Zompist Bboard Again

What do you call the chapter about comparison, questions and negation? Is there a term that encompasses the three? Not really afaik, but what about something like "Basic pragmatic functions" (although that might imply including imperatives and/or topicalisation in the same section too) or...

Seed 1691484330: The vowel system is /a aˤ ɛ i ɔ ɔˤ o u/. I know that some Gbe languages are back-vowel heavy, but this just seems weird; I think it's the low-vowel pharyngealization. This is not weird at all, it's basically just a two-column six vowel system /i e a/ :: /u o ɒ/ with /e/ slightly lo...

This might also count as one of your "larger phenomena", but then it's about one particular semantic category that's systematically found in an unusual word category: Most Iroquoian languages have their kinship terms lexicalised as verbs. These are typically transitive, often with the olde...

From the README: • Conkey supports only Latin scripts (not including the IPA). If it's aimed at conlangers, why is the IPA not included? That seems like a strange design decision to me... (In my own custom keyboard layout, I am using the Caps Lock key to switch from Latin mode to IPA mode, with the...

German allows all of these across morpheme boundaries and/or in recent borrowings. /mn mt ms/ are also found in synchronically monomorphemic words (here marked with °), but most of the best-known examples are actually older loans that have been nativized. /mt ms ŋt ŋs/ are special in that they frequ...

Serial verb constructions with "leave", "exit", or similar.

For the object of stative postpositions, you could simply let everything go its regular way so that -t > -ʔ > -Ø, effectively merging with the nominative case in this usage. Alternatively, maybe the -t gets treated like a word-internal coda consonant before stative postpositions, if this triggers in...

I can't think of an example, but I believe many languages can do something like that. However, I think it usually wouldn't be used with sufficient frequency to get grammaticalized to the degree of a typical "voice". As in your English example, it would likely remain periphrastic. And even ...

That article looks very interesting as well, but it looks very jargony - I can't understand it because I don't know Optimality Theory. Could you give a summary, or at least point me to some resources to help understand it? While we're discussing syncope: what could happen after V > Ø / _# in multis...

How reasonable is a change that deletes unstressed vowels / C1_C2, where C1 is more sonorant than C2? I see no problems with that. ['kanad] > ['kand], why not? It will also give things like [ra'ka] > [rka] without [ka'ra] > [kra], the latter of which seems like perhaps the more natural developement...

Many languages have not just one applicative, but several ones, and while it's probably true that the one that includes a benefactive meaning is most likely derived from "give" in a language that has (or had) serial verb constructions, that's not the only option. For example, an original m...

Sort of related to the nature of this thread: I can't find the ZBB thread wherein people discuss how i > k and u > p in some coda environment. Does anybody know where it is? I don't know where to find that thread, but here's a paper talking about such a type of sound change , although it lists /k/ ...

I hope something in there made sense :) Yes, it did! I hadn't looked at this thread before, but I must say I really missed out on that; I'll have to go back and read your earlier posts too. This last one is really well-thought-out and well-written. I especially love how you use a combination of tel...

Nortaneous wrote: ↑Fri Mar 15, 2019 3:31 am Possibly one of /l r/ exist in loans or something.

Or maybe /ɬ d/ have allophones [l ɾ] in some positions, so that foreign liquids can get imported as /ɬ d/...?

I don't think that would count as raising, no. It looks like two clauses in apposition to each other, the first of them functioning as a topic for the second one. (At least if "concern" is really a finite verb in that example.) Your basic, single-clause example also doesn't really look lik...

He was succeeded by Bonamy Dobrée - I've no idea whether 'Bonamy' comes from a surname or is just a weird first name (bonhomie?). Bonamy sounds like an adaptation of the French phrase "bon ami" ("good friend") to me, which is semantically similar to the original meaning of some ...

Does anyone know of a natural language where the grammatical marking of a certain type of oblique object is suppletive based on the number, definiteness, or topicality of the subject of the clause? For example, a language that regularly uses one adposition to mark a certain type of oblique object w...

Would this chain shift make sense: mp nt ɲt͡ʃ ŋk → mb nd ɲd͡ʒ ŋɡ → b d d͡ʒ ɡ → p t t͡ʃ k → f t͡s ʃ x At first glance it looks a bit strange that prenasalised stops become voiced but plain stops become voiceless. But I think it does make sense if you think of it as a pull chain; i.e. the voiceless s...

IIRC a syntactic change from S Aux O V or Aux S O V to S O V is fairly common, typically with an intermediate S O V-Aux stage (so that the inflected auxiliary, which originally appeared early in the clause, eventually ends up suffixed to the clause-final verb). I suppose such a change can and does h...

German typically uses the same gender as the local language ( die Alhambra (f.sg.), die Akropolis (f.sg.), der Louvre (m.sg.)), and also the same number for placenames that are morphologically plural ( die Uffizien (m.pl.)). This sometimes even applies when there's an obvious mismatch with the gende...