Zompist Bboard Again

Why do you think it's not made "with the intent to change one's native language"? Because the intent to sound cool or prestigious is a different (kind of) intent than the intent to conlang. Besides, 'coolness factor' borrowings are a subset of superstratum influence, and speakers aren't a...

To me this sounds like someone saying it's a totally different thing to draw faces from life, and to draw invented characters, so we should strictly separate "natfaces" and "confaces." Except that if you say that drawing an invented character is an analogy to conlanging, then th...

People making naturalistic conlangs are, well, trying to be naturalistic. Often that means simulating natural changes. E.g. you take a word list, run it through some plausible sound changes, and see what havoc that does to your morphology. That in turn suggests changes to the syntax. All this is pr...

[j] > [c] ['œcɕ] eoisc "(to a woman of higher rank than oneself) Mrs., Ms.; (with titles of office) madam; (of judges, justices) your honour" Voiceless vowels drop with compensatory lengthening of the previous segment ['ɟ͡ʝec͡çː] giecia "(to a woman of higher rank than oneself) Mrs., ...

Whaat, why miss out on that opportunity? Is there some draconian punishment if you don't show up after having confirmed?

Another point is that conlangs' grammars are created consciously and with clear intent, whereas natlangs' grammars just sort of evolve on their own. People don't intentionally fiddle with morphemes and syntax, not with the intention of how their language "should" look like a couple of gene...

Indeed that's it! Regarding the Kartvelian form, it's discussed in another paper by the same author.

Random musing: why do we sing a song, but not drink a dronk? Make up your mind, English!

No, pretty sure it was positted to occur only in front of *l - something with related with the phonetics (and/or phonotactics) of the sonorant cluster [ml] made it likely to change to bl. IIRC there were examples given of ml > (m)bl in other languages. If only I could find the paper, I'd cite them. ...

Dunno if this has been discussed already here, but PIE *Hebl- 'apple' may not be a loanword at all, and instead just be a metastethised form of *meHlom. Can't track down the paper from academia.edu I originally read that in, but the gist is that an intermediate form *Heml- underwent ml → bl. Also, a...

Right, begining of the Old English period , not language. It's not like the ol' Angles went to bed one night speaking Proto-Germanic and woke up the next morning speaking Old English. "English", "Old English" and "Proto-Germanic" are all labels we arbitrarily tack on a ...

[kx] > [cɕ] / V[+front]_ ['œcɕ] diórhe "(to a woman of higher rank than oneself) Mrs., Ms.; (with titles of office) madam; (of judges, justices) your honour" Palatalisation: ['ɟʝe.cɕæ̥] gaiciah "(to a woman of higher rank than oneself) Mrs., Ms.; (with titles of office) madam; (of jud...

doctor shark wrote: ↑Wed May 01, 2024 11:33 am Here I was hoping unemployment would be a bit more vacation-like. Guess not!

Welcome to the club

I was linked to this impressively accessible grammar of West Greenlandic: https://oqa.dk/assets/aitwg2ED.pdf . It’s a little eccentric in its presentation, but then again West Greenlandic is a little eccentric too, so it works well. From just reading the first few pages this seems much more "f...

Darren wrote: ↑Mon Apr 22, 2024 6:29 am Actually English phonotactics are almost identical to those of Latin, you just have to add some more sC onsets, a few more RC codas and then a indiscriminate post-coda /s~z θ t~d/. Suck it, Catholics.

Ah, the strengths of English.

Who gets to say what's acceptable and what is correct?

I feel like it has to count against loanword hypotheses for 7 that other loanword hypotheses for Indo-European numerals don't seem to hold much water. Blažek reviews them in passing for every numeral and only fails to reject any for 7 because there is no consensus on an internal derivation (the bes...

Alright, I don't know about ancient Egyptian, but apparently Akkadian has sebettum '7.MASC.FREE' and sebūtum '7th.FEM', and both are just a couple of vowel drops away from *septm . Infact, Proto-Slavic - and perhaps Proto-Germanic - rather point to *sebdm , and an alleged pre-form *sebtm nicely acco...

What does a Milwaukee rhotic sound like? Is it close to any of these pronunciations? Searching for "Milwaukee uvular rhotic" turned up nothing of interest.

Just decompose them to a semivowel and a nasal? Nʲ Nʷ → jN wN / V_#
Or if you're feeling rather more rebellious: Nʲ Nʷ → Ni Nu / _#