Zompist Bboard Again

I didn't say anything for a reason, and I never told anyone whether I was "quitting the forum", so I would appreciate if people did not put words into my mouth OR try to divine my thinking, and would just leave well enough alone. Thanks. [There's no need to reply to this post either.]

That’s a pretty horrible orthography! You should post that in If natlangs were conlangs . Especially bizarre in that alongside the cute and Englishy ee and oo there's the technical and esoteric-looking barred u! (Perhaps used because it was easy to make on a typewriter. But then again, why not uu?)...

The Kiowa alphabet was also devised by a native speaker, Parker McKenzie, an amateur linguist (eventually he received an honorary doctorate) who did a bunch of language documentation work, some of it in concert with white linguists, for many decades, and was a really interesting guy in general . (Al...

I don't have much time atm so I'm just gonna respond to this part for now and try to get to the rest tomorrow, sorry! Oh, dear. Would that be Dixon and Aikhenvald’s Complementation ? I did attempt to read it, and went away thinking that it was totally useless for learning how complementation works. ...

I would also caution against an over-reliance on Dixon or thinking he always represents the """mainstream""" on some given point, since he has some idiosyncratic views, although this case isn't so much an instance of that, as he's just mentioning the cases where "...

I'm assuming it's a Papuan language but I don't know enough about Papuan languages to really narrow it down much. Maybe a Sepik or Lower Sepik-Ramu language? (going purely off the prenasalization and <ɨ>, though it would have to be one either without a vertical vowel system or where the allophones a...

The paragraph from Dixon that bradrn cited is actually referring to Perlmutter's original paper; Dixon seems to be referencing "unaccusative" and "unergative" as descriptors for ambitransitives and split ergative phenomena because one of the things Perlmutter briefly mentions is ...

I will say I don't actually think it's that weird a convention. A voiced velar fricative is vaaaaaaguely-ish similar to [e] in contact with another vowel (not as similar as [a], but whatever -- /e/ only occurs in loanwords in Aklanon while /a/ occurs in native words, which may have been part of the ...

I also posted a reply in the Linguistic Miscellany thread (before I saw your reply here) so we could continue the discussion there if preferred.

I don't know what Ars Lande's answer is, but there's nothing that needs explaining: real languages have syncretisms and ambiguity, they don't follow some platonic ideal where everything perfectly fits into a conjugation chart with no complications and no overlap and no weird exceptions and ... etc. ...

Yeah I would agree that having it in IPA transcription rather than the original orthography is more of a real challenge, though possibly a too-difficult one in some cases. Basically, if it's really, really obscure language, you might be able to keep it in the original orthography and have it still b...

bradrn wrote: ↑Fri Apr 17, 2020 9:01 pm

Pabappa wrote: ↑Fri Apr 17, 2020 8:36 pm I saw the "vocalic/nonvocalic contrasts in phonemes" item and didnt understand what they meant by it.

I think it means a voiced/voiceless contrast.

Presumably it means all languages have both phonemic vowels and phonemic consonants, which is true.

To add to that, even ignoring all the other stuff, I'm not sure why you would expect deaths to significantly decrease two or even three weeks after implementing lockdowns? The disease has an incubation period of several days and sometimes considerably more, and it's not like people who do get it and...

Voicing won't contrast in my setting's Elvish language's plosives but will in its fricatives. Is this attested in any natlang? Does having the language's affricates pattern like its plosives or fricatives sound more natural? It's hard to find examples of languages with a voicing contrast in the fri...

i always analyzed "bucktooth" as being an ordinary compound of buck (animal) + tooth . which animal it is, i wouldnt be able to say, because a lot of them have teeth like that, .... the most ocmmon animal to be called a buck is the deer, but deer's teeth look nothing like that, so i would...

I hold basically no right-wing policy views, and I despise Trump and think he's the worst president in modern American history, but I have to say I'm really getting tired of constantly seeing shit like this: Because as right-wingers, they naturally believe that constantly losing any semblance of se...