Zompist Bboard Again

Oo [o] as in British En. th ou ght or American En. n o rth (without the following r-sound). (It is not pronounced as in g oa t). I think most linguistically-naive speakers of AmE will struggle to isolate the [ɔ] of north , and, if they have the cot-caught merger, won't understand what's supposed to...

Side note, but what combinations of vowel length, tone, and nasalization are contrastive? If they all contrast independently then I count 2,560,000 possible syllables! Well, there are 16 initials, 6 pre-initials (counting null), 11 vowel qualities, 2 lengths, 2 options for oral/nasal, and 2 tones. ...

Verb conjugation Verbs agree with with their subject and object in person and number. They inflect for tense/aspect and some kind of voice, but my notes on all that are rather messy... so for now, while I work on straightening all that out, we'll stick with forms unmarked for tense/aspect. The mean...

This is a neat way of making the syntax tree unambiguous—feels like something a programmer would come up with for serializing data. Are there third person pronouns, or some other way of referring back to a word/phrase earlier in the discourse other than by the adjunct relation? Like if you have the ...

In addition to nominal suffixes, there's a subordinating suffix -ni which comes last. When it follows accusative -ne they fuse as -nei . They have to bear at least one of the possessor, case, or subordinating suffixes. Forms with no suffix or no suffix besides plural -mo do not exist. They have som...

The 3rd person pronouns (morphology) The four 3rd person pronouns (one for each of the four noun classes) inflect much the same as nouns, but with a differences: In addition to nominal suffixes, there's a subordinating suffix -ni which comes last. When it follows accusative -ne they fuse as -nei . ...

Final n assimilates to the place of articulation of a following consonant, and is transcribed as m when realized as such So /aŋka/ is written amka ? No, sorry, I phrased this poorly. /aNpa/, /aNta/, /aNka/ are written ampa , anta , anka . It's logically inconsistent, I guess, but I'm not a fan of h...

There's no cultural or fictional background to this one (yet), just experimenting with ideas I like. It's an agglutinative, suffixing language with very free word order and a simple phonology. Without further ado... Phonology Vowels: /a e i o u/, written as in the IPA. Consonants (transcription matc...

Orthographically; why have <ch> for /tʃ/ when you have no <c>? Also, <sh> for /ʃ/ when <h> is /x/ seems weird. It's also very "Englishy". You could use <ç> and <c> for them respectively. Just a thought. It's English-y on purpose: I like how it looks and it makes it more accessible if I sh...

quinterbeck wrote: ↑Sun Jul 05, 2020 2:36 pm I'm trying to think of morphemes that contain non-initial h, and so far I have only ahoy, ahead, cahoots - I have a feeling there won't be many (even ahead is historically a result of affixing a- to head).

There's also behest, where the vowel preceding the /h/ isn't a schwa.

I don't think /nɪˈhoʊ.ni.əm/ is a valid pronunciation for me; if I say it a couple times it turns into [nɛ-] right away, which is probably underlying /nə-/. Since it's a recently coined international word I imagine the dictionary pronunciation is based directly on the spelling. I pronounce nihilism ...

Good job on this one. This one is great for concepts and ideas about animal thought. Thanks! How does predicative possession work in this language? or maybe context alone would distinguish from the copula (or maybe the concept of possession is quite different in their culture) I don't have an answe...

My dialect has a merger of original /ʌl/, /ʊl/, /oʊl/ to something like [oɫ], which I think of as /ʊl/, but a few words maintain a distinct /ʌl/—the ones I can think of are insult , result , adult , and ultimate . In every other word ending in - ult it's pronounced as /ʊlt/. The /ʌl/ in those words ...

"Temple" was strongly associated with non-Abrahamic religions for me growing up, despite its importance in the Bible. (Roman Catholicism just doesn't seem to dwell on the period of the First Temple much at all compared to Jews or most Protestants.) I found it odd that there was a college ...

Ser wrote: ↑Mon Jun 29, 2020 7:51 pm Is a church a temple?

Yes (pace Zompist).

Is a god a spirit?

A god is a spirit and, without the articles, God is spirit.

I'm a bit confused to discover the vowel of NEAR is conventionally transcribed /ɪr/—it sounds like /ir/ to me, while the sequence /ɪr/ just doesn't occur in my version of AmE, regardless of syllabification. Maybe I'm being influenced by writing, but I looked up a sound clip of the British pronunciat...

Another one I remembered: in normal speech I break up the sequence /ɚl/ into two syllables, so pearl is /ˈpɚ.l/ and rhymes with squirrel /ˈskwɚ.l/. The one exception is girl , which is always a single syllable /ˈgɚl/ and as a result does not rhyme with pearl , or any other word. (Of course, when it ...

I merge poor and pore as /pɔɹ/, but at some point I started pronouncing boor as /buɹ/ to distinguish it from bore , even though I find the sequence /ur/ pretty hard to pronounce. (I mostly pronounce pure as /pɪɹ/, homophonous with peer . The other main /ur/ word is lure , which also takes some consc...

For me, the furthest I reduce probably is [ˈpʰɻʷɔbli]. In addition to the very conservative [ˈpʰʁɑːbəːbɰi(ː)], there's also [ˈpʰʁɑːɤ̯iː] and [pʰʁɑːi̯] here. That’s true — now that you mention it, I will occasionally say [ˈpʰɻʷɔɫi]. But I have no analogue to your [pʰʁɑːi̯]. The [ˈpʰɻʷɔɫi] pronunciat...

I try to be accepting of non-standard speech in English. "On accident?" Sure, go ahead. "On accident" is non-standard?? "By accident", afaik, is standard. "On accident" is by analogy with "on purpose". Which leads to the question: does the reverse o...