Zompist Bboard Again

I should note that aside from the cases with /ər/ such as tiger and Tiber , it seems all the lenis plosive cases involve /d/. I should also note that there are clear discrepancies such as fiber , which always has [ae̯]. Oh, wow, then I am much different, then. I have raising on cyber (and all deriv...

The rule seems to be that /aɪ/ is [əe̯] before fortis obstruents and before lenis plosives followed directly by /ə/ (when not realized as [ɘ], e.g. Ida , Idaho ), /ər/ (e.g. tiger , spider ), /əl/ (e.g. idle ), /ɔ/ (e.g. Midol ), or /oʊ/ (e.g. Fido ) unsplit by a morpheme boundary. Note that the vo...

Quechua and Mayan are of course attributable to Spanish influence. That's extraordinarily flippant, and unjustified. The q > k shift happened in a number of branches of Mayan and forms a deep and early isogloss in the family, and has nothing to do with Spanish. I don't know about Quechua, but I hop...

That history of surnames being used as first names is very interesting. It looks like we've got a step-by-step transformation in use: surname > middle name > male given name > unisex given name > female given name. What's interesting about this is that, in English, it seems to be an almost ironclad ...

Pedantry: "Windsor" is the name of the royal house, but it isn't a surname. The British royal family have never had surnames; their royal houses have been terms of convenience, often only applied after the fact. Some of them have descended from surnames - the House of Stuart were descende...

Not quite the same thing, but a lot of Kings of Sweden sandwich a regnal number between two personal names, e.g. Carl XVI Gustaf . You see this elsewhere as well: Alexios I Komnenos, for instance. "Komnenos" is a surname, though - the tradition for the later Byzantine emperors is to refer...

The "no distinction between name, rank, and title" thing makes me think of the names/titles of a lot of rulers of Persianate monarchies - e.g. the Mughal Emperors Shah Jahan and Bahadur Shah. "Shah" obviously means "king/emperor", and they were kings/emperors, but was &...

Well, anyways, I didn't mean to drop a bomb about French grammar, I just wanted to show what disfixation could look like if it did exist in a language. Just pretend the words I listed are from some unrelated language that coincidentally resembles French.

Another complete newbie question: if you divide languages into agglutinative, fusional, and isolating, how common is it for a language belonging to one of these types to eventually turn into another type over time? Very common. For some changes, like completely isolating to completely fusional, we ...

Second, a question about the scope of nonconcatenativity: do any of the following count? Truncation - Is this nonconcatenative? If so, why is any one form of the word considered the "base form"? Isn't it just that everything else has an affix, while the truncated form is the base (a-la th...

This actually makes me wonder, though: how many conlangs use stress in a similar way? I think I remember a romlang or two that had a regular stress contrast somewhere in the verb system, but otherwise, has anyone made a "stress lang" (so to speak)? I've speculated about making something l...

I don't know. Are tone & stress considered "morphology"? I assumed they weren't, and therefor wouldn't be "non-concatenative morphology". Tone and stress are absolutely considered morphology. They're distinct phonological segments which can bear meaning - there are morphemes...

I suddenly wonder - are there sign languages with phonological alternations? That is, purely phonological in diachronic origin, akin to consonant mutation or umlaut? I know some (most? all?) sign languages have verbal alternations marking aspect (e.g. iterative, etc) but I'm under the impression the...

Well, Esperanto will always be interesting in that it's the most widespread and successful conlang in history - it has a 130-year-old linguistic community with tens of thousands of members and even some native speakers. I don't think it's particularly good as an auxlang, but the fact that it's gener...

Something useful I found out recently from The Oxford Handbook of Grammaticalization - evidential categories often develop from "ordinary", non-evidential TAM forms. This typically happens when a TAM form takes on an evidential implication or shade of meaning. This can remain stable of cou...

2+3 Clusivity wrote: ↑Sat Nov 10, 2018 8:52 am /t ts k/
/s h/
/n/

/ʉ a/ plus accent, nasalization.

{s, h}CVC

Onset h only surfaces following an accented $.

Very boldly minimalistic, like a toy Iroquoian language.

Wrt onset /h/, do you mean lone onset /h/, or /hC/ clusters? Or both?

Does anyone know of any languages with fairly simple phonologies - especially ones with small phoneme inventories, and possibly ones with very simple phonotactics - that have a good amount of morphological alternations? I can think of rendaku and Lyman's law in Japanese, and those stem extensions th...

Yeah, all of the changes were pretty superficial. The only British-American spelling difference that's ever caused me trouble is draught. I went years not realizing it was the same as draft, thinking it was pronounced the same as drought.

Does anyone happen to know of any languages that permit only one particular consonant in the coda, other than /n/ or an archiphonemic nasal? (like in Japanese?) E.g. a language that only allows /s/ in the coda. I do know there's Iau with its word-final [p̚] < /f/, but that's very unusual if I'm not ...

Yes, there is a "hearing accent" that is very obvious to native signers. Presumably the "hearing accent" (or rather, the non-native "hearing variety") differs depending on the native language of the hearing learner. But I suspect that many (mainly phonological) aspects ...