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Fascinating points, thanks! I had not considered that a verb could pick up noun morphological categories because it is a reverbalised deverbal. Fiendishly simple! I should have guessed from the presence of the copula.

I don't know much about Hindi, but it's apparent right from the beginning of the Pimsleur recording that Hindi verbs agree with their subject for gender. I found this surprising because—unless I'm having a severe senior moment—there's nothing like that in Sanskrit or any other ancient Indo-European ...

It would be interesting to know, but difficult to research, where and when exactly this usage originated, whether there was a specific word in a specific language that was calqued as “medicine”, and which other groups of people picked up the same usage before it became a stereotype of “broken” Engli...

Gaoidhealg is per Wiktionary: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Gaoidhealg ... I don't know how reliable Wiktionary is for this sort of thing. Any guesses how the first syllable of "Gaedhelg" would have been pronounced? The "ae" would have been a digraph representing either a distinctive simple vowel o...

I can’t figure out whence come the rococo orthographic vowel sequences that are so distinctive of written Irish. For instance, modern Irish “Gaeilge” (“Irish language”), from Early Modern Irish “Gaedhilge”, genitive of “Gaedhealg”. Per Wikipedia, there was some vowel breaking in Old Irish due to met...

I think you mixed up several phenomena: 1) There're 2~3 different <r> in Mandarin, the first is the onset <r->, pronounced [ɻ~ʐ], the second is the rhotic vowel <er>, pronounced [aɻ] in Beijing but [ɚ] in Taipei, the third is the erhua suffix <-r>, pronounced [ɻ] but interacts with the vowel and th...

When I saw the subject of this thread, the first thing I thought of was surd, "voiceless consonant".

Mandarin Chinese has a syllable final rhotic that to my ear sounds a lot like /ɹ/ in rhotic English dialects. The Chinese sound is written <r> (as in "Harbin"). On this basis, I've always assumed it is a positional allophone of initial <r>, which is a voiced retroflex sibilant. Wikipedia claims ther...

You can see the process at work in contemporary Spanish. Originally, a personal was only used with human objects (thus the name). It has since spread (optionally) to non-human animates, but the criteria vary by speaker. It seems its most common when the animal is "personalised" in some way (such as...

One might imagine that pharyngeal consonants could derive from assimilation with pharyngealized vowels. Various phonation effects can be caused by tone, so that might be the ultimate culprit. In my conlang, I once had it that pharyngealized vowels ultimately derive from something like VgV > VɣV > Vʁ...

Thanks, Cedh ... tons of fascinating sound changes in there. You're right – very different from Indo-European.

Are there are any non-Indo-European languages that have interesting diachronic accentology? I would appreciate links to papers or books that discuss them. It's possible that the answer is no. Complex diacritic weight patterns in non-tonal languages do not strike me as terribly common and, since most...

I have looked for these on the wider internet, but not had much luck. I turned up an old paper arguing that aspirated descended from glottalised stops. That may well be one source, but there seem to be quite a few languages around with both. I suppose a language could develop glottalised stops whic...

Several languages of New Caledonia have interesting sources of both aspirated stops and nasal vowels. Aspirated stops often derive from geminates, e.g. Pwapwâ tʰai < *ssa-i < *sasa-i. Vowels seem to nasalize out of nowhere sometimes, while other times they come from oral vowels adjacent to nasals, ...

yep -- mostly an areal feature of East Asia. most extensive in Tibetan (esp. Cone) but also present in Burmese, Korean, some Hmongic, and dialects of Pumi. generally not used in conlangs, along with all the other weird shit in East Asia. also appears in some American langs. Mongolic and Armenian oc...

I've probably made longer words than this a few times, and I could certainly use incorporation to make very long spot coinages, but a personal favorite that comes to mind is wõgàʻạȟịmúyami [wʊ̃ˌgɑʔɑ̰xḭˈmujəmi] "How about you come with and smoke weed?" (phrased as a suggestion, not a question, natura...

Haloed Bane wrote: Happy New Year~ (Grond morvune!!)

Great job this year, HB! I really enjoyed reading your oft-fanciful example sentences.

Lexember day 31 two words today: žaváy [ʒəˈvɑj] RA (rectus) žavúd- [ʒəˈvud] RA (contstruct) -žvad- [ʒvɑd] A, -žavad- RA [ʒəvɑd] (combining) noun: year, spring vĩ́ [vĩ] N (adjective, status) vín- [vin] N (aorist) víni- [vinɨ] NR (irrealis) -vin- [vin] N (combining) noun: new, recently occurring, ( of...

Lexember day 30

ráwe [ˈrɑwe̝] NN (adjective, essence)
rámyu [ˈrɑmju] NR (adjective, status)
ráwe- [ˈrɑwɨ] NN (aorist)
rắwe- [ˈrəwɨ] NN (irrealis)
-ram- [rɑm] N

stative verb: to be other, to be distinctive, to be unfamiliar

Lexember day 29

čö̃́ [t͡ʃø̃] A (adjective, essence)
čö́ñu [ˈt͡ʃøɲu] AN (adjective, status)
čö́ñ- [t͡ʃøɲ] A (aorist)
šö́ñi- [ˈʃøɲi] AR (irrealis)
-čañ- [t͡ʃɑɲ] A (combining)

stative verb: to be empty

Lexember day 28

bṍ [bõ] A (adjective, essence)
bónu [ˈbonu] AN (adjective, status)
bón- [bon] A (aorist)
móni- [ˈmoni] AR (irrealis)
-bon- [bon] A (combining)

stative verb: to be full, to be satisfying, to be delicious or desirable

Lexember day 27

váy [vɑj] N (adjective, status)
vád- [vɑd] N (aorist)
vúji- [ˈvud͡ʒi] NR (irrealis)
-vači- [vɑt͡ʃi] AN (combining)

stative verb: to be on fire, burn (intransitive)

Lexember day 26

dö́ʻ [døʔ] N (rectus)
döʻá [dɵˈʔɑ̰] RN, döʻ- R (construct)
-dö-, -döʻ- N (combining)

noun: snow

Lexember day 25

ňímu [ˈŋimu] NR (rectus)
ňimú [ŋɨˈmu] NA (construct)
-len- [len] A (combining)

noun: a child (immature human being at any age too young to be considered a social adult)

Lexember day 24

lúš [luʃ] N (infinitive)
lú-š- [lu ʃ] N (aorist)
lắ-š- [lə ʃ] N (perfecive)
láwi-š- [ˈlɑwɨ ʃ] AN (irrealis)
lám- [lɑm] N (potential)

eventive verb: (intransitive) to play, (transitive) to think about repetitively, to ruminate about