Zompist Bboard Again

How's this for obscure? A five-consonant inventory used in a (partly incorrect) transliteration of Persepolitan late Elamite texts by Edward Hincks in 1846: p t k s n Modern analysis suggests more like eleven consonants – still fairly small. I like Hincks's thinking though (he added the vowels /i u ...

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...

An interesting case of a claimed six-consonant inventory in the Austronesian language Yuanga (New Caledonia) – Stephen J. Schooling describes it has having the following consonant phonemes: p t k f θ x But then adds onto this seven suprasegmentals – aspiration, labialisation, retroflexion, palatalis...

Are there any natlangs that, like my new conlang fad'ami , have a complete lack of adpositions, expressing equivalent ideas with applicatives, relational nouns, genitive case, and relative clauses? Common motifs in fad'ami include using an applicative on a verb with a relational noun belonging to a...

What happens with the sequence of tenses, as in standard 'I said I'd got time to spare'? Does that get replaced by 'I said I had time to spare'? Yeah, the former sounds at best very weird (although parseable). The second is what I'd usually use. I am in agreement here. I would not call the former S...

Interesting. Is substandard 'got' as an uninflected present similarly defective? For me, a Briton, the infinitive in this meaning.the first, a synonym of 'to have', doesn't feel natural, but the rest of the semantically present and formally perfect forms seem to exist. I think in AusEng present &qu...

Interesting. Is substandard 'got' as an uninflected present similarly defective? For me, a Briton, the infinitive in this meaning.the first, a synonym of 'to have', doesn't feel natural, but the rest of the semantically present and formally perfect forms seem to exist. I think in AusEng present &qu...

On an advert - DIY or Do It For Me

Granted I'm not confused about what they mean, but it reads horrendously

All languages have some way of expressing basical logical operations like "and" and "or". But I wouldn't be surprised if there were some languages without a separate word class of conjunctions. I remember hearing about some (Papuan?) language where conjunctions were just a subcla...

IMD "got" and "gotten" have slightly different meanings: "got" merely implies possesion, "gotten" emphasizes acquisition. E.g. "I've got the money" = I have it, it's available "I've gotten the money" = I've acquired it, recently enough tha...

Nortaneous wrote: ↑Sat May 25, 2024 3:34 am

Darren wrote: ↑Sat May 25, 2024 1:05 am

Nortaneous wrote: ↑Sat May 25, 2024 12:56 am

i have bad news for you about the united states of america

pray tell

the past participle of "get" is already "gotten" (and many nonstandard varieties replace the simple past of common strong verbs with the past participle)

both are true of auseng too

J’inclus la prononciation car je lutte encore avec l’orthographie. /ʒ‿ ɛ̃ kly la pʁonɔ̃siasjɔ̃ caʁ ʒə lyt ɑ̃kɔʁ avɛk l‿ɔʁtɔɡʁafi/ I am including the pronunciation as I still struggle with the orthography. Pour moi, l'orthographe n'est jamais une problème. C'est presque complètement régulière, même ...

Nortaneous wrote: ↑Sat May 25, 2024 12:56 am

Darren wrote: ↑Fri May 24, 2024 11:09 pm In a similar vein you can add redundant -en onto strong verbs without sounding too far of ( ... gotten,

i have bad news for you about the united states of america

pray tell

I was trying to implement a toy version of a Northern Vanuatu-style sound change (where unstressed vowels disappear, influencing the vowel in the preceding syllable to massively increase the vowel inventory of a language). [o u] / [ø y] / _ C Frnt [i y e ø o u] / [e ø ɛ œ ɔ o] / _ C [V -Open] a / [...

English strong verbs have a surprising tendency to trigger analogy, despite being highly irregular themselves (I think there's probably about forty synchronic "ablaut" patterns). I have read somewhere that verbs reached (rought?) peak regularity in the 11th century and since then more weak...

Today the ID came up in the course of a discussion I had with Alexandre François :o Examples — it would be nice to have examples for each sound changes. This shouldn’t be too hard for any halfway reliable source, although it would make for more work. Given the hyperlinked nature of the new ID , he ...

Subbing the Roche limit into the equation for orbital velocity, you get v = sqrt(GM/(r(cbrt(2M/m))) v = orbital velocity G = 6.67 × 10^(−11) M = mass of primary r = radius of satellite m = mass of satellite To maximise the orbital velocity, we need big M and m, and small everything else (could also ...

You could get a more reasonable distance if you're orbiting something really massive. Say you're orbiting a supermassive black hole of 500,000 solar masses at a distance of 0.005 au (460 thousand miles); your speed will approach the speed of light. And that is (self-evidently) outside the event hori...

But, on the other hand, the presence of -n’t seems to be key here: 3. ?? If I had not have had that cake, it would’ve gone mouldy. 4. * If I had have had that cake, it would’ve gone mouldy. Honestly 4 kinda works for me. Interesting… for me it’s completely ungrammatical, no uncertainty about it. &q...

Unmotivated /s/ → /ɬ/ is attested multiple times, although areally not that widespread; Yue Chinese, some Central Tai languages, Hlai, Tanoan apparently. In SE Asia /s/ isn't as stable as it ought to be, it keeps turning into /t/ or /ɬ/ or some bullshit along those lines. edit: MiS's push chain woul...