Zompist Bboard Again

Seems like the monospace font on some devices borks the IPA symbols

I've been reworking phonologies and, while I have my own ideas, I'm curious how others would prefer to write this one. Can be analysed as having 11 consonant phonemes: p t t͡ʃ k q m n ɲ ŋ ɮ j There are 5 vowel qualities which occur long and short: i e a o u iː eː aː oː uː All except j can surface as...

This discussion reminded me of Kusaal , an Oti-Volta language spoken in Ghana and Burkina Faso. It has "invisible clitics" or, as they're called in the grammar I link, "prosodic enclitics", which have no surface realisation of their own, but undo apocope and effects of tone sand...

(I wasn't sure if that was the almost, or if there was something else I missed - knowing me, I didn't discount the possibility)[/size] Yes, that was the almost . There's a good paper here which discussed some examples and what counts, for the enclitic case anyway: http://cysouw.de/home/articles_fil...

I've been working or reworking a phonology with apocope and syncope, and I was considering how it might be interesting to add ditropic case clitics into it. A ditropic clitic is a clitic that attach one way phonologically but another way syntactically. For example, Belep has case clitics which attac...

You’re not wrong! But I find that for my purposes, it works well enough. And being plain text makes up for a lot, since it’s so easy to process via other means. So are spreadsheets though! You can manually export to CSV, but I just use pandas.read_excel in my Python code to read in the summary tabl...

if we really want to commit to ascii then let's really commit: /b d ɡ/ ⟨! " #⟩ /p t k/ ⟨$ % &⟩ /s ʃ h/ ⟨' ( )⟩ /w r j/ ⟨* + ,⟩ /m n ɲ ŋ/ ⟨- . / 0⟩ /i u e a/ ⟨1 2 3 4⟩ Long vowels: ⟨5 6 7 8⟩ #2&3 ,4.%4 $4(1*4 &3#3.4 &2+2 !3'%4.1 (2+*1 "4.%4 $4!4'1 &2.,4 -2+104 )4."...

/b d ɡ/ ⟨b d g⟩ /p t k/ ⟨p t k⟩ /s ʃ h/ ⟨s x h⟩ /w r j/ ⟨w r y⟩ /m n ɲ ŋ/ ⟨m n j g⟩ /i u e a/ ⟨i u e a⟩ Long vowels: ⟨ii uu ee aa⟩ I’m not quite sure how to interpret the rule for nasal assimilation: presumably /danma/→/damma/, but that would contradict your statement that geminates are disallowed....

Relevant. Indeed, I follow this advice and keep my conlangs in simple hand-coded HTML files - thereby also not needing any conversion when I am going to put them on my web site. This is why I use SIL Toolbox — its native format is MDF, which is plain text (somewhat reminiscent of LaTeX, but a lot s...

Is there a little bit of Japanese inspiration to the verb morphology? Obviously it's not the same, but I got the feeling that there might be a bit of that in the mix. Incidentally, there's a cool addressee distinction from Basque that you might be interested in: traditionally many verbs agree with t...

Kalam actually has quite a large amount of literature — mostly by Pawley, but luckily he’s an excellent analyst. It mostly focusses on the SVCs, but you can find stuff about coverb constructions too. The literature includes: Pawley 1993, A language which defies description by ordinary means (chapte...

I’m not sure how qualified I am to comment on this, but Aikhenvald’s Classifiers has a nice chapter on verb classification if you’re interested. Yeah, I have that book but the two chapters on multiple classifier languages are not that helpful. They're very high-level, mostly for languages that I do...

I've been debating for some time whether incorporated nouns should go where they currently do in the template, and reading through Valentine's grammar of Ojibwe has given me more thoughts on the issue and an idea about how to move forward. https://chrisintheweeds.com/2023/06/21/why-noun-sandwiches/ ...

Ooh, very interesting! I never thought of verbal classifiers as being the same phenomenon as light verbs… though then again, given the differences you note, maybe there’s reason to consider them different. Kalam feels like the real outlier there, because it uses SVCs so extensively. I agree that th...

I've been trying to get a better handle on verb classification and light verb semantics in Australian languages and Algonquian, so I did a bit of data collection and wrote a blog post about it:

https://chrisintheweeds.com/2023/06/14/ ... -boogaloo/

The argument about defense from terrorists doesn't really work on anyone who is at all objective though, when you invaded first and started the whole war, are still doing much much more damage to the country you're invading than they're doing to you. It's not worth holding back on things that can he...

My takeaway is that the story of the local elections was the return of tactical voting. The Conservatives did worse than expected not just because of vote share, but because of a lot of tactical voting for the most likely candidate to beat them. The evidence was much more that people hate the Conser...

Although I actually think the following apparently (if I understood comments in Dixon's overview correctly) attested system is quite cool: 1. Alveolar apical 2. Retroflex 3. Laminal (allophones: palatal before i, dental otherwise) I think it gets what you might want in a way, which is presumably to ...

I'm struggling to find specific Australian examples though. Most of the two series laminal - apical languages seem to go for either the apical alveolar option, or alveolar~retroflex allomorphy. It seems like to have retroflexes you maybe need plain apicals too, which means that in Australian languag...

A simple and maybe dumb question: Do languages with a retroflex series of consonants (such as /ʈ ɖ ɳ ʂ ʐ ɽ ɭ/) always also have a palatal series (such as /c ɟ ɲ ɕ ʑ ʎ/)? I don't think so. According to Dixon's survey of Australian languages, while most contrast apical and laminal coronal series, the...