zompist bboard

No, phones go in boxes. Phonemes are stored in slashes.

And how do you expect a single affricate of /tʃ/ to arise (that is, it has no geminate equivalent and no aspirate)? /ts/ is faar more likely to be the only affricate. Also, why do you lack /ʃ/ when wishing for /tʃ/ while having such an unrealistically symmetric inventory? What about something like ...

Gogochurebi - (Georgian words I still can't read) I love how their voices are so deep in comparison to most other female singers I've heard. It sounds so good. <3 გოგოჭურები — ხევსურს რა უნდა მეტი Gogoč̣urebi — Xevsurs ra unda meṭi The Gogoč̣uris — What does a Xevsur wants more? (or maybe What a Xe...

The transliteration for Georgian that I think's best uses č̣ for ჭ.

I dreamed the trailer for a new Werner Herzog film, about a trio of highschooler friends from Alabama. The main character was a pretty butch lesbian with hair dyed into a rainbow (it was a pretty cool hairstyle, actually). She was part of a women's club and was feeling left out because she was the o...

Yeah, must be. I was just thrown off that there is another EMPH morpheme that has a very different shape, and the line both "EM" and "EMPH" appear on there's definitely enough room for another two letters.

According to Mithun's Languages of North America : • Fairly small phoneme inventories: /p t tʃ k f ɬ s h m n l w j i a o/, and a few more language to language. The family exhibits pitch accent systems, lexical and grammatical, to various degrees. Vowels can contrast nasalization and/or length. • Abl...

It's not that I am overblowing anything. Indexical shift is a fairly new line of research, but it's not some fringe analysis... I would point you towards Philippe Schlenker's work , Pranav Anand 's, and other papers by Yasutada Sudo . Besides Uyghur, Slavey, Amharic, and Zazaki, I've also seen thing...

Who is the object of the embedded clauses; the subject is pro-dropped.

I know, Amharic looks crazy... I mean, the word for "am" is <nññ> =O

The accusative subject construction is very mysterious. I'm very curious as to what assigns the accusative case structurally, and how indexicals to the left of the subject are prevented from being reconstructed to be within the monster's scope. What I find cool about monsters is that every language ...

Well it seems that you're pretty familiar with the morphology, at least, which I'd say is quite an accomplishment =) Could you refresh my memory about the iambic syncope process? I found that to be one of the coolest phonological features I've heard about. IIRC it doesn't occur in every Ojibwe diale...

A few months ago I ran across this very interesting paper and started looking into monsters/indexical shift. It's a really cool phenomenon, and I thought I might share. Indexicals are those words whose meaning is determined by the utterance they occur in. I , you , yesterday , here can all mean very...

This is a great thread. I was reading a grammar of Nishnaabemwin and all I could think when I was reading it was that this is the most well designed conlang I've ever seen. Where/how are you learning Ojibwe?

The second and third commas demarcate a parenthetical phrase. He's saying that [n̠ʲ] is effectively a fronted version of [ɲ], and that [tɕ dʑ] are fronted versions of [cç ɟʝ] that are also sibilant. I'd say your intuition that [ɕ] is between [s] and [ʃ] is correct acoustically, but Travis is right s...

Yes, of course it is. It's the subject of the sentence. What exactly the tree looks like depends on your favorite syntactic theory. However, it should be exactly parallel to "It should impress Phoebe". The simplest explanation is that "that" is a subordinator used to turn a clause into an NP, exact...

Georgian: წიგნი, რომელიც (მან) წაიკითხა c̣ign-i romel-i-c (man) c̣a-i-ḳitx-a book- NOM which - NOM - REL ( 3S.NAR ) PV - VV -read- AOR.3S PV is "preverb" and VV is "version vowel". The first generally encodes perfective aspect, but, for this verb, the second morpheme doesn't really have a function t...

In Georgian, "rain (n)" is წვიმა c̣vima ; "it rains" is წვიმს c̣vims . The verb never takes any arguments. I suppose the noun is actually the verb's masdar. As for eating, there's ჭამს č̣ams "s/he eats it" and საჭმელი sač̣meli "food". სა—ელი forms the future participle. The vowel dropping out of the...

I really like that you conflate so many things together— often we are tempted to treat instrumentals and comitatives and allatives and postelatives and everything else uniquely, so it's nice that you have ambiguity both in your prepositions and verbal concord. If you conflate patients/themes and exp...

Here's a new phonology I've been toying with that I'm really excited about. South Caucasian + Salish + Australian + American English /pʰ p bʱ b ɓ t̪ʰ t̪ t̪' d̪ʱ d̪ ɗ̪ t̠ʰ t̠ t̠' d̠ʱ d̠ ɗ̠ kʰ k k' gʱ g kʷʰ kʷ kʷ' gʷʱ gʷ q q' qʷ qʷ' ʔ ʔʷ/ /tsʰ ts ts' dz tʃʰ tʃ tʃ' dʒ/ /s s' z ʃ ʃ' ʒ x x' xʷ xʷ' χ χ' χ...

Here in Manhattan gyros are more common from my experience than Shawarma, there are a couple Arabic places, mostly downtown, but generally all the well known places are Greek or Greek-inspired, like Gyro II which has the best Gyros I've ever eaten. Hahaha, I guess it's because I live downtown, but ...

The NP idea just takes a CP complement: [ TP [ DP the [ NP idea [ CP that I would donate money to him]]] is ridiculous] It's one of English's strategies to evade a naked embedded CP; it's not a relative clause modifying the idea . Compare That I would donate money to him is ridiculous , Me donating ...

I like "Dead-headed Ed had edited it" [dɛɾɛɾɨɾɛɾɨɾɛɾɨɾɨɾɨt̚] (or something)

I'm interested in the relationship between Na-Dené and Yeniseian languages and the I just really wanna have a good thorough knowledge of a dying language basically and the oddities that come with it. Yeah, I'm very interested about that connection too. I'd point you toward Vajda, but I'm sure you k...

This summer I was staying at a university with a carillon. It was great. It's a shame they played such goofy I-V-I music on it— I think the instrument's more suited to haunting music. This is a really cool piece.

English bathymetry milk collar Spanish cuales "which. PL " desigual "unequal, uneven" desaparezco "I disappear" Georgian წყვდიადი /ts'q'vdiadi/ "deep darkness" გყავს /gq'avs/ [ʁχ'aβs] "you have him" ჩაიშალა /tʃʰaiʃala/ "it fell apart" Russian обязательно [əbʲɪzatʲɪlʲnə] "necessarily, without fail" ш...