Zompist Bboard Again

It's also a perfectly cromulent phrase for me, although I think I rarely use it myself, and I haven't lived in areas with much Scandinavian or German or whatever influence. I was born and grew up in eastern Massachusetts, though, which I see is in the ~4 range on the map, so I guess it fits, whateve...

Well, discontinuous phrases are classically one part of a "non-configurational language"; the other key elements are widespread (and always possible) null anaphora and "free" (in practice, pragmatically rather than syntactically determined) word order, at least for many elements....

It is actually future English! Though none of the modern-day /l/ survives to see the devoicing begin - that was the reason why I asked about the feasibility of losing /l/ twice earlier in the thread - so the /l/ that devoices actually comes from loanwords. Ah, gotcha. Perhaps I can have plosives+/ɬ...

I agree; the greater compactness is a bit more aesthetically pleasing, I think.

Just have different resolutions for some of the different clusters, like Nort said. So, for example, you can have Sl > tɬ, lS > ɬS, at least some of which > ɬ, as you planned. You can also have things like fricative+ɬ > ɬ. For example (IIRC this is a future English thing, so I'm using English exampl...

"Veto" vs "Plato" isn't a problem for me because I have a flap in both!

"Beethoven" with a flap (and to a lesser extent with non-initial primary stress) sounds really odd to me. I consistently pronounce it with [tʰ] but stress retained on the initial syllable. Now I'll have to pay more attention when other people say it...

abso-fucking-lutely like in English Yeah, I actually considered mentioning the English "fucking" [etc.] infix construction. I will note that in English it's an infix and in Unami it's just an incorporated noun that goes into the available slot for incorporated nouns within Unami verbs. (W...

Yeah, voicelessness can apparently spread really well sometimes, hence all my conlang diachronic shenanigans with devoicing. Yod becoming a postalveolar fricative during devoicing isn't unrealistic, is it? I just can't find any examples of it at all. Quite plausible. Rioplatense Spanish has basical...

Apparently one way of swearing in Unami Delaware was incorporation of scatological or similarly rude-ish roots into stems. For example: /kpənihəla/ "you fall" /hunti hu kpənʃːeːtːijehəla/! "pretty soon you'll fall the hell off!" (with incorporated -/ʃːeːtːije/- "anus") ...

Yeah, voicelessness can apparently spread really well sometimes, hence all my conlang diachronic shenanigans with devoicing. Yod becoming a postalveolar fricative during devoicing isn't unrealistic, is it? I just can't find any examples of it at all. Quite plausible. Rioplatense Spanish has basical...

Hopefully you'll have better luck with Canadian speakers :) Not with LA French speakers, though. The most common realisation for both /ɲ/ and /nj/ is [j̃]. Sometimes the nasalisation is lost, as in manière , which in Vermilion is often pronounced [majæ(r)], particularly when used adverbially. There...

Under what realistic conditions can fricatives become related stops (or nasals)? Examples: f → p, s → t, x → k. I want to get rid of most of the fricatives in my conlang somehow but I was told that an unconditional change into stops is very unlikely. You can get away with it, particularly with inte...

Is it realistic with this sound change. The notation is: S is stressed syllable and s is unstressed syllable, then the unstressed syllable in SsS word doesn't get reduced but the first unstressed syllable in SssS vowel gets reduced? So the language tries as far as possible to have exactly one unstr...

Someone on the talk page has already pointed out that in context "cool" in the Collins quote means "bold, audacious" or the like, but apparently no one bothered to do anything about it. Etymonline dates "cool" in the positive slang sense to the 1930s-40s, apparently ori...

This thread was prompted by this news story about an alleged incident on Wheel of Fortune where a contestant called D a couple times, but some fans allegedly claim she was instead calling B. I am not sure where it's coming from—did she labialize it more than a typical English speaker? Particularly ...

Certainly. Though my instinct in this situation would be to skip the middle stage and just have the language borrow foreign /l/ as [n], [r], etc from the get-go. Can it still borrow /l/, though? There are a fair few languages with certain phonemes found only in borrowings, especially if the influen...

Of course it's possible. Speakers don't know what sound changes happened in the language or what its phonemic inventory was before they were born, and even if they did somehow know this, why would that stop repeated losses of the same phoneme? Well, Wikipedia may be wrong. Of course, errors usually ...