zompist bboard

Soap wrote:Phaeryngealized vowels are common in some Khoisan languages (but not others)

I thought that was epiglottalized, aka strident (with an epiglottal trill coarticulation). Pharyngealization is, IIUC, basically the same as retracted tongue root.

Astraios wrote:

Viktor77 wrote:Well, straight women and gay men are kind of similar...

Except that we're so much hotter than they are.

The gynosexual front begs to differ.

Has there ever been anybody nutty enough to posit the existance of Proto-Salish-X, whatever X is? I'm currently having a discussion with someone on Nostratic-L who seems to believe in Uralo-Salish (or something along those lines, hard to tell)… (…) I do not posit compounding or suffixation for fëlh...

You see any global tendencies to this map? Me neither. WALS, strangely... does : No, all those hotspots of large or small inventories are pretty regional. By "global tendency" I would understand something like "small inventories in all of the Americas" or "large inventories in all equatorial areas".

I found a dictionary of Haida a while ago.

Sound change tidbit: it seems the northern dialects get their /ʡ, ʜ/ from original *q, *χ, while original *qʰ, *qʼ remain uvular.

roninbodhisattva wrote:It reminds me a teensy bit of Nivkh. Just a teensy bit though.

Oh nice, the influence is visible?

Some bits taken from Icelandic and Eskimo-Aleut as well. I'm thinking this lang should be polysynthetic or therearound…

jal wrote:I had to look twice on my tiny laptop screen to see that k-with hook-thingy, it looked like an ordinary k. So what is the hook (or bend) thing? Can't find it in the IPA table.

It's a k with acute, which is PIE transcription for the palatovelar stop (so something like [kʲ] or [c]).

Appealing to the "no vocals" clause once again… Ricochet Gathering — Linda's Ghost.

There needs to be more Berlin School music with live drums

I'm not sure if I ever posted this one… It's based on a discussion here around 2008 and… fuckitnotrelevant: /p t c k/ /θ s x h/ /m̥ n̥ ɲ̊/ /m n ɲ/ /ʋ l r j/ The velars have uvular allophones next to back vowels. Buccal fricativs have voiced allophones in voiced contexts, also initially. Vowels: /i ʉ...

What I think would be interesting would be to try reconstructing language families based on only modern languages, i.e. construct Proto-Germanic only using modern Germanic languages, nothing older. I do happen to have a project on those lines cooking. The fact that standard literary English/German/...

What I think would be interesting would be to try reconstructing language families based on only modern languages, i.e. construct Proto-Germanic only using modern Germanic languages, nothing older. I do happen to have a project on those lines cooking. The fact that standard literary English/German/...

Works for me. In all Northern Paman languages, except Uraδi and its sister dialects, *C1 was lost invariably. Even in Uraδi, the prevailing tendency has been toward initial loss, although *C1 is sometimes positively reflected in that language. In Yinwum, initial laminal consonants (*tʸ, *nʸ, *y) had...

One thing we could do here is: - reconstruct Vulgar Latin from modern Romance languages - reconstruct Latin from intermediate reconstructions Compare the result with the real thing. Hasn't at least one of those been done? Anyway, I thought the discussion was about determining relationships rather t...

The problem is that 5000 is an arbitrary number. For all we know the limit is 50,000 years. I don't think it's all that arbitrary. Latin is well attested in written sources, and yet we can't reconstruct it perfectly or purely from it's descendants. We can get close to Vulgar Latin, but there is a c...

*m is more likely to stay put than *o is, [...] Is it? So does the incidence of m increase over time? No, because sound changes that create /o/, or most other "more volatile" segments, are also common. If not, why are you confident that m is so stable? List me three languages or language groups tha...

There are also some non-cranks working on linking Niger-Congo with other language groups. Specifically, there is one scholar who argues that Niger-Congo is a subgroup of Nilo-Saharan. That'd be Roger Blench , and what I get from it is the impression that the standard of comparision used to demonstr...

Doesn't sound likely to me, especially not in an open syllable. Ejectives are so very stuck-together that they aren't really clusters, they're coarticulated. [tʼ] and [tʔ] aren't the same thing, not really. I'd say what you're more likely to have is the ejectives becoming another kind of plosive, a...

Would it be more likely for a language to have /{y/ or /{}/? And in actual pronunciation (i.e. allophony), would this diphthong be more likely to end in [y] or [}]? My suggestion would be for /æy/ with a "cardinal" glide over /æʉ/. I could imagine [æʉ] existing allophonically if there's some sort o...

Fanu wrote:Could I get an /l/ out of an /ŋʲ/? Maybe through /ŋʲ/ > /nʲ/ > /lʲ/?

Or a Slavic-like /l/-epenthesis: *ŋʲ ŋlʲ lʲ l.

I could (cud?) fix the thre(a)d title (titel?) if y(o)u can promis(e) to pronounce it /frɪkətaɪv/ henceforth.

By the way, you do realize riling up grammar nazies (natzies?) counts as a type of fun?

Example for ɬ ∅ found: Proto-Kartvelian *ɬ Zan ∅ (and *tɬʼ h, interestingly enuff). Thanks, WP user Benfaremo!

David McCann wrote:Why only one vote for <ï>? It does make sense to have
front rounded: ü ö
back unrounded: ï ë

Handy yes, but inverse marking seems ideologically somewhat suspect. Sort of like if Polish and Hungarian had a baby that used <ś z s ź> for /s z ɕ ʑ/…

also, "tällainen" sometimes gets harmonized for me Yeah, in that particular word the harmonized pronunciation is actually quite common, I think. However, do we actually know how recent this innovation is? AFAICT, both variants could well have been in existence for quite a while now. Also, there's t...

Mecislau wrote:you see *d as the first radical in a disproportionately large number of roots dealing with destruction, death, and desolation

…Did you do that intentionally?