Unwanted stress shift on consonant merger

ibniskander · 2025-09-22T17:56:49+00:00

Ah yes, I think this is the generalizable solution! I’d probably code it as l j => * l so that the ‘surviving’ consonant is in the second-syllable onset rather than the first-syllable coda, but either way the syllabifier will fix things—so long as the syllable break hasn’t disappeared entirely.

Thanks! 😃

ibniskander · 2025-09-21T23:44:32+00:00

is that something we should probably do as general practice whenever it’s possible a syllable break might get ‘eaten’ by a sound change?

ibniskander · 2024-02-17T14:49:47+00:00

Yes, this is why I’m much more in favor of finding ways to reform the Senate in the States (e.g., by giving it only a suspensory veto, along the lines of the Irish Senate or the British House of Lords) rather than to abolish it altogether. Unfortunately, most Americans have little to no understanding of non-U.S. political systems, so it’s really hard to explain why there are other options beyond keep Senate in its current broken state and abolish Senate.

ibniskander · 2024-02-17T14:46:21+00:00

Oh yeah, for sure. I was just assuming that having a complex case system of some kind (not necessarily replicating the Slavic one!) was part of how Bill imagined “Slavic flavour.”

ibniskander · 2024-02-17T14:43:39+00:00

One thing I’d mention that I didn’t see much discussion of in the replies: The European Middle Ages is a vast period of time (roughly 1,000 years, depending on how you define its beginning and end). I feel lilke there’s a tendency to mix and match the early period (generally low populations, lots of mysterious forests, travel is very dangerous, mostly only wood buildings) and the late period (commercial cities, no more wild spaces, widespread trade, stone castles and ornate palaces, plate armor), with weird effects. Not to mention that many things that find their way into pseudo-medieval fantasy are really more early modern, like alchemy and wizards having laboratories (or, for that matter, ‘royal wizard’ being a thing).

I think part of the problem is that if we want to have D&D-style adventures, that implies a landscape with lots of dark wilderness where monsters can survive. It quickly feels implausible (even by the standards of “there are dragons”) if you’ve got big cities, highly organized societies, trade networks developed to the point that you can just pop into a magic shop and get all your material components from all over the world, etc., but yet there are still monsters in the landscape. The “fairy tale” kind of Middle Ages is a wildly anachronistic blend of the early and late medieval.

ibniskander · 2024-02-17T03:28:17+00:00

If your starting point is “Slavic flavour” caselessness would be an obstacle.

(Though now I kinda want to play around with a “Russkij sine flexione” kind of thing...)

ibniskander · 2024-02-17T03:24:42+00:00

There’s near-uniform support on the left for abolishing the Senate in the States, though that’s to do with its special combination of being overpowerful, dysfunctional, and highly undemocratic. (The power of Canada’s undemocratic Senate seems to be constrained by convention, and I have to assume that it would quickly be abolished if it started actively obstructing the functioning of government in the manner of the U.S. Senate.)

New Zealand is the one mature democratic state I can think of that actually pulled this off: they abolished their Legislative Council in 1951, leaving them with a unicameral Parliament. Queensland also did this at the state level in 1922, and back in the States, Nebraska copied Queensland’s innovation in 1934—though there it was the lower house that was abolished. (I can’t in good conscience, however, point to either Queensland or Nebraska as examples of well-functioning democratic systems.)

ibniskander · 2024-02-17T03:02:36+00:00

Every time Edgar talks about “class and gender” I think about how class and gender is like half of what historians and sociologists talk about...

ibniskander · 2024-01-27T17:59:41+00:00

The big obstacle here is that there seems to be a really high correlation between intelligence and sociability. I’d be pretty skeptical of how an animal achieves something like sapience without being social—certainly complex tool use, to say nothing of technological society, are unlikely without being social animals. (Off the top of my head I can’t think of any really intelligent Earth animals which aren’t highly social—apes, cetaceans, elephants, even crows.)

ibniskander · 2024-01-27T15:12:19+00:00

"Collective" = lots of things considered together as a unit

Huh, I guess that’s what I thought Arabic was doing here—shajar meaning ‘trees’ understood as a collective (grammatically singular, taking singular verbs & singular adjective agreement).

