zompist bboard

How powerful is analogy? If most, but not all, two-syllable verbs have stress on the last syllable, and most, but not all, two-syllable nouns have stress on the first syllable, would it be possible for words with the 'wrong' pattern to change to the other one, or for this stress shift to be product...

Ah, I have "bolth" for "both". I wonder if that's some kind of hypercorrection, since I have /l/ in a lot of words that historically lost it, such as palm and balm. (But not all - I don't have /l/ in "folk", for example.)

Maybe you can use wikipedia as an assisting tool? look up the articles about the place names of Ohio? So, my question is - when toponyms originating from a linguistic substrate can be used to delineate an area in which the substrate was once spoken, what is that area called? Is there even a name fo...

I'm a senior undergraduate in geography, though I'm minoring in linguistics and looking to go to grad school in linguistics. For a capstone project, I'm attempting to analyze the spatial distribution of English place names of Native American origin in Ohio, by language and language family. The raw o...

thetha wrote:l > tʃ in Anejom, in the environment of front vowels (e.g. *tolu > *teli > e-setʃ). That's a pretty odd reflex for palatalization of L.

Well, a lot of Spanish dialects have /ɟʝ/, /dʒ/, /ʒ/, or /ʃ/ for historical /ʎ/, thanks to yeísmo.

Chemakum has a similar velar inventory, but minus even /kʼ/ and /kʰ/. And it doesn't have the other aspirated stops either.

With the case of /r/ it doesn't even have to be a cluster to trigger prosthesis - this happened in some Turkic and Balkan Romance languages, as exhibited in the names of the Aromanian and Urum languages.

The Indefinite Morpheme The unmarked form of the noun in Yeyzalha is not truly indefinite - as in English, all nouns must have a determiner. But unlike in English, the plural affix does not count as a determiner - though an affixed possessor does. In any case, indefiniteness is marked by the morphe...

Hmm, I guess another obvious one I forgot about was part-of-speech marking on every noun, verb, etc (especially if through an invariant morpheme). Mainly found in auxlangs, but also in some naturalistic-ish artlangs I've seen.

@purpdick http://www.silcam.org/documents/bow_thesis.pdf, five seconds on Google, also http://www.eva.mpg.de/fileadmin/content ... slides.pdf it's less one-vowel-like than nuxalk, since there are 'prosodies' that color whole words for front/back, so [e a o] are /aʲ a aʷ/. you could think of it as v...

A wonderful thread. Subscribing. Loving the attention to small details in these posts, keep 'em coming :=) Well thank you both so much! I'm finally getting around to posting the next part. I'm actually holding off on the indefinite prefix for the next time. The History of Ha Earlier I mentioned tha...

BTW, I wonder whether if it wasn't for the Afroasiatic family, triconsonantal roots would be considered "unnatural". Another thought - a lot of conlangers design triconsonantal or biconsonantal languages that really don't resemble Afro-Asiatic at all. I.e. these conlangs posit abstracted roots, à l...

I don't know the details of vowels in Old Albic, but you might be interested in natlangs like Moloko: there's one phonemic vowel, /a/, and then an epenthetic schwa, and front/back is a word-level feature that can spread to roots from affixes. Wait, only one phonemic vowel?! I thought that the only ...

I've been thinking of typological features that, while fairly common in conlangs, are unattested (or nearly so) in natlangs - especially features that are seemingly "naturalistic". The prime example I've thought of is the alignment system known as the conlang trigger system , which is inspired by ce...

The Nominal Paradigm Or, well, the paradigm of one particular word. Here we see the inflection of zutər in the "oldest" stage of Yeyzalha: http://i.imgur.com/tHlDnVv.png Note that in this stage of Yeyzalha, no form of vowel length existed at all - adjacent vowels of the same quality simply merged t...

Possession As with, for example, the Algonquian languages, the principal method of marking possession in Yeyzalha is simply by prefixing the bare pronoun (the possessor) to the possessed noun. Such constructions are known as the possessed form of the noun. As with the plural prefix, the prefixed pr...

I'm going to discuss possession next, but first I briefly want to cover personal pronouns. Personal Pronouns Yeyzalha has no grammatical gender and does not mark for case. Its pronouns are no exception. The pronominal paradigm is quite simple. Pluralization is marked through simple reduplication, so...

The Noun and Number Next, we will look at the different ways nouns can be inflected for number in Yeyzalha. This is a fairly messy topic. Nouns in Yeyzalha distinguish between the singular and the plural. The singular is simply unmarked, while there are two principal ways of forming the plural. The...

I'm going to be sharing some content on a till-now-unnamed conlang that I originally posted elsewhere. It's not exactly a general outline of the language, but perhaps I will be able to piece one together from it. The language's original name is/was Yeyzalha , but it is perhaps more often known by th...

As a general pet peeve, I think linguists should stop making up whacko symbols for the languages they describe. Firstly, it's ncredibly hard to type especially for people who will have only primitive access to digital resources. This is 2015 and even Indians in the amazon have cellphones and many w...

Soo, if I'm debuccalizing /f/ to /h/, and feel the need to likewise debuccalize /v/ to /ɦ/...what can I do with /ɦ/? Is it plausible for /ɦ/ to simply merge into /h/?

Trying to make this a little more data-driven, I made this table of The Civilysed Tongues and their phonological peculiarities of note: It doesn't look like there's much commonality except the presence of /h/. Out of curiosity, why is pre-Natchez included on this list? Is it hypothesized that the a...

More on Diphthongs So, I realized that having the diphthongs (and resultant triphthongs) wait until after /h/ disappeared to monophthongize would result in catastrophic damage to the sound system, so to speak. So I organized the progression of sound changes into stages a bit more. First Diphthongiza...

Okay, so a bit more with Latin loanwords. After Roedrig's Law, there were two sources of new /k/. One was /q/ - Ancient Teavislian had /q/, and it fronted to /k/ after original /k/ was lost. The second source was loanwords. Let's look at this word, kluku ("chick, young animal") - modern Teavislian k...

Started sketching out some ideas today and they turned out pretty well: Teavislian /tə'vaɪ̯.li.ən/ is the language of Teavislia /tə'vaɪ̯.li.ə/, the English-language name of Taewiulie /tɛ'vil.jə/, an archipelagic country in the Atlantic ocean, consisting of three main islands, about 550 miles west-no...