Zompist Bboard Again

Why not call them moods or evidentials and treat the tense information as implicatures?

- for an unrelated example, Wurm's Papuan groupings are extremely preliminary & admitted as such, but generally presented as accepted facts on par with families that have been established through any real methodology whatsoever I think there has been a great deal of progress since Wurm's work. ...

Also very challenging: languages like Jiwarli where word order just does not seem to matter. Constituents can be freely scrambled, and if you ask people to repeat a sentence, they're likely to say it in a different order . I always thought these were a great argument for movement transformations in...

I have to admit that I do not yet fully understand what you are trying to eliminate. Could you give an example in English (or some other natlang)? Do you want to eliminate some kinds of (verb-like) dependent clauses, like infinitive constructions, raising, control, etc? Or do you want to exclude nou...

Qwynegold wrote: ↑Thu Sep 17, 2020 12:47 pm I didn't measure F3, because I thought "nah, it will be too much work. F1 and 2 will probably be enough."

I think this is totally okay. F3 is often harder to measure and interpret anyway. It also disorts the nice two-dimensional chart

This is each vowel quality regardless of length and stress. We can see that some vowels have quite a lot of variation, while others have much less. The weird thing is that /ø/ overlaps with /y/, and /o/ with /u/. :? I think this is common in languages where the mid vowels are high-mid. IIRC, F3 is ...

bradrn wrote: ↑Sat Sep 12, 2020 5:56 am Less obviously good are the choices of ⟨-h⟩ for vowel length and ⟨-ng⟩ for nasalisation [...]

That might be German influence.

I'm thinking should I just draw on paper? That way I can get exactly what I want, but it's hard to work with such a fine grained scale by hand, with values between 200 and 3050. Or should I use Adobe Illustrator to create diagrams? These fine values are no problem when drawing vector art, but I onl...

I think <ⴲ> and <Ꙙ> do actually look cool. I also think both of them would fit in a romanization without being classic roman letters.

I think that per analogy it makes sense to use variants of <h>, <v> or <f>, because (a) bidental and glottal /h/ fricatives do not involve any classic active articulators and (b) labiodental /f, v/ and bidental uses the same passive articulator, namely the teeth. Also, all of them are fricatives of ...

I usually use the standard setting (which is 5, IIRC). If I see a strange formant that is really out of the range I adjust the number of formants to 3 and the Hz range to something I expect. This might not be scientifically valid without further justifications, but I think as a hobby it is certainly...

I'm not using sentences, because so far I have 53 words in my list, and trying to come up with 53 sentences and recording them all is just too much. And after I'm done with these vowels, I want to investigate what allophones I have for /h/ and whether there any difference between diphthongs and vow...

That sounds very fascinating. Has this been done before for Finnish? Here are my thoughts on measuring vowel length. There is phonetic final vowel lengthening in many languages. This can happen at the end of words, phrases or utterances. Since this is very variable, I would try to measure vowels som...

Any questions about how this works thus far? Does this system seem a) naturalistic, b) stable, and c) interesting? I think this looks naturalistic. It is worth mentioning that some Bantu languages with ATR harmony also have a few non-productive cases of backness harmony, IIRC. I also think it looks...

Okay, I'll have to think about those things. Meanwhile, I have some new questions. I'm focusing on just grammar in this conlang template, because phonology is not the part where I personally get stuck. But there is one phonology related thing I want to bring up: how many syllables word roots consis...

Can anyone provide any examples of languages in which pronouns are indistinguishable from regular nouns? Several varieties of Indonesian can use kinship terms (ibu 'mother', bapak 'father', etc.) and sometimes proper names as pronouns. These can also be used for first and second person. This is a b...