Zompist Bboard Again

Oh yeah, Saanich is DEFINITELY worse

Use of capital letters is normal Americanist phonetic notation for voiceless resonants, so this is essentially just Washo using linguists' phonetic alphabet as its regular orthography (for the most part), which is moderately common in North America, though less so than in the past. (Not saying this ...

They're kind of weird. Basically everyone is casting a single vote for president, which determines who from each party [EDIT: or coalition] is that party's nominee for the presidential elections, i.e., whoever from each party gets the most votes (and also if a given party doesn't cross the necessary...

So there's presidential (and other) elections in Argentina today, which have not been mentioned yet. As is traditional, Argentina is in the midst of an economic crisis, which adds an extra little spice to the elections. The only two viable candidates are the current president Mauricio Macri , runnin...

TurkeySloth wrote: ↑Thu Oct 17, 2019 5:05 pmAre [ʌ̞, ɤ, ɯ] plausible outcomes for [æl, el, il]?

Very much so

I love our tendency to backform verbs from deverbal noun compounds. Two new instances spotted in the wild today: “The person after me has scuba dived.” “his boyfriend looks like he will serial kill someone” Somehow, the first one makes perfect sense to me, while the second one doesn't. I interprete...

Yeah, I agree

Mishta-miam tshitishi-tuten! Something giant? My attempt at "good work" [with the caveats you've all been discussing, obviously] although I don't know if it's actually idiomatic in any Innu variety. (mishta= "great/very" + miam "exactly" [mishta-miam = "very good&...

Mishta-miam tshitishi-tuten!

Yeah unfortunately PHOIBLE is......not terribly reliable. I mean with any large database like this you're gonna get a fair number of errors, and the main use for it should be broad statistical trends, not dependable information on any specific language. Same with UPSID, which is also one of PHOIBLE'...

It did originate in 2002, yes. (And you guys are all making me feel extremely old...Also it's occurred to me several times lately that I've been on the ZBB for literally more than half my life, which is rather astonishing...)

Most of the terms used in English to refer to other cultural groups/languages aren't of pejorative origin -- and particularly for groups that English speakers have only had relatively recent knowledge of, the name is usually just the other group's borrowed endonym! This is the case for most of the n...

By the way, what is the difference between: A man who is standing over there is my friend versus A man standing over there is my friend They both mean the same thing, but at least for me the second one sounds much more natural and, of the two options, is what I would say. The first one isn't ungram...

But...no one said or insinuated "all exonyms are bad" at any point...? Mèþru's post addressed specifically pejorative/xenophobic exonyms, and my post was just an expansion on the etymologies and usages of the -nyms they mentioned.

Well "slave" was certainly not a friendly appellation when Crees first applied it to Athabaskans, although the Slaveys did refer to themselves in English with that term for quite a while, and it's still in wide use in academia. (But I think now the trend among the people themselves is to u...

I forgot to mention that one dialect of Beaver is Halfway River Beaver . A number of Salishan languages have amusing names, but my favorite are Nooksack and a dialect of Southern Puget Sound Salish, Muckleshoot . There's also a dialect of Tlingit called Tongass , and another extremely great entry is...