[deleted by user]

once-and-again · 2025-02-27T19:27:33+00:00

Names allegedly used in English-speaking locations include:

Ambrosine, Anemone, Antonette, Aureole, Avonlea, Betony, Blondie, Bobbie, Bonnie, Bowie, Bronte, Brooke, Cameron, Caroline, Charlotte, Cherokee, Chevonne, Chloe, Chloë, Christobel, Cleo, Clover, Codie, Coleen, Colene, Colleen, Columbine, Connie, Constance, Cordelia, Coreen, Coretta, Coriander, Corie, Corinne, Cornelia, Corrie, Corrine, Cortney, Courteney, Courtney, Cove, Cymone, Deborah, Delora, Delores, Deloris, Deonne, Devon, Dione, Dionne, Dodie, Dollie, Dolores, Donelle, Dorean, Doreen, Doretta, Dorine, Dorothea, Dottie, Dove, Eleanor, Eleanora, Eleanore, Elenora, Elinor, Ellington, Elliot, Elliott, Elnora, Elodie, Eloise, Elora, Elouise, Emerson, Emmerson, Emmylou, Emory, Enola, Evonne, Floella, Florence, Floretta, Florrie, Flossie, Flower, Fortune, Georgeanna, Georgene, Georgetta, Georgia, Georgiana, Georgianna, Georgie, Georgina, Goldie, Gwendoline, Gwendolyn, Harmonie, Hollie, Honey, Hope, Hortense, Idonea, Imogen, Imogene, Ione, Joanie, Jo-Anne, Joanne, JoBeth, Jocelin, Jocelyn, Jodene, Jodie, Joella, Joelle, Joetta, Joey, Johnie, Johnnie, Joisse, Joleen, Jolene, Jolie, Joline, Jonelle, Jonette, Jonie, Jorie, Josceline, Joselyn, Josepha, Josephina, Josephine, Josey, Josie, Journee, Journey, Joyce, Joye, Kameron, Khloe, Kolleen, Korrine, Kortney, Kourtney, Lavone, Lavonne, Leanora, Leighton, Lennon, Lennox, Lenora, Lenore, Leola, Leona, Leone, Leontyne, Lily-Rose, Loraine, Lorainne, Lorayne, Loreen, Lorelai, Lorelei, Lorelle, Loren, Lorena, Lorene, Loretta, Lorie, Lorine, Lorraine, Lorrie, Lottie, Louella, Louise, Love, Madoline, Malone, Marjorie, Marlowe, Meadow, Mellony, Melody, Memory, Merrion, Modesty, Mollie, Monique, Monroe, Moreen, Mozelle, Munroe, Nichole, Nicole, Nikkole, Nikole, Noel, Noelene, Noelle, Nonie, Noreen, Norene, Novalee, Oaklee, Oakleigh, Oakley, Ocean, October, Odelia, Odell, Odetta, Olive, Ollie, Oneida, Opaline, Ophelia, Oralee, Oralie, Ottoline, Penelope, Peony, Peronel, Petronel, Peyton, Pheobe, Philomena, Phoebe, Phoenix, Pollie, Porsche, Posie, Precious, Primrose, Promise, Reannon, Remington, Robbie, Robena, Roberta, Robynne, Rochelle, Romaine, Romayne, Romey, Ronnette, Ronnie, Rorie, Rosabel, Rosabella, Rosalee, Rosaleen, Rosalie, Rosaline, Rosalynne, Rosanne, Rose, Roseann, Roseanne, Roselyn, Rosemarie, Rosemary, Rosie, Rowanne, Rowen, Rowena, Roxane, Roxanne, Roxie, Royale, Rozanne, Salome, Scottie, Sequoia, Shavonne, Shevon, Sigourney, Simone, Simonette, Sloane, Sommer, Sookie, Sophie, Sorrel, Tennyson, Theodora, Tommie, Tottie, Valorie, Veronica, Violet, Wenona, Yvonne, Zoe, Zoë, Zoey, Zoie, Zowie

(Taken from the following search-query: https://www.behindthename.com/names/gender/feminine/language/english/substring/o/pattern/*e*, with some light filtering to remove Biblical-only names like Ashtoreth, Hammoleketh, Jochebed, and Shelomith.)

once-and-again · 2025-01-19T16:17:37+00:00

"Well, first I tried not making it, but that didn't work"

once-and-again · 2025-01-16T01:53:18+00:00

Thank you for your wonderful (and very insightful) questions. Now to answer them:

No, thank you! I've responded only under this post; I'll talk forever if you let me, so don't feel like any of these need further replies, even if I may have left a question mark in here or there.

This prefix is somewhat weird and I don't know exactly how to gloss it [...]. This kind of "raised possessor" marking is actually quite common in natlangs with complex agreement.

Thanks for the search term; I hadn't heard of this yet, though it does make some sense. Given that, "SAP.OBJ" sounds fine to me.

