Zompist Bboard Again

If I'm not much mistaken, in Standard Chinese it's idiomatic to omit the possessive particle de (的) before kinship terms but not before other nouns. I was going to post that, but looking at it further, it gets complex, and it's not limited to family members. The general rule seems to be that if the...

I have alluded to this before here, but does anyone else here find that they have to deliberately not speak like they do at home to be consistently understood by non-native speakers of one's native language? Note that a key factor seems to be how natural their informal English is ─ if they speak in...

@zompist and anyone else who’s never heard “whooping cough” said out loud, what did your local ‘lect call that disease? “Pertussis”, perchance? Or, maybe, 100-day cough? Nothing— I never heard of anyone getting it. This graph probably explains why . I know the term of course. There's been a vaccine...

we have /hʊf/ and /wʊp/ (maybe sometimes /wup/ but never /hup/) Initial /h/ is certainly usual in whooping cough in my BrE experience. In the varieties here in southeastern Wisconsin it is always /wʊp/ ing cough . I'm kind of surprised you guys say "whooping cough" at all— I don't think I...

In referring to interstates by names, in Chicago, it makes sense: the numbers for some of them do change, particularly the toll roads. For example, the Tri-State changes from I-294 to I-94 en route to the IL–WI border. This isn't quite right. Interstate numbers don't change: 94 is a national route ...

Young women, lower working class, with high social connectivity. does this mean that conlangers don't influence languages... First, the question was about sound changes, not "influencing languages." Second, you seem to be making some strange assumptions about the demographics of conlangers.

Labov even identified which sociological groups are likely to spread sound changes. Which groups did he identify? Young women, lower working class, with high social connectivity. Here's an article that mentions Labov but focuses on more modern research. (You might ask: does that mean young men pick...

I don't really have specifics, but your take is similar to mine. The idea wasn't to introduce gods, but more community-oriented behavior, with just enough rituals and interesting cosmology to make the religion sticky.

BTW, elements of cyberpunk were predicted in Winsor McCay's Little Nemo back in 1910, and aspects of the Internet by Edward Bellamy in 1888. I knew about Bellamy, but McCay? Sounds intriguing. How does a comic about a little boy's dreams predict cyberpunk? Are you saying that the boy's dreams were ...

I think this all depends on what you consider "science fictional" and what period of sf you mean. There are a lot of experiences that didn't exist in my childhood, were predicted in sf, and now exist. Space stations, comsats, laser weapons, flyby photos of Pluto, drone warfare, GPS, phones...

As for internal etymologies, those are the source of the whole problem. The protolanguage is well-worked-out, and has a strong tendency towards light verb constructions and serial verb constructions; the modern system then results from univerbations of those. OK, that's cool. I don't know what your...

Indeed, these both have internal structure, as do all lexical verbs: lisŋumŋun is root √lis-mŋun ‘related to visual perception’ plus aspectual marker -ŋu- ‘stative’ asanmarnir is root √asan-rnir ‘related to sitting’ plus aspectual marker -ma- ‘punctual’ (This is all in the post I linked.) I looked ...

I’ve been wondering about the plausibility of some word shapes in my current conlang — especially its verbs , which are often long and phonologically heavy. Even basic verbs like lisŋumŋun ‘see’ and asanmarnir ‘sit’ can reach three or four closed syllables. Does this kind of thing have any natlang ...

alice wrote: ↑Fri Sep 06, 2024 2:59 pm The Oxford Book of Oxford, written by and for Oxonians exclusively in the City of Oxford, and even printed exclusively there too, with every word guaranteed 100% Oxonian?

And printed by oxen at the actual ford.

Probably a combination of two things. One, different crops. I've said that Almean millet is particularly adapted to cold climates— originally found in Arcél, it allowed classical Skouras to expand into its littoral, and that was about the same time Čeiy was settled. It's also likely that Čeiy develo...

Historically we see completed or mostly-completed sound changes, so they look regular. But it's not guaranteed that every word that could be affected actually was. So sound changes can have a patient zero? Patients zero, but yeah, pretty much. Labov even identified which sociological groups are lik...

This stuff has been talked about for over a hundred years, and even elementary textbooks on historical linguistics will cover some of the difficulties. The lesson of the Neo-Grammarians shouldn't be taken as "100% of sound changes are regular and complete", but "Don't give up on regul...

The first time we meet an Ogorodé in Against Peace and Freedom , they're described as "a small, sad, grey, nondescript alien with big eyes". Well, to me at least, that sounds suspiciously like those Grey aliens UFO believers keep talking about. No, I've never liked those depictions. The O...

Though most revolutionary right-wing ideologies at least tend to glorify the past and claim to restore a lost ancient greatness. The Italian fascists liked to refer back to the greatness of the Roman Empire, while the Nazis glorified the Germanic conquests of the Völkerwanderung and Arminius's succ...

I don't really agree, and to make my point, I'll try to reconstruct Ares Land's old point from memory: The basic idea is that the Right sees society's traditions and traditional behaviors, including the traditional hierarchies and power structures, as something " given " - depending on in...