Zompist Bboard Again

Everybody else gets to have an apartheid state that's actively committing genocide and lying about it, but suddenly people object when the Jews do it? Nobody makes a peep when there's ethnic cleansing in Sudan or Myanmar (don't google it), or when the AfD tries to do the fourth reich (don't google t...

The proliferation of "weird" conlangs in the early days of the internet may have been a product of the lack of material on natural languages. It used to be, if you wanted to know how Venda dealt with comparative adjectives, you had to get to a college campus, and not a shitty one. No wonde...

kodé wrote: ↑Tue Apr 23, 2024 10:42 pmMuskogee (indigenous to SE north America) has this, and IIRC you also see it in some Iroquoian and Algonquian languages.

Source?

Nortaneous wrote: ↑Mon Apr 22, 2024 6:11 pm 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.

Kinda, yeah.

/ð/: "Hi, I'm the least robust phoneme in the universe. Literally sneeze and I'm gone forever."
ZBB: "How could this phoneme possibly fail to show up where it's supposed to? Could it be the reflex of an archaic pronominal clitic? Are Vikings to blame?"

Some languages, like English and German, have a complex ruleset for phonotactics. Their ruleset is too big. Other languages, like Japanese, have a very simple ruleset for phonotactics. Their ruleset is too small. What does it even mean for a language to be ‘too big’ or ‘too small’?... please don’t ...

I think phoneme frequency is an underexamined aspect of conlanging, so I support this endeaver. Here's a fascinating paper about phoneme frequency in context in Korean.

All of these variations sound perfectly normal to me, with none being incorrect or even awkward.

Watching closely...

In your example the applicative elevates the recipient to the accusative, but in Vrkhazhian, wouldn't that happen anyway, without the applicative? Sometimes people assume "applicative" is just a thing that you add to a verb, because that's how it works in some famous examples. In Swahili, ...

all neither uncommon opinions in conservative circles nor incompatible with [some definitions of] socialism! I'm happy to throw the Democratic apparatchiks, journalism professors, Clinton donors, and White suburbanites with ally bumper stickers into the volcano when the revolution comes. The proble...

On the question of polls, you could ask people "Are you responding to this poll right now, yes or no?" and the nos would not dip below ten percent. People always assume the floor is zero for poll responses, but it never is.

Anybody who's surprised at Biden's support for Israel's current genocide, google his position on unkilled Serbian children (tl;dr: he's against it). But even on other matters, he's a total piece of shit and always has been. It's been said all over the internet, but it's worth repeating: The entire s...

The one time a computer just up and died on me, it gave me ample warning by being an HP. As for the "this random word looks like this other random word" discourse, I thought we were past all that. If you want to demonstrate that something was loaned from language A to language B, you have ...

The Democratic Party is run by crypt-keepers (Pelosi), cops (Harris), and cowards (Pelosi and Harris). As far as their West-Wing-soaked brains are concerned, Biden is doing a great job. If Trump wins again, they'll be the last ones to see it coming.

It's impossible to say which feature is more important in Swedish /eː/ vs. /ɛ/, length or height. They are both important. /j/ can be [ʝ] in some dialects, but not in standard Swedish. Of course it's possible. Remove length from one set of words and height distinction from the same set for differen...

In North America there are two main strategies. Most direct-inverse languages use both.

First, you can just add an additional argument to the verb and let context do its work.

Second, applicatives can elevate what would be an indirect object to a direct object.

The voicing of intervocal single fricatives shows up in enough Germanic languages that it may go back to proto-Germanic, so the German innovation is that initial prevocalic fricatives follow the same pattern. This is an areal change that swept across much of West Germanic, including some English var...