The CBB

Well, I'm not an avid fantasy reader, so I don't have a lot to compare it to. I'm just used to Tolkien-esque fantasy where the map is a small insert on the book flap that shows a single west or east-facing coastline with little hamlets labeled and not much realism (let's face it, Tolkien is an excel...

Maybe it's too much of a cliché by this point, but A Song of Ice and Fire by George R. R. Martin , better known as "Game of Thrones". Aside from the fact that this series will probably never be finished, the world-building is incredible. It isn't just a snippet of a country, a single coast...

Is there any real difference between "may" and "might" in a present tense sentence? I understand "might" as the past tense of "may", but in a present tense sentence indicating possibility, I don't recognize any difference between the two and I'm noticing my ch...

Wow, Üdj, are you really that young? That's cool that you're into conlanging at such a young age. That's around the time I made my first attempts, but it was mainly because I'd started studying Latin in middle school and most of my first attempts were fairly run-of-the-mill Romlangs (just with more ...

I mean for god's sake, Wikipedia lists nine major pronounciations of deirfiúr (sister), and none of them, not one reflects the spelling! I mean, you'd think that with nine pronunciations at least one of them would match the spelling even if only by coincidence, but no! If you were trying to confuse...

I'm glad to see Brazilian Portuguese on your list. It's one of my favorites as well. I just love the way it sounds and I've begun studying it, with the help of a native speaker friend. It's gotten to the point where I'm finding myself pronouncing Spanish or English words as if they were Brazilian Po...

Probably something similar going on with the pronunciation of "Derby", "Berkley", and dialectical American "bear" (homophonous with "bar").

Pissed off at the National Spelling Bee. https://spellingbee.com/round-results/1 As you can see, Reid's spelling was "sopaipilla". They said the correct spelling is "sopapilla", without the first i. According to Merriam-Webster Unabridged -- the official fictionary for the NSB -...

eldin raigmore wrote: ↑26 Apr 2023 19:16

KaiTheHomoSapien wrote: ↑26 Apr 2023 17:19 Haha. To be clear, I didn't know that "nesonymy" was a real word, but it seems it has some usage. I thought maybe I'd coined it.

Look at page 76 of this

Oh cool. I do seem to be interested in onomastics.

Haha. To be clear, I didn't know that "nesonymy" was a real word, but it seems it has some usage. I thought maybe I'd coined it.

^That's the study of Italian island names.

Are most of the names of the Greek Islands of Pre-Greek origin? Is there a database somewhere with etymologies of the island names? I guess this field would be called "nesonymy".

I encountered it recently in a YouTube video when someone mentioned The "Woof" of Wall Street. The only other place I can specifically remember hearing it is the Angry Video Game Nerd, who consistently says woof, including "werewoof". Hah. "The Woof of Wall Street" is ...

Thanks for the answers [:)] I pronounce the L's in both "palm" and "almond"; where I'm from (Contra Costa County), not pronouncing the L in "almond" sounds weird. I don't pronounce the L's in "folk" and "yolk", though. But one of my grandmothers pron...

Is pronouncing the /l/ in words like "folk", "palm", and "almond" a feature of a regional dialect or is it just idiosyncratic? I pronounce the "l" in all these words, but many people don't. Pronouncing the /l/ in "folk" is even considered nonstandard...

I think "drunk" works as a past participle for me, but I understand the semantic reasons behind "drunk" meaning "inebriated" replacing the past participle usage. There's still no real parallel in English of the Russian example, but I guess "go/went" suppletion...

The article doesn't explain it; that's why I'm asking. [:)] Here's a link to the article, if anyone's interested: https://www.academia.edu/20056034/Defectiveness_typology_and_diachrony I know we may never know, but I'm always interested in the reasons behind irregularity. Irregularity is one of the ...

Interesting discussion. I hadn't thought about those English examples. And I can understand how verbs are more commonly defective than nouns and how it more commonly affects an entire category rather than one inflectional form missing (perhaps the Russian example is exceptional).

Why does the Russian noun мечта́ (fantasy, daydream, dream) have no genitive plural? This word is a classic example of defectiveness and I first learned about it from reading a paper on defectiveness. For some reason, there's just no genitive plural of this noun, and the genitive plural of a differe...

How come in so many countries around the world, their stop signs say "stop", borrowed from English (I've seen it rendered into Cyrillic and Greek as well)? Has this always been the case, was it a later adoption, at what point was the word "stop" borrowed from English into so many...