Resources Thread

[Raholeun]

The Austronesian Comparative Dictionary is online, for those of us who might want to make a Austronesian conlang someday (like me).

You might be interested in the Austronesian Basic Vocabulary Database. It sure is not as thorough as the ACD, but it arguably does a nice job in indexing the various contemporary forms of a lexeme, not only for Austronesian, but peripheral languages too.

[Whimemsz]

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[chris_notts]

Most of the past issues of the papers from the annual Algonquianist Conferences are also now available online free of charge here: https://ojs.library.carleton.ca/index.p ... ue/archive

That's interesting. Algonquian is quite interesting but also a bit difficult for outsiders to get into due to a lot of odd or non-general terminology and the sheer complexity of some of the morphology. For example, this article from that website about animate and inanimate stems, which is a sea of TI, TA, ...:

Sentience and Stem Agreement in Blackfoot

https://ojs.library.carleton.ca/index.p ... /view/1201

I've read before that some of these alternations are potentially more voice-like than pure agreement. See for example:

Applicative and antipassive: Algonquian transitive "stem-agreement" as differential object marking

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source= ... y__uwws0Bh

I'm not sure how much sense this makes, but intuitively it seems likely given how intertwined the categories seem to be with stem selection, that suggests something more derivational than inflectional.

[Whimemsz]

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[chris_notts]

Unfortunately the family-specific terminology can be a barrier, yes. Although I don't think TA/TI/AI/II is especially complicated, one just needs to remember the T or I marks transitivity and the A or I marks the animacy of the absolutive. [I did see a glaring mistake in that Blackfoot paper at the top of page 359 that made it past the editors which is quite unfortunate -- (3b) should be marked as AI, not II!]

Maybe TI/TA was a bad example, but I've just had a hard time in general getting through brief descriptions of Algonquian morphology and coming out the other side feeling like I understand how all the bits fit together. Individual bits like direct/inverse, obviation etc. are all comprehensible individually, but either it's very hard to understand the overall system or a lot of people do a bad job of describing it.

Which freely available reference grammar or summary would you recommend to fully understand how all these categories interact within the Algonquian verb? Is one particularly easy to follow?

I'll admit I didn't follow all of Quinn's argumentation in the paper you linked, partly because it's in the form of terse bullet points rather than fleshed out arguments and partly because I honestly don't know enough about current GG to know what concepts he's referring to in all instances. So I'm not sure I can give it a proper response, other than to note that reducing transitive stems to "TAs = dative-accusative syncretism" and "TIs = unergatives/antipassives" seems like, at best, an extreme over-simplification of the actual situation, and forcing Algonquian into a preexisting mold rather than approaching it on its own terms.

Actually, that paper made me wonder whether, in Sint (current conlanging project), I'd accidentally created something in some ways similar to parts of the Algonquian TI/TA system. To be honest, I also struggled to follow it, but what I took away from it was the suggestion that TA/TI was similar to transitivity and applicative markers in other languages.

In Sint, I started out with some multi-functional voice suffixes (causative ~ instrumental applicative, antipassive ~ dative applicative), but I've been busy reforming the system a bit because of problems elsewhere. Given that the language is strongly head marking, and lacks overt obviation marking or similar, I realised that ambitransitives potentially caused me reference tracking issues and have been busy adjusting the system in ways that make transitivity more overt but also make more overt morphological notions of control and affectedness.

I would definitely agree with you (and generativists) that the stem-forming finals (light verbs for them) are derivational and not inflectional, but AFAIK that's a view shared by all Algonquianists of whatever theoretical background, since they're quite clearly separated from the following inflectional suffixes and since they obviously contribute standard derivational-type meanings, even though they also index whether a certain participant is animate or inanimate.

Fair enough. I'm involved enough in Algonquian linguistics to know whether the standard analysis is derivational or inflectional, only that I'd somehow got the impression that it was normally analysed as agreement, which I normally think of as an inflectional category.

[Salmoneus]

Fair enough. I'm involved enough in Algonquian linguistics to know whether the standard analysis is derivational or inflectional, only that I'd somehow got the impression that it was normally analysed as agreement, which I normally think of as an inflectional category.

