Zompist Bboard Again

Did you ever use "rubber" for erasers?

But when the tests work... So even when both "verbs" and "adjectives" can stand alone as predicates, form relative clauses or become attributive with 的 b de /b But, as I said, not all Mandarin adjectives can stand alone as predicates, and many get a comparative sense when they do...

There isn't really a whole lot to report so far, other than a reminder that Mandarin (all of Sinitic? can anybody who knows Canto chime in?) adjectives are really just stative verbs. There are, afaik, virtually no real tests to distinguish the two that aren't strongly contrived. There remains an im...

Xwtek wrote: ↑Sun Oct 20, 2019 8:41 am I wonder how do you pronounce my profile name. I pronounce it: [xʷtɛ̀k]

Exactly as I clicked on the thread to check your comment, I wondered if it was supposed to be something like [xɯ.tek].

Yeah, that's the sort of phonetic background I'm thinking of. Do you think it could make a difference that those are cases where it's an alveolar that's getting retroflexed? Which is to say, they're apical → apical. (Assuming I've got RUKI right.) (Possibly relevant: Mandarin, which does about this,...

Is vowel-conditioned retroflex~palatal allomorphy something lots of languages do, or am I too much under the influence of Mandarin? (You might prefer to say "postalveolar" or something rather than "palatal"; however you think of ɕ . E.g., maybe you'd have ɕi and ʂu , but not ɕu o...

That's fair.

Interesting! Looking into this a bit further, it seems that Niger-Congo consists of Atlantic-Congo (which comprises the vast majority of languages in it) plus Dogon, Mande, Ijoid, Kordofanian and a few others. Wikipedia and Glottolog both imply that Atlantic-Congo is fairly widely accepted, which w...

Thank you!

Does nʷ → n̪, tʷ → t̪, sʷ → s̪ → θ make any kind of sense?`

I seem to like Nðaḥaa enough that it might be a while before I have it sorted out enough for more posting, so much for a little sketch. One thing is that I'm fairly set on having most noun and verb stems include nominalising and verbalising morphology, the nominalisers specifying gender and the verb...

This might help: https://www.google.com/search?q=rock+on&tbm=isch.

Some more checking. The Bowern grammar of Bardi doesn't hint at what those might be. j̪ appears to be a laminodental approximant in the Pama-Nyungan languages I was able to check (e.g., in Blevins's grammar of Nhanda). The wikipedia page on alveolar approximants has a bunch of false positives, and I...

If the question was about my suggestion, the suggestion didn't really involve tone. The idea was that if lower pitch is one of the phonetic cues to voicing, then if something else results in lower pitch, then that could be misinterpreted as a voicing cue. Or something like that, not really sure how ...

You can get 加拿大 abbreviated too, at least in 加幣 (Canadian dollar). I'm pretty sure I've also seen it in a shop name or something like that.

Those first few examples break my IPA. But will risk checking further.

Checking Xumi quickly finds that /ʐɹ̩ / is a possible syllable (^RPlɐ-ʐɹ sleep; RP is a "right-prominent" tonal melody). (Chirkova et al, Upper Xumi.)

I wonder if it could be a factor that pharyngeal consonants, like voiced consonants in general, tend to lower pitch on neighbouring vowels. Maybe that could lead to the cluster as a whole being heard as voiced? ...If at the same time aspirated plosives tend to raise pitch, you could also see how the...

Are there languages with 'plain' apical alveolar approximants? I mean without retroflexion or pharyngealisation/uvularisation/bunching or rounding. Update . I shouldn't have posted without checking at least the obvious. PHOIBLE has just one language contrasting ɹ and ɻ ; the Reichard grammar indicat...

TurkeySloth wrote: ↑Fri Oct 11, 2019 2:39 am Though, please be careful when you separate phonemes or phones with a tilde because it, actually, symbolizes free variation, which was never true of the family's /i, y/ phonemic pair.

The tilde is also regularly used in cases of conditioned alternation.

Interesting. The fact that they're in complementary distribution, at least in Spanish, maybe makes it a bit complicated, but the argument looks pretty good to me.