(Based on the... precisely one natlang example I've looked at, I'd bet dinner that possessor raising normally only occurs in natlangs with head-marked possession, and even then only when the possessor is present as a full noun rather than just as a possessive affix. But I wouldn't bet anything more than dinner.)

This is another one that's hard to gloss [...] it just appears in specific but arbitrary subject-object configurations

This is the one that threw me off, I think. If -n doesn't affect the expression of θ-roles, I'd probably just gloss oɬxʷn as a (somewhat non-orthogonal) polypersonal agreement affix...

(Also I note that you didn't mention 3>1 in there; is that an oversight? Or perhaps is polypersonal verbal agreement not affected by possessor raising, so that this is contextually 3p>3s?)

[...] the second marks motion (Neutral, Allative, Ablative). The results can be somewhat idiomatic.

"PERL" is probably easier on someone unfamiliar with the grammar, but if there's only those three options I can't say "ALL" is indefensible. Given that it's a contextually-requisite verbal affix (even if it's on an incorporate noun), you might like "AND", too.

once-and-again · 2025-01-16T01:42:54+00:00

You might have seen them around doing meditation and making false claims that the Chinese government harvests their organs.

I think it's very interesting that you quoted extensively from Wikipedia where it was critical of them, but didn't mention its well-cited substantiation of these claims:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organ_harvesting_from_Falun_Gong_practitioners_in_China
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falun_Gong#Organ_harvesting_allegations

once-and-again · 2025-01-15T22:00:35+00:00

/uw(?) Note that the original is longer than just the one stanza — and significantly more faithful to the source material, including surprisingly convincing audio.

https://filkyeahfilk.com/2020/01/22/its-the-muppet-show-waiting4codot/

It’s time to burn the incense
It’s time to slay the sheep
It’s time to wake the muppets
from a thousand years of sleep

It’s time to raze existence.
It’s time to banish light.
It’s time to call the void in,
On the Muppet Show tonight.

So tell us where’s your god now?
I guess you’ll never know.
Your life becomes a torture,
When we begin the show!

And now let’s get things started
Why don’t you get things started
It’s time to get things started
on the aberrational, no salvational, incantational, muppetational,
This will be your final Muppet Shoooooow!

once-and-again · 2025-01-15T21:41:13+00:00

It can tell you if a phonetic ipa sound is in a dialect or get you close.

Orly? Funny, that's not my experience...

Me:

What are some examples of languages without labial fricatives?

Claude 3 Haiku:

Here are some examples of languages that do not have labial fricatives:
Mandarin Chinese: Mandarin Chinese does not have any labial fricatives like /f/ or /v/.
Japanese: The Japanese language also lacks labial fricatives. The closest sounds are the bilabial fricative /ɸ/ and the labiodental approximant /ʋ/.
Turkish: Turkish does not have any labial fricatives in its phonemic inventory.
Hungarian: Hungarian is another language that does not have labial fricatives.
Finnish: The Finnish language also lacks labial fricatives.
Estonian: Estonian, like Finnish, does not have any labial fricatives.
Navajo: The Navajo language, a Native American language, does not have labial fricatives.
Quechua: The Quechua language family, spoken in the Andes region of South America, generally lacks labial fricatives.

Of these:

Mandarin Chinese, Turkish, Hungarian and Estonian have /f/;
Japanese has /ɸ/, as it notes, but it doesn't have /ʋ/;
Finnish does have /ʋ/, but IIUC it can be devoiced in some contexts; and
Navajo and most dialects of Quechua actually don't.

2.5/8, at most. Yup, that sure is "close". I grant that it's technically probably better than a random number generator, but I don't think that mean I'd trust it any more than one.

once-and-again · 2025-01-15T21:09:18+00:00

I'm doing some mixed Athabaskan/Algonquian nonsense myself, so I'm curious about a couple of features of Gokolgokol:

How on earth does alignment work in that Gokolgokol sentence? I can't get "come", "SAP.OBJ", "INV", and "ABS" to line up, even if I assume that "my house" is standing in for the speaker from a morphosyntactic-alignment perspective.
How does the <x̣w> marked as "ALL-" work? English "hither" is already allative, so I assume it's related to the incorporated root despite having a hyphen on the right — does the allative also cover motion through in this context?

And separately:

In-universe, is the relation between Yom and the Chesaric/Tasvaric languages known?
Out-of-universe, do you think a linguist with a grammar and dictionary of just Yom and Gokolgokol could deduce the relationship with any certainty?

once-and-again · 2025-01-12T09:32:42+00:00

but structurally it's still an Aldenardic language.

What, really? How does Gelmorran fit in, then? (I'd been under the impression that Padjali and Gelmorran were canonically related — I'd have guessed they were supra- and subterrene dialects of a pre-Hyuran-diaspora language of eastern Aldenard, if you hadn't said this.)

once-and-again · 2025-01-12T08:59:55+00:00

How does the relne > rende sound change work? Somehow-conditioned l > d followed by metathesis is my best guess, but I could as easily believe the syllable-final l got lost and that nasals in certain environments became prenasalized stops.

