Zompist Bboard Again

With a view to the ultimate aims of this project: all this is honestly fascinating, but would we integrate this into a new version of the ID ? I particularly worry about citing sources — normally that’s easy, but the source here is merely ‘personal communication from Darren’, and I’d feel extremely...

A short post to note one change that jumped out at me for Papasena: There are five wordlists for Papasena, which have pretty precise phonetic transcriptions and actually make Papasena one of the best documented languages in the family. There seems to be a lot of dialectal variation with regards to t...

Hmm, I’ve had no luck with this. It looks like she’s at the University of Newcastle; they have a thesis collection , but I can’t find Maitland there. I saw one place which listed Bill Palmer as her supervisor, but she isn’t listed on his ‘Supervisors’ page — perhaps because it was a Bachelor’s thes...

I mean, don’t get your hopes up too much. If you can’t access it, probably I won’t be able to either. (By the way, what’s the full citation for the grammar?) Page Maitland 2020, "A grammatical description of Fayu: a Western Lakes Plain language of West Papua". It's on researchgate but no ...

This reminds me, I should get back to working on the LP sound changes. It's a pity that a) the sources are so sparse and b) I can't get my hands on the Fayu grammar which is the only full grammar of a normal LP language rather than the fascinating but somewhat useless outliers of Abawiri and Iau. H...

This reminds me, I should get back to working on the LP sound changes. It's a pity that a) the sources are so sparse and b) I can't get my hands on the Fayu grammar which is the only full grammar of a normal LP language rather than the fascinating but somewhat useless outliers of Abawiri and Iau. (O...

Old Suraic/Late Suraic Enɡlish /ɨ̃lɨʃ lɛ̃wɨʒ/ Urnhlursh Lanhwurzh /p b t̪ d̪ t~h d k~x g/ <p b th dh tt d k g> /tʃ dʒ/ <ch j> /m n/ <m n> /f v s z ʃ ʒ/ <f v s z sh zh> /l ɾ ɹ j w/ <l t> /ɐ ɛ e i ɨ ʏ~œ u o ɔ e͡ɪ/ <u a e i ur oo uh or ol o ee> /ai oi au/ <ai ye oa> + nasal <Vnh> Middle Suraic /s̪uɾaje...

Old Zlang /zjɛɴ/ < Zyxn > /m n ɳ ɲ ŋ ŋʷ ɴ/ < m n nh nr nk nw n > /mb nd ɲɟ ŋg ŋgʷ/ < mb nd ngh ng ngw > /b d ɟ g gʷ/ < b d gh g gw > /p t c k kʷ q qʷ ʔ/ < p t c k kw q qw ' > /pʰ tʰ cʰ kʰ kʷʰ qʰ qʷʰ/ < pp tt cc kk kkw qq qqw > /mbʐ mbʑ ndz ɳdʐ ɲdʑ/ < mbr mbh ndz ndr ndh > /bʐ bʑ dz dʐ dʑ/ < br bh d...

On a completely different tack: is Rousseauian the only English word containing four different vowel letters next to each other? onomatapoeia sequoia Iroquoian If we try hard enough, we can turn sequoia into a verb and past tense it to get "sequoiaed" with all five in a row. In fact, goog...

St Ouennais (probably something like /sẽwɛnɛː/ Sqhwenee ) /p b t d k g/ <p b t d k g> /f v ð s z ʃ ʒ/ <f v dh s z sh zh> /m n ɲ/ <m n nh> /l r j ɥ w/ <l r y wh w> /a ɛ ɐ o i y u ɑ̃ ɛ̃ ẽ ø̃/ <a e x o i j u ah eh qh xh> (/õ ɔ̃/ <oh>) + length <VV(h)> /ø̃n arlvɛː l ɛːtɛ paːsɛ j avɛ ø̃ kupj dɛː moːv dɛ ...

I was looking up the Latin -que and -ve suffixes today – the ones which mean 'and' and 'or' because I'm basically stealing it for a conlang. I'm not all that familiar with Romance languages though and I was wondering if these actually persisted into any modern languages? As far as I know, no, they ...

My BAD-LAD split matches Imralu's pretty closely, except Chad, gad, clad and Brad have BAD (and I think maybe pad does as well, at least for some senses). Other minimal pairs are "can (auxiliary)" /kæn/ vs. "(tin) can" /kæːn/, "Nan" (grandma) /næn/ vs. "Nairne"...

Qalta Edim /t ʈ k/ t tr k /tʼ kʼ ʔ/ z q x /b d ɖ ʤ ɡ/ b d dr j g /m n ɲ/ m n ny /n̥/ nh /s ʃ/ s c /ɬ ɽ̊/ lh rh /w l (ɻ) ɽ j/ w l r r y /i u a/ e o a /iː uː aː/ i u aa (/e o/) e o /ja:kasti iniʃambiʤa baɬkinu tʼaminwalatabi || na:ʃagda idatabi wala ɲanta: ijuʔbiʤa ji:ʈamgi: || na:ʃagda gan̥a idi:m g...

It's weird how germanic languages seem to be predisposed to aspiration of voiceless stops; Grimm's law, the High German consonant shift, allophonic aspiration in numerous descendants at different times. Seems to of happened independently several times. There might be some kind of deeper phonologica...

Interesting! In modern Australian English, aspiration is very pronounced; /t/ (often) and /k/ (sometimes) are affricated to [t͡s k͡x]. I've witnessed people map Mandarin /t͡sʰ/ to plain /t/ rather than /ts/ or /s/. It's weird how germanic languages seem to be predisposed to aspiration of voiceless s...

Just wanted to chime in again to mention that many languages of Papua have a contrast between voiced prenasalized and voiceless aspirated plosives, which are transcribed as voiced vs. voiceless by convention. I recall a footnote in some work on Dani where the author said that he considers Ndani as ...

Digging through Laycock's list on paradisec, he uses symbols <mb̃ mb̃w p̃ p̃w mp̃ p̬̃ p̃ʷ ᵐb̃> which (I assume) represent bilabial trills. The most common ones are <mb̃ mb̃w p̃ p̃w>, which suggests to me a (phonetic?) inventory of [ʙ̥ ᵐʙ ʙ̥ʷ ᵐʙʷ] like Donohue says is phonemic. They're pretty frequen...

Ningera consonants are something else p k b d m n ʙ ʙʷ l w ᵐʙ ᵐʙʷ Like what the fuck? A THIRD of the consonants are bilabial trills?? The source is this , the same one that gives Biritai as /b t d ɸ s/. Donohue's done a lot of work on Papuan languages before so I can't see a reason to doubt him. Th...

Can having a specific set of cases exist as an areal feature? E.g. Languages within an area that are unrelated all possess either an ornative ("with/having x") and privative ("without/lacking x") case, an equative case, or all four. Underlying premise is these cases are more lik...

Ningera consonants are something else p k b d m n ʙ ʙʷ l w ᵐʙ ᵐʙʷ Like what the fuck? A THIRD of the consonants are bilabial trills?? The source is this , the same one that gives Biritai as /b t d ɸ s/. Donohue's done a lot of work on Papuan languages before so I can't see a reason to doubt him.