Zompist Bboard Again

alice wrote: ↑Thu May 23, 2024 2:13 pm Note that Scottish schools generally start their summer holidays at the end of June or the start of July. As John Swinney pointed out, Rishi didn't know, or care.

The Conservatives are traditionally better at getting out the postal vote. Voter suppression is Tory policy nowadays.

In the case of English, we see in everyday English a "subjective accusative" in the place of the "subjective genitive" (e.g. "If it weren't for me setting up the firewall this Windows box'd be full of worms by now.") At the very least, there's also the attraction of th...

Travis B. wrote: ↑Thu May 23, 2024 4:52 pm We also see the subjective accusative in things like "me and my friends rode around town in my pickup truck removing stop signs".

I think that's just an example of the nominative being triggered by an adjacent verb, with fallback to the unmarked accusative when separated.

I think it's a generalisation of 'I could have done that', which doesn't really make a lot of sense when one analyses it. This particular construction does make sense to me. You just need to notice that English modals don’t really have past tense forms — so if you want to place a modal in the past,...

Other fun in this sort of department are things like: I'd've never've gotten my box cryptolocked if I hadn't've downloaded that "antivirus" program from that site. To me, this feels almost like aspectual agreement! It doesn’t work in my dialect, though: it feels very much like a feature o...

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. while in English the plural agreement is inconsistent and varies by dialect ("maths is..." etc.). I don't th...

When Lithuanians sort lists in Lithuanian alphabetically, do they use the same order as dictionaries? I ask because I've seen evidence that some at least consider 'e' and 'ė' as as different as 's' and 'š' (definitely different letters when the brain is engaged), while happily disregarding ogoneks o...

Exactly. And in this case there are no convenient historical events that we can firmly peg a transition in our periodization to (such as how 1066 is used as a demarcation between Old and Middle English). Nitpick: The Old to Middle transition is normally dated to 1200, for which the historical peg w...

Does alliteration exist as a poetic device in the languages of the Southeast Asian sesquisyllabic erosion area? If so, can C1- alliterate with P.C1-? It does, and it depends . So the answer to the second part seems to be 'No'. Alliteration, at least for alliterative quasi-reduplication, requires bo...

This is getting beyond what I’m familiar with, but according to Wikpedia , such a region of the universe would result in a gamma-ray signal from annihilation with our region of the universe, and we’ve seen no evidence of such a signal. It only says that for regions within the observable universe.

Professor Brian Cox, around 2013, did a special lecture to a celebrity audience explaining (among other things) why time travel into the past will never be possible. It was a Doctor Who themed lecture and was a part of the BBC's 50th Anniversary celebration for DW. From what I remember it requires ...

Darren wrote: ↑Sun Apr 21, 2024 7:10 am In that case it makes sense that there's more of one kind than the other, since otherwise we wouldn't exist to observe said universe. 'Nuff said.

Can we do more than say that there's more matter than antimatter in the visible universe? The antimatter might mostly be beyond the horizon!

The frequency of phonemes in Vrkhazhian will be even more skewed because of the deaffrication of /tɬ tɬ dɮ tʃ tʃʼ dʒ/ into /t tʼ d/ (when geminate) or /ɬ (ɬʼ) ɮ ʃ (ʃʼ) ʒ/ (when singleton) and subsequent mergers of the postalveolars with the central alveolars. I think you may need to evolve your wor...

I suspect that you, Jonlang, may be becoming more pernickety as you gets older, and are thus more aware of the possibility of refraining from "neg hopping".

Now, I have encountered a claim that Danish in England was simply Anglicised so much that it wound up being simply regarded as English. It is then claimed that the opposite has happened in Jutland - an Ingvaeonic language was so Danicised that it wound up simply being considered bad Danish. Unfortun...

English as we know it already has quite some Old Norse influence, but there could be a variety of English with even more Norse influence. Maybe the English dialects of the former Danelaw have more Norse influence than Standard English, but I don't know about that - I know virtually nothing about En...

...For instance, many of the distinctions merged in the Mary - merry - marry merger have been resurrected in a marginal fashion through consonant elisions and resulting vowel cluster reductions... Surely this is only an issue if the merger is still active. Is it? You cannot create new words that re...

Geneticists have found out that the Yamanya people who probably spoke PIE emerged from the mixture of two populations, one related to the probable speakers of Proto-Uralic, the other from south of the Caucasus. My idea is that the latter spoke an Afroasiatic language related to Semitic. That, howev...

Whatever the transcription, I think the best explanation is that this phonologically is /jn̩/, but that’s so highly marked sonority-wise that the language ‘tries really hard’ to get rid of it (so to speak). Why does the phonology even have /jn̩/? Wouldn't /jən/ do just as well? In a few ways, the [...

bradrn wrote: ↑Sun Mar 24, 2024 4:37 am Whatever the transcription, I think the best explanation is that this phonologically is /jn̩/, but that’s so highly marked sonority-wise that the language ‘tries really hard’ to get rid of it (so to speak).

Why does the phonology even have /jn̩/? Wouldn't /jən/ do just as well?