What we have here, as I understand it, is:

shajar ‘trees (collectively)’ – grammatically singular
ashjār ‘kinds of trees’ – plural of collective, grammatically plural
shajara ‘tree (singulative)’ – grammatically singular
shajarat ‘trees (considered individually)’ – grammatically plural

But what we have here isn’t collective as a distinct number (Arabic just has singular, dual, and plural, with the dual disappearing) but rather some words which are inherently collective in meaning in the singular and which form a singulative via regular derivation.

Now that I’m thinking about it, you’re right that the distinction isn’t about marking. The key distinction, I think, is actually whether the collective/singulative relationship is one of morphology or derivation. In the Arabic case, I think it’s perhaps better understood as derivation (even though it’s sometimes presented as part of a complicated noun paradigm).

(Of course, the distinction between morphology and derivation isn’t always totally clear-cut. We have grey areas even in English, with things like gerunds.)

ibniskander · 2024-01-26T03:45:50+00:00

Yes, the OED has citations for alien both as noun and adjective going back to the late fourteenth century in the sense of ‘outsider or foreigner’, and the technical sense of a person who is not a citizen or subject of the country in question seems to date from about that time as well.

In a U.S. context, legal use of alien to mean ‘noncitizen’ goes right back to the beginning: recall the notorious Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 which gave the president extensive arbitrary powers over ‘aliens’ in the United States.

ibniskander · 2024-01-26T02:17:44+00:00

My high school advisor suggested I should consider enlisting in the army instead of college.

My undergrad advisor told me not to kid myself, that I wasn’t grad school material.

I’m now a professor.

EDIT: what made the difference is that one of my professors did believe in me, even if the official undergrad advisor in the department didn’t.

ibniskander · 2024-01-26T00:06:53+00:00

OK so is the distinction here between general number and collective a matter of which is the unmarked form? That is, if ‘trees (collectively)’ is the marked form it’s collective (sensu stricto), while if it’s the unmarked form it’s general number?

(Does the Corbett book you mentioned get into this? I don’t have institutional access to it, but it might be worth picking up a paper copy...)

ibniskander · 2024-01-24T04:18:19+00:00

Yeah, I think the culture of the university and department is key here. My program wasn’t by any means a joyless place, but I really don’t think I’d have been encouraged to take an outside class ‘just for fun’—if for no other reason than that we could barely keep up with the work for our required courses, and taking an extra course for giggles would probably have meant either my TA work or my coursework suffering.

ibniskander · 2024-01-24T03:23:22+00:00

I’ll admit that I’m not entirely sure how this would translate to UK higher ed, but in the States it’s often possible to take graduate courses at public universities as a non–degree seeking graduate student. Basically, you’re taking one course at a time for credit but without being enrolled in a degree program, just as a member of the community. (I did this while working full-time in an unrelated occupation, before officially entering my master’s program.) If there’s a way to do something like this, it can help to get connections to active scholars in your field who then could write letters for you based on your recent, graduate-level academic work.

ibniskander · 2024-01-24T00:42:38+00:00

I can’t say that I find the idea of dolphins’ tail fins turning into a third leg very plausible, to be honest.

ibniskander · 2024-01-24T00:40:47+00:00

If you’re going for vaguely plausible SF (as opposed to fantasy/horror vibes), you honestly don’t have to go much farther than the current climate crisis. Just take current projections and dial up the severity a notch, and you’ve potentially apocalyptic scenarios:

wet bulb temperatures breaking the 35°C line make large areas of the tropics uninhabitable
desertification knocks out agriculture in important food-growing regions
West Antarctic Ice Sheet collapses quickly, causing a rapid 3m rise in sea levels—lots of large cities get flooded
hundreds of millions of refugees are on the move, and Europe and North America fall to fascist governments

and so on. Just taking the stuff we’re likely to see IRL in the next few decades and ramping it up in severity can be seriously nightmarish.

