Zompist Bboard Again

1) First of all, the invariable article le . Interlingua does away with gender entirely. I can see the appeal in resolving mistakes with nouns ending in -e, but I think la should be made at least optional for feminine Romance cognates, or to keep it as simple as possible, all female entities or ina...

"Muhammad" is still a runaway favourite given name for males in most of the Islamic world. I'm sure the percentage in some countries is pretty eye-watering. In Bangladesh in particular Mohammad is so common they don't even bother writing it in full a lot of the time, indicating it simply ...

What is ‘Isidorianist’ even supposed to mean? Isidore of Seville (Latin: Īsidōrus Hispalēnsis , ca. 560 - 636 CE) is the author of a very long treatise of Latin etymologies, entitled the Etymologiae or the Origines , where he basically just makes connections between words based on their sound. Lots...

Per the discussion here : poor boor moor to pour tour tourist tournament tourniquet Tourette syndrome Also, what about path/truth vs. paths/truths? Saw some people elsewhere saying they pronounce the former pair of singulars with /θ/, but the latter pair of plurals with /θs/ or /ðz/. i want to spell...

In Salvadoran Spanish, maleta is gender-invariant adjective that means 'bad' in the sense of incompetent. Un profesor maleta 'an incompetent [male] teacher', plural: profesores maletas.

This is quite something: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Stan_traynor/Wikipedia_is_not_a_reliable_source Merely a tip of the iceberg though. https://miidashgeget.wordpress.com/2022/04/26/wikipedia-sucks/ And mind you I am someone who edits Wikipedia and Wiktionary now and then myself. I sure hav...

https://seveleu.com/pages/semitic-synta ... rative-sem
Interesting list of Hebrew-Arabic cognates, with divergent meanings annotated.

a funny thing happened to "otaku" in korean it was loaned as 오타쿠 o-ta-ku but then it was changed to make it sound like a hanja word: 오덕후 o-deok-hu (ive seen 俉德厚 and 五德珝 or 五德厚 but there is no official hanja spelling of this word (obv)) which was shortened to 오덕 o-deok or 덕후 deok-hu 오덕 o-d...

Talking about things difficult to hear, I find it amusing how I (as a Spanish speaker) find it very hard to hear the distinction between /p b/ /t d/ /k g/ in Indonesian intervocalically. I just hear [ b d g], e.g. Jakarta sounds like [dʒagarta] to me. Shouldn't I at least be biased towards hearing [...

I believe Dewrad, some years ago, posted a link to a Gaulish grammar. (It might have been his own work. I don't remember very well). It was either a Word or Google Docs file. Does anyone remember it? Yes, it was his own work, and I happened to save that stuff. Grammar (seems to be from 2012): https...

bradrn wrote: ↑Wed May 03, 2023 7:15 pm I can’t read Chinese… what does this sign show? (My guess is Simplified vs Traditional, with the usual political connotations.)

Yep, exactly that. Sign is officially in Simplified, and someone hand-corrected the second character to the Traditional form.

Mark Twain, saying, practically complaining, that German is too much of a sweet, mild, gentle language: There are some German words which are singularly and powerfully effective. For instance, those which describe lowly, peaceful, and affectionate home life; those which deal with love, in any and al...

The difference between European and Brazilian Portuguese quote marks also exists in Spanish. For all intents and purposes, the standard of quote marks in Lat. Am. Spanish is "...", not «...». I have very rarely seen «...» in a book or newspaper printed anywhere in Latin America... I'd be i...

Is it attested for there to be distinct words for "to be" and "to be so"? I don't want to give my language dedicated words for "yes" or "no," and I want to give them pro-verbs that they can use to respond to polar questions instead. (They can also employ echo...

There is definitely some idiolectal variation in how "clearly" people articulate sounds, just as there is variation in how fast they speak. My brother is a bit of a lazy (Spanish) speaker and he sometimes slurs words enough that I can't understand something he's said. Yes, my own brother, ...

Yet another reason is simply analogy, either coming from words of the same type or subtype of word class, or from words from the same family (being derived from the same root and bearing related meanings), in which one word should undergo a sound change, but the other words influencing it have a dif...

in some russian dialects the digits are named after family members thumb - grandma index - grandpa/mum middle - mum/aunt/father ring - sister/sonny/grandma pinkie - bro/daughter sometimes mixed in with standard nominations apparently japanese also has alternate terminology where it's a whole family...

https://i.redd.it/ytbkqo0ht8j81.jpg

There is definitely something to be said about the use of -cel, -pilled, going [noun] mode, and -core. And the suffix -maxx.

You have some great taste in conscripts for sure.

There is apparently a [x] vs. [ç] minimal pair in German for many speakers: Aachen vs. Archen [aːxn̩ aːçn̩]. Quick question that I've been wondering about. So there's the concept of a "principal part" in Latin or Ancient Greek grammar, for example, where each verb has multiple stems that n...