Zompist Bboard Again

Some people being bigoted is part of individuals' character and not a part of the field. Absolutely wrong. Biased people make biased theories and it is "part of the field." Biased theories are temporarily part of the field until they're proven wrong. Biased theories do not invalidate the ...

Biased theories are just that, biased theories that are later proven wrong. What they're not is 'false sciences'. We have only one way to conduct science - the scientific method - and so far everything points that it's correct. If you feel like writing about ethics of 19th and early 20th century min...

Have there been false sciences? Also yes. Science doesn't mean what you think it means. Before the scientific method there have just been "natural philosophies". Perhaps you need to look at the history of science more. It's gone down plenty of false paths. Some were just mistakes, others ...

Man in Space wrote: ↑Sun Feb 25, 2024 4:35 pm (Shoot…I think we posted at the exact same time because I got no notification of an edit conflict)

oh dnoes!

anyway, let me cheat a little and insert two changes in a row: expressive reduplication and dissimilative fortition

[ɟʷeːbʲeː]
ǯuà’çibà’çi
‘1SG.EMPH’

Have there been false sciences? Also yes. Science doesn't mean what you think it means. Before the scientific method there have just been "natural philosophies". but the same would be true of gods: they exist outside of humanity, and will outlast us. Burden of proof is on the claimant. Fo...

Word-initial consonant clusters are broken up by epenthetic vowels

[də'nɔus]
Denous
“God”

n > 0 /_s>s:# Buck 1904: 72 {präsynkopal}
n > 0 /V>Ṽ_t Buck 1904: 70f.
z > 0 /V>V̄r_ Buck 1904: 76; Meiser 1986: 172f.

Are those supposed to mean this?:
ns → sː / _#
Vn → Ṽ / _t
Vrz → V̄r

I don't think WALS is a good example, because there is a huge amount of authorial input and decision making in WALS Hmm, how so? Please, I am begging you. Tell me you're joking. Even if you don't mean it. I thought WALS was pretty uncontroversial? Of course there has to be decision making if you on...

depalatalisation

/sin.se/
śinśe
"feather"

Clearly, my clever strategy of ‘just force everyone to use GitHub’ has not worked. I have a few other things going on at the moment, but perhaps I’ll just go back to transcribing the collected sound changes in this subforum and putting them into the repository myself. We can work out an easier meth...

Nope. I guess your best try is to contact somebody from that team (https://www.frathwiki.com/Akana#The_Thi ... .282014.29) and/or dhok or Serafín. Though the game forum is down (along with its host), so somebody better has a copy of the original protolang.

Woot! As luck would have it, the wayback machine preserves both of these: Proto-Ronquian reconstruction: https://web.archive.org/web/20180305084533/http://akana.conlang.org/wiki/Proto-Ronquian Proto-Ronquian reconstructed lexicon: https://web.archive.org/web/20211020032643/http://akana.conlang.org/w...

Even if no-one else is interested, I’d at least like to explore this idea a bit. The first step is, of course, simply getting the data — but that has its own challenges, now that the Akana website has disintegrated. Does anyone know where I might be able to find the previous protolangs and reconstr...

I had just assumed that French has at least some inherited - and not borrowed - acc words, but then again I don't speak French.

I've read a reddit guide on tonogenesis but it doesn't tell you how to manifest tones from closed syllables or syllables with dipthongs or syllables with onset clusters or all three. I was trying to write up something, but in the process I discovered this paper which looks quite comprehensive: http...

Right, I guess I was having in mind Romance languages, since English words are borrowings either way. Though they could have been borrowed from French, which has /aks/ as well. Are all French /aks/ words learned borrowings or instances of hypercorrection, too? Regardless, this is the most striking i...

I just realised how strange the acc- words are (accent, accident, etc.): in their initial consonant cluster, they first feature the original consonant before the latinate palatalisation, immediately followed by its present-day reflex, i.e. /ks/ instead of just /s/ or maybe /sː/. I'd have thought tha...

Is any of the following sound changes at all plausible?

ɾ > ∅ / V_V
ɾ > h / V_V
ɾ > ʔ / V_V

I.e. can I get away with deleting intervocal /r/ provided that there weren't many minimal pairs to begin with?

Wasn't Proto-Semitic spoken in the south of the Arabian peninsula? It's a stretch to posit some parasemitic substrate in the EE steppe.
Although the lexical similarities are suspicious indeed.