Zompist Bboard Again

Latin had both noun - cardinal and cardinal - noun as allowed word orders; maybe other old IE languages did too. It could simply be a conservative feature of your European IE conlang.

Looking at Sally Caves' list as quoted by Jörg Rhiemeier, does anyone know what Semitic languages #5, #7, #11, #12, #13, #16 can be found in? I don't recognize them from what I know of Classical Arabic and what little I know of Akkadian, Ge'ez or Biblical Hebrew. I wonder if Sally Caves was more fam...

I'm not sure if this is truly innovative or just a regional difference I was previously unaware of, but: "Because of this flexibility it was slightly unusual from other tower blocks of a similar vintage." Speaking against this being a regionalism, the other examples I found online don't s...

Hell, even for words coming from Latin, their etymologies are largely useless. Don't you love, too, all those words that just say "De orig. inc.", when Coromines & Pascual may even simply entertain two etyma from Latin ? Anoher Spanish etymologist was Vicente García de Diego (1878-197...

Zju wrote: ↑Sat Dec 03, 2022 4:04 pmDoes that paper happen to have description of the phonology? I'm curious to see what the phonetic realisations of /kîɛɛɛr/ and /dɛ̂aaal/ are.

Here is the paper. The author simply says Nuer has three degrees of vowel length, and gives a minimal triplet.

is this a "real" concept in linguistics? idgi I'd also like to mention that it's a very uncommon concept in linguistics outside of the world of Latin / Ancient Greek and Esperanto / Ido. No, not at all. To take just one example, Bhat’s Pronouns (the same source as in my last post) has a w...

Emily wrote: ↑Fri Dec 02, 2022 1:50 pmis this a "real" concept in linguistics? idgi

I'd also like to mention that it's a very uncommon concept in linguistics outside of the world of Latin / Ancient Greek and Esperanto / Ido.

am i correct in understanding that the concept of "correlatives" as people use it, and the tables they make of them for this or that language, was invented by zamenhof?? is this a "real" concept in linguistics? idgi Zamenhof didn't invent it. Back in the old forum I pointed out ...

In Ge'ez, Amharic and Tigrinya, human nouns are gendered (masculine or feminine), so adjectives, determiners and verbs agree in gender with them, but most inanimate nouns don't have a fixed gender, being able to be either masculine or feminine at the speaker's whim. (I don't know what animal nouns d...

In reply to "Who hit the ball ?", one could answer : (a) John did. (b) That guy did. (pointing at John) (c) He did. (pointing at John) And in reply to "What did John hit the ball with ?", one could answer : (c) The bat. (d) That. (pointing at the bat) but one could not say: (e) ...

And the passive stems.

(I don't think forms IX and XI have an available passive, maybe along with the later uncommon forms...)

I'm sorry but I'm still not sure I get it, even after looking at the relevant Wiktionary pages. So form II is derived from form I by doubling the middle consonant of the root, I get that. But how would I know that the form II present tenses are yu-qattil-u, tu-qattil-u... from the fact that the for...

Can someone explain how inflection of derived Arabic verbs works? Wikipedia only gives inflectional charts for Form I verbs, and I'm struggling to see how the inflection patterns could be generalized to other verb forms. They work in the same way. Okay, sometimes there's a different vowel in the pr...

"juvenilia" I just had to spell this for the first time I can remember and kept getting it wrong. I've always had /eː/ for the stressed vowel and was surprised to find out that the normative form is with /iː/. That supposedly normative pronunciation you mention (from Wiktionary?) seems ve...

French: Il pleut. ("it rains") Il neige. ("it snows") Il fait beau. ("it makes beautiful", in a rather similar way to Mandarin, 'it's sunny') Il fait soleil. ("it makes sun") Il fait du soleil. ("it makes some sun", with a "partitive" artic...

Something I find funny about English and Spanish is how different weather conditions are handled differently grammatically. Rainy weather is handled in both languages with an impersonal verb. And "It's rainy (today)" in English, with an adjective, would simply refer to a statement from a w...

I vote for Portuguese as "most Romance" of the Romance languages. The phonetic differences between European and Brazilian Portuguese even come up as useful in terms of forming an "average".

Someone shared a screenshot of a multilingual "I voted" sticker, and it said 我已票投 (Wǒ yǐ piàotóu). I was a bit surprised to see no 了, and indeed Google Translate supplies 我投票了 (Wǒ tóupiào le) instead. On the other hand, Google does recognize 我已票投 but translates "I have voted." S...

A lot of languages do this for genitalia. English "pussy" and French "chatte", Spanish "pájaro" and arguably Mandarin 雞雞 jījī if it isn't sound symbolism (bird, for the penis), Spanish "paloma" (dove, penis), Spanish "bicho" (bug, vulva in Nicaragua,...

Moose-tache wrote: ↑Thu Sep 29, 2022 12:43 am They don't called it "cursed" for nothing.

Get better, Pedant!

I thought it was only the first reconstruction relay (or was it the second?) that was called The Cursed Relay due to many people losing their work as their computers failed / stopped working.