I know nothing about Algonquian linguistics, and not much about other linguistics. But I would say, whether you call it 'agreement' or not, lexical (hence presumably potentially derivational) agreement systems are a thing in some languages. That is, it's a continuum between pure inflectional agreement - the "same" verb can be used with any arguments, but is "inflected" for certain arguments - through to restrictive lexical selection criteria, in which many verbs can only be used with arguments of (or not of) specific classes.

[Whimemsz]

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[chris_notts]

Heh, well, in my case it was...actually learning an Algonquian language. (There literally was this one, specific moment I can identify where everything clicked into place in my brain and I just *got* it.)

Unfortunately, there really isn't anything quite like you've described, to my knowledge. Valentine's grammar of Nishnaabemwin remains the most thorough grammar of an Algonquian language, but it has pros and cons. Pros: doesn't assume prior knowledge, lots of explanation of terminology and concepts, extensive coverage of a lot of areas of the grammar. Cons: somewhat disorganized (in my view), a number of the most interesting areas of syntax and especially discourse pragmatics are given very little coverage, no interlinear glossing. Bloomfield's 1946 article is the "classic" in the field and introduced a lot of the concepts and terminology still used, but it's focused almost exclusively on phonology and morphology (and specifically derivational morphology), can be difficult for newcomers to follow, and has been superseded in many areas, so I wouldn't recommend it. I've seen Amy Dahlstrom's grammar of Plains Cree (Plains Cree Morphosyntax, which is probably in the Pile, although I don't have time to check at the moment) cited a lot but never had an opportunity to read it so can't personally vouch for it.

There are also various articles on how some of these phenomena interact within specific languages, that can usually be (more or less) generalized to Algonquian as a whole. For example, I would recommend Ives Goddard's "Aspects of the Topic Structure of Fox Narratives: Proximate Shifts and the Use of Overt and Inflectional NPs" in IJAL 56(3): 317-340, and this paper by Lucy Thomason (also on Fox, and a useful companion to Goddard's; she also summarizes some of Goddard's findings, if you don't have access to his paper).

It's a pity there isn't a really good summary, since Algonquian does seem to be really interesting. I'll try the free links you provided, since unfortunately I don't have access to any non-free repositories.

I've tried doing some reading elsewhere since then, and the whole "final" thing reminds me a lot of asymmetrical symmetrical verb constructions if I've understood vaguely correctly. For example, in Yimas SVCs are created by compounding within a single grammatical word, and important processes like dative applicatives/promotion are done via compounding of verb roots. The Algonquian final system seems to me like a limited set of asymmetrical SVC constructions for manipulating argument structure, causation, and effect got frozen in time and grammaticalised, and the finals have retained the kind of preferences and selectional restrictions that independent verbs often have for certain argument types and dynamics.

[Raholeun]

Unfortunately I have found myself to be in a Mexican stand off type of situation with the local Uni library. Yet I am desperately looking for some resources on grammaticalization. Is there a Pile/Stack/Heap with resources on grammaticalization?

[akam chinjir]

libgen?

[Raholeun]

Thanks! Just found a mirror and it has exactly what I was looking for. Don't know if a working link can be posted here, because it cannot be 100% legal..

[bradrn]

EDIT: Please don’t use this any more! If you want a highly multilingual keyboard, use Conkey, not this half-baked extension of Finnish Multilingual. If you really still want to use this one, expand the block below.

More: show

Recently I've been looking for a keyboard layout which can type a large number of diacritics and letters (as opposed to US-International, which doesn't include useful ones like ẽšāŋəħʒł). The other day I found this implementation (click on the 'trial version') of the Finnish Multilingual keyboard layout, which looked promising. Unfortunately, typing on this keyboard proved excruciatingly difficult - the punctuation is in different places compared to the US layout which I use! (I'm using LaTeX, which only exacerbates the problem.) So I decided to modify the layout to move the punctuation into (approximately) the corresponding place on the US keyboard. You can find my modified Finnish (Nordic International) Programmers layout for Windows at https://www.dropbox.com/sh/kp0s9zdod4cr ... 9ZQEa?dl=0 - download the whole folder, then unzip and run setup.exe. Compared to the US layout, there's a few major differences:

