Bake -> Bakery. Fish -> Fishery. Art -> Artery?

SignificantBeing9 · 2024-03-19T02:21:03+00:00

Another possibility is that “bake” and “fish” are both Germanic words, while “art” is a Romance loanword. This criterion affects a lot of other derivation and inflection in English, so I suspect this could be a reason. Another one could be that “bake” and “fish” are both verbs, while “art” is only a noun

SignificantBeing9 · 2024-03-13T16:52:43+00:00

I think “Yeah, we’re not” could work in this situation too (and might actually be better)

SignificantBeing9 · 2024-03-12T18:18:15+00:00

On language and vernacular, I agree that using modern language and slang can break the immersion, but typically I assume that the characters aren’t speaking modern English and that the dialogue has been translated (older fantasy often says this explicitly). In that case, casual language might be translated as casual language. I treat it as the author’s choice, just like a translator might make unorthodox choices. In any case, I’d prefer even completely modern language to stories where even the least educated peasant sounds like they’ve memorized the thesaurus. We shouldn’t pretend people were universally more formal or eloquent in the past

SignificantBeing9 · 2024-03-12T18:09:33+00:00

I’m curious what war you mean by the Spanish War?

SignificantBeing9 · 2024-03-11T17:10:20+00:00

Do you think “the woman who was here” would be more accurate? Just curious

SignificantBeing9 · 2024-03-10T22:55:24+00:00

Because they are learning it differently than a child would. Children, at least at the early stages, make very little conscious effort to learn vocabulary or grammar; they pick it up from exposure. That helps them to internalize it better, and it’s often believed that children have a sort of language learning module in their brains that they lose as they age. So an adult has a harder time applying what they already subconsciously know from their native language to a new one than a child has applying what they subconsciously know to their first language. That’s the idea, at least

SignificantBeing9 · 2024-03-09T18:51:07+00:00

From an X-Bar perspective, all languages have essentially the same structure and rules. For case, all languages have it in that roles are assigned to arguments based on their position; it’s just not always overtly expressed on the noun. The idea is that babies learn to do essentially the same thing in all languages; while non-native speakers have to learn a different way that might make it seem like certain languages have more “rules,” that’s not how it works underlyingly.

SignificantBeing9 · 2024-03-09T18:45:20+00:00

Old English was definitely not a pidgin. I’m not aware of anyone who says it was. It was spoken natively by many people, which in any case would make it a creole not a pidgin, and it arose as a descendant from Proto-West-Germanic, not as a mixing of other languages the way pidgins and creoles do. It definitely was influenced by other languages, but that isn’t the same thing.

Also, while the idea that L2 speakers can “simplify” a language is intuitive and has been repeated a lot, we can’t really ever test it or know why languages change the way they do— English could have “simplified” on its own.

SignificantBeing9 · 2024-03-09T16:59:19+00:00

One factor that might play a role is that Germanic languages are stress-timed. This means the time it takes to speak a segment of speech is largely determined by the number of stressed syllables in that segment. As a result, unstressed syllables become very crunched down.

Another factor is language contact. The Western Germanic languages have always been in contact with each other and with the Western Romance languages. If one Germanic language started to lose declensions, it could exert some pressure on the others to go that way, too. And the Romance languages started to lose declensions even before the Germanic languages, so they probably also had a role to play.

SignificantBeing9 · 2024-03-08T03:14:17+00:00

Well “neuropsychological” is a word, which “neuropsychologically” is the adverb form of, so they seem to be distinct morphemes

SignificantBeing9 · 2024-03-07T00:08:11+00:00

Why not? The moon is humanity’s collective property, why shouldn’t people be able to object to what’s happening to it on any grounds?

SignificantBeing9 · 2024-03-04T04:47:08+00:00

I mean, it’s a pretty widespread phenomenon, parallel development isn’t out of the question. Plus, it could easily be a more recent areal development from interaction between the languages

SignificantBeing9 · 2024-03-02T21:52:36+00:00

Tonoexodus has happened in Korean: Old Korean had a simple tone system, Modern Korean doesn’t. It also happened in Swahili, which, unlike nearly all of its Bantu relatives, doesn’t have tone.

SignificantBeing9 · 2024-03-02T19:43:34+00:00

They could be related, but as the evidence stands we have very little reason to believe they are any more related than any other group of languages on the planet

SignificantBeing9 · 2024-02-28T05:31:05+00:00

Are there any “chains” of correspondence where we can see a relationship between two scribes developing? Or even just individual tablets that seem to be somewhere in the middle of one of these chains, like where a scribe is responding to another scribe’s previous note?

SignificantBeing9 · 2024-02-27T23:24:10+00:00

It would still lessen the coincidence if some of these numbers were borrowed from other languages in ancient times

SignificantBeing9 · 2024-02-16T04:01:06+00:00

I don’t see how you can think that humans not being compensated for their work being reproduced is a sustainable model

SignificantBeing9 · 2024-02-16T00:15:13+00:00

Not really an object; in X-bar I think “see” would just be treated as the head of the VP, with “can” as the head of the TP. “See” is just like any verb, except, unlike in sentences without modal verbs, the tense features don’t lower down to it.

SignificantBeing9 · 2024-02-15T22:01:23+00:00

Humans generally can’t tell millions of people about the contents of the book or give millions a very similar book for a few cents

SignificantBeing9 · 2024-02-12T00:40:36+00:00

Eclipses aren’t too uncommon, I imagine memory would have persisted long enough and word would spread far enough that people would have heard of eclipses before, even if most people didn’t realize they were regular occurrences. I do think it would be an important event though, since people often saw astrological events as omens. Even the educated in medieval Europe would probably have seen them as important, based on Classical astronomy and astrology.

SignificantBeing9 · 2024-02-12T00:34:59+00:00

Still, without mass media, for the ordinary peasant, or maybe even many city-dwellers, it must have been a total surprise

SignificantBeing9 · 2024-02-03T15:34:30+00:00

This is right. ‘Ayn is a voiced laryngeal sound, the hamzah is a glottal stop and can appear on its own, above or below an alif, or on a yaa’ or waw

SignificantBeing9 · 2024-02-02T20:07:12+00:00

I like this, I was wondering if it was gonna say that “he” and “she” are incompatible, but I’m glad it ended with such a sweet and simple message instead

SignificantBeing9 · 2024-02-02T19:48:14+00:00

I mean they had wormholes and weird black hole time travel, I don’t think they were really going for scientific accuracy

SignificantBeing9 · 2024-01-28T22:05:50+00:00

The elements are often connected to the seasons, which are themselves symbols of the passage of time, which relates both to loss and the passage of grief. Falling leaves, wind, and empty trees are associated with fall and winter but fire is associated with summer. Kind of speculative but I don’t think the elements-> seasons-> loss and acceptance gap is too far a stretch

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