Zompist Bboard Again

Honestly? My sort-of-consonantal-root-language isn't even diachronic-first. I make the patterns I want first and then bullshit out justifications after the fact, because I know from experience that doing it the other way round is headache-inducing. I haven't even gone all the way back to pre-conson...

Here's something I came up with suddenly this afternoon - yes, a Romlang nominal inflection table, how wonderful. Inspired by Romanian's suffixed article, of course. A word in each of the three genders is provided. https://i.imgur.com/jAcLqSW.png https://i.imgur.com/4SeJfYX.png https://i.imgur.com/U...

Knit Tie wrote: ↑Sun Jun 23, 2019 7:23 pm

Nortaneous wrote: ↑Sun Jun 23, 2019 1:32 pm

Akangka wrote: ↑Sun Jun 23, 2019 2:01 am Is it realistic to turn rhotacized vowel into creaky voiced vowel?

no

Really?

I mean, why would it be? What physiological motivation would there be?

Anyone else have laxing of vowels before /l/ in common contractions, such as we'll , you'll , he'll , and she'll ? (For me we'll and wool , he'll and hill , and she'll and shill are homophones outside careful speech.) Likewise - in fact, I would say that my variety has completely lost the full-vowe...

I haven't heard of the Sino-Platonic Papers before. I guess it's not a very reputable journal? It's a project Mair has run since the 1980s - it's a journal, but not really a traditional one, that focuses on "the intercultural relations of China with other peoples". It encourages submissio...

I honestly wish they'd remove Mair's posting rights. Even if it would kill the blog, it being that he's practically the only one who posts anymore. (Though they could invite a new crop of posters.) The first outright crackpot he platformed on the blog - the one involving that laughable "transla...

I've been thinking about a conlang where most words have a C(R)VC template that can be plugged in with /a i u/ and suffixed with /ə/. Each root has a different pattern of vocalism (well, not each root, you could group them in classes or declensions) that could be described as a paradigm of case-numb...

There actually apparently is a language in Mesomaerica that has absolutely no grammatical method for forming questions at all, not through a particle, word order, intonation, or anything. I.e. questions do not exist as a distinct type of sentence - requests for information, if not phrased as imperat...

how realistic is ɛ > e before velars and at the end of a word? The former happens in contemporary American English: leg and egg , for example, historically end in /ɛg/, but many people in the Midwest (including myself) pronounce them with [eg]. As for the latter, you don't really need an excuse to ...

That sounds completely fine. It's just a merger.

It's a kinda weird but if it's just a gap in patterning of CC onsets it's not unbelievable or anything. What would be unbelievable if a language allowed, say, CCC onsets but not CC ones.

I mean, if you don't have anything in between blocking your way, you can pretty much just go directly: /ɒː/ > /aː/ or /æː/ > /eː/. Or you can raise it first, then front: /ɒː/ > /oː/ > /əː/ or /øː/ > /eː/. All of these are attested. For some reason long vowels just love to front and raise. And note t...

No, they're different sound changes. Some languages do have this kind of epenthesis/prothesis/excrescence where a final vowel like /u/ gains an offglide that can fortite to a fricative or stop, like u > uw > ug or something. But there are also changes where coda glides (whether word-final or not, an...

I find large amounts of eye-dialect spellings baffling, because they don't show any difference with standard pronunciation. What's the point of writing yer, ta in a character's bubble, in a context when everybody would use a schwa anyway?? To make the character seem uneducated with a completely unf...

Yeah, it's quite perplexing to insist that the US doesn't have significant dialectal differences anymore - or even, whether or not they're "significant", any varieties truly distinctive to a particular region. Now, there is a lot of leveling and spreading going on. And the middle/professio...

I find that a lot of newbie conlangers are extremely reticent and unconfident about what kinds of sound changes are plausible. I guess because they don't yet have an understanding of what makes sound changes plausible. If you don't have a basic understanding of articulatory and acoustic phonetics, t...

English of course has the pronoun your excellency , sometimes abbreviated simply to excellency. EDIT: and in a specific register it has the wonderful pronoun my right honourable and learned friend . This is a combined 2nd ("I will get back to my right honourable and learned friend with that in...

I've never brought any conlang to even a very meager degree of fleshed-outness, but when I fiddle around with and sketch out different ideas, things that tend to come up again and again are: Strong tendency for maximal CV syllable structure Simple vowel inventory, usually the five cardinal vowels, s...

My point is the absence of other way to form inflection, nothing can distiguish suppletion with being a different root. You could say "come" as suppletive venitive conjugation of "go". But it's not how English works. Yeah, sorry, I should've been more clear - not true suppletion...

Occasionally I've thought about making a conlang whose history took it directly from largely analytic to largely internally-modifying, without passing through an agglutinative or fusional stage. There's precedent in various kinds of diachronic and synchronic changes in different languages around the...