Zompist Bboard Again

Quick Quiz, how do you render these? I realize some of these are not the most natural way to phrase these statements, but bear with me. The Tongolese delegation to the UN storms out of the chamber: "Tonga _ leaving." Seven family members sit down to dinner: "The family _ gathering.&q...

Biblical Hebrew had all of /p ħ ʕ kʼ/--and [ɣ] counting begadkefet. My guess would be Akkadian. And there's a strong suspicion that ayin additionally represented a phoneme like [ɣ] in words like the name of Gaza down to the time of the Septuagint. Yes, Biblical Hebrew probably retained PS /x ɣ/ for...

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: /...

It was *libb- in Proto-Semitic, but IMO there isn't any particular reason to assign the Proto-Semitic noun to a "root," since it was a primary noun -- not derived from anything else and with an unpredictable and meaningless vowel. In those daughter languages which have derived verbs from i...

Ooh, nice! I say go for it.

I don't think any of the changes proposed are unrealistic, with one possible exception; Akangka's point that ts, dz might be expected to undergo the same palatalization process as s, z is certainly true, but it doesn't mean they must . However, the EVERY C1 becomes the geminate in C1C2 clusters chan...

I'm working on a naming language at the moment and would like it to have clicks in it. What hasn't been observed, as far as my quick scan of the replies revealed, is that it would be pretty unrealistic if people speaking languages without any clicks, would use names that have them. And if you need ...

Don't know where else to put this, but the connection of Arabic qalb 'heart' with the homophonous verbal noun from qalaba 'turn, change' just doesn't make semantic sense to me. And from what I can see on wikipedia a lot of Mehri forms, including the word for 'heart', have some kind of ḥa- prefix. W...

Sure, although not all of them as equally widespread. "Wine/vine" is maybe the best example: Indo-European (including multiple borrowings within IE), Semitic, and Kartvelian at least all seem to share the word although no one can apparently agree on which family it originated in. (Historic...

(a) do some basic research on what kinds of sound changes are common cross-linguistically -- many of the questions posted in this thread concern incredibly common types of sound change As someone who struggles a bit with thinking up interesting yet plausible sound changes, what resources can I use ...

Is the sound change that occurs word finally but not clause finally realistic? I want some language to have a differentiated adjective-noun declension when the proto-language has them identical. A sound change that occurs clause finally but not word finally seems reasonable, as that is what appears...

The paper cedh linked had no > nope as an example of one of those changes. That's not an actual example of a sound change u# > up#, though, even discounting the vowel height. The paper specifically notes that that's a one-off, irregular development in an interjection, the kind of words that are mos...

The paper cedh linked had no > nope as an example of one of those changes. That's not an actual example of a sound change u# > up#, though, even discounting the vowel height. The paper specifically notes that that's a one-off, irregular development in an interjection, the kind of words that are mos...

Sort of related to the nature of this thread: I can't find the ZBB thread wherein people discuss how i > k and u > p in some coda environment. Does anybody know where it is? I don't know where to find that thread, but here's a paper talking about such a type of sound change , although it lists /k/ ...

Well for one thing, Everett wasn't the first linguist to work on or write about Piraha, so he came to the task with an inherited transcriptional tradition (although his differing analyses of various aspects of the phonology led him to change some of those). Arlo Heinrichs in 1964 wrote the vowel as ...

Firstly, how common is it to have a phonology with /x/, but no /h/? What about a [x~h] morpheme with realisation dependent on position? This is normal; a prominent example is Mandarin. (Admittedly you won't go far with the assumption that if it happens in Mandarin phonology then it must be normal.)...

Is it attested to have phonemic /ŋ q/ but lack phonemic /ɴ/? Yes, that's attested in multiple languages (take Jakaltek as one random example), because both /ŋ/ and /q/ are vastly more common phonemes than /ɴ/ is; /ɴ/ is virtually non-existent. UPSID and PHOIBLE and WALS are all unreliable in detail...

I'm comfortable saying that a pure change of Ø > k outside of that sort of epenthesis in clusters is impossible, and ditto for any other Ø > obstruent [including nasals] change. The only sort of Ø > consonant change you can have at all is either epenthesis in clusters like that, or epenthesis of a ...