Zompist Bboard Again

Reading that paper, I honestly wonder doesn't English also have strong and weak nouns? Cf.: * Word is missing. A word is missing. Father is missing. A father is missing. Granted, they'd have different syntactic functions than those in Hiw (as father can be modifier in NP). This is really interestin...

i think thats just how it's done ... since, by definition, all PIE roots are unattested, why not project every known proto-Germanic root back into PIE since we have a pretty strong impression of what they would have been in PIE if they were in fact inherited? for whatever reason, though, it seems th...

i think you all are missing the point .... none of these criticisms hold water if you accept that the languages are of different groups in the first place .... youre essntially trying to prove PIE is monogenic by assuming that PIE is monogenic and then listing examples of roots that follow sound cha...

what is the central dispute about here? from what i understand, we're arguing over whether Indo-European languages are descended from a single common ancestor, or whether they are an areal grouping of clusters of smaller families like Altaic is. obviously almost all scholars agree that there is a si...

it could be a house-of-cards situation .... Germanic didnt make French what it is today, but it put French into an unstable situation roughly a millennium ago where a lot of inflections were defective, important posttonic vowels were scrunched together into schwas, etc .... such that further rapid e...

the German surname Hamtramck suggests that coda /mk/ is at least treated as natural, unless this name dates from the era when spelling was an unreliable guide to pronunciation, or belongs to a dialect which isnt considered part of standard German.

i noticed some years back that the word autism is also prone to this, and some people said it was due to association with the related word autistic, but that theory wouldnt explain why it happens to this word too.

A square sheet of inscribed metal mounted to a pole, found in Iran and dated to around 2400 BC, is claimed by many to be the world's oldest flag. https://www.reddit.com/r/vexillology/comments/3b4zjp/shahdad_standard_circa_2400_bc_iran/ Putting aside the arguments about whether metal sheets inscribed...

I did say mound once when I was about 10 years old, well aware that it was wrong, but it just came naturally to me and I knew that there was no chance of misinterpretation. I put it in the same category as my mother's skun your knee .... not correct, and not even colloquially acceptable, but at the ...

is it possible that out the window could be classified as an adverbial phrase? that might resolve the contradiction. on the other hand, i see no problem calling out a preposition even in the first sentence .... it's well known that sentences can end with prepositions, even if it's considered to be n...

https://www.academia.edu/7134408/A_First_Etymological_Dictionary_of_Basque_as_an_Indo_European_Language i found this .... written in 2013 but just appeared on my feed today. from the title, it seems this researcher goes further than Blevins and others .... he claims not just that Basque is related t...

well, two issues .... one seems like a matter of terminology .... personally i'll stick with the simpler definition of phonology, .... a table of consonants and vowels, rules of where they can go, and maybe allophony if i really need it. the stuff about root constraints etc is not really phonology, ...

I think all words ending in stressed -ative (even if considered secondary stress) use the FACE vowel, as in math class "commutative" etc although those who grow up with an accent where those words are pronounced with schwa may not have that background to base their intuition on.

Aromanian seems to have repurposed the accusative as the nominative. I have language resources/sources on Aromanian that are written in Greek (although they have their own Greek propaganda trash shoved in there) and I am paternally Aromanian (and possibly half-maternally) so you can ask me anything...

yeah, having re-watched the video now, i think i saw something that wasnt quite there. i'd assumed the unusual choice of showing two new branches in similar shades of blue was meant to imply that they were especially close to each other, but even if so, those branches divide into more than just Germ...

I gave a 👍 on the video because it's very detailed and well put together ..... but there are sooooo many things going on there that he's just guessing at. it's not to say he's wrong .... if he was wrong, we wouldnt be seeing so many wild guesses. the balkan/germanic connection is interesting .... i'...

Thousands Mysteriously Wash Up in OR

No, not people ... thankfully .... but sand dollars. Apparently the headline writer was in a hurry, or perhaps they just didnt have room for three more words in their text area.

I have the /r/ in all of those words, including February, and always have. Though I admit that when I first heard the word paraphernalia , I thought it was a mockingly hypercorrected form of a word *paraphanalia even when I saw it in writing. I never mastered the pronunciation of /rʲ/ and so I would...

Though English has a perfectly good native word, shink , meaning "cupbearer, waiter; to pour an alcoholic drink", it has fallen out of use. I've always heard that the traditional explanation for disappearances like this is that a word falls out of use when it sounds too similar to another ...

🤷‍♂️ maybe if you do a voice recording where youre imitating someone else? i noticed only just recently that speech features I'd thought were seared into my motor memory go away when I do a voice recording where Im not using my natural speaking voice, even when Im not consciously trying to change th...