Zompist Bboard Again

That happened weeks ago, that's old news.

You know it seems to me that pre-nasalised stops are super-common, more so even than ejectives. They're found everywhere from Amazonia to Africa to South-East-Asia to Oceania and other random spots inbetween, whereas ejectives are much more limited in distribution, being common in Western North Amer...

Basque is a pretty good conlang. However, something bothers me. Why you put your conlang in Eastern Europe? ? Basque is about as west as you can get, nowhere near Eastern Europe, you must be thinking Hungarian, which has its own problems, like who thinks double acutes are a good aesthetic, and what...

Whoever did Icelandic - you have over a millenium to play with, you can't just merge some of the vowels, make minor alterations to the consonants and leave everything else untouched that's not how language evolution works!

Somebody tell that guy who did Navajo that determining the ordering of nouns in a clause by an animacy hierarchy is a stupid idea.

ńəw kele jəlka
new word-PL do.IPF-1SG
I have been making a new language

Xŏmsəńər Kele nemŏle
marsh_island-person word-PL name-3PL
It's called Khomsener.

Indo-ewrəpejski kele Äsaṣ wŏxan.
Indo-European word-PL Ob'-PER speak-IMP
It's an Indo-European language spoken along the Ob' river.

Are South Semitic languages mainly VSO either historically or currently? Also, I'm not sure about the relationship between Semitic and Egyptian Basically the only groups that are or have been VSO are Northwest Semitic and Arabic and its close relatives. Modern South Arabian is pretty universally SV...

To answer your question, though, yes, syntactic borrowing can absolutely happen. Some prominent examples include Akkadian becoming SOV (originally VSO) under the influence of Sumerian, some modern Maya languages becoming SVO (originally OSV) under the influence of Spanish, Armenian becoming aggluti...

As far as I know, no language has a segmental phoneme that occurs only in a small number of prefixes like this. At most, one can think of some kind of a prosodic feature instead which caused otherwise unexplained o-grades. Arammba has a voiced interdental fricative which appears solely in 3rd perso...

I am completely at a loss right now. On the one hand this could be the chance we have of putting an end to Brexit once and for all. On the other, in all likelihood we've consigned ourselves to no deal and the inevitable disaster that results.

OK, before I do clause-conjunction, I guess I'll bring over the post on particles I made on the CBB, because they're kind of important. As discussed, Asta is fairly non-configurational, but there is a preference for verb-initial order, and there are a number of particles which find themselves in cla...

The writing system is a bit shit imho. I kinda get what the creator's trying to get at with the morphology, but it's just a little to rigid and non-naturalistic, and the verbal morphology just seems like an attempt to create a regular agglutinative version of a typical European system without actual...

Furthermore I think it is inappropriate to project our modern-day concerns about rats onto peoples of the past. Firstly most first colonists were not ecologists; they wouldn't have necessarily understood the ecological impact of introducing rats into an environment which before didn't have them, so ...

Part of the thing with Aramaic was that it was actually the main administrative lingua-franca of the Achaemenid Persian Empire, I think mainly because the ruling Persians didn't want their language to be spoken widely by the common people.

Subtractive morphology, nearly grammaticalised verbal marking for three arguments, nasal vowels... clearly French has a strong Muskogean substrate!

With regards to the shipping contract nonsense (I do despair I really do), isn't the entire reason they got the contract basically because they have a family/friendship connection with a cabinet, in the same way that the selling off of council housing under Thatcher resulted in most of the propertie...

LGBTQI+ me and half the board Huh, I indeed count about 50% so far, and that's without subtracting replies that have no info either way. The LGBTQ lean in linguistics is a known phenomenon, but over here it seems still stronger yet than IRL. (No especial concentration of lefthanded Lithuanians visi...

Eh I personally don't much care for analytic conlangs either, but I wouldn't say they're underrepresented. The Akana project has quite a few, for instance the Rompian excluding Rrób Tè Jĕhnò. If anything, I'd say analytic languages are overrepresented in real life ;). In all seriousness though I do ...

Does Johnathon Ross not actually understand English just because he can't say it correctly to save his life? Not only is he a native speaker, he speaks using an accent which is distinctively regional and quite characteristic of a certain section of Britain/British society. The change [ɹ] > [ʋ] is a...

I suppose the cool thing about Esperanto for me is that it shows how loads of people will happily learn a conlang regardless of how linguistically broken it is.