u/Vampyricon

And how does the size of its corpus compare with historical forms of Celtic languages that never went extinct?

I keep hearing people say this, often when introducing the languages' secondary, "agglutinative", case systems, but what are the actual examples of their agglutination? Every presentation of the case systems of the languages seem to stop at one case tacked onto the inherited accusative form, and it doesn't seem to be very agglutinative to me if they couldn't actually add more case endings onto those secondary cases.

By semantic contamination, what I mean is the semantic similarities between certain words causing their pronunciations to become similar as well, such as femelle > female under the influence of male.

It's obvious that the different forms of a word in a paradigm have pretty similar semantics. Could ġefroren becoming frozen under influence of freeze also be seen as a case of semantic contamination?

I'm not sure if this is the right sub to ask, so if not tell me where I should be asking.

I've seen some claims floating around the Internet that Neanderthals didn't have language, but no one has given much evidence for that claim (or against, for that matter). Given their close degree of genetic similarity to Homo sapiens sapiens, I would assume that they did have language. Does anyone have any specific evidence pointing towards either position?

Is there a paper or something somewhere that states all the changes? Or do linguists consider it trivial and leave it an an exercise for the reader?

I know it devoices word-final fricatives, but I'm not sure when it deletes vowels (e.g. *balgiz > balgs) nor if there are other changes I missed (I think there might be *-jj- > -dd-?), so help would be appreciated.

I'm trying to prove Tamil is the mother of all languages find resources on Old Tamil but the only things I can find are single chapters in the Routledge and Cambridge volumes. Are there any papers or books that give a more thorough description of the language in English, or is most scholarship on it done in Modern Tamil?

Hawaiian /k/ exhibits free variation between [tk] in native speakers. Does /n/ show [nŋ]?

I'm working on a module for Wiktionary and I'm hit with an output I don't understand.

This is the module in question: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Module:ja-pron-dialectal

And this is the test page: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/User:Vampyricon/ja_dialect_module_test

The problem concerns the first 6 items under "Issues" on the Test page, for which the relevant sections on the Module page should be around line 600 (the part under if dimora ~= 0 then). The first 3 items on the Test page are giving the correct outputs with both the Japanese and Roman characters, as well as the bars. However, the next 3 are incorrect: There should only be one ー after the え, and the Roman letters should look like ee ga, ignoring diacritics.

That is, it currently looks like

• … えーーが [ee ega] …

when it should be

• … えーが [ee ga] …

Again, ignoring diacritics.

It seems to me the problem is at

if n_morae == 1 then
	acc_part.kana = gsub(acc_part.kana, "([%. ]*)$", "ー%1")
end

This is what it currently is, which gives the erroneous output for the second set of 3. However, if I change the search string in gsub to "([%. ]+)$" (swapping out the * for a +), the second set of 3 examples are correct, but the first set of 3 are now wrong, showing

• … え [e] …

instead of the correct

• … えー [ee] …

So it seems like whenever I fix one set, the other breaks. Can anyone figure out why this is the case and tell me how this could be fixed?

I'm working on a module for Wiktionary and I'm hit with an output I don't understand.

This is the module in question: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Module:ja-pron-dialectal

And this is the test page: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/User:Vampyricon/ja_dialect_module_test

The problem concerns the first 6 items under "Issues" on the Test page, for which the relevant sections on the Module page should be around line 600 (the part under if dimora ~= 0 then). The first 3 items on the Test page are giving the correct outputs with both the Japanese and Roman characters, as well as the bars. However, the next 3 are incorrect: There should only be one ー after the え, and the Roman letters should look like ee ga, ignoring diacritics.

That is, it currently looks like

• … えーーが [ee ega] …

when it should be

• … えーが [ee ga] …

Again, ignoring diacritics.

It seems to me the problem is at

if n_morae == 1 then
	acc_part.kana = gsub(acc_part.kana, "([%. ]*)$", "ー%1")

This is what it currently is, which gives the erroneous output for the second set of 3. However, if I change the search string in gsub to "([%. ]+)$" (swapping out the * for a +), the second set of 3 examples are correct, but the first set of 3 are now wrong, showing

• … え [e] …

instead of the correct

• … えー [ee] …

So it seems like whenever I fix one set, the other breaks. Can anyone figure out why this is the case and tell me how this could be fixed?

What I mean is, there are English dialects that still keep most Middle English vowel distinctions apart. The only distinction that I don't think can be fully recovered is between ME /eː ɛː/. However, it seems like every English dialect in the present day has simplified a lot of the consonant clusters such as /kn gn/ > /n/, /wr/ > /r/, etc. Why is that?

I may have the wrong impression here, but what struck me is how it separates out the "nasal vowels", transcribes words with brackets just to put a tilde on the vowel (but not, say, the retractedness of /s/), and such, even though it states vowels are allophonically nasalized before a nasal consonants. I don't really see the point of [fɾãnˈt͡sɛjs fɾãnˈt͡sɔjs ruˈmãnt͡s] over /franˈt͡sɛjs franˈt͡sɔjs ruˈmant͡s/.

Of course, these later (often) turn into Modern French nasal vowels, but at the time being described, it seems completely redundant.

Specifically, why is it placed before Egyptian, which Wikipedia says has the first complete sentence, and from what I could find, the first grammatical particle written down as well?