Conlang Random Thread

[Richard W]

That seems to be in the mama category. I can add Northern Thai mam mam 'din-dins'.

Perhaps so, but I don't see how that necessarily excludes them from being imitative at the same time.

It suggests that we may have an anomalous region of vocabulary where similar forms keep being adopted. English munch and French manger come to mind, though the latter seems to be a case of a word being selected because it sounds right.

i wouldn't rule out cats being fairly new when these names were given. And the first four could all have a common origin - Shan and Lao obviously do; it's the same word in Thai. Li implies it is Proto-Tai in his handbook, but I can't rule out the name just spreading through the dialect continuum.

All of that may be true, but it isn't relevant to Raphael's question:

Would it be plausible for a language to have onomatopoeic words for things with which the ancestors of the speakers of that form of that language have been familiar for a long time before the language got that form?

Cats are clearly no longer new to Chinese, Lao, and Thai speakers, and yet they have an onomatopoeic name. The fact that it may be a holdover from when they were new presents us with a possible origin for an onomatopoeic term for a familiar thing - retention from an earlier stage of the language when the thing was unfamiliar. It's a different question to ask "Is it possible or likely for languages to innovate an onomatopoeic term anew for a familiar, non-novel referent - and use it as the primary word for the referent - when the language already has an existing non-onomatopoeic word for that referent?"

My points are that this does not look like a new, onomatopoeic name for a long familiar animal, and the four examples seem to derive from the same innovation. I couldn't work out when Felis replaced Prionailurus as the Chinese commensal felid rodent killer, which is frustrating.

[Pabappa]

Karok amnaam "eating place; hotel". This seems to be a heavily fusional language, though, as the constituent morphemes are /av/ "eat" and /raam/ "place". It seems that the /v/ regularly changes to /m/ in most or all compounds.

[Raphael]

I seem to be doing something wrong in my attempts to use Zompist's SCA. And I have no idea what. Basically, I want to have a rule that shortens unstressed long vowels, except in monosyllabic words. In my romanization, I generally mark long vowels with an "h" following the vowel, but in order to make them work with the SCA, I replace the "h" with a macron above the vowel, so

ah=ā=long a.

The first two words in my input lexicon are "ahf" and "ahr" (meaning "to expand" and "to collect, gather, pick up", in case you're wondering).

So a shortened version of my input file is

C=lpbťhrwfďsyžzθšdkgtd̂čjmn
V=iíīîuúeéōôaáāâ


ah|ā


ā/a/_/#(C)(C)_(C)(C)#



āf
ār


But I keep getting

ahf → af
ahr → ar

as my output lexicon. i can't get the SCA to accept the exception to my rule. What am I doing wrong?

[Kuchigakatai]

Would it be plausible for a language to have onomatopoeic words for things with which the ancestors of the speakers of that form of that language have been familiar for a long time before the language got that form?

I have come across quite a number of etymologies of common words for common concepts that are proposed to be onomatopoeia, simply as I've read (parts of) etymological dictionaries, say, in English and Spanish.

I don't pay much attention to those because I don't like onomatopoeic etymologies that much, but off the top of my head I remember, uhh, Spanish topar 'to hit sth, to fit, to bump into sth', in the sense of making something make contact with another thing (not violently). For example, when you're moving a large sofa with another person, and you tell someone "let's move it slowly now so that it doesn't hit the wall [as we move it]". Topar is supposed to be from an onomatopoeia of the bad hit, represented by [p]. Similarly, tocar 'to touch sth' is supposed to be a softer version of it.

Latin had contingō for topar and tangō for tocar. Tangō (infinitive tangere) survives into Old Spanish as taño (inf. tañer), but is afterwards narrowed to 'to play [an instrument]', and now has recently become an archaism, completely replaced by tocar (even in the 'play an instrument' sense!). The words have cognates in Portuguese (topar, tocar) and French (arguably tomber as in tomber sur qqch, toucher).

There's quite a number of others, and as you can see, they're not necessarily nouns even. "To/A bump" is another easy example.

[Raphael]

Would it be plausible for a language to have onomatopoeic words for things with which the ancestors of the speakers of that form of that language have been familiar for a long time before the language got that form?

I have come across quite a number of etymologies of common words for common concepts that are proposed to be onomatopoeia, simply as I've read (parts of) etymological dictionaries, say, in English and Spanish.

I don't pay much attention to those because I don't like onomatopoeic etymologies that much, but off the top of my head I remember, uhh, Spanish topar 'to hit sth, to fit, to bump into sth', in the sense of making something make contact with another thing (not violently). For example, when you're moving a large sofa with another person, and you tell someone "let's move it slowly now so that it doesn't hit the wall [as we move it]". Topar is supposed to be from an onomatopoeia of the bad hit, represented by [p]. Similarly, tocar 'to touch sth' is supposed to be a softer version of it.

Latin had contingō for topar and tangō for tocar. Tangō (infinitive tangere) survives into Old Spanish as taño (inf. tañer), but is afterwards narrowed to 'to play [an instrument]', and now has recently become an archaism, completely replaced by tocar (even in the 'play an instrument' sense!). The words have cognates in Portuguese (topar, tocar) and French (arguably tomber as in tomber sur qqch, toucher).

There's quite a number of others, and as you can see, they're not necessarily nouns even. "To/A bump" is another easy example.

Thank you!

