zompist bboard

Or, to sum it up in far fewer words, preexisting words, especially grammar words, behave as if they have more degrees of freedom than new words. The former are best analyzed as having independent vowel quality, vowel length, vowel nasalization, following obstruent fortisness/lenisness, and pitch accentuation, and trying to force them into less degrees of freedom results in very contrived analyses. Yet, at the same time, the latter behave as if they have significantly fewer degrees of freedom, with vowel length being clearly directly tied to following obstruent fortisness/lenisness, vowel nasalization being clearly tied to following consonant nasality, and pitch accentuation clearly being tied to adjacent syllables where one of them has primary stress that can be merged through relatively fixed phonological pathways. In essence, there are two incompatible sets of rules at work that are very difficult to reconcile within a phonemic-type model.

What? Again you're at it with the not making sense. It's not a major contrivance to say /t#d/, anyway.

(to the first post)

Another question about prepositional constructions: does anyone else use different from, different than and different to depending on context? I tend to hear of people using just one, as a dialectal preference, but I've noticed a pattern to my usage:

"from" is for comparing nouns:
X is different from Y.
They speak differently from how we do.

"than" is used to compare clauses straight:
They speak differently than we do.

"to", as far as I can tell, is used for comparing perspectives:
That looks different to me (than it did/from how it did).
My prononciation of French is different to both Québec and European varieties.
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