Re: If natlangs were conlangs
Posted: Mon Dec 05, 2022 1:20 am
Here is the paper. The author simply says Nuer has three degrees of vowel length, and gives a minimal triplet.
Here is the paper. The author simply says Nuer has three degrees of vowel length, and gives a minimal triplet.
It's the Year of Our Lord 2020 and they're just now figuring out how many tones Nuer has. And here I thought there were no more worlds to conquer...We aim to establish the basic parameters of the Nuer tonal system, such as the number of tonemes.
Here we're potentially close to hocus pocus territory, where the truth isn't out there, and certainly not if we look for a language's phonemes. Southern Thai is another example, where for tonemes, having minimal pairs can depend on regionally limited consonant mergers, and the whole is probably now complicated by bilinguality with Standard Thai.Moose-tache wrote: ↑Mon Dec 05, 2022 5:30 pmIt's the Year of Our Lord 2020 and they're just now figuring out how many tones Nuer has. And here I thought there were no more worlds to conquer...We aim to establish the basic parameters of the Nuer tonal system, such as the number of tonemes.
Ok, creator of French, you couldn't get any more convoluted, could you?Rounin Ryuuji wrote: ↑Wed Dec 28, 2022 1:29 pmthe grave, if I'm remembering right, was used to mark a change from [e] to [ɛ] in the presence of a coda consonant where there had once been a final schwa
Yes, they can.Raphael wrote: ↑Thu Dec 29, 2022 4:21 am From a response Rounin Ryuuji gave to a question about accent marks I asked in the Linguistic Miscellany Thread:
Ok, creator of French, you couldn't get any more convoluted, could you?Rounin Ryuuji wrote: ↑Wed Dec 28, 2022 1:29 pmthe grave, if I'm remembering right, was used to mark a change from [e] to [ɛ] in the presence of a coda consonant where there had once been a final schwa