Zompist Bboard Again

But it turned out on the way that the book is also the most important source for that magnificent spreadsheet that Samuel McCabe (formerly known on the ZBB as TheGoatMan, later Goatface and yet later Morrígan) has put together, so when I have a question about a PIE antecedent of a Hesperic word, I ...

If you wanna talk about a real name conflict in the Romance languages, there's Romania (the country where Romanian is spoken) vs. Romania (the Romance-speaking domain) which are at best distinguished by a single letter. I notice English-speaking scholars tend to, well, not use the latter in the fir...

How... long ago did you stop coming by? I've been around here since 2008 and I don't remember any Glenn!

Coincidental tweet by Marijn van Putten:

https://twitter.com/PhDniX/status/1622662636948054017

Plot twist: Marijn is actually reading us?

No speculation allowed, no fun allowed, we're Serious Scientists here.

I was trying to envisage James Spader saying "And YOU gotta help us!" à la the Hotel Mario intro earlier this evening and I came upon an interesting quirk of mine idiolect. For example: "My friend's wife got him a guitar." This seems like it should become, if not referring to a ...

One that's a bit funny is "preservative" (mineral or chemical that preserves food) vs. Spanish preservativo / French préservatif 'condom'.

I feel I definitely wouldn't understand the ventilator/ventilateur pair either...

A pretty well-known group of false friends is English "actually" vs. Spanish actualmente / French actuellement (both meaning 'currently, at the present time'). I once read an article about the difficulties of translating "world English", when politicians insist in using English w...

I also know a Freemason and he's very open about it. I have no idea what they could possibly do in their meetings nowadays, but he really enjoys the symbols and symbolism it seems.

I could have sworn we had a thread like this a while ago, and it got abandoned? But anyway: - a single subject argument is typically marked with case #1 - by default, if there's both a subject and object, the subject is marked with case #1, and the object with case #2 - if pragmatic focus falls on ...

This is pretty much my favourite thread over on the CBB forum, and I wonder if we could get it going here too. It's just a thread to post random ideas about grammar, whether involving morphology or syntax or both. Here's an example: I came up with an alignment where - a single subject argument is ty...

MacAnDàil wrote: ↑Fri Jan 20, 2023 7:51 am I discovered the Glottobank via Martin Haspelmath's Researchgate page and thought it may interest others: https://glottobank.org/

And I have to ask, how is anything accessed? I don't see any online UI, or download links, or Github links or anything for Grambank and Phonobank...

I have a recurrent dream where I walk into a mall, and it's flooded. The water is almost at my knees' level, but it keeps flowing so it's not difficult to walk in one direction. I go along with it, and at some point I find some stairs going down, and I walk down the stairs in spite of all the water ...

How common is phonemic /d͡z/ without phonemic /z/? Proto-Semitic is usually reconstructed like that these days, with a /ts dz tsʼ/ series (parallel to /k g kʼ/ and /θ ð θʼ/) and a single /s/ sibilant. The more traditional reconstruction had /s z sʼ/ and /ʃ/ instead. I'm not familiar with the litera...

Raphael wrote: ↑Fri Jan 13, 2023 3:14 pm How would you describe the particular sound quality, arguably almost like a kind of tonality, that you can sometimes hear in the last word of a sentence or half-sentence in Hiberno-English?

Do you have any audio examples?

Please note that when Old French or Old Spanish are said to have "V2 word order", this isn't the same as the V2 you find in modern German. Verb-initial (V1) declarative sentences are perfectly common Old French and Old Spanish (say, verb + object + place adverbial, with a subject expressed...

/t ʔ m n w l/, with /i a o/ as vowels (/i/ is sometimes [j])

zompist wrote: ↑Thu Jan 05, 2023 3:09 am> 5) Special form of the verb peculiar to relative clauses.

True, if that means the suffixed -u.

Ah, interesting. Well, at least #5 is found in Akkadian...

I saw someone ask ChatGPT to make an IAL, and it simply started describing Esperanto in Esperanto...