Zompist Bboard Again

I completely misread the post and only just realised it. I thought the book was claiming it doesn't have a silent T in British English, so I was expressing surprise that Emily took the implication that in American English it does in stride.

trait has a silent final t in british english ...does it not in American? other words where final [t] is often left out include just, wrist, host, next, locust (he writes "In locust few cultivated speakers would acknowledge omitting the final consonant, yet in current speech it is doubtful if ...

Although I don't fully agree with Gamkrelidze and Ivanov, I think the mainstream theory doesn't explain the origin of s-mobile, which IMHO could be some kind of fossilized (i.e. no longer productive) prefix. The usual explanation is that it's a fully phonological process where a final -s on one wor...

In summary, Gamkrelidze & Ivanov posit a "compact fricative" sibilant *ŝ- in PIE which would account for Ø- in Sanskrit and š- in Hittite (e.g. šakuwa- ) and t- in Luwian (e.g. tawi- 'eyes'). And Fenwick, writing in 2016 and well aware of Gamkrelidze and Ivanov, points out that the ex...

I disagree; s-mobile appears before consonants, which isn't the case. *h₃ekʷ- , *h₃negʰ- and *h₂eḱru all begin with laryngeals, which last I checked are generally considered to be consonants. (I am aware of the arguments for vocalic allophones; it seems a little odd to me that a language would be c...

Well, this is [their] theory. Mine is we're dealing with a Wanderwort with several reflexes in IE and elsewhere: Nakh-Daghestanian *mhalV- ~ *mhanV- 'warm', Uralic *omena ~ *omVrV 'apple', Basque udare, udari, madari 'pear', umo , umao (B) 'ripe, seasoned'. This is quite a list. I can find a "...

Although I think *abVl- could be remotedly related to *meh₂l- , it can't be derived from it with regular/predictable sound changes (not ad hoc ones!) Not all sound changes are nice perfectly-regular neogrammarian ones; sometimes there's loans from related dialects ( vixen ) or folk etymology ( eggc...

Mainly because: 1) it has a limited distribution, only found in a few branches. 2) it has a non-native phoneme *b . 3) it's seemingly related to Hittite šam(a)lu- . Cool, we're all happy with the reasoning so far and I agree with the criticism that a *b makes a PIE reconstruction suspicious in part...

Not exactly. These are differents renderings of a Wanderwort also found in Hittite sam(a)lu- 'apple (tree)' and which probably originated in the Middle East (Kurdistan), the region where apple trees are native from. The discussion following the post you quoted includes links to a pair of papers by ...

Do you think there's still artifacts bearing evidence of historical Indo-European languages waiting to be found which can improve our reconstructions, or is it more likely that we have everything we'll ever get and the best we can hope for is philologists finding specks of gold in their pans?

Mapos Buang seems to be the only language in the world with a prenasalised uvular stop. As best I can tell it's just a statistical accident that prenasalised stops and uvular series happen not to coincide areally, but because Oceanic languages tend not to have a uvular series I'm curious to know ho...

vlad wrote: ↑Mon May 27, 2024 2:43 pm I'm pretty sure that's a spelling pronunciation. He's saying /motekuhsoma/.

Could be. The page does specify "modern Nahuan pronunciation", and I didn't want to make assumptions since I know even less about its descendants than I do about Classical Nahuatl.

What's going on with his name? You have Moteuczoma, Durand-Forest has Motecuhzoma, and slightly older sources have Moctezuma. I'm guessing the reading order of the glyphs has changed? His name in Classical Nahuatl was [moteːkʷˈsoːma], and people differ on how to romanise Nahuatl syllable-final labi...

The UK and its love affair with irregular readings of its place names is good, but there's also a lot of irregular kanji readings in Japanese place names which are just plain fun. I particularly love the instances where a place name containing a negative verb ( akezu no mon dōri "Gate-Does-Not-...

bradrn wrote: ↑Sat May 25, 2024 4:18 am

I tried a backreference and I think I managed to crash the parser, since I got "exit with exit code 1"

Now this shouldn’t happen at all: I’ve never managed to crash Brassica. What sound change did you enter that triggered this?

a / @1 [ɛ ɔ] / _ C @1 Open

I have a couple of questions. I don't have a → key on my keyboard, but I do have programming fonts installed which include a -> ligature. Would it be possible to recognise the -> digraph to separate the input and output as well? I was trying to implement a toy version of a Northern Vanuatu-style sou...

Depends on the council (and public schools keep their own timetable) but I checked the website for my local council and their summer term ends on the 24th of July. (Half-term is on the 27th of this month and goes through to the 3rd.)

ChatGPT is a bad research tool because it doesn't know anything and will fabricate citations if you ask it for citations. van de Loosdrecht et al. (2018) happens to exist, but it's not titled "Ancient genomes from North Africa evidence prehistoric migrations to the Maghreb from both the Levant ...

It's really interesting how an object's orbital speed is governed by its distance from a central object. One would think it were possible for an object to orbit faster than another object at the same distance around a central object. You can be going at any speed in any location, but then your orbi...

An Earth-like planet with an orbital speed of 0.99c would have an orbital distance of around five millimetres, so it'd be dominated by being inside a star in the moments after you start the simulation but before it stops being a planet.