Zompist Bboard Again

The other day on Reddit I saw someone use "sept" as the past tense of "seep" - not as a joke, just in a big block of non-whimsical running text

It doesn't matter. A linguist writing a phonological description would put them in a table and the brackets wouldn't really be necessary anyways since they'd say something to the effect of "there are 15 phonemic consonants in _______, as well as one major allophone (fig. 2)" that would mak...

It doesn't sound too odd at all, actually, especially considering that Cypriot has initial geminates. Some Romance varieties of Italy also have Cj Gj > Ctʃ Gdʒ, including word-initially (thus /blaŋko/ > /bjaŋko/ > /bdʒaŋk/ in some Lombard varieties) This makes me imagine a sound change like: Cj Gj >...

Another morphological solution: If a definite marker becomes so weakened and semantically empty that it ceases to mean anything at all, the former definite form may simply become the default, unmarked form, with the definite marker simply glommed onto all nouns. This happened in Syriac, and I've hea...

From The Dialects of Italy by Martin Maiden and Mair Perry: Insertion of a homorganic consonant after a final nasal, e.g. [sa’lamp] “salame”, [omp] “man” (Friulian) All consonants except /ŋ/ lengthened after stressed short vowels - e.g. /mel/ > [ melː] but /meːl/ > [meːl] - including the first eleme...

Another kind of horrible thing I just thought of: A language where every vowel has a consonant counterpart and vice versa - it only permits CV(C) syllables, and words are strictly consonant-initial, meaning that if a prefix (with an odd number of phonemes) is added, the entire thing is resyllabified...

A while ago I had this ridiculous idea where every single noun and pronoun occupies a unique place on the animacy hierarchy, meaning sentences can always have totally free word order without any additional marking since the higher-ranking NP is always assumed to be the agent unless inverse marking i...

I don't think anything like that has happened in the history of Romance. Though its not impossible, I think in Taravo you have a distinction preserved between short /i/ and long /eː/. Apparently, in the northwestern Balkan region, the Romance vowel system had a tendency to confuse long /eː/ with /i...

So I'm thinking of a split-S conlang where: - Inanimates can never be the syntactic subject of a transitive verb (a real thing) - Non-specific inanimates can't be (syntactic) objects of a verb at all (a real thing) And I'm thinking there's going to be a form that removes the object from transitives ...

For compounds - you could use some kind of interfix or special particle. Something genitive-like. It could just be, say, o . Or lo . I guess the form would depend on the typical shape of root words. If the roots are more CVC-like, then it might look like kat + gom = katogom. Or kat-o-gom. If the roo...

Not mine, but David J. Peterson has remarked that if he's working on a language where, for whatever reason, he has decided the orthographic representation of long vowels will be a doubled vowel letter, then that language can never have long /e/ and long /o/ - he always gets rid of them by dipthongiz...

pres/ind and pres/subj looking very ripe for merger with just a small vowel change - Western Romance style /a/ with /a:/, /i/ with /e:/, and it would be an almost total merger

is ibi- the "augment"? what's the diachronic source of that?

I have recently speculated a bit about a Romlang in which the Latin vowels turn out as: Latin > Romlang i i: > e i e e: > e i a a: > a a o o: > o u u u: > o u Now, I am certain this is possible if it evolved directly from the Latin vowel system, since the length distinction would keep /e:/ and /i/ (...

I would think you could get P' from sP extremely simply, just by sP > hP > PP > P'

I mean, I think hP > PP is plausible. It could go hP > ʔP > PP, and that would be plausible for sure, right?

/p b t ɖ q ʔ/ p b t d k f
/tɬ tʃ dʒ/ z c j
/v ʂ x ɣ qχ/ v s h x q
/l r/ l r
/m n ŋ/ m n g
/w y/ w y

/ɪ ɛ a u o/ i e a u o

/qaʂtaxvɪʂ waʔ ram loʂ ʂaɖ xuɣ ʂɪdʒlax qɛtboɣ loɖ/
Kastahvis waf ram los sad hux sijlah ketbox lod.

Oneida. It has two feminine genders, feminine-zoic and feminine-indefinite. Broadly speaking, feminine-zoic is used for women of childbearing age and female animals, while feminine-indefinite is used for older women and for generic/unspecified referents.

What are some of the ways a language can develop an initial-only velar nasal? Are there any phonemes that love turning into one? This can actually just happen by itself. Some languages, I think in particular some of the Samoyedic languages, have undergone a sound change where all vowel-initial word...

I have Peterson's book, I've read it, and I think it's great. I don't know what people are talking about with saying that it just talks about how he made his languages, and not how to conlang in general. Now, there can probably be some criticisms of how it's laid out or what exactly it addresses, bu...

Don't press me on a source for this, but one theory I've heard (maybe on the old ZBB?) is that Iranian and Indo-Aryan was originally a north (Iranian) - south (Indo-Aryan) split, with the southern group coming into close contact with the Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex, thus giving the Indo-...

There are some Bantu languages that do this. I can't recall an example from a specific language, but it generally went something like this:

okana > okana > okana > kana
ikana > ikʲana > it͜ʃana > t͜ʃana