Zompist Bboard Again

Surely in the IPA ʝ˕ just is j.

Is the idea that you've got i~y and j~ɥ, and are wondering if you could write them both as ɩ? I don't see why not.

And once again I find myself wishing I knew more about Arabic. Some of the cases exemplify a different sort of pattern that's interesting to me---the cases in which (as far as I can tell) the past-active and the present-passive are distinguished only by the agreement affixes. It's sort of a combinat...

I'd actually be curious to know more about what markers tend to fuse with what. Like, I'm pretty sure it's most common to have subject agreement and tense (or tense/aspect?) marking fuse; and I'm pretty sure that having all of agreement, TAM, and valency markers get fused is pretty unusual; but it w...

Just to add slightly, it's a bit easier to see how you get a suffix in a verb-final language like Japanese, since whether "do" (or "suru") is a suffix or a light verb, it'll come after the thing it's verbalising. I was also thinking about "throw"---like you could take t...

One possibility would be to borrow only nouns, and then use them in a light verb construction (e.g., with a verb meaning do---Japanese mostly does this, for example).

Is it 'unrealistic' for people across hundreds of miles of China to have been speaking Chinese for thousands of years? I was going to say this is wildly unrealistic, but I don't know how restrictive that "hundreds of miles" is supposed to be. But the real reason to mention this is that th...

Didn't chris_notts also have one? The documentation I found for IPA Zounds ( here ) doesn't suggest a way to handle stress. I've managed it fairly neatly in Phonix ( here ), though it's still not directly supported. Something that parsed words into syllables the way Phonix does, but then allowed you...

Raphael wrote: ↑Wed Oct 02, 2019 10:14 am Conlanging-related computer question, because I'm feeling lazy:

That's easy to do with basic programming. If you want to PM me a list of the vowels and consonants, I could do it for you, if you want.

Do you have stress? If you do, that should provide some ways to get what you want. Something like: target unstressed syllables, but exempt initial or final syllables. E.g., suppose you've got primary stress on the second syllable. Then you could have a change that deletes the vowel in the third syll...

Another possibility is "archiphoneme," maybe.

I'll give it a try! (Soon, I promise.) But first you get this post about nouns. Maybe it includes some implied word-building? Oops, and also: I've made up my mind about tone, there's a marked high tone, which I'll transcribe with acute accents. There's some funny business, which I'll be trying out i...

Vowels Okay, I've decided. Nðaḥaa̯ has four vowel phonemes, which I'll mostly transcribe as i e a o . (Maybe ɐ would be more accurate for a .) o has u as a fairly common allophone, especially word-finally and next to velars. Pharyngealised alveolars, along with q , lower a preceding high vowel, mer...

Okay, forget about ɴ . It was silly to try contrasting it with ŋ . And I used the symbol ʕ̞ , which doesn't make any sense (whatever a pharyngeal approximant is, it's not a lowered pharyngeal fricative). When I want to transcribe a pharyngeal approximant, I'll just write it as a̯ or ɑ̯ . I'm still f...

If I had to choose between relative clauses and participles I think it's more common to say that a language uses participles as relative clauses, rather than instead of relative clauses. (I'm pretty sure I've seen relative clauses defined as verb forms that get used like adjectives, especially attr...

Thanks! Akiatu itself was actually supposed to be fairly peripheral to the main goings-on in the conworld. (It's still a bit peripheral, though a lot less so, both geographically and world-historically.) The project as a whole has a fairly broad geographic spread (I generally say "subcontinent,...

Yeah, that paragraph was there largely because I was struck by the fact (if it's a fact) that pharyngeal vowel lowering doesn't pattern nicely with ATR distinctions. Not really surprised, I so far don't know enough that any of this stuff can be really surprising, but I did find it striking. (Fun fac...

I seem to have run out of steam with Vædty Qyṣ. Here's an inventory I'm liking at the moment. Let's say for now that the language is called Nðɑħɑɑ̯ . lab dent alv alv+phar postalv vel uv phar glot m n̪ð n nˤ ɲ ŋ ɴ p t̪θ t tˤ t̠ɕ k q ʔ b d̪ð d dˤ d̠ʑ g θ s sˤ ɕ χ ħ h β~ʋ ð~l z~ɹ xˤ~ɹˤ ʑ~j ʁ~ʁ̞ ʕ~ʕ̞ T...

That reminds me, still have to send you my English translations---so you'll know what I thought I was reading in Vijay's Turkish, and what I thought I was writing in my Chinese. (But I can't see getting to it tonight.)

We'll see! In the end I think I figured it out reasonably well.

Some bits were definitely odd---I'm very curious to see what you made of them!