zompist bboard

I don't really post in this thread, but this might be worth it. Here's me a week and a half ago in my doctoral regalia.

How are you able to eliminate the sociological element? I'm fairly certain that's impossible, and I'm not sure why it would be useful. Presumably the differences between how (for example) men and women write are at least nearly entirely sociological, so eliminating them would leave... nothing? I'm ...

If languages aren't worth saving, why should cultures be?

or

If the study of languages is the study of the human mind, do you think you prefer 6000 datapoints over a single one?

Looks nice and I like the touch on the schematic in your Fig. 3. This now reminds me to work harder on a couple of papers we need to put out as soon as possible.

Space is harsh and spaceflight isn't for everyone, let alone colonisation. At least at the start you have to continue selecting only the best candidates for the journey and limit your need to build anything at the destination to the minimum. You'll necessarily end up living in small confined spaces ...

Sal, considering a colony on Venus to be more feasible than one on Mars doesn't seem terribly well motivated to me. Can you please provide us some as hard as possible financial calculations on the required mission costs to back up your argument? Maybe also consider what returns you can realistically...

Actually, the Galilean moons are bright enough to be visible to the naked eye; they're just lost in Jupiter's glare. (There's an unconfirmed theory that some Chinese astronomer spotted one of them, but most astronomers agree that that's highly unlikely.) It's actually quite easy to see Jupiter as a...

And for those who want minimal pairs, here's one that I've mentioned once a long time ago: The streetname [tiː.li.kɑn.o.jɑ] ("tiilikka" ditch, though I have no idea what tiilikka means) vs. [tiː.li.kɑ.no.jɑ] (brick hen), though there's probably a difference in secondary stress here somehow. There's...

Unfortunately, he did quite well, gaining four seats. He didn't do as well as predicted, but it's still not that good. Being left securely in the opposition is probably also to his liking. Actually getting into coalition governments and receiving the responsibilities that come with it is seldom goo...

Ah, Academia.edu, source of all kinds of quackery! Isn't that a bit unfair? When you browse it, Academia.edu is in fact full of solid refereed papers, just made available outside the usual paywalls. The distribution media sure can be an indication of the poor quality of papers but such offprint ser...

I wonder what they would use if they were eating, say, both rice and meat in a meal. Would they use a more generic verb to say "eat rice and meat", or would they say "eat1 rice and eat2 meat"? Kind of like how we have "eat rice and drink water" vs "consume rice and water". The paper has this to say...

Sure, and that's easy to explain simply as a feature of the lexicon without needing to describe a deeper grammatical model. With more complicated patterns, like in Maniq, it becomes much more interesting to consider coherent models for what's happening with the word choices. Here I was musing how we...

Thanks, I have to put that on my reading list. At a quick glance it seems that the language has developed a family of classificatory verbs around the basic meaning of ingestion. That's not that different from the classificatory existentials and handling verbs that are found in many other languages. ...

Nice. I noticed that the numbers 7-10 for both Manambu and Iatmul are all for some reason misplaced under the column for 7. I though also more about the Skou family numbers. Donohue's Skou grammar gives the numbers 1-8 in phonetic notation also for Dusur, Dumo, Leitre, and Wutung. Wutung is already ...

That's also the theory that Donohue favours.

The Middle Sepik numerals should probably be updated to follow more recent sources, where such are available. Here's my take. Manambu 1 nakaməy, nak, nə 2 viti 3 mugul 4 a:li 5 taba:b 6 abun a:b + [1] ? 7 abəti a:b + [2] 8 abumugul a:b + [3] 9 aba:li a:b + [4] 10 tabəti, tabati ta:b + [2] These are ...

4 should be Erzya /nʲilʲe/, Moksha /nʲilʲæ/ I should probably add that in the transcription used for the other Mordvin (Erzya + Moksha) forms <ä> = /æ/. Thus, the Moksha list should probably have <nʲilʲä> instead of <nʲilʲæ> or alternatively replace <ä> with <æ> for both "1" and "5". Since the list...

You can mark tense like this completely separated from the verb but a language might also allow the use of bound tense morphemes directly on nominals. Forest Enets allows past tense marking on nominal predicates, compare uu kursi enči-d SG2 what.kind.of person-SG2 "What kind of person are you?" and ...

OK, I agree that it's a quite satisfying word.

And I like that word. Never understood why people don't like the sound of it. I've always understood that "damp" refers primarily to unwanted moisture (as in "The clothes are still damp" or "There is damp creeping up your wallpapers") so "dampen the pie" doesn't really work as either a baking instr...

IIRC Finnish has a few words with similar origins, i.e. inventions of 19th and early 20th century enthusiasts. Alas, I do not recall any specific such words at the moment. The element names vety ("hydrogen"), typpi ("nitrogen"), and happi ("oxygen") are good examples. They are planned derivations f...

ObsequiousNewt wrote:

Nortaneous wrote:Vijay: Yes, the drift from 'scare' to 'irritate/disgust' is recent, and probably the internet's fault.

This is a thing that happened?

As in "His stupidity scares me." = "The stupid things he says really annoy me." ≠ "I am afraid of his lack of knowledge."

gach, thank you, these are all good points to think about to get the creativity kick-starting. I just kind of dried up at dependent clauses- like when you don't know where to start eating because there's too much damn food! I know the feeling. It doesn't help that most of grammar is complexly inter...

These people really have a rich culture judging from the example sentences. Here are some thoughts of the grammar from me. The grammatical description stops right when you start to get deeper into dependent clauses. I think this is an obvious place to continue writing. What's the function of the dep...

I'm not a planetary scientist, but I find it hard to think of a process that would bring massive amounts of water to a gas giant without also accreting the overwhelmingly more common hydrogen and helium. There are icy clouds (including water) on all of our gas planets but these are only clouds float...