Zompist Bboard Again

They don't have to be a formal word class, just express the concepts that conjunctions typically do. Cuz I'm quite aware some use adpostions or special verb forms to serve conjunctive functions . Like "with" also being used to mean "and" or the Ethiopian Semitic "gerundives...

All languages have some way of expressing basical logical operations like "and" and "or". But the concepts are not usually expressed in Middle Egyptian. Could this not be an accident of attestation? I find it rather difficult to believe that people wouldn't have needed to talk a...

While it's a bizarre analysis, it's the biggest discrepancy between consonant phones and phonemes I've ever seen – on average more than 6 distinct realisations of each phoneme. And yes, obviously it's complete bunk. Moloko (Chadic) has a single vowel phoneme with 5 realisations, plus another 5 real...

Is Sunak insane? It does seem quite likely, doesn’t it? At some point you do have to admit it as a serious possibility. (Not that I’m complaining, mind you. I like Starmer quite a lot, from what I’ve seen of him.) The explanation I have read is that he has given up on winning the general election a...

This man seems quite mad… I just saw the following headline: Sunak vows to bring back national service for school leavers Is he trying to sabotage the miniscule chance he has of re-election? I struggle to explain his actions in any other coherent way… Is Sunak insane? It does seem quite likely, doe...

This man seems quite mad… I just saw the following headline:

Sunak vows to bring back national service for school leavers

Is he trying to sabotage the miniscule chance he has of re-election? I struggle to explain his actions in any other coherent way…

What do you think are some crosslinguistically common or even "essential" conjunctions. None: I don’t see why a language should necessarily need any conjunctions at all. I haven’t really investigated the subject at all, but I would be unsurprised to discover a language which has no dedica...

The bug should be fixed now. (At least in the code; I won’t update the website until the next release.) The problem was that the target @1 [ɛ ɔ] is referring to category 1, but that category doesn’t exist in the target (which just matches a single grapheme). The code shouldn’t crash in that case any...

I tried a backreference and I think I managed to crash the parser, since I got "exit with exit code 1" Now this shouldn’t happen at all: I’ve never managed to crash Brassica. What sound change did you enter that triggered this? a / @1 [ɛ ɔ] / _ C @1 Open OK, I can replicate this. This is ...

Although to be fair I mostly ignore the difference between /e ø o/ and /ɛ œ ɔ/, and between /ɑ̃/ and /ɔ̃/, so maybe I'm not so good after all La liaison aussi c’est difficile pour moi. /la ljɛzɔ̃n‿osi sɛ difisil puʁ mwa/ Also, liaison is difficult for me. (Si je pouvais corriger ton français, il fa...

I don't have a → key on my keyboard, but I do have programming fonts installed which include a -> ligature. Would it be possible to recognise the -> digraph to separate the input and output as well? I see no reason why not. I’ll add this to the list. I was trying to implement a toy version of a Nor...

Je vois que cet fil a été revécu ! /ʒə vwa‿k sɛ fil a ete ʁɛveky/ I see that this thread has been revived! J’apprends le français. /ʒ‿apʁɑ̃‿l fʁɑ̃sɛ/ I am learning French. J’inclus la prononciation car je lutte encore avec l’orthographie. /ʒ‿œ̃kly la pʁonɔ̃siasjɔ̃ caʁ ʒə lyt ɑ̃kɔʁ avɛk l‿ɔʁtɔɡʁafi/...

Reviving this thread, here’s a rather interesting example of analogy:

ColinWright wrote: JH Conway used a different technique which I have swutch to when computing days in the current year.

Because in Latin, the ‘default’ pronouns were instead the subject ones! Which is precisely the usual situation for a nominative-accusative alignment, where the nominative case is ‘unmarked’ (to use the usual terminology). Now that strikes me as circular. :( I'm no expert on Latin syntax, but what's...

[…] my point is that both English and French are generalizing the default pronoun— making it more default, as it were. Well, my definition of ‘default pronoun’ was precisely that it is generalised. So wouldn’t this just be a circular argument? Not if the language has changed. I don't know enough ab...

[…] my point is that both English and French are generalizing the default pronoun— making it more default, as it were. Well, my definition of ‘default pronoun’ was precisely that it is generalised. So wouldn’t this just be a circular argument? You could probably argue that the default pronoun in Sp...

Got some inspiration: reflexive markers. They only refer to the subject. So if the word order in a reflexive clause is fixed to S REFL V (and reflexion is doubly marked), that could over time be interpreted as S=NOM V, after other case suffixes have appeared. Finally, the nominative enclitic would ...

"Default" might be a better word here... I do agree that "me" etc. is the default form in English (and "moi" in French)! OK, ‘default’ is a far better word here. Then ‘marked-nominative languages’ might be better termed ‘default-accusative languages’, and so on. The ke...

Starting with the most important point first: You'd probably have to explain what notion of markedness you're using. To me the form used in clefting and emphasis would be more rather than less marked. (Note that in French the clefted/emphatic form is different from both nom. and acc. pronouns.) Esse...

Even English is arguably marked-nominative. How so? Basically, what Glass Half Baked said: Citation form for the pronouns is the object series: me , us , them , etc. The object series is used after prepositions The object series is used for emphatic subjects and topics The object series is used aft...