zompist bboard

[*]Make voiced stops emphatic, then make the voiced aspirates simply voiced. That seems possible but unlikely IMO. I think a more Armenian-esque shift would make more sense: P > Pʼ B > P Bʱ > B The one real stumbling block is I’m not sure how to generate the lateral fricatives. That's easy: sl Hl >...

Now whenever I speak Spanish I'm really conscious of where my tongues touching whenever I articulate /t d s n l/ Oh, I have it even worse than that. When speaking in English, I have to be careful of my /s/ and /z/ consonants; they should be alveolar instead of dental. Ditto when I'm singing. But I ...

I'd call it gross, but I then I don't like chocolate, so... :p

If you want to use the West Semitic sound changes as written, you're going to have to make PIE look like PS first by hand. However, there's another snag: a great deal of the flavor of the Semitic languages comes from massive morphological analogy and leveling . An Indo-European language could easily...

AFAIK the only precedents for ejectives spontaneously affricating are in Khoisan, so I'm not sure what's gained by assuming PGmc voiceless stops were glottalized rather than aspirated. Maybe Semitic, assuming tsade was once upon a time /sʼ/ rather than /ʦʼ/. There's no direct evidence for that, but...

The Haida conducted long-distance seafaring trade in canoes, from southern Alaska as far south as California. However, I'm unaware of anything like a Haida canoe in the Old World. Apart from that, it's dangerous (scientifically) to equate non-Old World cultures without extensive metallurgy with sto...

We know people in the stone age had primitive boats. There was probably some trading going on across the Black Sea and Mediterranean. "probably" as in "I have read reliable scientific sources hypothesizing this", in which case please supply some references or "probably" as in "I personally think it...

I had heard claims that some Americans had [ç] for /ʃ/. I only half-believed it until a few days ago when I was transcribing an interview, and the interviewee had this feature. I thought she was saying he until I discovered the antecedent of her pronoun was female, and she was in fact saying [çi]. T...

Ryan of Tinellb wrote:It's tempting though, isn't it? What if Inuktitut is agglutinative because it's too cold to leave your mouth open for too long?

Then having such long words doesn't really make much sense. :p

I grant that I don't have a good ear for glottal stops, but I can definitely hear the glottal stop in button or uh-oh or what (contrary to that article, word-final /p k/ don't debuccalize for me; they simply have no audible release )--I don't hear it in I or other word-initial positions. :/ Dialecta...

Vijay wrote:I'd say [ˈʔajmə], but apparently, it's supposed to be [ˈʔaːmə].

...There are initial glottal stops in English?

Proto-Semitic was spoken probably in the Levant, probably thousands of years earlier. Lipinski agrees with you, but a lot of Semiticists these days lean towards Arabia or Ethiopia. Which, of course, is even farther from the PIE homeland, no matter where you put it. Why Ethiopia? Doesn't Proto-Semit...

Salmoneus wrote:Proto-Semitic was spoken probably in the Levant, probably thousands of years earlier.

Lipinski agrees with you, but a lot of Semiticists these days lean towards Arabia or Ethiopia. Which, of course, is even farther from the PIE homeland, no matter where you put it.

The similarity between PIE *ḱerh₂- 'horn' and PS *qarn- 'horn' seems to have been noticed, but has anyone considered it in depth? Since the PIE word is a possible derivation of *ḱer- 'to grow, increase' maybe we're looking at a PIE borrowing in PS. But then the 'grow, increase' root is also reconst...

There have been these couple of papers claiming geographic causes for the distribution of ejectives and tonal languages: Evidence for Direct Geographic Influences on Linguistic Sounds: The Case of Ejectives Climate, vocal folds, and tonal languages: Connecting the physiological and geographic dots ...

I have a conlang whose name is Aqadian; does that answer your question? :p To make this more awkward, the Eastern word that gives Aqadian aqad "wetland, swamp," also has a cognate harad "open land, plain, expanse," in a (rather distantly) related language. Others: a tonal language called Zhong, and ...

Travis B. wrote:This usage of getting off seems perfectly normal to me, and not at all perverted.

Same. Wouldn't have even crossed my mind.

Sumelic wrote:When I first encountered the word "scarify" (and "scarification"), I read it as /ˈskɑrɪfaɪ/ (/ˌskɑrɪfɪˈkeɪʃən/) by association with the word "scar".

...Is it not? Wiktionary says it is, at any rate.

38. b
39. a
40. c

36. a
37. b

35. What mèþru said.
36. b

31. a
32. c
33. c -- He should be given a position as an abbot somewhere removed from the centers of power, where he won't be a threat to Conan's succession or produce heirs to be a threat to Conan's succession.
34. b

28. a -- Also used by Latin transcribing Greek, so it makes sense.
29. a
30. a

In-laws Traditional Mfalen society doesn't have a concept of in-laws because one of the two spouse is essentially adopted into the other's clan (i.e. come sunder the exclusive authority of that clan's leader for various matters). As such, they refer to their spouse's relatives as though they were t...

24. c
25. c
26. d
27. d