Zompist Bboard Again

Do you know what pronoun to use in organization. For example NASA, or UN? He, She, It, or They? If the organization is acting concertedly, "it"; if the organization is acting with disunity, "they." (e.g., "NASA announced it launched a new probe," but "The UN are d...

Ryan of Tinellb wrote: ↑Sat May 04, 2019 12:28 pm

Amal is phonologically inspired by Semitic languages.

I'm guessing not Arabic, with Amal's presence of /p/ and absence of /ħʕɣq/. Hebrew? Or am I way wrong?

Biblical Hebrew had all of /p ħ ʕ kʼ/--and [ɣ] counting begadkefet. My guess would be Akkadian.

Hominid wrote: ↑Sat May 04, 2019 7:39 am I heard someone say "I shook my head yes" to mean "I nodded my head." Is this a new thing? A regional thing?

I wouldn't use it personally, but I'm too accustomed to hearing it for it to sound remarkable to me.

zompist wrote: ↑Thu May 02, 2019 10:07 pmI don't remember which program was the culprit, though.

Photoshop? Photoshop garbled my Syriac.

Do you know what pronoun to use in organization. For example NASA, or UN? He, She, It, or They? If the organization is acting concertedly, "it"; if the organization is acting with disunity, "they." (e.g., "NASA announced it launched a new probe," but "The UN are d...

Also, really for my information more than anything else: Since there are no voicing contrasts until the implosives become regular voiced stops and merge with the allophonically voiced tennis stops, is it plausible with my phonotactics to have allophonically devoiced implosives? If so, where? Anyone...

Travis B. wrote: ↑Sun Apr 28, 2019 5:43 pm -ally, as in literally

[ɫ̩(ɫ)i]

Hmm, I've never heard prescient or nascent with any vowel but /ɛ/ and /ei/ respectively...

It's not exactly an innovation, but I have the feeling "nice" has come full circle. In my day, it was most often used sarcastically, to the point where I stopped using it to express approval. But now I'm seeing it used more often at face values (e.g. twice by younger friends only yesterda...

I've never heard the term "housemade," but I might equate it with "made in house"--i.e., something made from fresh ingredients in a restaurant rather than something pre-packaged/institutionalized distributed to the restaurant. For me, "homemade" means made from fresh in...

Yes, that was my impression. It wouldn't be the first time that Wikipedia gave undue credence to someone's pet theory...

A friend recently asked me if Pashto was a direct descendant of Avestan, and I told him it was my understanding that Avestan wasn't believed to have any direct descendants. I now see that Pashto's Wikipedia page, however, cites two linguists, one 19th century and one modern, as claiming that Pashto ...

What I mean is that names on a map are typically, synchronically, often not recognizable by people using them. This is true in Europe and the Middle East, but in Pre-Columbian North America it was quite normal for place names to be 100% transparent. Also in North America I can think of plenty of pl...

The classics: * anti- (as in anticommunist, antiseptic, antidepressant) * multi- (as in multilingual, and the distinct "multiverse") * bi- (as in bidirectional, bisexual) * di- (as in dihydrogen monoxide) Is there any pattern on who uses which pronunciation of the -i-? I have /i/ or /ɪ/ i...

I'm not sure a geminate glottal stop is even possible--if it were, I'd think Semitic would allow it, which it doesn't. ;) It definitely exists in Classical Arabic. That would explain a lot: Arabic is the non-Ethiopian Semitic language I know the least about (barring Old South Arabian and Modern Sou...

Aside from just their plausibility, I'm curious as to how long these might be expected to take. I had estimated about 2000-2500 years, but that may be way off. I don't think there's a standard or consistent rate of change, but your proposed time depth looks fine to me. 4. u-mutation: i e {a æ} → y ...

Maybe this is nitpicking, but are you trying to say that 'it is suspect to geminate all medial clusters', or 'it is suspect for gemination to always preserve the first consonant'', or both? The latter--I have no problem imagining a language in which all internal CC sequences are geminates. Whimemsz...

(The second part is a good point to bring up, though, depending on what the OP's intended use of the naming language is.) Though Tolkien would like to remind you that you can create a perfectly accessible phonology and still have people butcher your names--like /s/ in Celeborn or /ɒ/ in Sauron . Th...

Also, never in my mind this change is good: hat.su > hat.tu. It's more likely to turn into this instead hat.su > ha.t͡su or hat.t͡su. Attic Greek has such a change, but it has an intermediate step Tt > t͡sː > tt (a similar change in Celtic and other Greek dialects yielded /sː/). I'm inclined to agr...

I bit suspect this is not that realistic. For example, phoneme like /iwk/ can turn in /ivk/ which is harder to pronounce. Probably it's better if w>f b > v / _C happened in Neo-Punic. w > v unconditionally is so trivially common as to be not worth mentioning. /ivk/ is not at all hard for me to pron...