Zompist Bboard Again

foxcatdog wrote: ↑Wed May 15, 2024 4:41 am *m *n *nʲ *ɲ

Are you sure you mean *ɲ and not *ŋ? Those tailed n's are easy to confuse with each other, and a phonemic opposition between *nʲ and *ɲ seems weird.

London? Westminster? WTF? Historically, this conurbation should rather be known as Ossulstone

To me as a non-native English speaker, math are sounds wrong, but maths is is odd, too. Maths sounds like a plural to me, but math is definitely singular. To me, maths is is the only acceptable form. ‘Maths’ behaves like a mass noun, and ‘math’ does not exist as a word. Yes. Maths is not as definit...

I'm no expert, but I do have a Larousse, which says the word was singular or plural till the 18th century; while Etymonline says the English word became plural in the 17th century. I don't think it's random: it's "math" in the US and "maths" in the UK. While 'math' might always ...

You must not forget that PIE was no pristine isolated language, but was in contact with other languages around it, and thus probably contained loanwords that were borrowed into the language at a late stage when /a/ and /b/ had become phonemic. Such loanwords need not comply with the reconstructed wo...

As for PIE lacking post-velar consonants other than the laryngeals, Proto-Semitic is reconstructed in a similar way (though some Semitic languages at least have shifted /k'/ to /q/), and this is indeed the reason why Indo-Europeanists call them "laryngeals". Thing is, the *k *kʷ *q hypoth...

As for PIE lacking post-velar consonants other than the laryngeals, Proto-Semitic is reconstructed in a similar way (though some Semitic languages at least have shifted /k'/ to /q/), and this is indeed the reason why Indo-Europeanists call them "laryngeals".

That's a dangerous and twisted logic, Torco. Just because the present world (dis)order is bad (I do not like the term "neoliberalism" because it 1) is ill-defined and 2) denotes something illiberal), doesn't mean that a Trump presidency wasn't any better. In fact, it would be much worse - ...

Might the paper in question be Fenwick (2016) ? That's an interesting paper, thank you! Indeed that's it! Regarding the Kartvelian form, it's discussed in another paper by the same author . My thanks to Ketsuban and Zju as well. It's funny that Fenwick's ideas are partially close to what Taskubilos...

Get better soon. My best wishes.

For me, the fun in conlanging lies in figuring out what I want, personally, and investigating the richness of language myself. Why would I get a computer to do the fun bits for me? (And, if I want to describe languages created by someone else, actual linguistic fieldwork would give me far more inte...

I spot a Nineteen-Eighty-Four reference in the words listed.

I have long been entertaining the notion that the impression that languages change faster in times of social upheaval than in times of social stability may be a mirage resulting from the conservatism of written norms which are only broken up and realigned with the spoken vernacular in times of soci...

Wikipedia is not an authoritative source here. :P David Crystal in The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language : "The year 1066 marks the beginning of a new social and linguistic era in Britain, but it does not acutally identify the boundary between Old and Middle English. It was a long...

Might the paper in question be Fenwick (2016) ? That's an interesting paper, thank you! Indeed that's it! Regarding the Kartvelian form, it's discussed in another paper by the same author . Also interesting. The similarities between IE and Kartvelian may be due to Kartvelian also having been influe...

I fully concur with zompist here.

Right, begining of the Old English period , not language. It's not like the ol' Angles went to bed one night speaking Proto-Germanic and woke up the next morning speaking Old English. "English", "Old English" and "Proto-Germanic" are all labels we arbitrarily tack on a...

Getting a bit off-topic here, but a couple of interesting observations: One is that the Web is already filling up with AI-generated crap. When you feed an AI AI-generated stuff, quality goes way down. A metaphor I'd like to invoke here is the state of your water jar after you've been painting for a...

Indeed, substratum theories that don't even specify the substratum are cases of ignotum per ignotius and thus not particularly useful. What do you gain by saying, "Word X is from a substratum language, but we don't know which language"? Such a statement is not falsifiable and just a fancy ...

I feel sorry to hear that.