Zompist Bboard Again

Now, I’ve been thinking about my #1 a bit more, and I realised that the systems in Spanish, Ancient Greek etc. weren’t quite what I had in mind. In those languages, the article agrees with the noun in number, but number is primarily marked as an affix on the noun. But in the system I was thinking a...

I have /pl tl kl ql/ all merging together into /t͡ɬ/. All of the original clusters can also occur after syllable-initial /s/, but I don't want to have /st͡ɬ/ without an intervening syllable break. What can I do to the /st͡ɬ/ cluster, then? Elide the /s/ portion, especially if my phonotactics don't ...

A little bit ago I imagined a language that had a case/number/definiteness and maybe gender system, but which only had two forms for each noun and only distinguished a single, highly-prominent cell in the paradigm. Like say a language had a nominal suffix -ə, and it always appeared on nouns except t...

/p t ts tɕ k ʔ/ p t ts tc k ∅ /pʰ tʰ tsʰ tɕʰ kʰ/ ph th tsh tch kh /b d dz dʑ g/ b d dz dj g /mˀ nˀ ɲˀ ŋˀ lˀ/ mh nh gnh ngh lh /mʱ nʱ ɲʱ ŋʱ lʱ/ m n gn ng l /f s ɕ h/ f s c h /v z ʑ ɦ "hɦ"/ v z j hh gh /ɿ ɑ e ø ɛ æ ɵ ɔ ei/ i a e oe ea ae o oa ei /i iɑ ie iɛ iɵ iɔ/ i ia ie iea io ioa /u uɑ ue...

Yeah, I don't think that can happen. Why would [ʔ] become [ɾ]? It's entirely unmotivated; there's no mechanism by which it could happen.

and every beaver builds a dam and every bird builds a nest Sorry, nope. Beavers in shallow water ways build lodges or burrow, and penguins (yes, a bird) do NOT build nests. Completely pedantic and irrelevant. Whimemsz obviously didn't mean "all known species of...", they clearly meant it ...

-- the Iranians remembered a bunch of stuff about eastern Iran, but forgot about the Achaemenids This one really surprises me - How far does the word "forget" go here? IIRC Zoroastrian tradition is aware of Alexander and his conquest of Iran (him being regarded as a villain for the destru...

Various Norwegian dialects have suppletion in the lexical item meaning 'small/little' - depending on the dialect, there is singular-plural suppletion, gender suppletion, indefinite-definite suppletion, and/or suppletive superlatives, with a form cognate to little occupying some slots, and a form cog...

It's a modern-day descendant of a non-Latin Italic variety (such as Oscan or Umbrian) written with an Italian-influenced orthography, and likely with a hefty amount of phonological, lexical, and morphosyntactic influence from Latin and its Italo-Romance descendants.

But did <b> v. <v> word initially and after consonants once reflect a phonetic difference? It's not so long ago that good Spanish was supposed to distinguish /b/ and /v/ in at least some positions. Yes, I don't know the details of the contrast, but it was different than in Latin and the medieval or...

I recently saw a reddit comment featuring "he literally post it on Facebook" - i.e. the past tense of post as post , not posted . This reflects an ongoing (centuries-long) trend of English verbs ending in /t/ and /d/ taking past tense forms identical to the stem. (I helped open the thread ...

But we should also point out that several other shibboleths also involve metathesis of syllable-initial /l/ before two unstressed vowels ( jewellery (/dZul@ri/ > /dZu@lri/, with for some speakers further simplification to /dZulri/) Wrong way around - the historic, standard pronunciation is /dʒuəlri...

No, but I have ambiguous breaking of /il/. Nort's description is fairly apt for my variety, and I have breaking of /l/ after all diphthongs (including /eɪl/, but not /oʊl/, because it's not actually /oʊ/ + /l/, it's an aberrant "pure" /ol/) - I couldn't tell you for sure whether "seal...

The metathesis explanation is totally implausible. If it was metathesis of /kli/, then why didn't it produce /nukilɚ/ "noo-kee-ler"? Likely with reduction of /i/ to /ɪ/ or /ə/ "noo-kih-ler", "noo-ka-ler". One could say the /j/ in /nukjəlɚ/ is from the metathesized /i/, ...

I favor the rhotacized vowel interpretation for my American variety, i.e. to consider them a unitary tense vowel or diphthong, because vowel contrasts are vastly reduced before /r/ and there is no clear phonetic or phonological motivation to consider any of them directly equivalent to a non-rhotic v...

I'd love to see an in-depth explanation of the evolution Where does this take place? Unfortunately I didn't write down any detailed notes, the whole thing came to me in a couple hours of inspiration. I admittedly probably won't do much more with it for the time being. It wasn't anything special, th...

Based on some sign language reading I've been doing - some sign languages have auxiliary verbs used in certain circumstances that mark person agreement. One way they may be used is to mark person on a verb whose phonological form blocks marking of subject or object agreement. I'm now imagining a sig...

Does anyone happen to have any links to grammars of sign languages other than ASL?

Suppose that a language allows all the following nasal+plosive clusers between vowels: mp np mt nt mk ŋk What I'm wondering is whether it would make sense for homorganic nasals to be preserved, but nonhomorganic nasals to drop, nasalising the preceding vowel: ampa → ampa anpa → ãpa amta → ãta anta ...

Yeah, <á> is also used in Hungarian and all Slavic languages with a Latin orthography. It's fine if you want a European aesthetic. Scottish Gaelic also uses <à>. The colon isn't just in a few North American languages, it's used in most versions of the Americanist Phonetic Alphabet; i.e. for dozens a...