Topics

Linguistics

• Historical Evolution of Phonology - Language changes can be been looked at as 'sound changes', but this is just looking at the phonetic changes a language goes through. There are problems with looking at historical change like this, as can be seen by theories of phonology, theories of how humans learn language, and thus how language is relearned by every person, and even by evidence from looking comparitively at certain languages and making an attempt to relate them historically.
• The semantics of the phrases "not to mention" and "not so much (as)" and.. other things that I'll remember later and put here; thus the purpose of this being here.
• The whole issue of translation of words with their uses. Words to focus on: Russian быть & Kazakh бол-, Russian лищный (and how it translates to English, along with the problems of doing that), English optional (and how it has two readings, similar to translations of лищный: "not required", and "not not necessarily unnecessary" ... "Using an explicit subject is optional--especially when..." This is "not required". "Using an explicit subject is optional--even when..." hm.. well, I need to look at this more closely at some point).
  • I wrote a paper on this as it relates to machine translation: Media:translation.pdf.
• Reduced vowels (see Wikipedia:Unstressed_vowel), how they mess with metric systems (in terms of syllables and feet), how they are dealt with in terms of OT versus that theory that deals with filling in gaps between consonants with default vowels (and whose name I forget). American English (especially certain dialects, such as my own) and Kazakh are good languages to work with on this issue—Kazakh especially because it can be compared to Kyrgyz which behaves somewhat differently in this respect. (In some ways, Ukrainian compared to Russian can be looked at the same way?). I've begun gathering some data in English at JNW's_English#/ɩ/ (vs. /ə/ & /ɪ/).

Language-Specific

• Is Yiddish an Eastern Germanic language? - I don't think so, but I'm gathering evidence for and against here.
• The Weirdnesses of Yiddish Indirect Questions - Why they're strange, and an addressing of L2-acquisition issues that have to do with this.
• X-mX Language Game in Russian (and Kazakh!) and its implications for Russian consonant clusters
• The [truly?] asymetrical vowel harmony issue in Nez Perce

Turkic

• Rederiving of Proto-Turkic
• Linguistic aspects of bilingualism in Kazakhstan
• The asymetrical vowel harmony issue in [Northern] Kyrgyz (Kypchak rounding harmony)
• The equivalent issue in Kazakh (Kypchak rounding harmony)
• The form "qabağan" from the Kazakh verb qab- that should be "qabqan" (as with tab- › "tabqan")
• How to determine the phoneme which word (verb, noun) roots in Kazakh "actually" end with when the final phoneme is a b/p(/w), ğ/q, g/k
• The phonological and syntactical oddities of Kazakh's question particle in comparison to, say, Uzbek
• Which of Kazakh's (and other Turkic languages') "cases" are actually cases, and which are postpositions
• Kazakh Syntax Topics
• Sonority constraints in Turkic languages — consonant assimilation and dissimilation (just gathering data here for now)
• Turkic words that shouldn't be as they are

Anthropology

• Anthropological aspects of bilingualism in Kazakhstan

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