Zompist Bboard Again

It's possible to have hangups in a first language that don't carry over to a second language, I think.

Sakha my conlang, not Sakha the natlang. I think it'd be a good idea to call your conlang something other than the name of a natlang that gets talked about a fair bit in linguistics. :P It does? I can't remember ever once seeing it mentioned in any linguistics work or conference talk. Yeah, it's me...

That's awesome, Xwtek.

I wish it were easier to find substantial recordings of transcribed speech in arbitrary languages. (Or that I was better at finding them.)

Ser wrote: ↑Fri Nov 22, 2019 6:11 pm If anybody was curious, guisa is a Germanic loan meaning "way, manner" (cognate with clockwise), so a guisa de traidor 'in the manner of a trator, like a traitor', en todas guisas 'anyway' lit. "in all ways".

Also "guise"?

Thanks! Maybe I'll just go with what sounds right to me, for the general pattern anyway.

I like the idea of having the result sometimes be an unpredictable w. (Standard Average Akam has lots of w.)

If a language resolves vowel hiatus with epenthetic glides, and uses both j. or w for this, what's more likely (assuming the vowels are i e a o u )? You get w before o u , otherwise j . You get w after o u , otherwise j . You get w if either flanking vowel is o u , otherwise j . Something else. (My ...

I'm not sure I'm fully awake yet, but here are some reactions. So what stands out is that you've got something akin to a grammatical voice one of whose purposes is to let the speaker encode a variety of distinctions related to intimacy, respect, deference, register, and so on; and to encode it via c...

I remember third-grade Logo! (Okay, "remember" might be the wrong word.) I also remember Basic with line numbers.

I've ended up doing most of my (hobbyist) programming in C, though there was a point at which I was thinking about using an SCA project to develop my Haskell.

I was just looking at the inventories that PHOIBLE says contrast /ɨ/ and /ɯ/---madness! In what way exactly is that madness? Are you referring to the general unreliability of PHOIBLE, or something else? (... snip ...) So far, I only found one language with both /ɨ/ and /ɯ/ (Bora), and it has a vowe...

This looks really interesting! I'm trying to work out something that'll probably family-resemble your species/class system, so I'll look at that carefully, at least. (But not quite yet, I've just crossed the Pacific, and have not yet really woken up.)

almost no language contrasts /ɨ/ and /ɯ/ I was just looking at the inventories that PHOIBLE says contrast /ɨ/ and /ɯ/---madness! My impression is that phonologists usually treat /ɨ/ as [-front], grouping it with back vowels; don't know how sensitive that is to sound-change patterns, though, and I'm...

For more than you probably want about suppletive superlatives, there's Bobaljik, Universals in Comparative Morphology: Suppletion, superlatives, and the structure of words . A couple of take-aways: superlative suppletion is vanishingly rare outside of "a Greater European area"; and if eith...

Some worlding So I'm going to start trying to set out some of what I know about the world in which these languages are spoken. Blanket disclaimer: I know vanishingly little about most of the things you need to know to do this well (e.g., physical geography). Sometimes that means I leave things pret...

Generally speaking, is it acceptable to pair [ç] with [ʑ], despite the difference in sibilance, because [ʝ] sounds more similar to [j] than [ʑ], or could [ʑ] be articulated weakly enough to be [ʑ̞] rather than a strict [ʝ]? Hall, The Phonology of Coronals , has ɕ ʑ patterning with coronals and ç ʝ ...

Salmoneus wrote: ↑Thu Nov 07, 2019 3:11 pm I have finally (or arguably 'again') finished a rough draft of a description of the syntax of basic verbal clauses in Rawàng Ata...

I'd be eager to read that, if you're making it public.

Some morphosyntax and some prosody (Spamming today, sorry! But this is the last one.) So Nðaḥaa is a verb-initial language with no case-marking and a somewhat peculiar ergative agreement system. In this post I'll set out some basics. The verb template The full verb template will look something like...

Pronoun table I'm going to post this so it's all in one place. I won't be talking about all of it right away, but it shouldn't be too long. erg/poss erg+pfv abs free +ŋ +di +tal +ges 1s ŋ ŋi wo bów ŋoŋ nzi ntal ŋges 1+2p éjé(s) éjés i- heŋ ikáŋ éjéŋ éjézi éjétál éjégés 1p al~að al i-, aθ je jaj alb...

Pharyngeals, again, and tone, again My head's really not been in conlanging for the last month or so. One issue is that every time I come back to this I run up against my own ignorance about how pharyngeals work. I'm slowly working on that, but it'll be a while, and in the meantime I'd really like ...

Maybe? Though at the end of the day, at best he's got a reasonably good question, something you might ask after a conference presentation on a language you don't really know anything about. That's a pretty slim basis for the accusation that someone, along with the research tradition she supposedly r...

Vijay wrote: ↑Sun Nov 03, 2019 9:26 pm In what way was Falun Gong ever a rebellion, or in what way did it ever support one?

The idea is that that's the rationale, not that it's true.