Zompist Bboard Again

I must emphasize that if there is to be any temporal references, it is between future and non-future, not past and non-past. Sure, but your counterfactual seems decidedly +past. The realis can be marked in the apodosis, for matters involving implication (there are hoofprints here, so there must be ...

The irrealis is typically future-orientated while the counterfactual is nonfuture -orientated. So the distinction in the protasis makes sense. Yet, they (at least the irrealis) don't have to refer to time at all. Or, rather, the irrealis is far less tied to temporality than the counterfactual. So i...

Well yes, but I could just as much mark it in the irrealis mood since the irrealis deals with unrealized or nonactual events. So what for you is the difference between "counterfactual" and "unrealized/nonactual"? Seems to me that semantically these are very close, if not the sam...

So that is why I don't know whether the condition clause is supposed to be marked counterfactual or if it's the consequence clause, or both. I don't know the psycholinguostics or formal logic or semantic theories or whatever is involved. "Condition clause" and "consequence clause&quo...

hwhatting wrote: ↑Fri May 03, 2024 5:17 amRe Low German

Thanks for the addition/correction!


JAL

bradrn wrote: ↑Thu May 02, 2024 10:08 amI did mention Kupwar already, but that’s in Asia. (Apparently the name for this is ‘metatypy’.)

Ah, yes, I think it is Kupwar that I was thinking about, thanks!


JAL

I am kind of proud of speaking dialect everywhere I can, to be honest. (It is your own fault for not understanding Milwaukee dialect I'm all for it :mrgreen: I feel like it is unfortunate that many people elsewhere think that they must speak a standard variety, which is why we have things like trad...

keenir wrote: ↑Wed May 01, 2024 9:35 pmI fear that, next time, you may have to ask the barista to repeat your order back to you.

Or be less stubborn and just use GenAm when ordering


JAL

but grammars tend to converge anyway, because this is less obvious to the speakers themselves. Iirc there's an African(?) city where two languages are spoken that have almost no shared vocabulary, but almost identical grammar. Can't recall which city, unfortunately, and a quick google doesn't show ...

No, because that's not how language contact works. Vocabulary is in most situations the easiest thing to change. I'm going to disagree by proxy. I've read that there's two situations in which languages might influence each other. The first is contact where speakers of language A have contact with s...

Wow! Did you already translate six chapters? That's a lot of work! Me mek, an ye, olip wohk fo so :D I did, and yes, quite some work :D. (And I need to revisit the older chapters, as I started about five years ago, and the grammar has been changed an augmented, though most will still be ok. But tha...

Mi finis don cata 6 a Obit Ya, "Ota Skilat ina Faya". Yu me luk im de ya.
I finished chapter 6 of the Hobbit, "Out of the Frying Pan into the Fire". You can see it here.


JAL

I can't think of thousands of years of sound changes. I also have to start from somewhere, so some things are lost to the vagaries of time. Also, thousands of years are enough to change about any sound into another. Given levelling of irragularities over time, I think you can get away fine with a r...

bradrn wrote: ↑Sat Apr 20, 2024 4:09 amI know nothing of Doctor Who, but that last name reminds me of Greek ouroboros more than anything Latinate.

Seconded.


JAL

How did the Chancery Standard (the basis for modern Standard English) come into being? Was it based on some specific dialect, spoken in a specific region? According to Wikipedia: The Chancery Standard of written English emerged c. 1430 in official documents that, since the Norman Conquest, had norm...

foxcatdog wrote: ↑Tue Apr 09, 2024 9:22 pmI have a rhotic pronounciation of "Vehicles"

Veericles?


JAL

The pattern of traditional Central German dialects is to have fricatives instead of voiceless stops for StG /b g/ in many cases (which is reflected in StG by the standard pronunciation of - ig and in informal writing by things like writing Tag as Tach ). I must've confused them with Upper Saxon. As...

Travis B. wrote: ↑Wed Apr 03, 2024 10:04 amActually, this is the system in many Upper German varieties -- it just happens that traditionally the voiceless stops are written with <b d g>.

I thought this was a feature of the central German dialects, not the South ones?


JAL

So what may have happened is this: When Germanic peoples had conquered what is now southern Germany, Austria and Switzerland, the Vulgar Latin speakers, in adopting the language of their new overlords, identified the Germanic voiced stops not with their own voiced stops but with their voiceless one...

Had some more fun with ChatGPT yesterday. Wrote a concise conlang grammar and some vocab, then asked ChatGPT to translate English sentences. It's amazing what it can do, but also where it fails. For example, if you do not explicitly state what a vowel is, it assumes no letters are vowels, apparently...