Zompist Bboard Again

Wtf would be the pathway to merging /l/ and /f/? Can't see that happening in any variety of English unless we get into very hypothetical future developments and even then, it would require multiple stages. (E.g. [l] > [ɬ] > [ɬʷ] > [ʍ] > [ɸ] > [f]) And for those two words to merge, there's also the ...

The general structure of the phonetic representation of a syllable in cuneiform was a character sequence CVC or (CV)-(V)-(VC), where having VC only implied the presence of a glottal stop or a morpheme boundary. Moreover, the 3 V's represent the 'same' vowel, counting U, Ú and Ù as being the same vo...

I don’t understand this, though. In what way is Meroitic similar to Persian cuneiform? And what do you mean by ‘the cuneiform CV-V-VC structure’? If we ignore words with Old Persian short diphthongs or Meroitic '/e/', whatever it was, the process to convert the language expressed alphabetically to ...

Thank you for correcting me. It was merely my own idea. But apparently, the Ethipians (despite speaking a Semitic language) and the Indians (who didn't speak a Semitic language) found the abjad to be deficient and wanted to indicate the vowels in writing, so they invented (independently from each o...

The key step to get from an abjad to an abugida is to associate consonantal letters with an inherent vowel, which indeed seems to be what happened in Ethiopic and Brahmi. More precisely, they marked exceptional vowels. Brahmi and Kharoshthi at least were developed for languages in which /a/ is exce...

I valued speed over accuracy here, so you can have a look at the measurements of Thai tones on page 130 here: https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/document?repid=rep1&type=pdf&doi=8b4f73b6580f9a6dcf63de45c5674bff026500b1 . Ah, that paper that explains why some attested Thai words don't exist! (Wor...

sasasha wrote: ↑Thu Nov 30, 2023 5:39 pm In fact, in British kidsplay, a gallon is a very large amount of usually a desirable liquid. So I was very surprised to learn it's not, in fact, a huge vat of something.

But the expression 'one over the eight' gives a fair expression of what a very large amount is.

jcb wrote: ↑Mon Nov 27, 2023 1:17 am (7) Why is "tonne" (aka "metric ton") used instead of "megagram" ?

Possibly to avoid the confusion between mg and Mg.

zompist wrote: ↑Sat Nov 25, 2023 4:07 pm But love should be there too, or else why bother?

It's claimed that most people recover from love, though it takes a few years.

"I fought with the class bully" vs "I picked a fight with the class bully" The latter narrows the meaning of the former by nominalising it. What is this phenomena called This is generally called a ‘light verb’ construction. (According to Wikipedia, sometimes in English they’re a...

I don’t really understand what you mean here. Thinking about the one Afroasiatic language I know, Biblical Hebrew had pronominal suffixes for possession, which in Modern Hebrew have become possessive adjectives (more or less). Could you give an example of what you mean by this? I was referring to t...

I'm getting the strong impression that Welsh doesn't have an equivalent of the English possessive pronoun, but rather a translator must recast the sentence.

But does any non-IE language even make this distinction? Or — for that matter — is it present outside of Germanic? Well, there are languages where don't really have possessive adjectives, but possession is more like inflection, such as Uralic, Afroasiatic languages and Persian. Most of these theref...

But does any non-IE language even make this distinction? Or — for that matter — is it present outside of Germanic? Well, there are languages where don't really have possessive adjectives, but possession is more like inflection, such as Uralic, Afroasiatic languages and Persian. Most of these theref...

...then I realized I wasn't sure if you meant that a possessive could be part of the adjective, leaving the pronoun behind; I still think its very possible. ie, I'm pretty sure that Awfully Amateur was referring to the notion in traditional English grammar of possessive adjectives ( my , his , her ...

Oh, and by the way, I've going through the pronouns on my second conlang and, it occurred to me: Can you make possessive pronouns double as possessive adjectives or not? The simple answer is 'yes' (e.g. Latin), but there may be implicational universals around. For example, if there is no difference...

Be aware though that if a language has tense particles, it likely will have aspect and/or mood particles as well, or merge these concepts into fused particles. It is highly unlikely that a language will just have particles for tense, but is highly inflexional otherwise. Not impossible of course, bu...

I think I have seen bomb used with the meaning of 'flop'. You have. The phrase “box office bomb” refers to a massively unsuccessful picture, and “to bomb” can mean “to fail (at) something totally”, as in “I bombed the exam”. But going like a bomb is the exact opposite of bombing . Bad, eh? I suppos...

I think I’m not making my confusion entirely clear. The two mappings you listed are as follows: head_x body_y → head_x body_y_blanked (1 rule) head_x body_y_blanked → body_y head_dia_x body_y_blanked (14 rules) But as far as I can see, this could just as easily be done with only one mapping, namely...

Yes, this seems somewhat ridiculously baroque to me. More to the point, it’s a reasonably strong linguistic universal that stress position cannot depend on the value of the syllable onset. Yea! Another oddity for English (Middle Class Southern English?), where the vowel after a cluster -Ch- has to ...