• + and = have been moved to AltGr+- and AltGr+_ respectively to make room for the acute and grave accents
• ] has been moved to Shift+[
• { and } have been moved to AltGr+; and AltGr+: respectively

Other than that, all the keys on a standard US layout should work exactly the same - plus you can access a variety of diacritics/other letters with AltGr! You can find a full guide in the PNG image in the Dropbox folder, copied below (you may have to open the original Dropbox image to get the full size):

[removed]

Edit: I have just made a small update to this keyboard; accordingly, the now-outdated image has been removed. (It wasn't terribly useful anyway.) It's probably easier at this point to just present the keys in a tabular format:

Code: Select all

| Base letter (US keyboard) | Output       | +Shift       | +AltGr                     | +AltGr+Shift               |
|---------------------------+--------------+--------------+----------------------------+----------------------------|
| q                         | q            | Q            | ʔ (unicase glottal stop)   | N/A                        |
| w                         | w            | W            | ɂ (lowercase glottal stop) | Ɂ (uppercase glottal stop) |
| e                         | e            | E            | ə                          | Ə                          |
| r                         | r            | R            | ɣ                          | Ɣ (uppercase letter gamma) |
| t                         | t            | T            | þ                          | Þ                          |
| i                         | i            | I            | ı                          | N/A                        |
| o                         | o            | O            | œ                          | Œ                          |
| a                         | a            | A            | æ                          | Æ                          |
| s                         | s            | S            | ß                          | §                          |
| d                         | d            | D            | ð                          | Ð                          |
| g                         | g            | G            | ƣ                          | Ƣ                          |
| h                         | h            | H            | ħ                          | Ħ                          |
| z                         | z            | Z            | ʒ                          | Ʒ                          |
| n                         | n            | N            | ŋ                          | Ŋ                          |
|---------------------------+--------------+--------------+----------------------------+----------------------------|
| [                         | [            | ]            | double acute               | ring above                 |
| ]                         | umlaut       | circumflex   | combining tilde            | macron                     |
| . (period)                | . (period)   | >            | dot below                  | dot above                  |
| `                         | `            | ~            | stroke through             | N/A                        |
| '                         | '            | "            | caron                      | breve                      |
| p                         | p            | P            | horn                       | hook above                 |
| =                         | acute accent | grave accent | cedilla                    | ogenok                     |
|---------------------------+--------------+--------------+----------------------------+----------------------------|
| -                         | -            | _            | =                          | +                          |
| ;                         | ;            | :            | {                          | }                          |
| ,                         | ,            | <            | ’ (right quote)            | ‘ (left quote)             |
| m                         | m            | M            | µ                          | — (em dash)                |
| x                         | x            | X            | × (multiplication sign)    | · (middle dot)             |
| /                         | /            | ?            | ¿                          | N/A                        |
| 1                         | 1            | !            | N/A                        | ¡                          |
| 2                         | 2            | @            | ½                          | N/A                        |
| 3                         | 3            | #            | £                          | »                          |
| 4                         | 4            | $            | N/A                        | «                          |
| 5                         | 5            | %            | ‰                          | N/A                        |
| 0                         | 0            | )            | N/A                        | degree sign                |

So to input e.g. Ɣəqå, you would type AltGr+Shift+r AltGr+e q AltGr+Shift+[ a. (Of course, there's still the question of what sort of alphabet would require this crazy collection of letters...)
[/quote]

[akam chinjir]

I've just started looking at Derek Nurse, Tense and Aspect in Bantu. Very interesting! Besides the book itself, people might find its online appendices worth browsing---they give annotated tense/aspect paradigms for over 100 Bantu languages. Here: Appendix One and Appendix Two.

