Search found 433 matches

by Sequor
08 Apr 2020 00:05
Forum: Linguistics & Natlangs
Topic: (L&N) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here
Replies: 1110
Views: 282912

Re: (L&N) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Does anyone know if /d/ is turned into [ɾ] in New Zealand English for speakers who also do this with /t/? I find plenty of sources who talk about /t/ but no one mentions /d/... I[ɾ] is. It's funny that this phenomenon is commonly called "t-flapping" now that you mention that. It's not jus...
by Sequor
06 Apr 2020 21:02
Forum: Linguistics & Natlangs
Topic: Romance tidbits
Replies: 37
Views: 8820

Re: Romance tidbits

How about Italian "bordello" and Anglo-Saxon "brothel"? Ooh, great! The Romance word from bord-ellum ("board-diminutive"), with bord- 'board' borrowed from Frankish, and the English word from *breuþ-il-az ("fall_apart/deteriorate-diminutive-(nominal)"). That ...
by Sequor
06 Apr 2020 20:34
Forum: Linguistics & Natlangs
Topic: Romance tidbits
Replies: 37
Views: 8820

Re: Romance tidbits

Random comment: while it is pretty obvious that Latin habēre 'have' and Germanic *habjaną 'have' are not cognates (the true cognate of *habjaną in Latin is capere 'to grab sth', and Latin habēre has no cognates in Germanic), I do believe they strongly influenced each other to develop the have-perfec...
by Sequor
06 Apr 2020 06:48
Forum: Linguistics & Natlangs
Topic: (L&N) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here
Replies: 1110
Views: 282912

Re: (L&N) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Always been interested in iecur and iter, bizarre words they are. They seem to have been original r/n stems that then did a "cake and eat it too" thing in the obliques by stacking both -r and -n stems one after the other. And hilariously, the common IE pattern is reflected in the word wit...
by Sequor
06 Apr 2020 05:46
Forum: Linguistics & Natlangs
Topic: (L&N) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here
Replies: 1110
Views: 282912

Re: (L&N) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Where does the Latin word "senex" come from? By which I mean, how come the nominative singular ends in -x when the stem of all the other case forms of this adjective is simply sen-, whence genitive singular "senis" and nominative plural "senēs" (and not *senicis, *seni...
by Sequor
03 Apr 2020 20:43
Forum: Linguistics & Natlangs
Topic: (L&N) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here
Replies: 1110
Views: 282912

Re: (L&N) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

When it comes to linguistics, it continues to be common to expect readers to be able to handle French though. More so in papers than books. In Romance linguistics, all five of German, French, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese are regularly assumed (and you come across them in this order of frequency, ...
by Sequor
02 Apr 2020 23:56
Forum: Everything Else
Topic: The Sixth Conversation Thread
Replies: 762
Views: 194101

Re: The Sixth Conversation Thread

How every body's looks and discourse in the street is of death and nothing else; and few people going up and down, that the town is like a place distressed and forsaken. (Samuel Pepys, 17th-century diarist from London, 1665-08-30) Of course, in 2020, covid has killed 600 people in London, or 0.0066...
by Sequor
02 Apr 2020 03:06
Forum: Everything Else
Topic: The Sixth Conversation Thread
Replies: 762
Views: 194101

Re: The Sixth Conversation Thread

How every body's looks and discourse in the street is of death and nothing else; and few people going up and down, that the town is like a place distressed and forsaken. (Samuel Pepys, 17th-century diarist from London, 1665-08-30)
by Sequor
01 Apr 2020 20:31
Forum: Linguistics & Natlangs
Topic: Romance tidbits
Replies: 37
Views: 8820

Re: Romance tidbits

re: Spanish initials, it's worth remembering that initial voiced plosives used to be pronounced with a "hard" plosive articulation, and that unvoiced plosives tend to be "more aspirated" than other languages (though, not as much as English). So it could be like how English borro...
by Sequor
01 Apr 2020 09:43
Forum: Conlangs
Topic: Quick Diachronics Challenge
Replies: 1041
Views: 268919

Re: Quick Diachronics Challenge

I don't think I'll be able to work on this now until the 11th of April. With everything going on with COVID-19, we've become a lot busier at work than everyone had originally expected so we're having to put in extra shifts to keep up with the work load (when doing my homeworking shifts, I could eas...
by Sequor
31 Mar 2020 01:19
Forum: Conlangs
Topic: Darezh 国語, or my pathetic attempt at monosyllabic roots
Replies: 2
Views: 782

