The CBB

Forgive my own late—and very long—reply. Here are a couple tidbits from Gasparov’s “A history of European versification” that might shed some light on the situation. I will be using his notation from now on: a number indicating the syllable count and the letters m, f, and d indicating masculine, fem...

Eu respondo [:D]. Faz uns anos a gente tinha outro tópico para conversar em português; acho que eu era um dos últimos em responder. Üdj, você fala português como língua materna ou está aprendendo? Eu pela minha conta já estudei português de Brasil faz alguns anos (seis, se não lembro mal), ao conhec...

To honor one of the oldest ones in the book, a translation into Biblical Hebrew: :isr: הֲיֵשׁ קִשׁוּא בְּשִׂמְלָתְךָ אִם אַךְ תִּשְׂמַח לִרְאוֹתִי? hăyēš qišûʾ bəśimlāt̲ək̲ā ʾim ʾak̲ tiśmaḥ lirʾôt̲î INT=there_is cucumber in=himation=2MSG or surely 2MSG-rejoice.IPFV to=see-CSCT.INF=1SG Is there a cuc...

I notice that Mandarin, spoken Mandarin in particular, sometimes reinforces 我 wǒ '1SG' and 你 nǐ '2SG' with 这 zhè 'this' suffixed after, but I don't quite understand the nuance involved. A couple examples from an online corpus of sentences: 我这是开玩笑的。 wǒ-zhè shì kāi wánxiào de 1SG-this EMPH open joke ...

Start/finish: 7:47-8:30 I've been brushing up on Classical Japanese and kanbun kundoku , and that's pretty transparent here I think. Phonology n ɳ ɲ ŋ ⟨n ñ ṇ ŋ⟩ t ʈ c k ʔ ⟨t ṭ c k ʾ⟩ d ɖ ɟ ɡ ⟨d ḍ j g⟩ dʱ ɖʱ ɟʱ gʱ ⟨dh ḍh jh gh⟩ ɹ j ɰ ʕ ⟨r y w ʿ⟩ i u ⟨i u⟩ ə ⟨ə⟩ a ⟨a⟩ V́: high tone ∅: low tone (C)V sy...

This is my first time doing this! It seems long overdue to me, given how long I've been lurking around these parts. Aliases: FamedAstronomer, toomuchpiano Location: the great Floridian suburbs :/ Date of birth: late 2004—I’m currently 19 Gender: I go by he/him pronouns, but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Sexuality: pans...

Nice to get to know you more, Panini! 8. Glasses: aviators, actually—I am very nearsighted. You're saying you wear prescription sunglasses? [B)] I'm thinking of getting a pair of them myself, since the astigmatism in my right eye has gradually gotten worse over the years, but I don't want to have t...

Warren Cowgill had an explanation of the Insular Celtic absolute vs. conjunct conjugation by a similar feature, a second-position clitic *es 'it is (that)'. When the verb was the first word in the sentence, this clitic would follow the verb and protect the personal endings from phonetic erosion, re...

1. Gender: assigned male at birth, male if asked, confused if pressed. 2. Sexual orientation: pansexual, but fairly gynephilic. Not big on labels. 3. Handedness: northpaw, no questions asked. 4. Nationality: Puerto Rican, with everything that entails. 5. Ethnicity: Puerto Rican. 6. Neurotype: I am a...

ANADEW strikes again! Biblical Hebrew does something very similar: Most passages of Biblical narrative begin with the helping verb wayəhi followed by a verb in the infinitive. Wayəhi is an inflected form of the copula translated as “and it came to pass” in the KJV. It correlates to Quetzalcoatl’s “X...

I love it! The lightly anthropological take on magic reminds me a bit of Bret Devereaux's non-fiction Practical Polytheism series (see his blog at https://acoup.blog/resources-for-world-builders/ ). What are the rituals/practices associated with magic in your setting? Snippets are pretty much the st...

*sigh* Why can't I write poetry? It's always sort of irritated me that I have absolutely no facility for it. I’m sorry to hear about your poetic struggles. I feel the same way about alliterative poetry in the Germanic mold—I simply cannot make it flow. For the record, there’s no shame in writing bl...

This form of verse is unknown in the history of poetry in English; although it seems to me that its rhythms fit this tongue surprisingly well... Thanks for replying, Salmoneus! I hadn’t stopped to consider that this verse might seem off-kilter in English, if not erroneous. This meter—simple, harmon...

Case study: the décima Puerto Rico prides herself in the décima , a complex ten-line stanza hailing back to the Spanish Baroque. Long moribund in its native land, regional variants of the décima tradition have been carefully preserved from New Mexico to Argentina, where singers improvise verses to ...

In my experience as a non-native speaker of Brazilian Portuguese, [x] as a realization of the coda rhotic is strongly associated with the carioca or fluminense dialect of Rio de Janeiro. The variety which I speak, that of urban São Paulo, typically realizes coda /r/ as [ɾ~ɹ], although final /r/ is a...

With school and now the holidays, this thread has been derailed a little bit. There's a lot of interesting syntactic and sociological phenomena that I've yet to cover, but this format makes me want to do a complete overview, which I can by no means do. I'd love to turn this into a bit of an AMA rath...

a á c rc č e é f g h i k l ľ m n o ó p q r s rs š t rt u v y /p t ʈ k ʔ/ <p t rt k q> /f s ʂ ɕ x h/ <f s rs š g h> /t͡s ʈ͡ʂ t͡ɕ/ <c rc č> /m n/ <m n> /ʋ l j/ <v l y~ľ> /r/ <r> /i u/ <i u> /e o/ <e o> /a/ <a> /iə̯ ɨə̯ uə̯/ <é á ó> /p t ʈ k ʔ/ /f s ʂ ɕ x h/ /t͡s ʈ͡ʂ t͡ɕ/ /m n/ /ʋ l j/ /r/ /i u/ /e o/...

Thanks for making this post! As someone of Cuban descent, I can discern a lot of similarities with my dialect, so it's really cool to read through. I'm glad it's been well-received! Were you the individual who posted about their future Cuban Spanish 'lang a while back on the board? I loved that pro...

Morphology This will be a short post: most of the rest of what I want to cover is syntax or would be covered better in a series of posts on internal variation and social dynamics. Feel free to ask me anything! On the whole, Puerto Rican Spanish morphology varies little from the standard language. A...

Interesting, I didn't actually know any variety with lateral for the rhotic. Also, the nasal neutralization is interesting because it seems to be a dialect-defining feature in many languages. Caribbean Spanish tends to do strange things to coda rhotics: in the Dominican Republic they are sometimes ...