Zompist Bboard Again

An interesting detail here is that the position of da changes the meaning of the sentence slightly. Compare: Ich bin nach draußen gegangen, und es hatte schon da gelegen. (I went outside, and it had already been lying there in that exact place .) Ich bin nach draußen gegangen, und da hatte es schon ...

Q : How can I express the emphasis on the "ever" in "whenever", "whoever", "whatever", etc in German? :?: Wenn mein Bruder redet, redet er über Geld, Geld und noch mehr Geld. (Whenever my brother talks, he talks about money, money and more money.) You could u...

So earlier today, for a while, there was no power in about half of our apartment, while the other half had power. Seems simple enough, right? Except that, eventually, it turned out that the problem was street-wide , or almost so. Um, how can a problem with the electricity supply in the entire stree...

Currently, the trend is to go for Politiker*innen , with the Genderstern spoken as a pause. From a purely linguistic viewpoint, an interesting detail about this is that it introduces minimal pairs for the glottal stop as a true phoneme: Politiker*innen /po.ˈli.tɪ.kɐ.ʔɪ.nən/ vs. Politikerinnen /po.ˈ...

The West Germanic languages in general have a history of trading third person pronouns and demonstratives back and forth across part-of-speech classes, so I wouldn't be surprised if this behavior predates English as a separate language. Does anything screwey like this happen in German, say, in the ...

I not long ago learned that StG has short tense vowels, as found in d /e/ mokratisch and P /o/ litiker , for instance. Am I right in thinking that these are typically found in Latinate, Romance, or Greek loans, where words of Germanic origin would tend to have short lax vowels in similar positions?...

I not long ago learned that StG has short tense vowels, as found in d /e/ mokratisch and P /o/ litiker , for instance. Am I right in thinking that these are typically found in Latinate, Romance, or Greek loans, where words of Germanic origin would tend to have short lax vowels in similar positions?...

Um, no, this is all part of semantics. In some languages (notably active-stative ones), this stuff is reflected in the syntax, but English isn’t one of them, as far as I can see. So part of the misunderstanding here seems to be due to different ideas of what counts as syntax and what doesn't. (My o...

I have no idea what you mean by "emic" here. If you're making an analogy from phonology-- you can't do phonology without doing phonetics. If you're using the anthropological meaning, that'd mean that you want to use speakers' own terms and theories, which we already know can be quite erro...

So what do we think these things hanging around at the end of a sentence actually are? One thing that doesn't really matter (because it works and is just quirky) but if I think about it drives me nuts as a native English speaker is 1. "I put my coat on." versus 2. "I put on my coat.&...

1, 2, & 3 are all happening at 2. The speaker is speaking at 2 and is looking forward in time to what is about to happen (#3) or or looking back in time to what just happened (#1). The speaker starts "going to fix" at the beginning of the first red arrow (#1) and continues to do so ti...

Hmm, so if I want declension classes where some nouns take different affixes than nouns of other classes for a similar grammatical category I'd have to come up with situations where one noun uses one adposition and another noun uses another adposition. As it is, the difference between the -а ending...

Does anyone here know whether the R.E.M. song Shiny Happy People was intended as a parody of certain things, or as a serious work? I'm asking because IMO, if you take it as a parody of certain sub-genres of pop culture, it's pretty brilliant, while if you try to take it seriously, it's pretty much ...

Reworked Vrkhazhian verbs, verbs have more strictly defined theme vowels a = transitive u = dynamic intransitive i = stative intransitive [...] When it comes to Middle-Weak and Final-Weak roots, the ablaut system is mostly destabilized (only the II-y,w and III-y,w weak roots) where there is no dist...

8) Kestulhṇọdọq ẹṇulhṇọkwh. kest< u- lh- ṇọ >dọq ẹṇ< u- lh- ṇọ >kwh The camp is west of here. The essential aspect on kestulhṇọdọq suggests that this is a permanent camp at some kind of fixed resource-gathering area; its location to the west is an inherent property of it, it couldn't be anywhere el...

trailsend wrote: ↑Mon Aug 30, 2021 12:01 am

Rounin Ryuuji wrote: ↑Sun Aug 29, 2021 3:09 am Oh, are they new? I thought I'd seen that name before. Looks like I hadn't.

No, you likely have. I've been a member of various incarnations of the ZBB for a good while (I think I first registered in 2008?), but I hadn't reregistered since the last server change.

Welcome back!

Samt, Zimt, fremd, Hanf, fünf. But that's about it, as far as reasonably common lexical root words are concerned. The clusters /mk np nk ŋp/ do not seem to exist in coda position at all AFAICT. Word-final /mt/ (and to a lesser extent /ŋt/) clusters are common in inflected verb forms though (present...

[url=https://www.dwds.de/wb/etymwb/Reich] a native root *rik-, *raik- 'stretch, expand' (cf. English reach ) < PIE *rēǵ- You're misquoting somewhat - the root Polenz assumes for Germanic is different root from PIE *reg- , namely *rēiĝ-. Otherwise you wouldn't get the i-diphthong in WGmc. *raikjan o...

Maybe the reason for this is that "homepage" was borrowed a couple of months earlier than "website"? At least that's what I seem to remember from the late nineties...

Ronc Tyu would use serial verb constructions of several types, for instance with the modal verbs táe ‘it is preferable; would rather’ (impersonal), nrà ‘can, be able’ (transitive, same-subject construction), or ao ‘want’ (transitive, different-subject construction). The last of these constructions c...