Re: Darezh 国語, or my pathetic attempt at monosyllabic roots

Finally, there is one more featuer that I like in Darezh and would like to share with you: the main relative pronoun is actually a couple of words, one of which is used to mark which noun exactly the other one stands for. Those pronouns are "po" and "il" respectively. For exampl...
by Sequor
29 Mar 2020 21:24
Forum: Beginners' Corner
Topic: Some questions about part of speech
Replies: 6
Views: 2325

Re: Some questions about part of speech

Well, I wrote my answer taking an educated guess on what wyl118's homework is likely about. You're preaching to the choir there. I'm not much of a fan of TPs or IPs either, or of the various fashions that have appeared for thinking about trees in the Generative tradition. In practice, the model I te...
by Sequor
28 Mar 2020 21:19
Forum: Beginners' Corner
Topic: Unknown term for Ergative Languages
Replies: 23
Views: 5522

Re: Unknown term for Ergative Languages

I think it'd be useful to give the answer to those examples. I ate. - univalent, transitive or intransitive ("semantics is wobbly") I slept. - univalent, intransitive I ate salad. - bivalent, transitive (In Mandarin and Standard Arabic, it's very common to say "I slept a good sleep&qu...
by Sequor
27 Mar 2020 23:37
Forum: Conlangs
Topic: (Conlangs) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here
Replies: 1679
Views: 347929

Re: (Conlangs) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

My setting's Phoenixfolk language has [o̞ ɯ] and an extensive set of palatalizations. Are [fʲo̞ fʲɯ → fø̞ fy], for example, plausible? Sure it is. In fact, Old French had something like it without even needing palatalization on the consonant before. I wrote a thing about the relevant change in Old ...
by Sequor
27 Mar 2020 23:30
Forum: Linguistics & Natlangs
Topic: Romance tidbits
Replies: 37
Views: 8820

Re: Romance tidbits

A post about the development of the French rounded vowels, front and back. To discuss this, I think it's easiest to look at early Old French and then look both backwards to Classical Latin and forwards to late Old French, when the modern system of rounded vowels was basically established (with only ...
by Sequor
27 Mar 2020 20:25
Forum: Everything Else
Topic: The Sixth Conversation Thread
Replies: 762
Views: 194101

Re: The Sixth Conversation Thread

And if the final sentence of that post was dismissive... Well yeah, it probably was. But I certainly wasn't thinking of political scientists or philosophers when I wrote it! If I had been, I would've been a lot more careful (or rather, said something else entirely), precisely to avoid this kind of ...
by Sequor
27 Mar 2020 20:14
Forum: Conlangs
Topic: Does anyone else try and actually speak or pronounce their conlang or is it all on paper?
Replies: 53
Views: 12943

Re: Does anyone else try and actually speak or pronounce their conlang or is it all on paper?

No, I pretty much never say things in my conlangs aloud. I like the sound of some of them, but saying them inside my head is enough. I wouldn't record them and put the recordings up on YouTube or the like.
by Sequor
27 Mar 2020 02:29
Forum: Beginners' Corner
Topic: Unknown term for Ergative Languages
Replies: 23
Views: 5522

Re: Unknown term for Ergative Languages

So, if I make use of split ergativity, a sentence like "I instructed" could be made Nom-Acc and "I was instructed." could be Erg-Abs? Would this work? So far, it appears that you're not interested in working out reliable ways to disambiguate the roles of nouns in one-argument se...
by Sequor
26 Mar 2020 23:11
Forum: Beginners' Corner
Topic: Unknown term for Ergative Languages
Replies: 23
Views: 5522

Re: Unknown term for Ergative Languages

The tree was felled. The tree fell. Would they both be written like below: fell tree-DEF fell tree-DEF "To fell [a tree]" is a different verb from "to fall (down)". You could say "to fell" is a specialized causative of "to fall" (because the event of the tree...
by Sequor
26 Mar 2020 22:08
Forum: Beginners' Corner
Topic: Some questions about part of speech
Replies: 6
Views: 2325

Re: Some questions about part of speech

And here are my three questions: I know that in "give me the phone", "the phone" is a complement, but is "to me" or "me" also a complement in "give the phone to me"? Both "the phone" and "to me" could be considered complements of...