Zompist Bboard Again

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...

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 denotes...

This discussion reminds me of my own conworld, Atla , where my current diachronic conlangs are set. Atla (Old Albic 'World') is a version of the consensus reality with some extra languages. The idea is that some of the "secret languages" of traditional subcultures (such as travelling showm...

I think "areal kingdoms" in the vein of floristic kingdoms would include: Australia Mainland SEA, including South China Insular SEA Eastern Siberia and Nearctic Western Siberia, Europe, South and Southwest Asia, North Africa Subsaharan Africa Eastern South America Western South America Ea...

Travis B. wrote: ↑Wed Mar 13, 2024 12:53 pm

Raphael wrote: ↑Wed Mar 13, 2024 12:20 pm Noticed this at my local supermarket:

[snip]

Made me wonder if it's aimed at the aspiring supervillains among their customers...

It is probably aimed at gardeners...

It is. AFAIK, it is used to improve the capacity of the soil to absorb moisture.

But then, linguistic relationship doesn't go d'accord with genetic relationship often enough. Consider the case of the genetics of English in North America... Yes. Genetics allows to trace ancient migrations and population mixings, but tells us nothing about the languages. Language shifts are commo...

My idea is that the population from south of the Caucasus that contributed to the PIE-speaking population (as the geneticists have found out) spoke a language related to Semitic, while the other population with Siberian roots spoke a language related to Uralic, and more distantly to the other Mitian...

Apparently, a scholar named Rasmus Bjørn has proposed that the Neolithic farmers of Southeastern Europe spoke a language related to Semitic, but I can't say anything about that because the paper is behind a paywall. Myself, I have recently developed the idea that there was a Semitic-related substrat...

Being a linguist on the Internet is a Sisyphean task. When I was active on Reddit I got into it once with some guys on r/Conservative because they rejected the concept of AAVE. There was one guy (from Texas per his flair) who kept insisting that languages from the Amazon were inferior because you c...

Yes, I had it about five hours ago.

My congratulations to both of you, @Man in Space and @Raphael!

I have spent some thoughts on the Voynich Manuscript (VMS) which I wish to share with you. I think I need not tell you what the VMS is, should you have not heard of it yet, see Wikipedia . Nobody has managed to decipher it yet. The many illustrations in the VMS give a hint at the content matter, whi...

That looks pretty reasonable to me.

Did Latin go extinct, or did it become the various Romance language? And if it's the former, how many other languages should be counted as extinct, despite having surviving modern varieties? Lol, I was about to write almost the exact same when reading abahot's post :). For me, the answer would be t...

But do we measure diversity by the "stock" or by the language? Is an area less diverse when it's languages have diverged, say, 4000 years ago but there's 100 languages now, than the same area that has 10 languages that diverged over 6000 years ago? Good point. Of course, 100 languages div...

I am no expert on this, but I did spend some thought on the linguistic diversity of prehistoric Europe. In precolonial North America, which is perhaps best comparable to Mesolithic Europe, linguistic diversity (which is perhaps better measured in number of stocks , by which I mean language families ...