Zompist Bboard Again

In North America there are two main strategies. Most direct-inverse languages use both.

First, you can just add an additional argument to the verb and let context do its work.

Second, applicatives can elevate what would be an indirect object to a direct object.

The voicing of intervocal single fricatives shows up in enough Germanic languages that it may go back to proto-Germanic, so the German innovation is that initial prevocalic fricatives follow the same pattern. This is an areal change that swept across much of West Germanic, including some English var...

I would add that English speakers, no matter their ability to track and pronounce it, are aware of the existence of velar~uvular fricatives from a young age. It's the notorious "throaty foreign sound" that is impossible to not notice. The palatal fricative, however, has no status in the pu...

Anyway, I mostly stay out of the "Libs discover world politics" threads, but geez, this one is bad. 1) There is not "no one to negotiate with," according to Netanyahu's administration, who negotiated with Hamas over such administrative things as work permits. 2) The relative lack...

But Travis, do you condemn llamas?

Gotta say, I wasn't expecting the LCNAF to be 80% Korean.

You live in Germany in the winter, Raphael. You should be putting entire salmon in a blender just to get your vitamin D levels up to merely inadequate.

How did my collection of 19th century historiography escape and find the wifi password?

Zju, I have spent the last minute holding my finger up to my nose like a fool to confirm that the /j/ in "onion" for me is:
1) nasalized
2) not a stop
3) the onset of a second syllable

Otto Kretschmer wrote: ↑Sat Mar 23, 2024 11:07 am How did a French word for work (travail) become an English word for travel?

I know this isn't the reason, but the scientific definition of "work" requires a change in position, i.e. distance traveled. So to a scientist they are basically synonyms.

I'm not sure I can out-pedant you, but I can sure try. I count five separate vowels in xkcd's text: ə in was, a, of, obs- ʌ in up, Doug, stuck, etc. syllabic n in obstruct ion , onions syllabic l in tunnel ʊ in ugh A fun activity! I agree with your phonetic analysis (except I have STRUT for "u...

To me, "schwa" means [ə], a phonetic form that is very common as a reduction of various vowels, including but not limited to the STRUT vowel. But if you pronounce the STRUT vowel carefully, it's no longer [ə]. You might as well call the DRESS vowel "schwa," because it can be real...

One of my pet peeves is when people treat the word "schwa" as an alternate name for the STRUT vowel

An early form of pre-Slavic probably had a x/sh alternation based on the following vowel, but that's not really how the phonemes work in any attested Balto-Slavic language, afaik.

Thank you, I'll check these out!

It’s not even that weird, though. The most distinctive feature is stød, but then again English has preglottalisation, so there’s precedent for such things. This is only possible to believe if you learned Danish from a book. Actual spoken Danish is utterly incomprehensible. Click on these sentences ...

Nortaneous wrote: ↑Sat Mar 16, 2024 9:46 pm

Moose-tache wrote: MAR-uh-lund

This sounds wrong to me - I have /merɨlɨnd/ with schwi, pronounced approximately [meʴːln̩(d)]. (It probably should be /merɨlənd/.)

This wasn't meant to be linguistic transcription. It was meant ot show that syllables two and three are reduced, as they are in your reply.

If you think the second and third syllables of Newfoundland are both reduced, I would recomment you not travel to Canada. They get mad when you say it that way.

I feel like a lot of languages will have many changes in a short time, because they compound on one another. No one would ask why early modern English had so many more radical vowel changes than late middle English, because it's a chain shift. Of course they happened in rapid succession. Similarly, ...

That doesn't explain it fully, though. That could yield NEW-fund-lund with two reduced vowels, on the same principle as MAR-uh-lund. But it's NEW-fund-LAND. You will get yelled at by Canadians if you reduce the third syllable, and that's not easy to explain by simple reduction.