Zompist Bboard Again

I think "areal kingdoms" in the vein of floristic kingdoms would include: Australia Mainland SEA, including South China Insular SEA Eastern Siberia and Nearctic Western Siberia, Europe, South and Southwest Asia, North Africa Subsaharan Africa Eastern South America Western South America Eas...

I see. I don't think that sort of thing (public suppression leading to no practical language replacement) is unusual. The world is full of marginalized languages that survive just fine. I live in Korea, and there was about a ten year period where photographs, school books, radio programs, and other ...

Why do you say Czech was "entirely displaced?" The data we have does not support this. Czech was suppressed in the sort of contexts that are likely to leave behind lasting documents, like science and politics, in the 17th century. This was still at least partly true by the outbreak of Worl...

You haven't gotten a haircut in many years, and you weren't expecting your coworkers to say something about it? Do you work at the factory that makes autism?

Here you go: Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet.

You all misunderstand. It's a book about how terrible baggy pants and the ERA were. It's to help nursing home attendants complain about "kids today."

I think this is an important question. On a technical level, a community can persist with mostly endogamous marriage with a population of around 200 hundred. What's more, even communities that regularly intermarry can maintain separate languages. So theoretically we could have a new languages every ...

That's very kind of you!

Thanks for the recommendations. I also found the Atalan series, a self-published 9-book series that's comedy sci-fi, like what I was writing. Angry Planet felt a little too YA for my taste, but I do see the appeal. the Orville is very close to just being fan fiction. It definitely gets how to write ...

Here's my *extremely* bar napkin-y estimate. We start with Australia, using reasonable estimates of the number of pre-contact languages. We establish roughly how many languages are spoken in different parts of the continent, and end up with a figure of one language every 15,000 square kilometers in ...

bradrn wrote: ↑Thu Feb 15, 2024 8:16 pm

Moose-tache wrote: ↑Thu Feb 15, 2024 7:58 pm I don't think WALS is a good example, because there is a huge amount of authorial input and decision making in WALS

Hmm, how so?

Please, I am begging you. Tell me you're joking. Even if you don't mean it.

I don't think WALS is a good example, because there is a huge amount of authorial input and decision making in WALS, but I see what you mean about making it searchable. As for individual languages within Tungusic... You'd be surprised. I know for sure some of these languages don't have that, even th...

If we're not allowed any original scholarship (i.e. looking at Tungusic and saying "yup, that's a sound change") then we just have to skip Tungusic. But this approach raises a bigger question: Why is this project not just a bibliography? I have Charles Julian's work on Proto-Iroquoian on m...

After consulting my Janhunen and Vovin, I'm beginning to suspect there is no monograph where a Tungusic scholar lays out "here are all the sound changes" with any kind of scientific rigor. The Altaic nerds tried to do that in their landmark piece of tree-genocide the EDAL, but honestly if ...

Having combed through plenty of tungusic dictionaries for a conlang, this data matches everything I've recorded. For example, the languages that derive x/h from p versus the ones that derive it from k are listed accurately. The Manchu changes are accurate, from what I remember. It's at the very leas...

The Wiktionary entry is pretty sparse, so I went to the source: Christopher Ehret's book from 1995, which as far as I can tell is still the most confident reconstruction of PAA vocabulary out there. I'm not sure why Wiktionary stopped at 37. Ehret has over a hundred entries just for the labial cons...

The Wiktionary entry is pretty sparse, so I went to the source: Christopher Ehret's book from 1995, which as far as I can tell is still the most confident reconstruction of PAA vocabulary out there. I'm not sure why Wiktionary stopped at 37. Ehret has over a hundred entries just for the labial conso...

The problem is that the same logic is used for both directions: making and interpreting the daughter languages. Usually it's the exact same people doing both jobs at different times. It would be circular to use the data to validate the linguistic technique used to create the data. That said, I'm sur...

Just because French comes form Latin doesn't mean it doesn't have borrowings from Latin. The internet suggests "Autumnal(e)" is a word in French, despite violating several sound changes. Any French speakers care to confirm or deny?