Zompist Bboard Again

My boss is British, and the annual staff meeting + party was this evening. He revealed over a few beers that he voted Remain, but would now vote Leave.

I can understand voting Leave. I can understand voting Leave, and then wanting to switch. But...???

This is an attempt at creating another Yiddish--that is, a language descended from Old High German that is not exactly modern German. Tentatively, its in-universe location is in the Jura mountain region between France, Germany and Switzerland, in a small alt-country whose long tradition of independe...

I recall Trask's Standard Basque as being a model of clarity and exhaustiveness, but it's been years since I've been able to look at my copy (it's in a box somewhere). The Nishnaabemwin grammar is great, but morpheme-by-morpheme glosses would have been helpful. I'm aware this was at the request of t...

Given the amount of debt that American (at least) households are tied down by, I'm surprised nobody has run on a William Jennings Bryan-esque platform of deliberately engineering a spurt of higher inflation to ease debt burdens. It certainly seems like it would be much less destructive than allowing...

I wouldn't be so sure the military wouldn't want to take over given they're already going after academics.

It should be noted that Milton Friedman wasn't a true libertarian either. He was a neoliberal on consequentialist grounds: he believed that laissez faire economics was empirically the best way to improve everyone's lives. Accordingly, he supported redistributive taxation to support the poor, govern...

Supposing this psychotic break from reality were to continue and you saw a rat eating the coconuts; duly concerned, you might turn to your companions and say "kóreθ ehkaná in arunmá", informing them that a rat is eating the coconuts. They would again correct you to arún, as number is alre...

There is generally no orthographic difference in German between restrictive and non-restrictive relative clauses, because all types of relative clauses are usually separated with commas. However, I would say there is in fact a syntactic difference, although it's less significant compared to English...

Is there precedent for interactions between vowel tone and quality? Salishan seems to have some examples of this, browsing the Index Diachronica : e.g. Chilliwack Halkomelem appears to have undergone *ú *á > á ɛ́. However it also looks like there may have been interference from ablaut patterns... A...

High-tone vowels can break, and then you can epenthesize a consonant between the resulting vowels. Is there precedent for interactions between vowel tone and quality? Salishan seems to have some examples of this, browsing the Index Diachronica : e.g. Chilliwack Halkomelem appears to have undergone ...

Hidatsa had *w > m unconditionally. Crow had a change whereby vowels following a glottalized consonant lengthened and acquired rising pitch ("Retniw's Law"). Proto-Crow-Hidatsa is proposed to have undergone a change whereby the first two vowels in a word swapped places, i.e. *CV1CV2 > CV2C...

Can inanimate marker turn into obviative marker? I planned Middle Ku to have proximal-obviative, like Asent'o, unlike Rkou that have animate-inanimate one. The Proto-Algonquian animate obviative singular ending is identical to the inanimate plural marker; they're both *-ari . The jury is still out ...

"How Will Hurd Thrives in a Sprawling, Divided Texas District"

It took me several reads to determine that "Will" was the candidate's first name.

Given that Chinese compounding is head-final, you could get a return to Proto-Chinese's sequisyllabic structure where initial syllables lose their tone and simplify phonologically. As noted by other posters, you'd probably be looking at a lot of re-compounding. Say, for example, that 老师 (lǎoshì) wen...

Prehistory: -5000 to -500 While archaeology provides evidence of humans traversing and visiting the Spice Islands since at least the end of the last glacial maximum, the first firm evidence of permanent settlement we have is from approximately six and a half millenia ago. These settlers from the Ad...

['ɪ̃nɨˌnɛʔ] internet

(careful speech: ['ɪ̃ntəˌnɛt̚ʔ])

One that might be worth running with, seed 2107016151. stops: /b t d k ʔ/ nasals: /m n/ fricatives: /f v s z h/ resonants: /r j w/ vowels: /i e y ø a o u/ Syllable structure is (C)V(C). None of the listed allophony is particularly unusual. Seed 1994230582 only has non-front vowels /a a: o o: u u:/. ...

I am confused with your conjugation. Can you give the verbal template? Well that's the problem - in IE there is really no verbal template per se outside of root + derivation + inflection, since all the inflectional categories of verbs are marked in a single inflectional suffix. However I will eluci...

Oh for goodness' sake. I was being momentarily flippant, but wasn't attempting to sound dismissive or condescending--I certainly appreciate Sal's discussion, and I think almost everyone else on the board does too.

What do you think about this sound chanɡe, where pharynɡealisation/uvilarisation on consonants becomes a vowel quality distinction? i u ɛ → e o æ/ Cˤ_; _Cˤ æ ɑ →a e ɛ →e This results in a classic 5-vowel system. Also, how's this diachronic shift chain, assuminɡ that /ʕ/ exists in the lanɡuaɡe alrea...