hakase

Almost half of all English words are borrowed from French, dating from when England was colonized and culturally subjugated by the Norman French starting in 1066.

When we played it you also had to go down on one knee, and the person unfreezing you had to sit on your knee while they flushed your arm.

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.

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.

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.

Case in point.

"Does anyone else... (have trouble finishing video games/use their toenail clippings to add texture to a pot of chili/etc.)?"