Zompist Bboard Again

This might be more of a problem for Optimality Theory than a problem for your conlang. OT has some emprical problems anyway and 'stress the antepenultimate mora' sounds like a good description of a conlang.

I must have missed that.

Maybe time travel is more like going by train. You have to build tracks and stations before you can go somewhere. This could mean that you cannot travel to a point in time where time travel was not invented yet. Et voila, no time travel to our present.

With the new series of Doctor Who just a few weeks away, I had a thought - has anyone ever tried to make a Time Lord/Gallifreyan conlang? I don't think there's ever even been a nonsense Gallifreyan used in the programme, never mind a conlang. From memory, Gallifreyan names seem to be either nonsens...

Shouldn't there be a difference in meaning for at least some verbs? I think this related to a phenomen known as neg-raising.

All the time. I decided to just ignore the feeling and pick words from an autogenerated list.

I like ##, the ghost phoneme: 0000u0uuuuuu101uuu0uu0u00uuuu0

1369123504 has lots of consonant to comsonant assimilations but no consonant clusters. Also [c] becomes [kʷ] before rounded vowels. Also palatalization only happens after initial front vowels and sequences of vowels that end in a front vowel because palatalization happens after front vowels but fron...

I always wondered if Tagmemics maybe was the Basic Linguistic Theory (or maybe CxG) of its time? Everybody thought they finally found a sensible theory that is not centered on European language and that every structuralist (i.e. probably most linguists of the time) can agree on; this will surely sta...

I like some of the phonological processes. Seed 4711749792 has the following: Bilabial obstruents or nasals [m p b ɸ] become non-bilabial and assimilate in dorsality and uvularity and palatalisation and whether palatal or palatalised velar to a following phone. With the following example: /ɛmʃun/ [ɛ...

That looks really nice, especially the tones.

Have you looked at pitch tracks from two tone languages? There are no level tones to be found in the phonetics there. Generally, speakers start from the same pitch (or a similar pitch) and then move gradually towards the phonetic target pitch. I valued speed over accuracy here, so you can have a loo...

Are there tonal languages without a level tone? E.g. just rising and falling tone? Phonetically in isolation: yes, in most languages with a simple high vs. low contrast these tones are pronounced as a rise and a fall respectively if in isolation. Phonologically: maybe, depends on your analysis. Som...

I think the universals archive has the other meaning of syntax here (as in some typological research: word order.

Just wanted to throw in that labour laws and stuff in Germany have a complex history. Famously, Bismarck (a conservative, anticatholic, prussian monarchist) introduced social security laws to fend of socialists. Works council on the other hand were introduced in the short period of council communism...

How common is the diphthongization of /æ/ to something like [æe] or [æə] in English? Before nasals, diphthongization of /æ/ to [ɛə] or even [eə] is very common (one could even consider it standard) in NAE. Furthermore, in Inland North dialects typically this also occurs in general (but here in the ...

How common is the diphthongization of /æ/ to something like [æe] or [æə] in English?

I guess Java is a better place to look for people with homonymic birth order names. OTOH, naming practices are very diverse nowadays. Still, some people in Javs have homonymic names and some people use the Sanskrit (eka, dwi, tri...) birth order names.

Many places in Indonesia also use birth order names, either in the local/regional language (e.g. Balinese) or in Sanskrit (i.e. eka, dwi, tri, catur, panca). In Java, there are some places with a strong mononymic tradition, i.e. people have only a single name. I wonder if there is a place in Indones...

Not too much diachronic, but Meeussen's Rule in Bantu and Lyman's Law in Japanese.
EDIT: And of course, Whorf's Law.