Conlang Random Thread

[WeepingElf]

These don’t make any sense to me, for various reasons. If they’re IPA, /ph th kh/ are just a different way of transcribing /pʰ tʰ kʰ/, while /tʃ/→/ch~cʰ/ and /ʃ/→/sh~sʰ/ would make no phonetic sense. Meanwhile, if they’re not IPA, these are just describing different romanisations rather than any linguistic change.

Right, in the high register, h after a consonant makes it ejective. I didn't want to type a backslash to escape the single quote and forgot to fix it afterwards. I don't like the look of a quotation mark inside a word anyway, so maybe I should keep it.

Aspirated stops are AFAIK not likely to become ejectives. Rather, the unaspirated stops become ejectives, and the aspiration of the aspirated stops loses its phonemic relevance, i.e. /t tʰ/ > /t' t/. This is, for instance, what happened in the one Armenian dialect with ejectives which the glottalists like to cite as evidence for ejectives in Proto-Indo-European.

PS. Ejective because of this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ejective_ ... Hypothesis

Which I do not consider very plausible, but you can of course do what you want in your conlang.

[Ares Land]

PS. Ejective because of this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ejective_ ... Hypothesis

Which I do not consider very plausible, but you can of course do what you want in your conlang.

I was amused to see the mountain hypothesis with an 'Everett (2013)' cite, and a little disappointed it turned out to be an other Everett.

EDIT: and amused again to see that Caleb Everett (of the mountain hypothesis) is the son of Daniel Everett! (of Pirahã fame)

[WeepingElf]

PS. Ejective because of this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ejective_ ... Hypothesis

Which I do not consider very plausible, but you can of course do what you want in your conlang.

I was amused to see the mountain hypothesis with an 'Everett (2013)' cite, and a little disappointed it turned out to be an other Everett.

EDIT: and amused again to see that Caleb Everett (of the mountain hypothesis) is the son of Daniel Everett! (of Pirahã fame)

Sometimes crackpottery runs in the family

[Lērisama]

Which I do not consider very plausible, but you can of course do what you want in your conlang.

I was amused to see the mountain hypothesis with an 'Everett (2013)' cite, and a little disappointed it turned out to be an other Everett.

EDIT: and amused again to see that Caleb Everett (of the mountain hypothesis) is the son of Daniel Everett! (of Pirahã fame)

Sometimes crackpottery runs in the family

I wouldn't call (Daniel) Everett a crackpot, just unchomskian¹.

¹ Not intended as a non-compliment

[rotting bones]

Aspirated stops are AFAIK not likely to become ejectives. Rather, the unaspirated stops become ejectives, and the aspiration of the aspirated stops loses its phonemic relevance, i.e. /t tʰ/ > /t' t/. This is, for instance, what happened in the one Armenian dialect with ejectives which the glottalists like to cite as evidence for ejectives in Proto-Indo-European.

Didn't the ejectives emerge out of voiceless aspirated stops in Georgian? If I'm wrong about that, it could be worth changing it.

Which I do not consider very plausible, but you can of course do what you want in your conlang.

It's more of a trope than a naturalistic citation.

[WeepingElf]

Aspirated stops are AFAIK not likely to become ejectives. Rather, the unaspirated stops become ejectives, and the aspiration of the aspirated stops loses its phonemic relevance, i.e. /t tʰ/ > /t' t/. This is, for instance, what happened in the one Armenian dialect with ejectives which the glottalists like to cite as evidence for ejectives in Proto-Indo-European.

Didn't the ejectives emerge out of voiceless aspirated stops in Georgian? If I'm wrong about that, it could be worth changing it.

Where did you read THAT?! Because it's nonsense. The Georgian ejectives are inherited as such from Proto-Kartvelian, which has not been shown so far to be related to anything else, so we can't say where its ejectives came from. (And even the Nostraticists, who are probably off the track, assume that the Proto-Kartvelian ejectives already were ejectives in Proto-Nostratic.) One language where we know where its ejectives come from is Itelmen, a Chukotko-Kamchatkan language, whose ejectives evolved from various consonant clusters resulting from the loss of unstressed vowels.

[Travis B.]

Aspirated stops are AFAIK not likely to become ejectives. Rather, the unaspirated stops become ejectives, and the aspiration of the aspirated stops loses its phonemic relevance, i.e. /t tʰ/ > /t' t/. This is, for instance, what happened in the one Armenian dialect with ejectives which the glottalists like to cite as evidence for ejectives in Proto-Indo-European.

Didn't the ejectives emerge out of voiceless aspirated stops in Georgian? If I'm wrong about that, it could be worth changing it.

Georgian contrasts voiced, voiceless aspirated, and ejective stops and affricates, except it lacks voiced and voiceless aspirated uvular stops.

A common pattern actually is that a voiced, voiceless, ejective inventory will have aspiration on the voiceless stops and affricates, and it is not uncommon for aspiration of the voiceless stops and affricates to develop from unaspirated stops and affricates in languages with affricates. This happened in Akkadian, for instance.

[Travis B.]

One language where we know where its ejectives come from is Itelmen, a Chukotko-Kamchatkan language, whose ejectives evolved from various consonant clusters resulting from the loss of unstressed vowels.

Other language varieties where we know where their ejectives come from is some English varieties, where preglottalized coda, especially final, plosives are often realized as ejectives.

[Travis B.]

And speaking of aspirated and ejective consonants, a common pattern in languages with both voiceless aspirated and ejective consonants is for the ejective consonants to be relatively weak, and in some languages this has gone further and the historical ejective consonants have become tenuis. This is found in Georgian, whose rather weak ejectives are actually used to transcribe tenuis consonants in foreign names, and in the Turoyo Neo-Aramaic language, where originally ejective "emphatic" consonants have become tenuis, contrasting with both voiced and aspirated voiceless consonants.

[rotting bones]

I seem to remember that in Polivanov's diachronic reconstruction, ejectives might have emerged as strengthened versions of voiceless aspirated stops. Since I'm wrong about that, I will change the pattern and try again. Thanks.