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The letter "a" should never be a schwa in American Spanish. Maybe in Europe it is that way in some dialects. As for b and v, I think they are both the same: /b/, except /B/ intervocalically. <d> and <g> follow the same patterns: they are stops, but change to fricatives between vowels.

I think there's a small vowel there, yeah. I also think there's a small vowel between the k and t in ktuvok and similar words, though. I don't know if I'm correct or not.

con quesa wrote:I can't seem to reach the site, (in Opera- in IE clicking on the link makes the program not respond and close). Is this me, or is there a problem on Zomp's end?

All of zompist.com seems to be down now. The page should be back up when the rest of the site is.

I still use the American r\ for Spanish <r> in some positions, especially word-final. Personally I think there has to be a small vowel before and after every /4/ or /r/, so in Andanese I made it a rule that <r> has to have vowels on both sides (the rn in my sig is a retroflex n).

I know I'm the one of the few people in my Spanish 101 class who can pronounce the Spanish correctly, but seeing as I've taken 6 years of Spanish already and this class is just one that I'm taking so I can get an easy A, that's not really anything that makes me feel proud of myself. アルバイト What does ...

That all sounds a lot like Swahili with suffixes instead of prefixes. So I suppose !Xoo might have adopted the system from the Bantu languages? I know it is found in West Africa as well, so it wouldn't seem likely that it would go in the other direction. In fact, it also sounds a lot like IE with no...

So which one is it that has the largest phonology? The book seems to be saying that it is !Xu ... so did they make the same mistake?

If you're prepared to just use nouns and forget about pronouns, you could get along without inflection for person. But it wouldn't take long for people to invent pronouns out of words such as "speaker", "listener", etc. unless there was some barrier in their way in preventing them from doing that.

/kx/ is found in Bavaria and probably a few other places. It arose at the same time /pp\/* and /ts/ did, but didn't catch on in the North.

* which is itself also realized as /p_df/ and maybe /pf/.

Well, if this makes you feel any better, English has a lot of loanwords. English is like a monster among languages ... it goes around eating up all the other languages and adopting their vocabulary, and to a lesser extent their grammatical and phonological features. English just keeps growing and gr...

I vote for letting the last vowel in the root decide it all. That's close to what you find in Finnish and other Uralic languages that have vowel harmony. A real Uralic speaker would know more than me.

Oh, yeah ... don't worry about homophones, people in China and Polynesia get by just fine with dozens of homophones per word in some cases. Just as long as the two words that become homophones are words for totally different things, like "apple" and "telephone cord", you should be OK, because in ord...

Nikolai wrote:What do you mean? Like each syntactical position is irrevelant to meaning, but, say in the 2nd, regardless what is put in that syntactical position, is headmarked? or something else?

Lots of Australian langs do that. I dont think Basque does it, but it does exist in Australia.

Actually I didnt know Basque could do that, so you taught me that. Also I forgot to mention that uitsatai is the East Greenlandic word for "eyes". So in other words, they put a lot more meaning than necessary into their words, but they compress it using complicated sound rules, so the actual words a...

No, I was just giving an example of how words could be compressed, and I know of at least one polysynthetic language family (Eskimo-Aleut) that does use compression to shorten out the length of its derived words. An example is the word "uitsatai", meaning allegedly "those by which he keeps gazing". ...

It depends if you allow homophones in the verbs that make up the larger words. If "ati" can be allowed to be used for memorize, L and N could be the head markers, and there you go. Or just do it Edo's way and only use the first few letters of the word.

Maybe a culture could have the opposite: things are named in relation to the recently deceased - "orange" could be "johnsmith-liked-it", "bookcase" could be "johnsmith-habitually-tried-to-make-it-but-always-failed". I've done this in Xap, although words like these are a small subset of the total vo...

The Navaho name for Albuquerque is "The place where the railroad trains make that noise" ... or something close to that, anyway ... an Albuquerque resident who learned some Navaho told me this.

Most languages with complex phonologies hardly use any of their possible sound combinations for affixes, prepositions, etc. anyway ... for example there is no final -c in Latin declensions, as far as I know. or -b, -f, etc.

Usually it's front vs back, round vs unround, or high vs low. But average people are not linguists, and they dont often follow the rules. For example, notice that /i/ is in both groups.

It says he made 2 posts, but I can only find one, so the other one must've gotten deleted or pruned away.

I'm guessing that when it comes to naming species and things like that, even the most verbal of languages have to use meaningless words at some point. "Cecropia" and "Luna" don't mean anything to us English speakers, so why not nonsense words for your language too? (Or loanwords, or something.)

No "k" at all in women's Chukchi? That would be interesting if it was true. At least one site I've found claims that it's "r" that women won't say, rather than "k".

Interesting ... I'm pretty ignorant of all of Zomp's languages because I haven't browsed the site. I had the same idea for my own languages, but I've put it off to the side for now so I can work on making a "winter" language. I'll come back when I need some more ideas.

But why not /a/ /M/ /y/ instead? We could call it the Amy system. I can't offer any support for the baby theory, because it's just what I would like to be true, rather than what I think actually is true. But anyway, at a young age babies don't really emulate the speech patterns of their parents. I'm...