Unless you’re talking about Scots, the closest languages to English are separated by at minimum more than a thousand years, which is plenty of time for those constraints to change significantly.

I’d even expect different dialects of English to behave differently when adapting loanwords, because they already show plenty of phonotactic differentiation.

I have a private theory about that, actually (that is, not backed up by research yet to my knowledge).

I think this is due to accidental gaps, that some languages allow for clusters that just don’t happen to appear in those languages by an accident of history (e.g. they allowed them at one point but they were eliminated by a phonotactic filter that no longer exists in the language, etc.), so when they borrow a word with that string now, they can pronounce it no problem.

If you think about phonotactic constraints as being the result of constant rankings (as in models like Optimality Theory), this should even be predicted as a form of Emergence of the Unmarked (though stop clusters are pretty marked, so this would be more like “local” or “coincidental” unmarkedness).

I also think that studying borrowing adaptations like this would give us a more accurate picture of the overall constraint ranking of a given language than just restricting ourselves to native words.

Not on lemmy.ml there isn’t!

What actually happened is that these roots were borrowed from Ancient Greek by paleontologists to form the word “pterodactyl”, not modern Greek.

In Ancient Greek, they would have pronounced both the “p” and the “t”, but “pt” isn’t a possible beginning of a word for English speakers, and so borrowed words that start with “pt-” (and “mn-” and a few others) have the first sound deleted as a repair mechanism to allow English speakers to pronounce them.

In modern Greek, “pt” consonant clusters that used to be pronounced as-is have undergone dissimilation - both “p” and “t” are stop consonants, so the “p” has instead become an “f” (which is a fricative, not a stop), to make the cluster easier to pronounce.

Qualcomm really does want to become Intel.

Just bought $50 of merch off their website – this is the sort of journalism we should all be supporting.

That’s about a pound of cheese every two days. Pretty sure I could hit that number without any trouble at all.

And 5 was a significant downgrade from 4.

I’m still playing civ IV. With the direction the series has been going, it looks like I probably always will.

Thou seest me rolling, thou’rt hating.

Upvoted for the appropriate Salt and Sanctuary reference.

Eh, letter’s height to width ratio looks better.

No, I have it the right way around. Artificial languages can be irregular, so your order doesn’t follow.

No regular language can be natural, though, so if you come across a regular language, you can always correctly conclude that it’s artificial through modus tollens:

“If a language is natural, then it is not regular. This language is regular, therefore it is not natural.”

Lots of !badlinguistics in this thread (but some goodlinguistics too though!).

You must resent every single natural human language then, since all of them show the exact same kinds of irregularities, for the most part.

And, if we all did decide to use Esperanto because it’s regular (and therefore artificial), irregularities would inevitably be introduced within a single generation, because the nature of human language is to change, and that change will always result in irregularity.

I’m an older millennial and I have no idea who Cypress Hill is.

Since you’re getting blasted here, I just wanted to hop on the downvote train to let you know that I think you’re exactly right on all counts.

TIL we actually live on the Bionis

We really need to stop using lemmy.ml for main subs like “memes”.

Like go ahead and argue for an end to misandristic violence if you’d like.

Nah, I’ll go ahead and argue for an end to all violent crime, and not exclude the victims who aren’t lucky enough to have their gender be the reason they were murdered.

I’ve never understood this prevalent idea that murder victims are only worth caring about if their gender played a role. Like, how horribly fucked-up is it to say that some murder victims are more worthy of concern than others, especially when those victims only comprise a small minority of murders?

Being killed because of your gender and being killed because you were in the wrong place or because you looked like an easy mark are all equally bad reasons to murder someone. They’re also all phenomena that could just as easily be addressed by government programs like in the OP, and yet all we ever hear about is the “violence against women” epidemic that only affects a minority of victims.

Plus, even if the numbers of women murdered for their gender is going up (which is obviously horrible and inexcusable), that number still has a long way to go before it even approaches the much higher number of men who are already being killed every year. Like, of course it’s a horrible thing that the number of murdered women is increasing, but I fail to see how that’s so much more important than the much higher number of men who are already being killed, but that nobody is doing anything about.

I mean, the reason for it is the same as it always is - men are seen as disposable by society and therefore issues affecting them are ignored - it just sucks to constantly be inundated with evidence of just how deeply ingrained this misandry is in our society.