Zompist Bboard Again

The frequency of phonemes in Vrkhazhian will be even more skewed because of the deaffrication of /tɬ tɬ dɮ tʃ tʃʼ dʒ/ into /t tʼ d/ (when geminate) or /ɬ (ɬʼ) ɮ ʃ (ʃʼ) ʒ/ (when singleton) and subsequent mergers of the postalveolars with the central alveolars. I think you may need to evolve your wor...

I suspect that you, Jonlang, may be becoming more pernickety as you gets older, and are thus more aware of the possibility of refraining from "neg hopping".

Now, I have encountered a claim that Danish in England was simply Anglicised so much that it wound up being simply regarded as English. It is then claimed that the opposite has happened in Jutland - an Ingvaeonic language was so Danicised that it wound up simply being considered bad Danish. Unfortun...

English as we know it already has quite some Old Norse influence, but there could be a variety of English with even more Norse influence. Maybe the English dialects of the former Danelaw have more Norse influence than Standard English, but I don't know about that - I know virtually nothing about En...

...For instance, many of the distinctions merged in the Mary - merry - marry merger have been resurrected in a marginal fashion through consonant elisions and resulting vowel cluster reductions... Surely this is only an issue if the merger is still active. Is it? You cannot create new words that re...

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 is that the latter spoke an Afroasiatic language related to Semitic. That, howev...

Whatever the transcription, I think the best explanation is that this phonologically is /jn̩/, but that’s so highly marked sonority-wise that the language ‘tries really hard’ to get rid of it (so to speak). Why does the phonology even have /jn̩/? Wouldn't /jən/ do just as well? In a few ways, the [...

bradrn wrote: ↑Sun Mar 24, 2024 4:37 am Whatever the transcription, I think the best explanation is that this phonologically is /jn̩/, but that’s so highly marked sonority-wise that the language ‘tries really hard’ to get rid of it (so to speak).

Why does the phonology even have /jn̩/? Wouldn't /jən/ do just as well?

Some recent talk about religion got me thinking. Would a scenario where 'paganism' in whatever form would survive to the present day make any sense? Or was it inevitable that Christianity replaced everything in Europe? I thought it had survived - see harsh words on Mariolatry. Remnants of Lithuania...

I'm not sure I can out-pedant you, but I can sure try. I count five separate vowels in xkcd's text: ə in was, a, of, obs- ʌ in up, Doug, stuck, etc. syllabic n in obstruct ion , onions syllabic l in tunnel ʊ in ugh A fun activity! I agree with your phonetic analysis (except I have STRUT for "u...

This is more an English-learners-of-German question. It seems to me that English-speakers in general have an easier time learning the ach-Laut that the ich-Laut, despite the fact that the ach-Laut is only found in certain English varieties such as Scottish English, and the ich-Laut being found nati...

In languages with a single articulation for non-syllabic rhotics, what are the likely possibilities for a syllabic rhotic with a length contrast? I've hit the question in respect of Sanskrit, for which the options I find most attractive are [ɹ̩] (alveolar approximant) and [ɻ̩] (retroflex approximant...

You're talking about the trisyllabic pronunciation, not the bisyllabic pronunciation. Yes, because I doubt there even is a bisyllabic pronunciation in BrE. While listening out for a recording of the disyllabic pronunciation, in English indistinguishable from mine, I was struck by a similar pronunci...

Travis B. wrote: ↑Wed Mar 13, 2024 10:13 am ... while in rule /rul/ [ˈʁʷˤu(ː)ʊ̯] I do not even have a /j/ in the first place (like most present-day North Americans).

According to Wiktionary, Welsh English preserves /ɹɪu̯l/, but I think the /j/ has disappeared from rule for most British English speakers.

I'm not a native speaker, but I'm pretty sure there's no "syllable final rhotic" in "various"? Mmm, checked Wiktionary, and it seems that the GenAm pronunciation has, weird. Anyway, like Wiktionary says, I'm 99% sure that the "r" in "various" is the onset of ...

How do you pronounce "various" and "rule"? I'm particularly curious as to whether non-rhotic speakers have a syllable final rhotic in the bisyllabic pronunciation or the first, or an onset /ɹj/. I'm not sure how one objectively distinguishes the two possibilities.

A fronting of [ʃ] to [f]. I never would’ve figured on that as a direct step. ʃ to x and thence to f, sure, but this may be useful to some. The direct step is also hinted at in Welsh ffroen 'nostril' from Celtic *srognā and there is a voiced parallel in Latin sobrinu 'related via a sister' from *swe...

Raphael wrote: ↑Mon Feb 26, 2024 12:36 pm So, does this mean that people who grew up in the 1990s, such as myself, are of nursing home age now? As they say, I can't even.

No. Significant memories can also be laid down in one's 30's and 40's.

there are usually no clear boundaries in time between a language and its descendants. That's why counting language deaths is a clever conceptually simpler idea that I believe yields almost the same answer. The only problem I see is whether related languages can merge, which it seems can happen with...

Fun with spellcheckers: My Mom just reported to me that her Microsoft Word spellcheck (or, more accurately, grammar check) apparently can't decide whether to write a specific letter sequence as one word or two words. When she writes it as one word, the software "suggests" that she should ...