zompist bboard

Birdlang wrote:My conlang Swampsparrownese has 15 vowels, and it is written in Cyrillic.it has /i e æ/ /u ɯ o ɤ ɑ ɒ/ /ɨ ʉ ɘ ɵ a ɶ/. Know any similar vowel sets?

Are your conlangs actually meant to be somehow spoken by birds, or are they in some way...bird-inspired? Just out of curiosity.

While this thread is active again - are there any languages with just a plain /a i u/ vowel system, but without any length contrast? Sure— Quechua, Cree, Moroccan Arabic, Aleut... Oh okay. For some reason I thought Quechua had a length contrast. The only other examples of /a i u/ systems I could th...

While this thread is active again - are there any languages with just a plain /a i u/ vowel system, but without any length contrast?

Yeah cmon Birdlang, not all languages can be Ubykh/Nuxalk/Vietnamese mashups. Just saying. A small selection of graphemes or a moderate-sized selection with an interesting twist would make just as interesting a challenge. OK a ā c e ē g h i ī j k m n o ō p q r s t u ū w x z ɲ ǥ ꝛ/R rotunda ỻ/Middle...

Something Modern South Arabian? I can't help but think it must at least be Afro-Asiatic, if not Semitic.

Oromo?

Yeah cmon Birdlang, not all languages can be Ubykh/Nuxalk/Vietnamese mashups. Just saying. A small selection of graphemes or a moderate-sized selection with an interesting twist would make just as interesting a challenge.

So, on another board I was having a discussion with someone who has a number of problematic theories, but one I found particularly odd was that he was convinced that the Scythians are the ancestors of the Slavs and the city of Punjab. Doing some poking around, as far as I can tell the nearest moder...

Obviously not my own, but we have to give an honorable mention to the classic Bello orthography for Spanish:

El jeneral i el rrei están qomiendo gindas i zerdo en la qasa del ombre.

Okay, if we're going off this one: a ā å b c č d e ē f g ħ h i ī j k l ł m n ñ ń ņ ň ľ ĺ o ō œ ø õ ö p q r ŕ ř s š t u ů ū ü v w x y ÿ z ž ' £ ^ / < > 7 3 ư ơ ả ẻ ỉ ỏ ở ủ ử ỡ đ þ ŗ ļ ķ ģ ḥ ŀ n̈ ŋ ă ĕ ĭ ŏ ŭ g̊ f̧ f̈ x̂ ẋ ẍ A few mergers have taken place. The orthography distinguishes a few allophones...

WeepingElf wrote:My latest plaything: Svalbardian.

Just 5 consonants with plenty of allophony and orthography in bold:

[...]

I really like this! Small consonant inventories fascinate me. I hope to see more.

It was surely a cruel joke by some advanced alien race, or a terrible coincidence of a space-time rift. One day, several thousand people - all the world's native speakers of Esperanto, and many of the world's most proficient L2 Esperantists - awoke to find themselves in a seemingly uninhabited world...

Are there any cases where a /p/ > /t/ or /b/ > /d/ shift has been attested before, whether conditional or unconditional?

Well, it turns out the Chimakuan languages (all two of them) are an odd bunch. Quileute has a very curious morphological feature: Quileute features an interesting prefix system that changes depending on the physical characteristics of the person being spoken to. When speaking to a cross-eyed person...

Well, it turns out the Chimakuan languages (all two of them) are an odd bunch. Quileute has a very curious morphological feature: Quileute features an interesting prefix system that changes depending on the physical characteristics of the person being spoken to. When speaking to a cross-eyed person,...

I just realized that "switching the place of the subject and object" doesn't actually create a true passive, because it doesn't demote the subject and promote the object, but I'm just going to call the particle that. So today I was fiddling around and decided to just start writing out syllables for ...

First rule of elision: If the referent pronoun is the first pronoun in the relative clause, then the resumptive particle may be elided. Why not just change this rule to state that the 'if the referent pronoun is the first noun phrase ' which would make more sense and prevent the ambiguity without r...

Definitely the first is okay. The second is much more iffy, [s z] are very acoustically distinct from [f v] and [t d] in a way [θ ð] are not. Off the top of my head I don't know of it happening unconditionally, and even conditionally it's pretty rare afaik. An unconditional /s/ > /θ/ happened betwe...

... ...NONE of those come from reanalysed portmanteaus. Werewolf and Watergate are simple compound nouns, Frankenstein is a loanword from a proper noun, encylopaedia/cyclopaedia/hypnopaedia/etc are borrowed compound nouns, exploitation is from a prefixed verb. Were- has been given a more specific u...

Werewolf isn't a portmanteau, just an ordinary compound--it's just that the word were for "man" has passed out of common usage. So terms like "werecat" or "werebear" make some degree of sense as simple compounds. I didn't mean that "werewolf" was a portmanteau. I'm suggesting the view that whoever ...

I was thinking about how English seems to have a productive process of reanalyzing portmanteau components as prefixes or suffixes, and was trying to come up with examples. I've got: were- -gate franken- -pedia -sploitation/-xploitation Though I suppose some of these are rather borderline - with the ...

At a university in a North Midland American English-speaking area - since I started paying attention, I haven't heard a single person pronounce "often" without a /t/, I often hear /foʊlk/ (or /fʌlk/?) for "folk", and last week I actually heard someone say /sʌbtl/ for "subtle". We are reaching an adv...

Any ideas on what I can lenite /m/, /n/, /r/, and /l/ to? Without dropping them entirely?

Nice isolang so far. I'm not sure if this is the kind of advice you're asking for, but with your five vowels plus 20 consonants, you'd have 2000 possible CVC root forms and 10000 possible CVCV root forms (assuming no restrictions), which should be enough for a naturalistic conlang. (I'd include CVC...

Phonological considerations I have a tendency to try to make my conlangs have self-segregating morphologies, so that's where a lot of the loglang-ish aspects come in. With this language, I am going to accomplish that by having initial stress on all words. Stressed syllables will undergo vowel break...