[MacAnDàil]

De Gruyter is allowing free access to a Grammar of Central Yupik: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1849562 ... 635883848/

[Frislander]

I'm not sure if it's complete yet, but my director of studies has been working on a handy atlas of Welsh dialect forms, which can be found here: https://cymraeg.ling.cam.ac.uk/

[Linguoboy]

Gwych! Apparently my idiolect would be most at home in Pengelli or Pontarddulais.

[Linguoboy]

http://www.quapawtribalancestry.com/qua ... ionary.htm

Looks like they tried to be as exhaustive as possible with the Quapaw sources, but what makes this particularly valuable IMHO is that they include cognates for related languages within Dhegiha, drawing from Rankin's dictionary of Kaw, Quintero and LaFlesche for Osage, and Dorsey and Stabler for Omaha-Ponca. Unfortunately the English entries only go as far as R, but hopefully they'll get around to mounting the rest.

[Pabappa]

Found this while browsing my hard drive.

Original author unknown, but does not seem to have come from Index Diachronica or from Wikipedia.

Code: Select all

Proto-Indo-European to Armenian sound changes

I. Simple Vowels
	1. Loss of quantitative opposition in IE vowel system
 		a. /u: u o:/ => /u/ / _
 		b. /o/ => /o/ (/a/) / _
 		c. /a: a/ => /a/ / _
 		d. /e/ => /e/ (/a/) / _
 		e. /e: i i:/ => /i/ / _
	2. Raising of /e/ and /o/ before nasals
 		a. /e/ => /i/ / _N
 		b. /o/ => /u/ / _N
	3. Changes resulting from strong stress accent becoming fixed on the original penultimate
 		a. /i/ => /@/ / [-stress] $
 		b. /u/ => /@/ / [-stress] $
 c.V => Ø / _#
	4. General examples of exceptions, unclear cases, etc.
 		a. /a/ instead of expected /e/
 		b. /a/ instead of expected /o/
	5. Realization of */H/ between stops (in every case)
 		a. /H/ => /a/ / [+stop] _ [+stop]
II. Diphthongs
	1. First phase
 		a. /ej/ => /ej/ / _
 		b. /oj/ => /ej/ / _
 		c. /ew/ => /ow/ / _
 		d. /ow/ => /ow/ / _
	2. Second phase
 		a. /ow/ => /oy/ / _
		b. New series of diphthongs arises
 			i. Happened before stress accent formed
 			ii. Weakening of stops causes new diphthongs with labial second elements
				* Example: ewt'n < *septm
 			iii. Also happens with /-m-/ between sonorants
				* Example: anun < *anown < *nomn
			 iv. This creates: /aj/ */ej/ /oj/ /aw/ /ew/ /iw/ */ow/
 		c. /ej/ => /e:/ / _
 		d. /ow/ => /u/ / _
	3. Diphthong changes after stress accent
 		a. /e:/ => /i/ / $[-stress]
 		b. /oy/ => /u/ / $[-stress]
 		c. /ea/ (from /i/ + /a/) => /e/ / $[-stress]
III. Syllabic consonants
	1. [+syllabic] => /a/ + [-syllabic]
 		a. E.g. /m=/ => /am/
IV. Consonants
	1. Under glottalic interpretation Armenian stop system is archaic
		 a.Series I, II, and III correspond to glottalics, voiced, and voiceless respectively
	2. Series I
		a. (/p'/ => /p/)
 		b. /t'/ => /t/
 		c. /k^'/ => /c/ (/t/)
 		d. /k'/ => /k/
 		e. /k_w'/ => /k/
	3. Series II
 		a. /b/ => /b-/; /-w-/; /-v-/
 		b. /d/ => /d-/
 		c. /g^/ => /j-/; /-z-/
 		d. /g/ => /g-/
