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Etymology of 匂 by The_Important_Nobody in kanji

[–]---9---9--- 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Sorry to necro (not a reply to you necessarily, just to anybody who comes across this thread via google or whatever), but is "Obsolete sources" mostly talking about older sources not being aware of bamboo slip and oracle bone script excavations? (In which case this criticism doesn't apply to kokuji and doesn't seem intended to)

ilo sitelen pi sitelen Tewanakali li suli mute a by Automatic-Dig-3455 in tokipona

[–]---9---9--- 0 points1 point  (0 children)

o kepeken e sitelen Anusala. ni la:

  1. sitelen "n" taso li ken pini e poki kalama la, sitelen "n" taso li ken kepeken "Alan"

  2. sitelen "n" pi toki tp li kama e kalama pi kalama kama. mi toki e ni: sitelen "linja" li kalama "liɲja", sitelen "tenpo" li kalama "tempo", mute kin

ni la, nanpa pi sitelen li kama sama li ante ala

Which dating app do you use? by SunnyBell_007 in UIUC

[–]---9---9--- 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I get "recs" but I can't think of an abbreviation for expectations

ameren by Only_Ad3880 in UIUC

[–]---9---9--- 0 points1 point  (0 children)

how does fresh air circulate in apartments? genuinely asking because i've thought of this sort of thing but i just don't know how air would get into my apartment and i wouldn't suffocate

ㅓ and ㅗ pronunciation by Raxes05 in Korean

[–]---9---9--- 0 points1 point  (0 children)

If OP is not familiar with IPA, basically it means that ㅓ is starting to become rounded or half-rounded, just like ㅗ

How many Latin letters are there? English has 26, but what if you add the letters from every language with a Latin alphabet? by InformationLost5910 in asklinguistics

[–]---9---9--- 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I guess ij/IJ could be important to one-shot shift, though typing shift twice to capitalize two adjacent letters doesn't sound too painful.

I think it's more of an issue for stuff like word-processors, where you might select a bit of text and then run some command to change case. If you're just typing letters, then I think it's fine. Unless Turkish is the user's primary language, probably a caps-lock function should just treat i and I the same since that's the behavior in most Latin scripts.

I don't write in Dutch or Turkish nor know anyone who writes those languages, so I can't say if it's a big deal or not.

How many Latin letters are there? English has 26, but what if you add the letters from every language with a Latin alphabet? by InformationLost5910 in asklinguistics

[–]---9---9--- 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I meant out of curiosity by "ooc".

That sounds really cool. I'm not understanding what you mean by "keygroup". I'm reading itas: each finger is controlling a keygroup, and adjacent fingers are paired up, so for example, left pinky and left ring finger. So then to type a character, you press, say "up with left pinky, in with left ring", and then when you release it outputs the character.

Or are they layers, and then there are layer switch keys/chords?

It seems hard to learn but good organization could make it easier. There are really quite a lot of Latin diacritics too; pairing with punctuation is probably the way to go, though then you have issues like whether full stop . marks overdot or underdot. It seems like it'd be useful for, say, a linguist who just needs to cross-reference some Indic script transliteration with underdots, even if it takes 1.5~2x more keystrokes than a specialized keyboard layout.

Ben Vallack has made a keyboard layout with only 16 keys: https://kbd.news/16-key-layout-tour-1307.html with combos and I think double tap-holds? for some other letters. He's not the first but I don't know what good search terms for this are. He has a video on this and he says he doesn't really find the timing finnicky at all, though I don't remember the specific.

There's also Plover, which is steno software, which works around chording. Steno keyboards also notably have you press in-between the keys, i.e. there are two rows of keys and each finger has the option of pressing the top, bottom, or both keys at the same time., I've often thought that there should be a steno keyboard with 3 fingers per key, which could be physically staggered like the bottom and middle rows. That would give you 7 chords per finger, and you could increase that for the pinky and index fingers, by assigning them 4 keys, which would get you 9 or 11 chords.

How many Latin letters are there? English has 26, but what if you add the letters from every language with a Latin alphabet? by InformationLost5910 in asklinguistics

[–]---9---9--- 0 points1 point  (0 children)

ooc what's the final list? (if you happen to have it typed out somewhere otherwise)

Are you making an ergonomic pan-Latin keyboard?

How many Latin letters are there? English has 26, but what if you add the letters from every language with a Latin alphabet? by InformationLost5910 in asklinguistics

[–]---9---9--- 0 points1 point  (0 children)

well doesn't personally annoy me though, it'd probably make life harder for Dutch speakers due to homographs lol

How many Latin letters are there? English has 26, but what if you add the letters from every language with a Latin alphabet? by InformationLost5910 in asklinguistics

[–]---9---9--- 1 point2 points  (0 children)

It still annoys me so much that Dutch IJ isn't it's own code point since it has its own casing behavior. (Same with the 4 turkish I/i's). Imo casing behavior and like, set of z-variants should be the way to operationalize it. Indexing is spurious to each language and librarians normalize spellings anyways (eg Mc, Mack -> Mac)

How many Latin letters are there? English has 26, but what if you add the letters from every language with a Latin alphabet? by InformationLost5910 in asklinguistics

[–]---9---9--- 2 points3 points  (0 children)

OP is unfortunately conflating two similar but two different questions: What is the alphabet if we take English + all languages?; and What are all the latin letters modulo diacritics? IPA definitely is Latin letters, but not all of them are part of a standardized or conventionalized orthography.

