The CBB

Does anybody know about compounding in Proto-Germanic? Specifically, how did verb-noun compounds work: what form of the verb was used? English can use its zero infinitive form. And German apparently uses a zero-form too - I have examples here for parken > Parkverbot, and fressen > Fressgier. But I d...

However, we also have to bear in mind that Vasconic had been living alongside Indo-European languages, including undescribed Indo-European languages that may well have been closely related to Italo-Celtic, for hundreds if not thousands of years before the era of Latin-to-Proto-Basque borrowings - a...

I don't know, but it's not just genus. A more famous example is opus (pl. opera). But on the other hand tempus (pl. tempora).

Fun fact I just realised: the terrible Elizabethan (Jacobean?) play Mark and Jez are forced to watch in Peep Show is Lust's Dominion , which isn't that well-known; but the raunchier Restoration remake, by Aphra Behn, is Abdelazer ; which also isn't that famous as a play (other than for Behn scholars...

Can you think of any reason it would be implausible? Just going by wikipedia, which I'm sure you've read, there's been speculation about settlement of the islands both from ISEA and from China, both of which would have been via Taiwan. And just going by the map, you can see as well as I can that Bat...

Yes, in my SSBE it's /naI.i:v/. Phonologically of course there's a [j] in there too, but that's just from the hiatus-resolving rules (my dialect does NOT like hiatus - we have intrusive /r/ almost anywhere not already occupied by intrusive /j/ or /w/). Actually, I guess the [ I ] is too? So maybe it...

Quickening awaystonedhood?

By "Northern Old English", presumably he means Northumbrian. This was spoken in the Kingdom of Northumbria - from Edinburgh in the north down to Hull in the south, to Liverpool and Chester in the west (though I'm not sure off hand whether Liverpool and Hull actually existed at this point). So yes, o...

not only does Irish have a velar nasal, it even has it (unlike the rest of Europe) in syllable-initial position. Doesn't Welsh have it in initial position, too? Also, if Nenetsia counts as being in Europe, then the Nenets languages are also languages in Europe that have it in initial position. Oh, ...

Is it true that no language distinguishes /ɲ/ and /ŋʲ/, or even /nʲ/ and /ŋʲ/? If so, what's the implication for languages that eg. palatalise all consonants before /i/ and have a phonemic /ŋ/? Does it merge with /n/ before /i/? Does it depend on the language? The reason I'm asking is that while [ɲ...

Cor, not Corona, surely. Although in any case it would be a folk etymology.

Haven't we discussed before the possibility of putting your puns either into a dedicated pun thread, or into the general conversation thread or something? With respect, I'm not sure what continued conversation you think might be generated by this. Everyone is either going to say "oh, that's a pun" o...

Incidentally: John Hume has died.

Indeed; in a pure sense, the gloss is really only telling us what each morpheme does - the grammar (in this case the discussion on syntax) will tell us how the morphemes interact to create the meaning of the sentence. That said, there are tools at hand. One thing I'd say would be to remember that yo...

cedh wrote: ↑

06 Aug 2020 15:40

Jackk wrote: ↑

06 Aug 2020 13:13

brblues wrote: ↑

06 Aug 2020 11:57

Torch has been passed on to cedh!

Received.

Received. I'm not sure how much time exactly I can devote to the translation in the next few days, but I think it should be OK...

Well, our side of the translation is averaging over a week per person, so I wouldn't worry too much...

The cases of /aI/ and /eI/ aren't equivalent, though. The English diphthong [eI] is just one dialectical realisation of the phoneme [e] - much as in many dialects /i/ is more likely to be realised as [iI]. It can be treated as a distinct quality because a) it's phonemically equivalent to the [e] fou...

Actually, I initially took it as just asking how it 'should' be spelled. My general point was just that there's no one right way to write a language: you have to choose that yourself. And there are many factors that might influence this. Nobody can say what spelling is better without knowing what ef...

Or Lahnraiodhounn...

I thought I would be able to find a language that doesn't mark past-tense, having past-tense as the default, but marks non-past. But I couldn't find any, or any discussion about it. Does it happen though? I think this is common actually, especially the past-tense as default part. This often happens...

FWIW, I had no insuperable lexical/conceptual problems translating the text into a 1st-millennium Germanic language, though it felt that that was not the intended cultural context. For an even more technologically undeveloped and/or alien culture, there may be a couple of terms that you might have t...