Zompist Bboard Again

I suppose I can see Akanga's point now about different slots - the passive marker for (say) the infinitive in naskun goes after the active infinitive ending (ie a different slot). To send = naskun; to be sent = naskun-ur not (which was my other option) nask-ugh-un. I had just wanted something diffe...

Pabappa, the whole point of Object-Oriented Programming, is that the meaning of a polysemous verb, is controlled better by the nature of its object, than by the nature of its agent. Does that affect your thinking about what you’re trying to do? As a programmer-in-training, this is false. In OOP, th...

Halkomelem, /kʼ/ is not something you use for baby talk.

Okay, probably not for question after all, but I do think we need a separate thread for discussing conlang ideas.

Didn’t there used to be a thread like this? This thread is for people to post ideas about the grammar, or morphology, or syntax, or morphosyntax, of possible conlangs. They may not have yet named or completed the conlang. Or they may not yet have decided which conlang to use the idea(s) in. We alre...

Why dental stop is often voiceless while alveolar stop is often voiced? In Indonesia, there's dental/alveolar asymmetry like that. In kayardild, /t̪/ is never voiced.

Anyone making a language with a relative pronoun? I used to make one, but I abandoned it. The diachronic is as follows. Initially, the language has a symmetric voice and nominative-accusative alignment. Pronoun is obligatory for relative clause, except if the subject is the thing that is relativized...

Using Case-Endings and Postpositions and Prepositions to Mark Case-Like Stuff Imagine a language with a few case-endings and a few postpositions and a few prepositions. Imagine the following are true: * any noun-phrase can be used with no case-ending and no postposition and no preposition. * any no...

[*] Wikipedia mentions pulmonic ingressives as well, but I don’t know how to pronounce them, and they seem quite rare in any case. That's exactly what I'm asking. And apparently, it's actually common, although exclusively paralinguistic. Well, as Pabappa said, you pronounce those by talking while b...

Clicks are easy — many languages have them in interjections, and I suspect that most people can pronounce them without any training. (Of course, this may differ for you; if so, please reply and I’ll try to explain how to pronounce them.) Yeah, it's easy. Implosives are quite a bit trickier. I’d exp...

How do you pronounce an ingressive consonant? I can't do it without making it having a strange voice, like snoring.

Thanks, Akangka. I'll think about the final forms. Before I post Aéhoi Creole's redone inventory, I have a question about phone classification. As commonly-used words can behave unexpectedly (the as [ðə], not [θə]), are <c> unconditionally shifting [p͡ʔ → ʔ] and <h> shifting [ɴ̥͡ɱ̊ → ɴ̥] before <u,...

What makes a part of speech distinct? In my language adjective is conjugated much like a verb (person-number, and also TAM, albeit restricted, diminutive/augmentative, and egophoricity) and modifies a noun with a structure like those of verb. However, it participates in resultative construction, and...

Also, while I don't know whether dental /n̪/ is realistic, why don't you palatize /n/ to /ɲ/ and simply not touching it in later sound changes?

After I read this article, it says that this change is not natural:

*C > 0 / _#

But why?

In both cases this is dental [t̪j] and not alveolar [tj] though, which could be relevant: dentals tend to resist palatalization better than alveolars. Thanks Tropylium, that's good to know! I wonder---could it make any sense to have dental t̪ and n̪ alongside alveolar d and s ? (I want sj to end up...

Then I see plothole. If your nagaji's mouth were human too, there's no need for alien morphology. One of the Empire's languages has four plosive series; tenuis ([p], etc.), aspirated ([pʰ], etc.), voiced ( b , etc.), and labiovelarized breathy ([bʷʱ~bʱʷ], etc.). Aside from merger and fricativization...

ʔ → ŋ / [+nasal+vowel] _ I don't know, but if you do Ṽ → Vŋ ŋʔ → ŋ Vŋ → Ṽ / _{C, #} It should be possible. However, there's a problem if your language allows something like ãʔka as the result is ãka, not *aŋka. [+vowel]ʔ[+vowel] → [+long] / _ Yes, just delete the glottal stop and resolve the result...

Does English even have geminates? Yes, but accross morpheme like ba ck k ick, thi s s addle, mi dd ay. There is no geminate morpheme internally. Phonemically, it's a cluster of two identical consonant from different morpheme, though. Also, what is a fun thing one can do with the English diphthongs ...

Do anyone has free resource of PIE morphology? I only found two book. One is Late PIE. And the others concerns more of culture than morphology