Zompist Bboard Again

A more general question: does anyone know of a good crosslinguistic survey of different types of vowel deletion? Either synchronic or diachronic. Oddly enough, a while ago someone recommended one to me in this same thread: Here's a whole dissertation on hiatus resolution: Casali (1996) [pdf] . That...

Another newb question: what is a periphrastic applicative voice? My current conlang has a deep and pervasive love of serial verb constructions, so it would probably have that if it is frequently associated with verb series. I wouldn't know off the top of my head, but I think I could work it out. Ac...

Also, how to design a conlang that sounds energetic and happy-go-lucky. I'm not sure there even is one way of doing this, to be honest - I would second linguistcat in saying that it all depends on your personal sound symbolism. And I would think that something which is 'energetic and happy-go-lucky...

While /k'/ is the most common ejective, It is unusual for a language not to have ejective affricate. In fact, many languages have just /k'/ and ejective affricates. While /p'/ tends to merge with /p/, /t'/ tends to be affricated. That's interesting! I always thought that ejective affricatives were ...

Ah, thanks for alerting me to those typos! They are fixed now. The reason there are only voiceless geminates is because they actually descend from an earlier 'fortis' series, which contrasted with the plain voiceless obstruents as well as the voiced ones. In some dialects they were realized as ejec...

As can be seen above, I'm probably not the best person to review sound changes. But I still have a few questions/clarifications: Old Northwest Shorzhic p t ts tʃ tɕ k pː tː tsː tʃː tɕː kː b d dz dʒ dʑ g ɸ s ʃ ɕ x h ɸː sː β z ʒ ʑ ɣ m n ŋ r l j w i iː u oː ɛ eː ɐ ɐː ɔ oː a aː ɛi ɔu ai au ɔi ɐu The nas...

ʔɐɪ ~ ɔɪd- ~ əː- ~ æɪtʃ < Eng. eat m̊ɐɪ ~ mɔɪd ~ məːt ~ moɪ < Eng. meat vaːðɛːɾæ ~ βɑʒɪteɾjɪː ~ βäːtsəɾn ~ ʋɑːʃɛɾ < Eng. vegetarian A: ʔeːse ɾɛɸɐɪ wæ ʔaː ʒæ sɑ vuːɾ < ? repeat what I just (said?) (before??) B: ɾɛpɔɪd nɑʊ wäd æɪð sɑð < repeat now what I'[d/ve] said C: ɾɛpəːt dʒi nə: wæt æɪd säd ɜt <...

That's Sampa. A lot of people just don't want to spend any extra effort to type IPA. That makes sense. I checked X-SAMPA, but I didn't think to check the original SAMPA. (The {: confused me because I didn't realise the : was a diacritic, so I was looking for {: as a single vowel.) So translating: /...

Well the world's your oyster. Any one of these, or conceivably more than one depending on the vowel sequence, might happen. There are probably other processes that could happen that I'm not thinking of, too. Vowel deletion (with or without compensatory lengthening): **gaʔen → *gaen → ga(ː)n, ge(ː)n...

From earlier, we had this issue: General transcription issue: I'm a colossal idiot. You're quite right, /ʋ/ is a labiodental approximant and is not what I intended in the slightest. Well, not exactly. Where you see /ʋ/, just imagine a /ʉ/ instead (or indeed a /ʉ̞/ would be a bit more accurate, but t...

I have grammars of Aymara and Jaqaru, so I could include information about them. That would be quite interesting too - I've heard they have some fascinating morphophonology. As mentioned on the Arrakum thread on the old board : There is a great deal of fuckery with vowel moras in Arrakum. This is d...

There are many, many examples of inflectional morphology which is irregular or fusional. However, it seems to be fairly rare to have any sort of irregularity in productive derivational morphology (although admittedly I don't have any source for this). Why is this? Do sound changes not affect derivat...

Well, conlanging is an art. Experiment. Try different combinations. Be creative and play with something wacky that's *gasp* unattested in a natural language. Choose the processes that lead to outcomes you find personally appealing, or go with them all and make a language family. Read grammars of la...

Let's say I have a language where vowels are not allowed to be next to each other (is there a technical term for that?); that is, no diphthongs or hiatuses. However, there is a glottal stop, so e.g. /gaʔen/ is allowed. If glottal stops are lost intervocalically (which seems fairly reasonable), what...

Let's say I have a language where vowels are not allowed to be next to each other (is there a technical term for that?); that is, no diphthongs or hiatuses. However, there is a glottal stop, so e.g. /gaʔen/ is allowed. If glottal stops are lost intervocalically (which seems fairly reasonable), what ...

The abstract mechanics of my conscript have developed nicely, but I have no idea what the script should actually look like. Despite my best efforts, I cannot find any inspiration. Have a look at Ian James's scripts ; they're exceptionally good. Mattias Persson has made a lot of scripts as well. Omn...

I think I'll end up doing this: p b t d k ɡ > f v s z x ɣ / V_V Leave as-is x ɣ > j Leave as-is w > v / V_C or V_# Leave as-is æ e i ɯ > e i ɨ ɨ Leave as-is ej > i / _# Leave as-is i > ɨ / j_ or _j Leave as-is s z > ʃ ʒ / _i Modify to include affricatives: s z t͡s d͡z > ʃ ʒ t͡ʃ d͡ʒ consonants next t...

Is it more realistic to turn payt͡se > pat͡ʃːe or peːtse instead? Sorry, that was a typo: I meant pajt͡se > pajːe. That's not what I meant. I mean, Is it more realistic to turn pajt͡se > pat͡ʃːe or peːtse instead? \ Possibly that's true. Really, the problem is that I don't know what natlangs do in ...

If I'm understanding right, in both of those cases you don't get the object marker on the verb if there's a separate pronominal object. That makes them look more like weak pronouns or clitics than like agreement affixes, imo. (My impression is that it's very common for pronominal clitics to get mis...

A bit of a bug... it looks like you can vote twice. On the other hand, I can't vote for three options at once, which at least shows that that bit of code is working properly. EDIT: Oh - looks like that when you vote twice it removes your previous vote before it adds your current vote, so it's not a ...