[Raphael]

I seem to be doing something wrong in my attempts to use Zompist's SCA. And I have no idea what. Basically, I want to have a rule that shortens unstressed long vowels, except in monosyllabic words. In my romanization, I generally mark long vowels with an "h" following the vowel, but in order to make them work with the SCA, I replace the "h" with a macron above the vowel, so

ah=ā=long a.

The first two words in my input lexicon are "ahf" and "ahr" (meaning "to expand" and "to collect, gather, pick up", in case you're wondering).

So a shortened version of my input file is

C=lpbťhrwfďsyžzθšdkgtd̂čjmn
V=iíīîuúeéōôaáāâ


ah|ā


ā/a/_/#(C)(C)_(C)(C)#



āf
ār


But I keep getting

ahf → af
ahr → ar

as my output lexicon. i can't get the SCA to accept the exception to my rule. What am I doing wrong?

OOooops, I forgot about this part of the instructions:

Because of the difficulty of lining up the _ in both environments, the exception environment can't include optional characters (those in parentheses) before the underline. (They can occur after it.)

That explains it.

[zompist]

Raphael, try this instead:

ā/a/V(C)(C)_
ā/a/_(C)(C)V

You can't have optional characters before the _ in the environment... it gets too hard to line things up.

[Raphael]

Raphael, try this instead:

ā/a/V(C)(C)_
ā/a/_(C)(C)V

You can't have optional characters before the _ in the environment... it gets too hard to line things up.

Thank you!

[Raphael]

In the SCA, if you apply sound changes and then afterwards click on "Download output lexicon", you get a .txt file which, however, contains an html line break after each entry. Is that supposed to be the case?

[bradrn]

In the SCA, if you apply sound changes and then afterwards click on "Download output lexicon", you get a .txt file which, however, contains an html line break after each entry. Is that supposed to be the case?

When I try, I don’t get that. Could you paste the contents of the .txt file into a post so we can see?

(By the way, I believe that looks like a new feature — certainly, I had no idea that it existed — so thanks for telling me about it! Does anyone know if there have been any other new features added recently?)

[Raphael]

https://zompist.wordpress.com/2020/05/2 ... e-support/

Yes, just about a week old. With Zompist's default input values, I get a .txt file that says

leitor<br>
doutor<br>
fogo<br>
jogo<br>
distrito<br>
cidade<br>
adotar<br>
obra<br>
segundo<br>
filha<br>
ponte<br>

(Sorry, the board won't let me attach .txt files.)

Hm, I'm doing this under Linux, which uses Unix line breaks in .txt files - could that be the reason?

[bradrn]

https://zompist.wordpress.com/2020/05/2 ... e-support/

Yes, just about a week old.

Thanks! That intermediate results thing looks really cool; I once thought about adding something like that to my own SCA, but I didn’t ever come up with a design as nice as that one.

With Zompist's default input values, I get a .txt file that says

leitor<br>
doutor<br>
fogo<br>
jogo<br>
distrito<br>
cidade<br>
adotar<br>
obra<br>
segundo<br>
filha<br>
ponte<br>

(Sorry, the board won't let me attach .txt files.)

Hm, I'm doing this under Linux, which uses Unix line breaks in .txt files - could that be the reason?

I think I may have found the bug. Poking around in the dlRules() function, I found this:

Code: Select all

	var s = theform.cats.value + "\n" + 
		theform.rewrite.value + "\n" + 
		theform.rules.value + "\n";

So possibly your browser interprets .value for textareas as being an HTML value, including <br>s. What browser are you on?

[Raphael]

Firefox.

[bradrn]

Firefox.

Odd, I’m using Firefox as well and can’t replicate it.

[Raphael]

Hey, it's not that much of a problem - after all, I can simply search-and-replace <br> with nothing.

[bradrn]

Hey, it's not that much of a problem - after all, I can simply search-and-replace <br> with nothing.

Of course, but now you’ve got me interested in this problem…

Anyway, if you go to the Developer Console and evaluate theform.ilex.value, what do you get?

[Raphael]

Anyway, if you go to the Developer Console and evaluate theform.ilex.value, what do you get?

I'm not quite sure how to do that. I think I've managed it to open the Developer Console, but I'm not sure how I "evaluate" anything in it.

[bradrn]

Anyway, if you go to the Developer Console and evaluate theform.ilex.value, what do you get?

I'm not quite sure how to do that. I think I've managed it to open the Developer Console, but I'm not sure how I "evaluate" anything in it.

Oh, sorry! From what you said earlier I assumed you would know how to do this. (You know what they say about ‘assume’…) But anyway: you can open the Developer Console by pressing F12. (Make sure to do this when using the SCA² tab!) Then switch to the ‘Console’ tab on the developer tools. Finally, click on the big empty window in the middle, and type (or simply paste) theform.ilex.value. Now press Enter. What is the result?

[Raphael]

"lector\ndoctor\nfocus\njocus\ndistrictus\ncīvitatem\nadoptare\nopera\nsecundus\nfīliam\npōntem\n"

[bradrn]

"lector\ndoctor\nfocus\njocus\ndistrictus\ncīvitatem\nadoptare\nopera\nsecundus\nfīliam\npōntem\n"

That’s what I’m getting as well. And, given this output (\n is just newline, in case you don’t already know that), I’m not sure where the HTML line breaks are coming from. Maybe I’ll have another look at the code and see if I can find anything else relevant.