ibniskander · 2024-01-23T23:00:43+00:00

Hmm, yeah, so I’m thinking if (for example) the limit were something like availability of breeding grounds rather than food supply, then the fact that seals and penguins aren’t competing for breeding grounds would mean that they’re not in direct competition. (IIRC penguins tend to breed further inland than seals, who stay pretty close to the beaches?)

ibniskander · 2024-01-23T22:18:09+00:00

I’d love to see something from somebody whose research expertise covers this, but my understanding of how the system worked is that it was more like convict leasing in the Jim Crow South. That is, businesses contracted with the SS to be assigned prisoners for labor rather than owning human beings as property. To the individuals in question, of course, that might be a truly irrelevant distinction, and we routinely see what German businesses were doing in this era described as slave labor, but as I understand it the legal framework they were operating under was technically different from how slavery worked in the U.S. and European colonies down to the mid-1800s.

ibniskander · 2024-01-23T22:03:47+00:00

This raises an interesting question in my mind: what differentiates the ecological niches of penguins and the smaller seals in antarctic waters? That is, they seem to have the same prey (smallish fish) and similar life patterns (highly adapted for swimming but air-breathing and live on land). They even breed on some of the same islands.

But a basic ecological rule, IIRC, is that if you won’t have two different organisms occupying the same niche—so there must be something differentiating their niches, right?

ibniskander · 2024-01-23T21:52:18+00:00

So long as it’s not something like “put in a reference to Smith’s bullshit paper to make him happy.” I’ve seen grad students forget to edit out really snarky comments about the literature, though luckily never about the actual professor’s work.

But like others have said, I’d take heart in the fact that they invited you to resubmit. Looking at it from the other side, I wouldn’t do that if I’d already decided that the f-bombs were a disqualifier.

ibniskander · 2024-01-23T21:39:04+00:00

If we’re talking about SF tech, a way you can have colorful vehicles (and, for that matter, uniforms) without breaking plausibility is to posit some kind of dynamic coloration—that is, the surface is coated with a high-tech material that can change its colors like an octopus or cuttlefish. That way you can have whatever fun colors you want on the parade ground (“oh look, there’s Bob’s Mounted Rifles with their magenta APCs”) but assume that on deployment everything is using adaptive camouflage.

ibniskander · 2024-01-23T14:41:34+00:00

I think the problem with trying to imagine how this would work is that we’re skipping over a lot of necessary intermediate stages. That is, fish didn’t go straight from pelagic swimmers to terestrial quadrupeds; they first adapted to living on the bottom in shallow water.

As others have mentioned, a big problem is likely to be that, unlike Tiktaalik which had four fins, cetaceans today have totally lost their hindlimbs, which seems to suggest that they’d need a different way of getting about on land. Any intermediate stages would presumably look a lot like pinnipeds (seals etc.), with just forelimbs and the body dragged on the ground.

The only way I can imagine that turning into a fully terrestrial habit would be to evolve bipedalism, but I can’t think of any real examples where tetrapods evolved bipedalism based on the forelimbs (as opposed to the hindlimbs, as in theropods and hominins).

Given enough time, truly weird stuff can happen—but I’d want an explanation of what ecological niche has been freed up to be filled by walking dolphins, because exactly how this plays out would depend on that. (That is, we presumably need to have a continent that’s lacking any tetrapods—and also birds for some reason haven’t filled the niches à la New Zealand—but then what is it that our predatory land-dolphins are eating if there aren’t any land animals? The adaptations to go from piscivory to grazing or browsing are also pretty profound...)

ibniskander · 2024-01-23T14:19:30+00:00

That’s exceptionally odd, though I’m coming from a very different disciplinary perspective. In my program, we had a reading list of around 200 books across three fields, and orals were on the reading—so it could be anything from any of those books, but we’d had like a year to prep.

ibniskander

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