Zompist Bboard Again

ÜberBen wrote: ↑Thu Oct 11, 2018 6:30 amMeaning that /ɾmkawh/ is a completely legitimate syllable.

I mean, weird resonance-hierarchy-violating syllables happen in Armenian, too, but they get broken up with epenthetic vowels. I could buy /ɾmkawh/ [əɾm(ə)kawh~əɾm(ə)kaʍ].

Before an alveopalatal obstruent, [t] become [t͡θ̺].

...This is so ridiculous I love it.

I don't insist on *h3 being a labialized *h2. It hasn't escaped me that few scholars reconstruct it that way. My main reason to assume that *h3 was a labialized *h2 was the Greek triple reflex, which clearly shows that in that language, the o-colouring effect of *h3 was still productive at a time w...

Modern literary fiction, in my limited understanding, seems to be dominated by two impulses. One is the homogenous "MFA" school, which is basically the journalistic Hemingway/Orwell/etc style that's had the edges smoothed off with a wash or two in some colloquial English, and then ornamen...

I don't read a lot of modern fiction because a lot of it is influenced by Hemmingway's style (which I loathe--prose should be beautiful, not composed of hijacked newspaper headlines--give me Tolkien or Le Guin or Austen any day), but having recently forayed into fiction published in my lifetime, he...

Also, the bit about Hemingway-style writing being "in vogue" because of business types stealing lunch money from the nerds and giving them swirlies is a slight exaggeration. All the major style guides in the US are written by and for academics, not business professionals. But the general ...

For what it's worth, there's an interesting paper on the supposed "substratum" of Sumerian by Gonzalo Rubio. (It's worth reading solely for the last sentence of footnote 1- ouch). How does one demonstrate an unknown substratum in an isolate ?!? The alleged substratum loanwords in units li...

I see what you did there.

When learning the basics of writing, one must learn the basic rules like "avoid passive voice." Learning to write well involves knowing when not to follow those basic rules, including when to use passive voice.

I have a little assortment of closely related languages descended from an English-based creole spoken by the nomadic peoples of the Outer Solar System in my sci-fi setting. There's no name for them collectively as their speakers always identify them by their individual dialect. They have varying deg...

Always /ð/ (which is also [ð]).

if you want it, keep it. never do anything you don't want to. i get that, just if I'm remembering correctly it was suggested I add it because it was a type of dipthong I was missing. yes you just combine/blend the two sounds. pronounce it smoothly and make it unbroken. I think i got its pronounciat...

Recently I was scrolling through my Hathirysy dictionary and realized I had four words for 'path' because I had forgotten I already had a word for it multiple times. Now I have to figure out what the distinctions in meaning between ver, aspa, bao, and nieda are. This gives me bad flashbacks to deve...

missals wrote: ↑Thu Oct 04, 2018 3:27 pmBut what consonant is [ɨ̯] likely to become?

/ɰ/ or /j/ seem the likeliest to me.

Ryan of Tinellb wrote: ↑Wed Oct 03, 2018 10:43 pm 3: /əəɹɥʇ/
...
8: /ʇɥɓ!ə/

Wat. :p

I have a quick question about ezafe: how are multiple possessives handled? Like in English? So say one want's to say "Rostam's daughter's husband," is that ROSTAM-e DAUGHTER-e HUSBAND? Since ezafe also marks adjectives, what about something like "Shah Rostam's golden crown"? ROS...

- e is like 'of' in English when connecting nouns, adjectives come after nouns in Persian rather than before with the ezafe connecting them, and 'King X' in Persian seems to just be 'X Shah' with no ezafe. So AFAICT it would be HUSBAND-e DAUGHTER-e ROSTAM and CROWN-e GOLD-e ROSTAM SHAH. Thank you. :)

I have a quick question about ezafe: how are multiple possessives handled? Like in English? So say one want's to say "Rostam's daughter's husband," is that ROSTAM-e DAUGHTER-e HUSBAND? Since ezafe also marks adjectives, what about something like "Shah Rostam's golden crown"? ROST...

Damin ? Aye, but that's a ritual language; my general impression is that natural languages with clicks have consonant inventories to make the Caucasus and PNW look tame by comparison. ;) The problem is though, because Clicks are so geographically restricted we not only have a small sample size but ...

Pabappa wrote: ↑Wed Oct 03, 2018 11:37 amI dont think /ʔ/ > /ŋ/ works either.

I'm reasonably sure it's attested, though, and it's pretty straightforward rhinoglottophilia.