Zompist Bboard Again

I haven't finished the paper, so maybe I should hold off on commenting Part of the point the paper makes is that the wave model reduces to the tree model given a set of constraints, so all arguments for the utility of the tree model are actually arguments for the utility of the wave model; it handl...

None the less, the fact is that on large scales the web of influences and relationships between different language varieties over time comes out looking like a tree. This is likewise a fact about reality, a fact which the tree model describes. No, this is simply incorrect. On large scales it doesn’...

The tree model is perfectly adequate. Species, too, go through a period of relatively free internal gene flow (cf. how humans of different genetic backgrounds can interbreed), but if two populations are separated for long enough they may speciate, i.e. genetically diverge to such a degree that horiz...

What texts are these examples from specifically?

There is a distinctive (in the ordinary sense, not phonologically distinctive) phonetic quality to the vowels of a lot of South Asian languages, both Indo-Aryan and Dravidian, but I can't seem to figure out what it actually is . To stoop to the level of pure subjective description, the vowels feel p...

Is unconditional l > r more common than unconditional r > l?

Are Old English and Old Norse actually mutually intelligible? To what degree? I have heard conflicting things.

Anyone know of a good reference grammar of Modern Japanese? I feel like I should probably have one.

You memorize that the present active of form II has the stem -(u)CaC:iC-, and then apply the relevant inflectional prefixes and suffixes to the stem. So yes. Note that vowels are completely predictable in derived stems (after you've memorized the stem patterns); it's just the form I stem vowels tha...

They work in the same way. I'm sorry but I'm still not sure I get it, even after looking at the relevant Wiktionary pages. So form II is derived from form I by doubling the middle consonant of the root, I get that. But how would I know that the form II present tenses are yu-qattil-u, tu-qattil-u......

Can someone explain how inflection of derived Arabic verbs works? Wikipedia only gives inflectional charts for Form I verbs, and I'm struggling to see how the inflection patterns could be generalized to other verb forms.

Japanese is basically the the same as Korean here. Rain, wind, and snow are described with action verbs: 雨が降っている ame ga futte iru "rain is falling" 雪が降っている yuki ga futte iru "snow is falling" 風が吹いている kaze ga fuite iru "wind is blowing" Note that they're all in the progr...

This is a bit circular, since the traditional PIE reconstruction is heavily influenced by Sanskrit-- way too much so, according to Lehmann. There was an attitude that things could decay but not be innovated, so anything in Sanskrit got tossed into PIE. The discovery of Hittite should have upended t...

When learning about a language family, I often get the impression that some languages are more characteristic of that family than others, because they have a particularly high proportion of features that make that family unique. This is, of course, not exactly a scientific notion, it's purely a subj...

For all its faults, Optimality Theory does actually do a better job of accounting for certain phenomena. In particular, some languages seem to have epenthesis rules roughly of the form "insert the fewest number of vowels possible to eliminate all disallowed clusters", and OT does that very...

zompist wrote: ↑Mon Nov 14, 2022 9:54 pm We could maybe do a counter-Edo: obviously the word is sо̄ryo-neko, Japanese for 'monk cat'.

江戸 Nyland, you might say

hwhatting wrote: ↑Fri Nov 11, 2022 4:13 am

dɮ the phoneme wrote: ↑Wed Nov 09, 2022 7:43 pm In this 2014 paper,

It looks like the paper is paywalled (at least for me)? I wanted to check the German examples - could you forward that paper to me?

Yes; for anyone interested, it can be found here.

Thanks, dɮ! I love a good bit of syntax, so thanks for taking the time to explain the issue. Just glad that my grad program is already paying off in terms of things to post about on the internet; truly that is highest purpose an education can serve. I want to ask, how about "an eon ago" T...

As an aside, I quite enjoy the title of this paper. I'm feeling the need to go back and tweak various structures in a few of my languages as a result of reading this paper, which seems like it will be a lot of work. So you could say a syntactic universal and its consequences have been a disaster for...

So, my impression is that most conlangers are not that engaged with theoretical syntax. This is fair, since theoretical syntax is perhaps a little bit fake (probably not all the way fake, though). And a lot of syntactic theory just isn't that relevant to us, as far as it goes. However, I was recentl...