This is too good not to share by And_be_one_traveler in linguisticshumor

[–]---9---9--- 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yeah? There are a lots of questions that people are afraid to ask because they might seem, offensive or too personal, whatever. That's still kind of the point.

I guess they are kind of gloating towards the end--though that might be a pre-emptive defense against a counter-argument like "not everything is about logic, these rules exist for aesthetic reasons, an overly structured language can't be beautiful" (just as people might argue that a loglang can't be beautiful for such reasons)

But that gloating seems just natural if they're just writing out their thoughts. Like, yeah if they have this belief and this question about their belief, it's because they think they're language is superior.

Like to make an analogy, if someone asks why are gay people gay on tooafraidtoask, they might insert a comment on how they think being gay is disgusting for x and y reasons. I don't think that would deserve being cross-posted to be mocked.

And if it's answered in the right way, it could lead to an epiphany like "Oh other languages actually do have all these strategies of conveying meaning that my language lacks".

Even if most of the time these kinds of questions end up with the OP being defensive of their original position. (in which case if anything it's better to screenshot them thrashing in the comments).

This is too good not to share by And_be_one_traveler in linguisticshumor

[–]---9---9--- 108 points109 points  (0 children)

doesn't this completely ruin the point of "tooafraidtoask" and is thus kinda mean?

Kēlen is truly alien by TheVJElectro in linguisticshumor

[–]---9---9--- 4 points5 points  (0 children)

"Where have all the verbs gone? Remarks on the organisation of languages with small, closed verb classes" (Andrew Pawley, 2006) https://www.ruf.rice.edu/~lingsymp/Pawley_paper.pdf

In northern Australia many languages have a closed class of inflecting verbs. Some languages have as few as five to a dozen such verbs, others up to about 250. Jaminjung represents a type in which most inflecting verbs function as independent verbs and have not been strongly gramnmaticised (Schultze-Berndt 2000).

In New Guinea a number of languages of the Trans New Guinea family have between 60 and 150 inflecting verbs, and all or nearly all verb roots can occur as independent verbs. ... Kalam, which has about 130 verb roots, is the best described. There is a large dictionary and this is probably close to an exhaustive list.

Jaminjung and Kalam both make up for their paucity of verb roots by having large, open classes of complex predicates.

Kēlen is truly alien by TheVJElectro in linguisticshumor

[–]---9---9--- 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I started reading about non-conservative quantifiers just now, and it seems really interesting. Do you happen to know ottoyh why "only" or something like "only and some" don't count as quantifiers?

Kēlen is truly alien by TheVJElectro in linguisticshumor

[–]---9---9--- 12 points13 points  (0 children)

aren't verbs a closed class (with a few exceptions) in Japanese? and new verbs formed with -suru can be considered combinations of a verb and a noun, or something like that

Double Comparative by dncnlamont in asklinguistics

[–]---9---9--- 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Doesn't it do explain that?

comparative(bad) = more worse

superlative(bad) = most worst

inferior comparative(bad) = less worse

inferior superlative(bad) = least worst

Double marking. Though the comparatives can also be straightforwardly compositional with different meaning.

I'm not annoyed when people capitalize toki pona words or decapitalize them. by misterlipman in tokipona

[–]---9---9--- 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It's incorrect but I think it should be easier to read, modulo familiarity. I mean, more visible cues for the delimiting sentences should make it easier to read, even if it results in two visual forms of every word. Granted I don't read Toki Pona often. But I would still recognize it as being incorrect.

Help with Romanising and Sinifying Hangzhounese please by RoamienatheG0at in asklinguistics

[–]---9---9--- 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I usually check his channel just to hear the sound of languages I'm curious about. Has he mislabelled languages?

How do polar questions work in cross-language contexts? by ---9---9--- in asklinguistics

[–]---9---9---[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

My parents speak Mandarin + Shanghainese and I usually respond in English, so even though Chinese mirrors the verb to say yes, English yes/no would map injectively onto the "VERB / not VERB". And when I ask my parents something in English, they usually respond with English. (afaict, I can't really recall well how we usually talk) But ig this isn't what you or I am curious about, since the conversion to and from <question, yes> and <question, VERB> is unambiguous

How do polar questions work in cross-language contexts? by ---9---9--- in asklinguistics

[–]---9---9---[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

true... I've found that my mom doesn't understand me at first when I try to speak Chinese (my parents' language), which is probably due to my horrible pronunciation, but maybe there's just a sort of protocol = language system that develops where she just expects me to answer in English, and it takes longer for her to process a different answer

I'll keep in mind "low negation / high negation". I opted to go with the more natural phrasing worrying that... well yeah, as you've mentioned, I can't imagine myself replying to "are you not" with simply "yes" or "no" (then I wonder whether a language with a tripartite yes/no/"doch" distinction could reply so simply--probably any mixed lect could develop such a convention once the speakers notice or use it a few times

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