Zompist Bboard Again

Let me chime in---I don't have the background to offer any useful feedback, but I read it all and was fascinated.

Can the glottal stop do anything other than disappearing or turning into /h/? Not much, really...glottal stops are pretty much the end of the line. Maybe turning into epiglottals or something very close, which could then maybe do other things? But I'm not aware offhand of any actual examples of tha...

But other transformations can get at "book", e.g. anaphors: "I have a red book and you have a green one." You could be right about that, though it doesn't really look like a case of movement, and I'm not sure what else "transformation" could mean in this context. Well,...

It seems like it's all back in Minimalism. There are certainly people doing things very reminiscent of generative semantics, down to abstract CAUS morphemes (like kill = CAUS dead ). In a way my favourite is the analysis of have as be with an incorporated preposition; I don't think that goes back t...

Though Mandarin is unusually suited to that approach Why do you think this is? Just that I think it's fairly rare to have multiple tones, with their pitch contours mapping so easily onto distinct common diacritics. Though actually, if you use -h to distinguish the low register (as in the Yale roman...

My first choice for tones is diacritics that match the tone contour, as in pinyin Though Mandarin is unusually suited to that approach, and really only if you think of its low tone in terms of the contour it gets when spoken in isolation. I mean, if you've just got a marked high tone, a macron is g...

Thanks StrangerCoug and missals!

And missals, that's a great idea.

I thought that all groups of words, of length 3 or more, have an underlying binary tree structure, whose nodes can be a single word, a branching point, or the null set? At least according to some theories of syntax. Not very well versed in any syntax theory, though. That's wrong on at least two lev...

Also, the traditional description of Spanish describes the ñ and hard-y sounds as palatal ɲ and ɟʝ , but the ch sound as a postalveolar tʃ . I am a native speaker and I don't perceive any difference in the point of articulation of the three consonants. I'd rather describe ch as " cç " or ...

Suppose that a language allows all the following nasal+plosive clusers between vowels: mp np mt nt mk ŋk What I'm wondering is whether it would make sense for homorganic nasals to be preserved, but nonhomorganic nasals to drop, nasalising the preceding vowel: ampa → ampa anpa → ãpa amta → ãta anta →...

Having a near-me / near-you / over-there distinction in demonstratives is fairly common, I think. I don't remember seeing an inclusive-1+2 version (near us), but I agree it seems reasonable (and a reasonable guess how to interpret the distinctions drawn in the Bantu grammar).

I'd guess so, yeah---broad enough in use that it's not just a genitive, but not so broad as you can think of it as a general attributiviser or relative clause marker. Like English "of" (and Mandarin "de 的", for that matter), but unlike ezāfe, it forms a constituent with the modif...

From the README: • Conkey supports only Latin scripts (not including the IPA). If it's aimed at conlangers, why is the IPA not included? That seems like a strange design decision to me... (In my own custom keyboard layout, I am using the Caps Lock key to switch from Latin mode to IPA mode, with the...

I think I've seen such things called associative markers or associative particles. "Linker" is probably safe, too.

Some of the things you mention are common---no one should bat an eye at SVO word order, fusion of TAM and person marking, or a lack of an inclusive/exclusive distinction. It's not as if you're talking about a "have" perfect or inflecting relative pronouns. Maybe the closest you come to som...

Thanks for the comment! I'll start my response with a bit more about how I'm imagining grammatical gender interacting with semantic gender in Iqę́hhǫ, initially restricting attention to words for human beings. Some words will (by Iqę́hhǫ lights) refer specifically to women or girls---including eppe ...

Nouns and simple noun phrases 1. Gender There are two grammatical genders, feminine and neuter (F and N in glosses). There's a lot I don't know about how semantic gender works in this society and language. As you'd expect, nouns referring specifically to female humans will usually be feminine, and ...

Phonology ( I'm going to put older posts between more tags to make it easier to scroll to the latest post. ) This'll be fairly bare bones, just enough to get started. Eventually I should come back and put in lots of examples, but not right now. 1. Inventory 1.1. Consonants Labial Dental Alveolar Pa...

Introduction to Iqę́hhǫ Here's a thread for the language Iqę́hhǫ and related matters. Iqę́hhǫ is supposed to represent a large family of languages spoken in the areas surrounding the lower reaches of the Akiatu River---ideally it would be the ancestor of that family, but I seem incapable of doing a...

Aporia? (Impasse?)