Zompist Bboard Again

coptic is fake. only fake coptic can actually be real

Or perhaps vice-versa; *h₂ep- 'water' is attested on most of the periphery and in the most archaic branches (Hittite, Tocharian, Indo-Iranian) while *h₂ekʷ- is only attested in Europe (in Germanic, Latin and perhaps Lusitanic and Slavic.) I think it's consensus that they're probably variants of each...

Can anyone recommend any reading on tone systems where a large number (perhaps the majority) of syllables are neutral tone? I think such systems exist. On the contrary, I would be surprised by such a system: I would expect tones to be equally distributed across syllables. (I wonder if anyone has st...

Doesn't a majority of 1 bode well for a GE? The Tories are sunk in the polls, so virtually everybody else can stand to gain from an election (though not everybody else will ), and all you need to do is convince one reasonable Tory MP in a safe seat, perhaps somebody who privately loathes Johnson (th...

Tilth , the condition of agricultural soil. Several birds have monosyllabic names, such as the shrike , grebe , shag , coot and chough /tʃʌf/. What’s the best we can do for the seasons? Osage has pee for spring and American English has fall . What about summer and winter? Mississippi Valley Siouan ...

Polish jokes are still semi-present in the US. When I learned the card game of Hearts, acquiring 25 points (the worst possible outcome) was known as a "Polish shot". (If you get all 26 points in the round, you have "shot the moon", recording a score of no points while all three o...

I recall reading at some point that Miller is an uncommon surname in Britain because the stereotype of millers was that they cheated peasants on their grain take--but the same sterotype did not apply to Germans named Müller, who are ancestral to most Americans named Miller.

Raholeun wrote: ↑Mon Jul 15, 2019 6:11 am To be fair, there are tons of threads in this sub forum where ideas like "the alternative right is superlative evil" are expounded. How is this new idée fixe different from the others that are already present?

you must be new here

FWIR the first British settlers were disproportionately wealthy (and nearly starved to death because they didn't know how to farm), so maybe that's also reflected in the distribution of surnames here in the US. I'm skeptical both of their great wealth and of their inability to either farm, or emplo...

I passed my German exam and admission to the Master's in comparative IE and historical linguistics at Vienna is now a shoe-in.

Happy Fourth!

Qo Xiong Initials /p pɹ t ts ʈ k q/ /pʰ pʰɹ tʰ tsʰ tɕʰ ʈʰ kʰ qʰ/ /mp nt nts ntɕ ɳʈ ŋk ɴq/ /mpʰ mpʰɹ ntʰ ntsʰ ntɕʰ ŋkʰ ɴqʰ/ /m mɹ n ɲ m̥ʰ n̥ʰ/ /f s ʂ ɕ h/ /ʐ ʑ/ /w l̥ʰ j/ I don't know anything about distribution, but it's probably not entirely Cartesian. Finals /i e a ɑ ɔ ɤ o ɯ ei ɛ̃ en ɑŋ ɔŋ/ /je j...

zompist wrote: ↑Sat Jun 15, 2019 4:37 pm Some of these may be phonetically assimilated-- e.g. "empty" is going to have a labiodental m.

"Empty" for me is ['ɛmti~'ɛmpti]; the /m/ definitely isn't a labiodental. But there's also hometown.

I have been Officially Recruited for continued development of the Allosphere. Some of you may be wondering what the Allosphere's astronomical situation looks like. The details are still being debated, but Allosphere is a bit larger than Earth (radius 7100 km) and has a year about one and a half time...

One Tiffany problem in the USA is that people here don't understand much about British accents. For instance, there's a widespread misapprehension that "Shakespearean English" was closer to contemporary RP than to American English or West Country English so they would reject a Shakespeare...

Knit Tie wrote: ↑Tue Jun 04, 2019 7:15 pm

dhok wrote: ↑Tue Jun 04, 2019 7:11 pm Dorsey's Law in Ioway-Oto: *CRV₁ > CV₁RV₁.

Friggin genius! Thanks!

What do you say I should change the approximant itself into?

*l > r, *r > j, *j > r and *w > j are all attested.

What can I do with the English rhotic in terms of diachronics to make it go away in all clusters and get replaced with something else otherwise? I'm slowly coming to the conclusion that my current /ɹ/ → /ˤ/ → vowel quality and /ɹ/ → /ʕ/ → /ɣ/ → /g/ → /ŋ/ shift sequences are not really something I l...

In drei Wochen mache ich meine A2-Prüfung auf Deutsch, die ich bestehen muss um auf einen Master an der Uni Wien mich bestellen. Mein Wortschatz ist nicht schlimm und ich lese und höre gut, aber mein Schreiben und Sprechen brauchen Verbesserung. Gibt es jemand hier, der vidya spielen mag und wöllte...

Would one of our resident Scotland experts be able to explain why Burger King is getting ratio'ed over milkshakes?