Zompist Bboard Again

Picture, capture.

[kʃ pʃ] or [ktʃ ptʃ]?

I realized recently that just applying certain sound changes in Japanese from Old Japanese progressively instead of regressively would greatly change the sound of the language that resulted, and likely suggest new sound changes that didn't occur in Japanese proper. I don't understand what you mean ...

He's worried about "failing literacy and the collapse of empires" and obsessed with trivialities, so he sounds like an alt-right dude. Nah, you're reading him with way more seriousness than he was speaking. He was trying to sound funny (basically some form of light trolling) and in realit...

Is he bothered by Velma being lesbian, too? What does this question come from? (I don't understand the relevance.) The irony is that fifty years ago one of the sins of The Youth was not knowing how to write cursive. The context of the above quotes was after a discussion of ancient Roman cursive, bt...

Some guy online, holding no punches against cursive (from a Discord chat, which explains the format): It pains me when people say that cursive is stupid Which many do cursive is stupid what you write is a reflection of what you think therefore, people who write in cursive think jumbled up, mushy, ru...

By the way, this reminds of how, whenever German soccer league team Bayern München gets mentioned in an English-language context, they're called "Bayern Munich". Shouldn't people either leave both parts of the name in the original German, or translate both parts of the name into English? ...

Sorry to say this, Moose-tache, but exonyms aren't inherently evil, unlike what some have come to believe. idk, Travis B. The RAE's eternal campaign to call Aachen "Aquisgrán" in Spanish when everyone on the ground, in Spain or otherwise, calls it "Aachen" seems pretty evil to m...

The conjunction "for" is rather literary; using it in an informal discussion sounds stilted. Using the phrase "for I am the one" sounds very stilted. Whereas it sounds perfectly natural to me! This august forum aside, do you spend your time reading mostly 19th and early 20th cen...

How do you guys refer to the left or right buttock specifically?

I guess the term "cheek" (and ass cheek) exists but it's very informal, probably vulgar. What would you say in a more formal way? Is that the one use you guys might have for "buttock"?

Just a note: I've never seen mayn't in my life...

It's pretty old. There's a website that's basically The Onion but specifically about Catholic things called Eye of the Tiber (defunct in November 2020 it seems!), and I found this Reddit post from October 2012 where it's clear the tagline "Breaking Catholic news so you don't have to" was a...

Table with a sequence of sound changes? I've never seen a nice short technical term for these, no. The "replacement limb" change seems the most interesting to me here, btw. Just a few days ago I saw a couple people commenting on this sound change in English, after finding some old guy (18t...

Hear me out, east vs. yeast.

For /ji/ v. /i/, cf. English year v. ear , that we have variants of words like eesh/yeesh that are certainly pronounced differently. I imagine those people probably would counter that the first pair involves r-coloured words, so they're more like [ɪɚ], [jɪɚ]. A better example is eat vs. yeet . :D

"history"

Two or three syllables for you guys?

no way to group sound changes, no way to repeat sound changes across different branches, poor referencing, What did you mean by this? If we’re serious about doing this, I’d suggest starting off by collecting comprehensive information about sound changes from a handful of small families, to get a be...

Citations and details, yes, and perhaps even examples if there are any, but I think argumentation and justification would have to be out of scope for a sound change database. (Anyway, how could you even justify an individual sound change sensibly without including masses of words?) I was thinking t...

A year on, I’ve been thinking about this again. Much like how a better WALS would include examples, detail and argumentation for classifying a given language in a feature, a better Index Diachronica would include examples, citations, details and probably argumentation for individual sound changes. ...

Amharic /sʼ/ is also [tsʼ ~ sʼ] in free variation. And Semitic languages in general, at some point in their development, likely had [tɬ ~ ɬ] and [tɬʼ ~ ɬʼ] as phonemes too (and [s ~ ts], [z ~ dz], [tθʼ ~ θʼ]). I've even seen "[dɮˁ]" sometimes as a possible realization of the Classical Arab...