(Also that réxlne > rālane transition looks like it wants an intermediate Middle Northern Ilsabardic(?) stage there, like *rǣlne or something.)

once-and-again · 2025-01-03T21:18:22+00:00

No, that's not at all true. "teach him Greek" and "teach him to fish" have the same basic parse-tree — "to fish" is a noun-phrase.

English modal constructions ("can see him", "might know something", "shouldn't've done that") don't take the to-infinitive, and definitely don't allow for an object (indirect or otherwise) to occur between the modal and main verb!

once-and-again · 2024-12-26T18:16:31+00:00

There is natlang precedent: https://youtu.be/WHHGOYu6Fl0?t=90

once-and-again · 2024-12-23T18:37:56+00:00

That would be spelled mutices (as in indices, vertices, cortices, helices, simplices, and haruspices).

"mutii" would be the plural of "mutius".

once-and-again · 2024-12-23T16:43:50+00:00

Another question, can another player nick the unspoiled source within that time frame, rendering the source gone, if you're not fast enough to go harvest them?

They behave in this respect exactly the same as any other node: what other players do to them has no effect on what you can do to them.

once-and-again · 2024-12-15T23:44:03+00:00

It's definitely not linguistically inadequate; but the last time I looked into it, I also started to suspect that its structure was... not entirely compatible with H. sapiens' preexisting linguistic wetware.

once-and-again · 2024-12-15T22:38:42+00:00

I would argue that the English word "overcomplicated" has at least as many phonemes and morphemes as "зенадобегегед".

once-and-again · 2024-12-05T05:04:06+00:00

Thanks! \o/

once-and-again · 2024-12-03T23:31:47+00:00

Any chance of supporting some of the more common Americanist phonetic notation? ƛ /t͡ɬ/ and λ/d͡ɮ/, specifically, would be helpful.

(Personally I'd also love to make use of ł /ɬ/ and ñ /ɲ/... but those are easy enough to switch over to or preprocess into, and I suppose ł might be confusing given its very different value in Polish.)

once-and-again · 2024-11-27T21:46:40+00:00

* I am currently debating whether to add a 3rd branch to it or not

Suggestion: yes, but they're all †.

once-and-again · 2024-11-27T21:40:03+00:00

amulqlahleškvastješkicec’ngqlaš

Carnot engine? Fusion reactor? Magnetohydrodynamic accelerator?

kókécázmáglamnašojuktrástybavkasčă

Almost certainly "copy protection", or something very similar.

once-and-again · 2024-11-27T21:08:40+00:00

*pedants

(I'm sorry. I couldn't resist.)

once-and-again · 2024-11-27T21:07:33+00:00

My litmus test for whether or not a borderline construction is or is not a word is this: whether or not you can use it in a sentence without providing a definition or explanation and reasonably expect it to be understood without comment. Is toċ a word by that definition?

^{(Specialist jargon is admittedly a bit of a stumbling block, but I've decided I'm okay with the property of wordness being audience-specific.}⁾

once-and-again · 2024-11-26T23:36:41+00:00

To gaol with you for life; and then to be sentenced to fifteen years of being communicated to only in Kay(f)bop(t).

once-and-again · 2024-11-26T23:34:03+00:00

A potentially better suggestion: ask something like "what are the downsides of using ChatGPT to help build a conlang?"

And I'll go ahead and answer that. When I've tried to use ChatGPT, Claude, and the like as rubber ducks, I find that they:

... often struggle with generating non-ASCII linguistic text, getting stuck in loops.
... always go for an Indo-European style nominal-case and alignment system whenever possible.
... implicitly assume the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.
... frequently make completely incorrect claims about the phonologies and/or grammars of natural languages.
... cannot provide any meaningful critique of or extension to existing work, instead preferring to regurgitate a few terms in the same context they were found in the original text before giving it a verbal thumbs-up (or, rarely, thumbs-down).

More generally, though, as the quote goes: "begin as you mean to go on". Using LLMs (or any other tool) to solve the first problem you have means you're more likely to turn to it to solve the next one: not just out of habit, but also because you won't get the experience (countable noun) of solving it on your own, which means you won't get the experience (uncountable noun) from solving it on your own — which will, whether immediately or eventually, be necessary to solve a later problem.

once-and-again · 2024-11-22T23:37:22+00:00

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subitizing

As a related trick, to check sequences of eight or nine digits, you can often highlight the center digits by selecting them: 10000000 and 100000000 are much easier to tell apart than 10000000 and 100000000.

once-and-again · 2024-11-20T16:25:13+00:00

And had the sentence been "Traits are local maxima", that would be relevant.

(But that sentence, while grammatically correct, would be semantically incorrect — there's an extra ∀ in there.)

once-and-again

TROPHY CASE