Zompist Bboard Again

Wow! Did you already translate six chapters? That's a lot of work! Me mek, an ye, olip wohk fo so :D I did, and yes, quite some work :D. (And I need to revisit the older chapters, as I started about five years ago, and the grammar has been changed an augmented, though most will still be ok. But tha...

Mi finis don cata 6 a Obit Ya, "Ota Skilat ina Faya". Yu me luk im de ya.
I finished chapter 6 of the Hobbit, "Out of the Frying Pan into the Fire". You can see it here.


JAL

I can't think of thousands of years of sound changes. I also have to start from somewhere, so some things are lost to the vagaries of time. Also, thousands of years are enough to change about any sound into another. Given levelling of irragularities over time, I think you can get away fine with a r...

bradrn wrote: ↑Sat Apr 20, 2024 4:09 amI know nothing of Doctor Who, but that last name reminds me of Greek ouroboros more than anything Latinate.

Seconded.


JAL

How did the Chancery Standard (the basis for modern Standard English) come into being? Was it based on some specific dialect, spoken in a specific region? According to Wikipedia: The Chancery Standard of written English emerged c. 1430 in official documents that, since the Norman Conquest, had norm...

foxcatdog wrote: ↑Tue Apr 09, 2024 9:22 pmI have a rhotic pronounciation of "Vehicles"

Veericles?


JAL

The pattern of traditional Central German dialects is to have fricatives instead of voiceless stops for StG /b g/ in many cases (which is reflected in StG by the standard pronunciation of - ig and in informal writing by things like writing Tag as Tach ). I must've confused them with Upper Saxon. As...

Travis B. wrote: ↑Wed Apr 03, 2024 10:04 amActually, this is the system in many Upper German varieties -- it just happens that traditionally the voiceless stops are written with <b d g>.

I thought this was a feature of the central German dialects, not the South ones?


JAL

So what may have happened is this: When Germanic peoples had conquered what is now southern Germany, Austria and Switzerland, the Vulgar Latin speakers, in adopting the language of their new overlords, identified the Germanic voiced stops not with their own voiced stops but with their voiceless one...

Had some more fun with ChatGPT yesterday. Wrote a concise conlang grammar and some vocab, then asked ChatGPT to translate English sentences. It's amazing what it can do, but also where it fails. For example, if you do not explicitly state what a vowel is, it assumes no letters are vowels, apparently...

Fed some conlangs to ChatGPT and asked it to analyse them. It was eerily correct. Start of its comments about Fake Germanic: The text you provided exhibits features from a constructed language (conlang) or an older Germanic language, incorporating elements reminiscent of Old English, Old High German...

Not really, though, because as zompist mentioned you don’t say [nəjən] — you can see in the spectrograms I shared earlier that the [nj] transition is pretty much instantaneous, whereas the [jən] takes much longer. Well, I think I say something like [ɲjn]. If I try to say [njn], I do produce somethi...

I think you’ll find that if you say [nĭn], your tongue glides both forwards and back with no difficulty. It doesn't glide at all actually, it just attaches, detaches, and attaches again, at the alveolar ridge. But as soon as you think ‘onion’ while doing it, your brain notices that that final /n̩/ ...

How did a French word for work (travail) become an English word for travel? According to Etymonline , Old French already had an "arduous journey" sense, but it also mention in the "travel" entry "The semantic development may have been via the notion of "go on a difficu...

How might Toki Pona develop if (hypothetically) taught to a group of people and used by them as a sole native language for a few thousand years? What do you mean by "develop"? Toki Pona is a kind of pidgen, as far as its complexity goes, so it'll very quickly gain a lot of vocabulary, and...

I thought the only "weird" thing about Danish is the pronunciation?


JAL

Moose-tache wrote: ↑Sat Mar 16, 2024 7:31 pmI feel like a lot of languages will have many changes in a short time, because they compound on one another.

Punctuated equilibrium in linguistics :).


JAL

Richard W wrote: ↑Wed Mar 13, 2024 12:14 pmYou're talking about the trisyllabic pronunciation, not the bisyllabic pronunciation.

Yes, because I doubt there even is a bisyllabic pronunciation in BrE.


JAL

Can you determine, with any kind of certainty, to which syllable an intervocalic consonant belongs? In Germanic languages that's pretty difficult, afaiu. I recall a post on John Wells's blog years ago that he had a discussion with a German dictionary publisher that marked stress on the vowel (e.g. ...

One question I have is how did Czech survive intact being essentially entirely displaced by German for the period of the from essentially the start of the Thirty Years' War to the start of the Czech National Revival, whereas Irish and Scottish Gaelic are severely marginalized today despite the best...