 		e. /gw/ => /g-/; /dZ/ / _/-e, -i/; /-Z-/
	4. Series III
 		a. /p/ => /h-/ or Ø; /-w-/; /-v-/
 		b. /t/ => /t_h-/; /t_h/ / /aw, ow/_; /d/ / [+nasal],[+liquid]_#
 			i. (book ambiguous!)
 		c. /k^/ => /s/ (/c'/)
 		d. /k/ => /k_h-/; /g/ / _[+nasal],[+liquid]#; /tS_h/ / _/e, i/#
 			i. (book ambiguous!)
 		e. /k_w/ => /k_h-/; /g/ / [+nasal,[+liquid]_#; /tS_h/ / _/e, i/#
	5. Vowel prosthesis
		a. According to Laryngeal Theory:
 			i. /h1/ => /e/ / _[-syllabic]
 			ii. /h2 => /a/ / _[-syllabic]
 			iii. /h3/ => /o/ => C_[-syllabic]
			iv. /h3/ => /a/ => _[-syllabic]
		b. Occurs always to avoid /r-/
 			i. /VCr/ => /VrC/ / #_
 			ii. /r/ => /ar/ / #_
		c. Occurs sporadically to avoid /l-/, /m-/, and /n-/
 			i. /l, m, n/ => /a/+/l,m,n/ / #_
		d. Similar occurrence with */w/
 			i. /w/ => /w/ / V_#
 			ii. /w/ => /g/ / _
		e. Related occurrence with */j/
 			i. /j/ => /dZ/ or Ø / #_
 			ii. /j/ => /dZ/ / [+sonorant]_
 			iii. V+[+sonorant]+/j/ => V+/j/+[+sonorant]
		 f.Semivowel-related business
 			i. /kj/ => /tS_h/ / #_
 			ii. /tw/ => /k/ / s_
 			iii. /tw/ => /k_ h/ / #_
 		g. Lots of weirdness. including:
 			i. IE *dw => *tw => *tg (see above) => *tk => *Vtk => *Vrk
		 h.Weakening, including:
 			i. /pn/ => /wn/ / V_(V)
 			ii. /pt/ => /wt_h/ / V_(V)
 			iii. /tr/ => /wr/ / V_(V)
			iv. /kt/ => /wt_h/ / V_(V)
	6. Liquids
 		a. /r/ => /r/ / _
 			i. I.e. PIE */r/ unconditionally became /r/ in all positions
 		b. /r/ is also retained in the originally final syllable
 		c. /r:/ is retained, reflex of PIE */sr/ and extension of contextual change of /r/ to /r:/ before nasals
 			i. /sr/ => /r:/
 			ii. Partially: /rs/ => /r:/
 			iii. /r/ => /r:/ / _[+nasal]
				* Occasional generalization
		d. */l/ has an interesting development
 			i. /l/ => /l/ / #_
 			ii. /l/ => /l/ / _#
 			iii. /l/ => /l/ / C_#!
			iv. /l/ => /5/ / C_#
			v. /l/ => /5/ / _C
			vi. /l/ => /5/ / V_V
			vii. Afterwards: /l/ => /5/ / V,C?_V+/5/
	7. Nasals
		a. [+nasal] + /s/ => /s/ / _#
 		b. /s/ + [+nasal] => [+nasal] / _#
		c. In chronological order, after the fixing of the accent
 			i. [+vowel][+nasal] => Ø / _# $[-stressed]
				* I.e. in polysyllabic words
 			ii.[+vowel][+nasal] => /n/ _# $[+stressed]
				* I.e. in monosyllabic words
 			iii.[+nasal+syllabic] => /n/ -#
	8. Sibilants
 		a. /s/ => Ø / _[+voiced], [+voiced]_
		b. Sporadically:
 			i. /s/ => /h/ / #_V
 		c. /st/, /sd/ => /st/ / _
 		d. /sk/, /sk_h/ => /ts_h/ / V_V
 		e. /ks/, /k_hs/ => /ts_h/ / V_V
		f. Dual realizations, sporadically, with stops:
 			i. /sp/ => /sp/ or /p_h/ / #_
 			ii. /st/ => /st/ or /t_h/ / #_
 		g. Weird transformation word-finally, but not for case endings with */s/
 			i./s/ => /k_h/ / _#
 			
 			

[Tropylium]

It has recently come to my attention that Robert Blust's handbook The Austronesian Languages is available freely as an updated digital edition.

[WeepingElf]

Thanks a lot! While I currently have no plans, conlanging-wise, with Austronesian, it is definitely something of interest.