Zompist Bboard Again

In Estonian this only occurs for C+/r l/ clusters (and C+j clusters turn into /Ci/), but in Hungarian this occurs for most heterorganic consonant clusters. The so-called "syncope stems" hence also include plenty of level or falling-sonority consonant clusters, e.g. from *rm: három : hárm(...

While we're discussing syncope: what could happen after V > Ø / _# in multisyllabic words? Oddly enough the Index Diachronica reports this change quite frequently, so it appears to be plausible, but I'm worried it could result in lots of weird consonant clusters at the end of words in cases like e....

Here's another dissertation: Gouskova (2003) [pdf] on syncope. That article looks very interesting as well, but it looks very jargony - I can't understand it because I don't know Optimality Theory. Could you give a summary, or at least point me to some resources to help understand it? While we're d...

Also, really for my information more than anything else: Since there are no voicing contrasts until the implosives become regular voiced stops and merge with the allophonically voiced tennis stops, is it plausible with my phonotactics to have allophonically devoiced implosives? If so, where? Anyone...

Here's another dissertation: Gouskova (2003) [pdf] on syncope. That article looks very interesting as well, but it looks very jargony - I can't understand it because I don't know Optimality Theory. Could you give a summary, or at least point me to some resources to help understand it? While we're d...

Here's a whole dissertation on hiatus resolution: Casali (1996) [pdf] . That might give you some concrete ideas. It's very comprehensive, with lots of information on which vowel is deleted, how often it happens, vowel coalescence, etc. Ah, thanks, that looks quite interesting! I should have specifi...

A more general question: does anyone know of a good crosslinguistic survey of different types of vowel deletion? Either synchronic or diachronic. Oddly enough, a while ago someone recommended one to me in this same thread: Here's a whole dissertation on hiatus resolution: Casali (1996) [pdf] . That...

Another newb question: what is a periphrastic applicative voice? My current conlang has a deep and pervasive love of serial verb constructions, so it would probably have that if it is frequently associated with verb series. I wouldn't know off the top of my head, but I think I could work it out. Ac...

Also, how to design a conlang that sounds energetic and happy-go-lucky. I'm not sure there even is one way of doing this, to be honest - I would second linguistcat in saying that it all depends on your personal sound symbolism. And I would think that something which is 'energetic and happy-go-lucky...

While /k'/ is the most common ejective, It is unusual for a language not to have ejective affricate. In fact, many languages have just /k'/ and ejective affricates. While /p'/ tends to merge with /p/, /t'/ tends to be affricated. That's interesting! I always thought that ejective affricatives were ...

Ah, thanks for alerting me to those typos! They are fixed now. The reason there are only voiceless geminates is because they actually descend from an earlier 'fortis' series, which contrasted with the plain voiceless obstruents as well as the voiced ones. In some dialects they were realized as ejec...

As can be seen above, I'm probably not the best person to review sound changes. But I still have a few questions/clarifications: Old Northwest Shorzhic p t ts tʃ tɕ k pː tː tsː tʃː tɕː kː b d dz dʒ dʑ g ɸ s ʃ ɕ x h ɸː sː β z ʒ ʑ ɣ m n ŋ r l j w i iː u oː ɛ eː ɐ ɐː ɔ oː a aː ɛi ɔu ai au ɔi ɐu The nas...

ʔɐɪ ~ ɔɪd- ~ əː- ~ æɪtʃ < Eng. eat m̊ɐɪ ~ mɔɪd ~ məːt ~ moɪ < Eng. meat vaːðɛːɾæ ~ βɑʒɪteɾjɪː ~ βäːtsəɾn ~ ʋɑːʃɛɾ < Eng. vegetarian A: ʔeːse ɾɛɸɐɪ wæ ʔaː ʒæ sɑ vuːɾ < ? repeat what I just (said?) (before??) B: ɾɛpɔɪd nɑʊ wäd æɪð sɑð < repeat now what I'[d/ve] said C: ɾɛpəːt dʒi nə: wæt æɪd säd ɜt <...

That's Sampa. A lot of people just don't want to spend any extra effort to type IPA. That makes sense. I checked X-SAMPA, but I didn't think to check the original SAMPA. (The {: confused me because I didn't realise the : was a diacritic, so I was looking for {: as a single vowel.) So translating: /...

Well the world's your oyster. Any one of these, or conceivably more than one depending on the vowel sequence, might happen. There are probably other processes that could happen that I'm not thinking of, too. Vowel deletion (with or without compensatory lengthening): **gaʔen → *gaen → ga(ː)n, ge(ː)n...

From earlier, we had this issue: General transcription issue: I'm a colossal idiot. You're quite right, /ʋ/ is a labiodental approximant and is not what I intended in the slightest. Well, not exactly. Where you see /ʋ/, just imagine a /ʉ/ instead (or indeed a /ʉ̞/ would be a bit more accurate, but t...

I have grammars of Aymara and Jaqaru, so I could include information about them. That would be quite interesting too - I've heard they have some fascinating morphophonology. As mentioned on the Arrakum thread on the old board : There is a great deal of fuckery with vowel moras in Arrakum. This is d...

There are many, many examples of inflectional morphology which is irregular or fusional. However, it seems to be fairly rare to have any sort of irregularity in productive derivational morphology (although admittedly I don't have any source for this). Why is this? Do sound changes not affect derivat...

Well, conlanging is an art. Experiment. Try different combinations. Be creative and play with something wacky that's *gasp* unattested in a natural language. Choose the processes that lead to outcomes you find personally appealing, or go with them all and make a language family. Read grammars of la...

Let's say I have a language where vowels are not allowed to be next to each other (is there a technical term for that?); that is, no diphthongs or hiatuses. However, there is a glottal stop, so e.g. /gaʔen/ is allowed. If glottal stops are lost intervocalically (which seems fairly reasonable), what...