nice. Publishing in an open access journal is a nice touch. They don't seem to be getting popular...

By the way, just out of interest, do you happen to have an offprint copy of the paper available vampireshark? It's interesting to take a look at what other people are up to.

Unfortunately academic journals have quite long processing times. I've been involved in papers with as short as two month publication times and on the other hand in one paper that's still pending after years because of an incredibly rude and uncooperative referee. My last paper was quite quick in ge...

The evidential system Before writing more about the more basic grammar features, I'll outline the evidential system of Classical Lkal sik. The language has a three way split between an egophoric (or personal experience) evidential -n , a direct evidence evidential -Ø , and an indirect evidence evid...

Motivated by Travis B. mentioning egophoricity in his Middle Tshyak thread, I thought that I should perhaps also post something on one of my side project languages that includes egophoricity in its evidential system. The language is called Lkal sik and is yet another one of these conlangs that draws...

I am inspired in doing so by Tibetan, but I have not yet run into a really good description of egophorics There's a handy Academia.edu category for egophoricity, https://www.academia.edu/Documents/in/Egophoricity. Newari is maybe the most standard language to cite in the literature and I've also fo...

Can you tell a bit more about the distribution and use of your egophoric? I'm also putting an egophoric evidential in one side project language and it'd be interesting to see if you've done something differently to me.

Right, it's about as easy to go to war with reindeer as it's with fish nets or bear traps. Reindeer herding can give you a competitive edge over neighbours who don't have it but it's also a technology that's not too hard to adopt. As a result, it's quite likely that it'll soon diffuse to your lingui...

So the logical thing to do would be to look at the Samoyed cognates. The word is reconstructible into PU as "tongue". I have Sammallahti's reconstruction (from 1988) handy and he gives *käxli for PU going to *keəj in Proto Samoyedic. Here x stands for the Uralic laryngeal and is seen to have been s...

Yet another point is, how narrow would the wavelength band really have to be to count as monochromatic and not just a narrow composite band? Remember that truly single-frequency light is a physical impossibility, there's always some spread in there.

Of course cyan is on the spectrum. You'll find it at 480 nm, give or take 10 nm or so. You can produce it just fine with monochromatic light. Such as this narrowband filter at 485 nm, though the image is only an approximate rendition of the true colour of the filter when you look through it. There'...

Curlyjimsam wrote:It's only two books (and reading just one of them would probably give you the answer you want), and both are pretty short.

Yeah I know, but I already fill my days with technical literature, much of it from my own field. Linguistics is just a hobby for me.