Zompist Bboard Again

How do you pronounce "various" and "rule"? I'm particularly curious as to whether non-rhotic speakers have a syllable final rhotic in the bisyllabic pronunciation or the first, or an onset /ɹj/. I'm not sure how one objectively distinguishes the two possibilities. I'm not a nati...

Wo fo yu pos dis tu taym?
Why did you post this twice?


JAL

masako wrote: ↑Mon Mar 04, 2024 11:09 amKlingon Alphasyllabary

Nice!


JAL

AwfullyAmateur wrote: ↑Wed Feb 28, 2024 1:38 pmMy family has a pine tree. It's very tall.

Yu af payn pam de Sajiwa, fo specal di Karibyan payn Pinus caribaea.
There are pine trees on Sajiwa, specifically the Caribbean pine Pinus caribaea.


JAL

Ye, mi swel won pam.
Yes, I like trees too.


JAL

Did Latin go extinct, or did it become the various Romance language? And if it's the former, how many other languages should be counted as extinct, despite having surviving modern varieties? Lol, I was about to write almost the exact same when reading abahot's post :). For me, the answer would be t...

But do we measure diversity by the "stock" or by the language? Is an area less diverse when it's languages have diverged, say, 4000 years ago but there's 100 languages now, than the same area that has 10 languages that diverged over 6000 years ago?


JAL

Maybe a better question is to ask how many languages have ever died. We can't possibly know, can we? We don't even know when humans started speaking, and when the first fully fledged, grammatically complex languages evolved. Some estimates are at least 100,000 years, which is 10 times the window in...

Imralu wrote: ↑Fri Feb 16, 2024 11:22 amLast night, a hawkmoth flew at my hand and my face and touched me with its proboscis.

Kis don nayflay
Kissed by a moth.


JAL

But we do-- we can see the Indo-European, Sino-Tibetan, and other families taking over huge territories over recorded history, and what we know of those areas from say 5000 years ago is that there were more families there. Where Europe is now almost entirely IE, and the Middle East is almost entire...

Otto Kretschmer wrote: ↑Mon Feb 12, 2024 3:12 amAny Japonic conlangs out there?

I've seen quite a few, including from members here. So the liteal answer is "yes" :).


JAL

Sure there is: because agriculture was invented, and thus empires, and thus continent-spanning language families. We have lost a lot of linguistic diversity, and weird exceptions to 'universals' unfortunately don't fossilize. Not sure if I agree. First, it's an untestable hypothesis: we just don't ...

WeepingElf wrote: ↑Fri Feb 09, 2024 3:28 pm[ɑ] and [ɒ] - two vowels that were dangerously close to each other

Didn't they have their cannonical values then? Because if so, it's just a rounding distinction? (And since in NAE [ɒ] > [ɑ], I would guess neither of them is unstable in and of itself?)


JAL

bradrn wrote: ↑Fri Feb 09, 2024 8:02 amPossibly, but I’m pretty sure others have it too.

Are there many people that are mid-SA and Australian? :)


JAL

hwhatting wrote: ↑Thu Feb 08, 2024 11:21 amMy wife says they are called "winter roses".

Dis mosa Helleborus, swel kol Kwismas ros.
That must be Helleborus, also known as Christmas rose.


JAL

bradrn wrote: ↑Fri Feb 09, 2024 4:37 amSomething between South African and Australian.

Wouldn't that be an idiolect though?


JAL

Zju wrote: ↑Mon Feb 05, 2024 7:28 amAre all /aks-/ words learned borrowings? Is there anyone more knowledgeable to sheld light on the issue?

I would think they're just spelling pronunciations of words that have had their spelling adjusted to look more like original Latin words.


JAL

Also note, language families are not born like children, so they really have no determinable age. After all, how old is the Romance family? There's an uninterrupted chain of transmission from one generation to the next going back 6000 years... and probably at least 50,000 more. We find it convenien...

masako wrote: ↑Thu Feb 01, 2024 1:32 pmI wasn't aware that was the name of the language.

Mi di go mek dis bway pas mi mek.
I could've made that clearer than I did.


JAL

masako wrote: ↑Thu Feb 01, 2024 10:57 amAre you counting languages you stopped making?

Ye, mi neba finis June 2016.
Yeah, I didn't finish June 2016.


JAL