Zompist Bboard Again

Well, etymology is always guesswork and speculation as there is no sure way knowing where the word actually comes from, though when there is a word in a clearly related language that matches nicely in terms of the known sound correspondences, one can be quite certain that it is cognate. Beyond that,...

zompist wrote: ↑Sun Apr 07, 2024 3:39 pm

WeepingElf wrote: ↑Sun Apr 07, 2024 2:53 pm

Ketsuban wrote: ↑Sun Apr 07, 2024 8:24 am सपति

Would you mind transcribing that for those of us who are not familiar with Devanagari?

sapati

Thank you!

Ketsuban wrote: ↑Sun Apr 07, 2024 8:24 am सपति

Would you mind transcribing that for those of us who are not familiar with Devanagari?

Hallo conlangers! I wish to share with you a thought of mine about how the High German sound shift came into being. This shift, which loosely resembles a second run of Grimm's Law but is actually quite different in detail, is generally considered to have originated in the south, in the area roughly ...

I have a nice new computer!

Concurred in all points.

The frequently cited paper by Haak et al. from 2015, while not saying which language the Yamnaya people spoke, effectively sets a terminus post quem for PIE about 3000 BC, which speaks against Renfrew's Anatolian hypothesis. What regards the "Caucasian substratum", my idea that it actually...

they were contributed by the AA language of the Transcaucasians. By the what ‽ Geneticists have found out that the Yamanya people who probably spoke PIE emerged from the mixture of two populations, one related to the probable speakers of Proto-Uralic, the other from south of the Caucasus. My idea i...

I can't give you references since my PC has died and I am on my phone now, but the Nostraticist literature is full of such comparisons between IE and Afroasiatic. I may be mistaken, but I think I recall hearing it from somewhere rather more reputable - akin to the comparisons of PIE and AA words fo...

Rounin Ryuuji wrote: ↑Fri Mar 22, 2024 6:21 pm I could well imagine German [ç] and [ʃ] merging; a similar change seems to have happened at some point in Middle English.

It actually happened in some German dialects.

I think it is from the medieval tradition of the journeymanship where a bachelor would travel from town to town to work and improve his skills.

Grammars written by conlangers are usually easier to understand than grammars written by academic linguists because of just that: the conlangers have no background in theoretical linguistics and therefore use simpler terminology (though they sometimes misuse terminology). Rather, I suspect the more...

Raphael wrote: ↑Thu Mar 21, 2024 8:20 am

WeepingElf wrote: ↑Thu Mar 21, 2024 8:18 am I can't give you references since my PC has died and I am on my phone now,

Good luck getting that sorted out!

Thank you! Fortunaterly I have backups of everything because it did not die out of a blue sky but had been acting up for some time, so I could prepare for it.

I can't give you references since my PC has died and I am on my phone now, but the Nostraticist literature is full of such comparisons between IE and Afroasiatic.

Grammars written by conlangers are usually easier to understand than grammars written by academic linguists because of just that: the conlangers have no background in theoretical linguistics and therefore use simpler terminology (though they sometimes misuse terminology).

I think it is the theoretical linguists to blame, and the curricula which make theoretical linguistics mandatory for linguistics students. The theoretical linguists constantly invent new concepts and terms to make people believe they had found out something new about language, but it is all old wine...

R. M. W. Dixon once quipped about incomprehensible grammars that in many of them, the theoretical framework needed to understand them will probably be extinct long before the language described is.

And Putin has talked about how we're shortly before World War 3 again. Is it it this time? My father would have said "Yes, it is. Will you stop fretting about that now?" He could be mean like that. ;-) As this is one of the ways I've decided not to be like my father, here's what I think. ...

1. Almea began as a Dungeons & Dragons campaign setting when zompist was in high school, which explains some things. For instance, the player character races of 1970s D&D are still recognizable though they are altered in many points: Elcari are essentially Dwarves, Flaids are essentially Ha...

I have spotted a terminological mistake in the grammars of Old Skourene and Tžuro, which has misled other conlangers. In these grammars, the word experiencer is used to mean 'intransitive subject'. This, however, is not how it is used in linguistics. Rather, it refers to a semantic role that denote...