Zompist Bboard Again

Does [ɛ] count? French -eille- is pronounced [ɛj], and produces minimal pairs like réveil [rɛvɛj] and rêvait [rɛvɛ]. (At least, that's how I was taught: [e] in rêvé vs. [ɛ] in rêvait. Maybe that distinction hasn't been maintained.) According to Wiktionary, Italian ne/nei are [ne / nej]. Is Italian ...

I'm looking over the long mid mergers in English (pane-pain/ toe-tow), and wondering if any language has a stable contrast between /e:/ and /ej/ and/or /o:/ and /ow/. I am aware English had the contrast for centuries, but it seems like something that breaks off before other stuff does. I can't think...

There are a few Arabic words that underlyingly start with a vowel, such as ism 'name' and ibn 'son'. I always wondered if that was an orthographic convention, given the constraint is lost in descendant Arabic languages and both of those words have plurals beginning with a consonant. I could be so w...

*natsí “friend” I call this the most misfortunately chosen conlang word I've ever seen. hey, at least the stress is on the other syllable! nice catch lol ---- /m n ɲ ŋ/ m n ni ṅ/nh /p b t d tʃ dʒ k g q ɢ qʷ ɢʷ/ p b t d ti di k g q ġ/gh qu gu /f s ʃ x ɣ/ f s si h j /r l ʎ/ r l li /w j/ w y is a thre...

/i u/ /ɛ ɔ ɛ̨ ɔ̨/ /a ą/ /m n nʲ/ /(p) b t tʲ ts d dʲ k q/ /(ɸ) ɬ ɮ s sʲ z ç~x (ɣ) χ h/ /ɾ j w/ <i u> <e o è ò> <a à> <m n ny> <(p) b t ty c d dy k q> <(f) hl l s sy z j (g) x h> <r y w> An acute accent marks a high tone. Doubling the vowel marks a long vowel. high tone on a nasal vowel is a down che...

For the record, i don't think ESL factor ever really justifies saying English slurs. Even if you didn't know, you coulda looked it up. Maybe more forgiveable, but eh. The paragraph about slurs being not the most important thing wasn't meant to be a dig, apologies. And i thank you for listening to my...

I guess you mean 'link'? Or there is some use of list that I, as a non-native speaker, don't know yet. Anyway, here is a link to the book but it's behind a paywall: https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783110451931/html I actually read the hardcopy in a library. Oh, i meant to simply sta...

KathTheDragon wrote: ↑Sun Aug 13, 2023 2:35 pm Ah, so you'd analyse them as /fɪn.gər/ vs /sɪng.ər/?

Basically, yeah.

Quasi-phoneme is a term that I've seen used. Do you remember where you saw it? No worries if not, tho i'm curious if it was a formal source or informal hobby thing like this. I think it was in Paul Kiparsky's chapter in the book titled "Phonological Typology" edited by Larry Hyman and Fra...

Quasi-phoneme is a term that I've seen used. Do you remember where you saw it? No worries if not, tho i'm curious if it was a formal source or informal hobby thing like this. On what grounds is /ŋ/ not an English phoneme? Because i agree with the idea that standard English /ŋ/ is basically /ng/ ([ŋ...

About, I think, 15 or 20 years ago, or perhaps a bit earlier - I'm not sure, some young people in Germany started to take the N-word - specifically, the version that ends with "-ah" or "-a" - and changed the "N-" at the start to "D-", and then started using i...

Yeah, English eng isn't a full phoneme either IMO. Surely some of the more formal linguists on the board have to have some direction i can take. I'll wait a bit then, i'll just jump the gun and invent neologisms for them.

Ay thanks! I finished my first week, it's going well so far. Technically training but it's easy.

Is there a fancy term for when a single phoneme is ultimately from two allophones that hardly conflict with each other? For example: most native English /ʒ/ comes from */zj/ or */dʒ/, and depending on the word, can be replaced with one or the other with limited changes in understanding. But the fact...

Got a new part-time job at the local airport. Wheelchair handler, about a 1-2 hour commute by train. I don't want to count my chickens before they hatch and say i finally have stable employment, but this does pay well for what it is and hopefully i can finally leave home actually live my life with t...

I'm not sure if I understand you correctly, but, for the record, the word "obvious" is one of my pet peeves. Often, what people are saying when they call a claim "obvious" is basically that they really really want everyone to agree with the claim, but they can't really think of ...

It would be really nice if some of the people close to me in real life would finally learn that I can't read their minds, so if they already know something, and want me to know it as well, they have to tell me about it. Fucking this. Crybully disease at its finest. Also, i wish people would stop tr...

I absolutely love these prospects! Makes me wanna work on my Gothlang(s). I wonder, how much of this is based of your personal analyses of the language's phonology, how much is your own artistic invention? How much influence are you willing to use from neighboring/ closely related languages? Likewis...

Okay, in that regard it becomes more of a lexical issue that i didn't consider. I don't necessarily consider all arguments/ conflicts/ etc. to be serious problems or even anything to worry about at all. But obviously, nothing really gets done (with people i respect anyway) when shit gets heated, so ...

Kinda wish we could make an English miscellany thread, for discussions on the language being used right now that aren't centered on questions about it: I notice there's no English diaphoneme for /ɛː/ the way there is for /ɔː/. I have to imagine that relative-unevenness triggers at least some dialect...