Zompist Bboard Again

Spanish has some stress based abbreviations...e.g. bolígrafo > bolí. English has abbreviations based on the first syllable... lab, gym, etc. Both of these sound like they could work in a language with no alphabet. ____________________ And Swahili does the initial syllable thing... https://en.m.wikti...

Would it be reasonable to have ʔ → k between vowels but ʔ → Ø everywhere else? e.g. maʔ → ma, amasʔe → amase, but paʔel → pakel. I've never seen the glottal stop to fortite to /k/ so not sure. Ah. I figured that since k → ʔ seems reasonably plausible, so would ʔ → k. I'll redo that one then. I woul...

Rural Appalachian English has final /o/>/ə/ and /ə/>/i/. E.g. "grand ole opry", "sody",etc and holler, feller, etc. Adding an R to the schwa may just be the intrusive r of nonrhotic dialects.

I know I posted here before .... whether it was this thread or a thread on the old board I dont remember .... but Ive met Polish and Italian Americans who've developed idiosyncratic Americanized pronunciations of their names, and will even correct people who try to pronounce it in the manner of the ...

Instead of using verb inflections to form for example passive voice, we can just drop either argument. So for a simplified example: AGENT Alice lick PATIENT Paul = "Alice licks Paul" AGENT Alice lick = "Alice licks (someone)" PATIENT Paul lick = "Paul gets licked (by someon...

My current sig: http://pabappa.com/pics/smarty3.jpg Poswa (original): bwubwa: Pabibo! Pibo! baby.boy: vegetable-INSTR-1p! happy.1p! boy: I'm eating vegetables! I'm enjoying myself! bammapa: Pybampave! Pappote! baby.girl: silly-surprise-see-2P! cheek.talk-agent-GEN-Ø-2P! girl: You're silly, seeing by...

Vijay wrote: ↑Sat Mar 02, 2019 7:57 pm

Pabappa wrote: ↑Sat Mar 02, 2019 7:21 pmTo me those are all unreleased /t/'s, with no glottalization and no voicing.

Even in "sort of"?

no, I think he just meant the ones before consonants.

To me those are all unreleased /t/'s, with no glottalization and no voicing. I think anything else would sound odd. Stops are unreleased before other stops, whether the cluster occurs over a word boundary or not. Its possible that its glottalicized somehow, but I dont know if its possible to do that...

I know /kw/ can become /p/ but is it possible for /p/ to become /kw/? If it can, then is it also possible for /kw/ to become /kʲ/? /pʷ/ > /kʷ/ is sometimes posited for Oceanic languages, but Im skeptical. It could have been the other way around, with the shift of /kʷ/ > /pʷ/ occuring more than once...

One thing I have always wondered: how does rhyming work in languages with significant inflection and agreement? Consider a language like Latin where nouns and adjectives agree in number, gender, and case. It seems like rhymes would frequently turn into repeating the same inflectional form in succes...

I havent gotten that far and probably never will since the society never moves beyond medieval levels of technology. However, political parties have a long existence, and their long official names necessitate abbreviations. I've always used three-letter acronyms when translating them into English .....

See viewtopic.php?f=4&t=291 .

In a language where voice and aspect are both derivational (not inflectional), is there a preferred order I should stick to? E.g. in Pabappa, the word for sing is inherently reflexive . Should "to sing for a long time" be patterned as 1) singing.REFL.DUR , or 2) singing.DUR.REFL ? In eithe...

I was rehired to my old job selling cellphones in the mall. The store was still in the same place as it was five years ago, but there was very little work to do, and we mostly sat around chatting. I recognized two of the other employees from when I had worked here before. Despite this, I quit after ...

I once considered the concept of a conlang with cyclic history, be it by time travel or weird cosmology; it would through convoluted paths end up as its own ancestor (and not just by general archaicity; including also things like the word for X ending up semantically drifting to become the word for...

Are there any known languages that have person agreement between possessed objects and their verbs, like Bappubo lappapo. My knife is sharp. Where both the noun bappub- "knife" and the verb lappap- "sharp; to cut through solid objects" are marked for 1st person? The sentence coul...

English still distinguishes "blessed " as a past tense verb with 1 syllable from "blessed" as an adjective with 2.

I wouldn't but I also use "bathroom" for a bathroom in any other context. I'm just not much for polite euphemisms I guess, even though "bathroom" originally was one too. Different families teach their kids different words, and some keep using those words as adults. Mine never saw...

I have never understood causative verbs at all ... i kept quiet in this thread because I didnt have anything to say until the question about the causative noun case came up, and even that is only something i know through my conlang. but i get the impression causative verbs are just a cover term for ...

gestaltist wrote: ↑Sat Feb 16, 2019 7:27 am What you're describing sounds like a causative case to me.
....
He-NOM killed John-ACC Mark-CAUS. = "He killed John, and Mark made him do it."

If it helps, my conlangs do this, and in most of them the causative case is identical with the locative. Haven't had any problems so far.