Zompist Bboard Again

This leads me to mention something else: if a language is ‘nounless’, presumably it has a single part of speech, which we’re calling ‘verbs’. But there’s no reason that we can’t call that single part of speech ‘nouns’! After all, it’s not like there are any other parts of speech to do a language-in...

Is there any language in which stress regularly precedes a heavy syllable?

That's, indeed, reminiscent of Nahuatl -- Michel Launey calls it omnipredicative . One interesting test is, are there parts of morphology that don't apply to (semantic) nouns? A good test case is tense. How do you say 'it was a bird'? Can you say bird-PAST You can't do that in Nahuatl, btw, you hav...

This is a very offhand reaction... to me you still have two classes of words: those which require arguments and those which don't. That is, "buy" seems like a clear verb, and "raven, man, egg" sure don't look like prototypical verbs. In both versions of the language (the one wit...

I've mused a number of times before that, upon a little thought, I can see a relatively naturalistic and straightforward path by which a language could eliminate its class of nominals entirely, and end up with only verbs. As far as I know, this is not (unambiguously, uncontroversially) attested. The...

Man in Space wrote: ↑Wed Oct 02, 2024 5:53 pm Is it bad form to post a placeholder while you're working on one?

I'll allow it. Also multiple people doing sketches for the same prompt seems fine to me.

When I get stuck in a conlanging rut, I tend to look to typology for inspiration. There are certain combinations of features that might be interesting in combination with one another, but don't tend to co-occur in natlangs because they are concentrated in different families or in non-overlapping lan...

A good example that comes to mind is θ > ð / #_V in English. This is a sound change that simply cannot be analyzed as a regular sound law. Rather, it is sensitive to stress and word frequency, which is why it is rare in English from a dictionary standpoint and extremely common in English from a cor...

/p t̻ t̻ʲ t̻ʷ t̺ t̺ʲ t̺ʷ k kʲ kʷ q qʷ/ /t̻s̻ t̻s̻ʲ t̻s̻ʷ t̺s̺ t̺s̺ʲ t̺s̺ʷ tɕ/ /p’ t̻’ t̻ʲ’ t̻ʷ’ t̺’ t̺ʲ’ t̺ʷ’ k’ kʲ’ kʷ’ q’ qʷ’/ /t̻s̻’ t̻s̻ʲ’ t̻s̻ʷ’ t̺s̺’ t̺s̺ʲ’ t̺s̺ʷ’/ /s̻ s̻ʲ s̻ʷ s̺ s̺ʲ s̺ʷ ɕ x xʲ xʷ χ χʷ h/ /m n̻ n̻ʲ n̻ʷ ɲ/ /r rʲ rʷ j w/ /i u e o ɛ ɔ a/ /V̀ V́/ (C)V(C) or (C)C syllables; all co...

These sound pretty awkward to me. "Magic place" is a dumb name, but even as is, shouldn't it be more like maho no basho ? It actually sort of seems fine; I would expect either mahoudokoro (with rendaku; cf. daidokoro "kitchen"), or mahousho / mahoujo (same kanji, just with onyom...

I am quite familiar with Japanese but know almost nothing at all about Korean. Much is made of the similarities between the two languages, but what about the differences? Naively I tend to work under the model that Korean is basically a Japanese relex (...a sentence seemingly fined-tuned to maximall...

Regarding Japanese, a few things should possibly be noted: The word kanojo , in addition to meaning "she", is also a noun meaning "girlfriend". Likewise kare means "he" but kare(shi) also means boyfriend. The fact that these terms have well established unambiguously nom...

Japanese has: 言う iu (transitive): The most basic speech verb, which is transitive and means "to say". Its argument generally takes the quotative. In fact it's much more general than just "to say"; it is also the typical verb used when giving the names of people/things jon to iima...

I haven't finished the paper, so maybe I should hold off on commenting Part of the point the paper makes is that the wave model reduces to the tree model given a set of constraints, so all arguments for the utility of the tree model are actually arguments for the utility of the wave model; it handl...

None the less, the fact is that on large scales the web of influences and relationships between different language varieties over time comes out looking like a tree. This is likewise a fact about reality, a fact which the tree model describes. No, this is simply incorrect. On large scales it doesn’...

The tree model is perfectly adequate. Species, too, go through a period of relatively free internal gene flow (cf. how humans of different genetic backgrounds can interbreed), but if two populations are separated for long enough they may speciate, i.e. genetically diverge to such a degree that horiz...

What texts are these examples from specifically?

There is a distinctive (in the ordinary sense, not phonologically distinctive) phonetic quality to the vowels of a lot of South Asian languages, both Indo-Aryan and Dravidian, but I can't seem to figure out what it actually is . To stoop to the level of pure subjective description, the vowels feel p...

Is unconditional l > r more common than unconditional r > l?

Are Old English and Old Norse actually mutually intelligible? To what degree? I have heard conflicting things.