Zompist Bboard Again

Šar nenuarakčasaħi nette Iħošči ? šar ne-nu-arak-0-čas-a-ħi net-te Iħos-či what.NOM think-CAUS-mouth-3p.SG-CIS-PFV-Q 2p.SG-ACC Iḫos-VIA "What inspired you to think of Iḫos?" (Lit. What made you think up Iḫos?") Ħu nenu mač Semitikarakattučinaki . ħu ne-nu-0 1p.SG.ACC Semitik-arakat-C...

Impressive! I find it especially interesting to see a calendar based on the astronomy of our Earth, but still with references to conworld plants. Is there a connection between the division of all time into 10 epochs and the division of each year into 10 months? Wrt: the latter, there's no particula...

Raphael's thread on calendars made me want to post the Episanist Calendar in common use in much of Pacifica (including among Penautic speaking peoples). The origins of the Episanist calendar (and in fact most calendars in use in this part of the world) come from the calendars used by the Amoshi cult...

Some quick and dirty notes on morphological change in Penautic: Nouns have seen some restructuring. The biggest difference is the emergence of the Proto-Kuzitic feminine collective suffix *- az (which is identical in PP) as a morphological plural marker. Its use for the feminine plural rather than t...

Although I ended my last post saying that I was more motivated to work on Deligic, that was actually not the case and I've gotten much more focused on the Penautic languages. Penautic is one of the most ancient attested branches of the family, with the first attestations actually appearing in borrow...

Does anyone have a good overview of 1. the different kinds of ablaut patterns in PIE and 2. their development in different descendants? I have an IE language which keeps failing when I try to trace morphology and get mixed up in the thicket of jargon.

I’ve enjoyed reading through this. I like the phonotactics, and I like the way you’ve presented the different cultural features of the different branches in a clear way (so I can see which languages are ancient literary languages, which are attested more recently etc) ‒ it’s giving me a good ‘feel’...

A few additional bits of information to add before I go on to descendants. Proto-Kuzitic pronouns: 1p.SG: * maws’ 1p.PL.INCL: * lá 1p.PL.EXCL: * péz 2p.MASC.SG: * dwík 2p.FEM.SG: * tné 2p.MASC.PL: * swágúʔ 2p.FEM.PL: * sninúʔ 3p.MASC.SG: * ken 3p.FEM.SG: * njá 3p.ANIM.SG: * ti 3p.MASC.PL: * kage 3p....

In my conlang Hayakan there is a verbalizer - amati which means to "to lose X." For example waka "voice, speech" → wakamati "lose one's voice." Hayakan is heavily head initial, so I justified this as one of several derivational suffixes borrowed from Sewaqli, the tradit...

I've done a bit less work on Proto-Kuzitic verbs, and these are a bit more in flux -- so I'm posting this with the understanding that it will likely change. PK verbs are exclusively suffixing, and appear to have been largely agglutinating. I'll describe the suffixes Proto-Kuzitic verbs receive, from...

Thank you much!!

Quick question - I don't have any real programming experience and had a little trouble figuring out how to do this from the documentation (partly because I have a cold.) I'm working on a series on sound changes for one of the Kuzitic branches which sees a two tone system develop into a pitch accent ...

Proto-Kuzitic cardinal numerals between 1 and 10 have been robustly reconstructed; they were likely decimal. 1. * íws’ú 2. * píns 3. * lét' 4. * zí 5. * meʁí 6. * ʁibḍé 7. * í 8. * eg 9. * laŋ 10. * s’eze Additionally, * ṭañqaʁu "eleven" and * lét'meʁí "fifteen" are well attested...

How plausible is something like /ɥ/ → /ʝʷ/ → /ʒʷ/ → /d͡ʒʷ/ → /d͡ʒ/ word-initially and after sonorant consonants and /ɥ/ → /ʝʷ/ → /ʒʷ/ → /ʒ/ elsewhere? Seems very plausible to me, though you could easily simplify it; /ɥ/ --> /d͡ʒʷ/ → /d͡ʒ/, with an additional lenition to /ʒ/ in the necessary places....

Proto-Kuzitic had four noun classes: masculine, feminine, animate, and inanimate. Gender assignment was quite regularly assigned based on semantic grounds; the masculine and feminine were reserved for human men or women (and likely a handful of other extremely high animacy entities, like deities and...

Here's a very rough map of subfamilies of Kuzitic: https://talkelections.org/FORUM/GALLERY/9216_01_09_25_7_06_01.jpeg The Kuzitic languages are typically divided into eight branches (Arroe, Lusoberian, Deligic, Darnic, Abo-Llapo, Penautic, Nachtol, and Todosic), which are more questionably grouped t...

This is a project I've been working on for a few years, though really sporadically; thus the thread is more of a scratchpad than a fully presentable result. It's a large language family, spoken in a version of the present day. The name comes from Proto-Kuzitic * kuz "person, human being." ...

-/ŋ/ is deleted from onset clusters (except in onset clusters like /dŋ/ where it's in the more sonorous position), which makes sense given how common prohibiting onset velar nasals is. Onset velar nasals are relatively rare, but I'd think that clusters like the /dŋ/ don't occur as the onset (rather...

Also, came up with a fun sound change for a language family I'm working on: -/ŋ/ is deleted from onset clusters (except in onset clusters like /dŋ/ where it's in the more sonorous position), which makes sense given how common prohibiting onset velar nasals is. However, this rule crosses word boundar...

Anybody have a list of lexemes that's a bit longer than the Swadesh list? I know this isn't the optimal way to build lexicon since there are likely all sorts of polysemies, etc. but it's for a protolang so quantity is more important here than quantity.