Zompist Bboard Again

Wrt the /e ə o a/ vowel system, it's attested in Upper Chehalis (according to wikipedia) and Chinook Jargon, although /e o/ alternated with [i~ɪ~e~ɛ~æ u~ʊ~o~ɔ]. Again it's kinda ok but don't expect it to last long. For me, the bigger issue here is the additional lack of /j w/. Both Upper Chehalis a...

I don't think there are any examples outside of Australia where only voiced stops occur - maybe Australian consonant phonologies lend themselves to voicing stops, possibly to do with the lack of fricatives. On the other hand, there are a couple of almost-rans outside of Australia like proto-Torres B...

Four dumb questions: In general, how many sound changes does a language go through every, say, 1,000 years? Also, how much variation is there? As others have said, it's very variable. However over time it's generally the case that languages generally take 1,000 years to change to a point where they...

I have noticed that there are certain words in the English I am familiar with that are normally pronounced with non-morphological geminates, particularly raccoon [ˌʁʷˤɛʔk̚ˈkʰũ(ː)n]. What might account for this, since Modern English is not supposed to have geminates that cannot be accounted for by e...

1. Stop voicing alternations In the next few posts, I'll be looking at cases where cognate sets show a discrepancy in stop voicing between different languages, for instance Fayu doû ~ Waritai toû , both meaning "short" and Sikaritai a-tá ~ Biritai a-ɾa "muscle, meat". I'd like t...

I know we’re all busy with the relay etc., but have you by any chance gotten around to doing any work on this? Not really... I've also lost my free excel + word subscriptions from school so it's harder to work on now. I'll pick it back up when I can. Sorry to hear that! If it helps, I’ve been using...

bradrn wrote: ↑Wed Mar 01, 2023 4:55 am I know we’re all busy with the relay etc., but have you by any chance gotten around to doing any work on this?

Not really... I've also lost my free excel + word subscriptions from school so it's harder to work on now. I'll pick it back up when I can.

Hi. I’m new to conlanging, and am not sure whether my new Elvish-y (for the lack of a better term) conlang has a realistic phonology. Any advice would be appreciated. Here it is: Consonant phonemes: p, b, t, d, k, g, f, v, s, x, h, m, n, ŋ, r, l, j, w, ʍ (Note: I would format it as a table, but it ...

Recently I've noticed people consistently using [l] as an allophone of /t d/. It seems to be the dissimilated realisation of the second instance of a flapped alveolar stop in a word/phrase, e.g. fixated in [fɪkˈsæi̯ɾɪlɪn]. It's hard to say for sure but I think in AusEng at least it's different to th...

What do you call ways of walking? E.g., one way has one's feet next to each other like when standing normally, and each step brings one foot straight forward, so after two steps, one is standing again. Another way sort of takes the phrase "put one foot in front of the other" literally, wh...

It seems as if PIE underwent a massive merger of vowels (which I call the "Great Vowel Collapse", abbreviated "GVC") before (or in the course of) the rise of the ablaut system, and it may be the case that the *T(h)/*Dh split conserves old vowel quality differences, similar to th...

(Couldn't front vowels voice surrounding consonants in Turkic or something like that?) Yep. Stop voicing is associated with advanced tongue root, which means that front vowels can voice consonants as seen in Oghuz Turkic. It can also go the other way round, like Adjarian's law in Armenian where vow...

If you wanna talk about a real name conflict in the Romance languages, there's Romania (the country where Romanian is spoken) vs. Romania (the Romance-speaking domain) which are at best distinguished by a single letter.

[θ] → [f]

['fe.çi]
télhi

I'd say [ˌmeɫəd͡ʒɻʷəˈmæɾəʔk̚], with a schwa for the second vowel.

Thanks! I must admit, I’m a bit curious as to how *ai turned into Saponi mamiɾɛ … but otherwise the relationship between the languages is really obvious! Saponi is a weird one. Its pronouns seem to be borrowed from East Bird's Head languages (1pl * meme , 2sg * ba ), although lexically it's pretty ...

I've just finished compiling a comparative Lakes Plain wordlist which covers a bit over 500 headwords for up to 25 languages, which as far as I know is the most comprehensive one to date. I'll be having a go at working out some further sound changes which weren't covered by Clouse. If anyone wants ...

I've just finished compiling a comparative Lakes Plain wordlist which covers a bit over 500 headwords for up to 25 languages, which as far as I know is the most comprehensive one to date. I'll be having a go at working out some further sound changes which weren't covered by Clouse. If anyone wants t...

High functional load isn't prohibitive - IIRC there's a case study of n > l in Cantonese about this, but also consider the phonological developments of Polynesian and North Bougainville I've had another look over the wordlists, and I'm beginning to think the 5-consonant inventory may not be so goof...

Metathesis

[ɕu.ɬɘ]
shułi
'a type of game similar to chess'