zompist bboard

Uh, probably not? Breathy and creaky voice are on opposite sides of modal voice. Thats kind of what I was concerned about, but I thought it might be workable anyways. What's the best way for ejectives to develop? The glottalic theory of (Pre-)PIE had Ejective > Voiced, and since sound changes gener...

Nortaneous wrote:Uh, probably not? Breathy and creaky voice are on opposite sides of modal voice.

Thats kind of what I was concerned about, but I thought it might be workable anyways. What's the best way for ejectives to develop?

Is it plausible for breathy voiced consonants to become creaky voiced and then ejectives?

Kinoxʷ Phonemes: Plosives: /p t ʈ k kʷ q/ Fricatives: /s ʂ x xʷ h/ Affricate: /ʈʂ/ Approximants: /j w/ Nasals: /m n ɳ ɲ/ Flap: /r/ Vowels: /a e i o u/ Allophones: Uvular Darkening: a i u > ɑ e o before or after uvulars Retroflex Centralization: a e o > ə i u > ɨ Nasal Assimilation: Nasals assimilat...

EDIT: Reposted due to lack of information.

I decided to start my first real foray into conlanging with a language family. This might seem ambitious, but I don't think I'm going to into detail with any of the grammar. It's more to just get an idea of how to come up with realistic sound changes and derivation. Plus, I'm really interested in hi...

This is a sound change I'm not sure about. In my conlang, non-stressed vowels vowels reduce. /a/>/ə/, /i/>/ɪ/, /u/>/ʊ/. /i/>/ɪ/ triggers palatization of the previous consonant, while /u/>/ʊ/ triggers labialization. Then, a later sound change causes all reduced vowels to merge to /ə/. I like it, sinc...

What is the best way to get /t͡ɬ/? I know the Aztecan languages developped it from /t/ before /a/. How did it originate in other languages?

This is my conlang's vowel system.
Each vowel has a nasal counterpart, but the nasal counterpart of /a/ is /ɑ̃/, instead of /ã/. I think French does something similar. I'm a noob, so I want to know if this is plausible.

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...

Is metathesis a plausible way to get rid of ejective consonants? So that [t'a] becomes [taʔ]?

My protolang has a set of voiceless stops: p t k q. T was sometimes pronounced ɾ intervocally, especially in informal/quick speech. Eventually, t shifted completely to ɾ. I want this to cause a chain shift with k becoming t and q becoming k to fill in the gaps. I understand something similar happene...

The opinion of a total noob: I really like it. If Eskimo and Iroquoian had a baby, I'd imagine it would look like this.

Thanks roninbodhisattva! My interest in proto-Salish isn't really conlang related, so I'm not looking for anything too in depth. My interest stems from the fact that I live in an area where Secwepemc is spoken and spend most of my summers in St'at'imc territory and have a great amount of interest in...

I was wondering if there was any information out there on the web about proto-Salishan. I've been searching for a while now and have yet to find anything substantial. I was wondering if any of you had any .pdf's or other info. Thanks!

I just meant not convincing in the sense that it doesn't have any references or proto-Germanic forms of the words.

I need to learn the Greek alphabet I guess, cause that pre-Greek paper looks fascinating. As for Folkish, I've seen people say that a third of proto-Germanic's lexicon came from pre-Germanic sources, and yet I've never seen any examples. The only thing I can find is this list on Wikipedia, which is ...

Just wanted to post this list here of proposed non-Indo-European words in Proto-Celtic. I don't have anything to add other than to say that *andera "young woman" looks a lot like Basque andere "lady", although the Basque etymological dictionary I'm looking at right now says it may have been borrowed...

Interesting, I didn't know that Old European river names were found in Britain.

Speaking of which, I've read several articles online about the Old European Hydronymy, but none seem to give examples. Wikipedia gives "Dur", but I've never seen any other examples. Can you provide any?

I've spent the past couple of days reading up online about the so-called Pictish language of Scotland during the early medieval period. Before looking into it more, I'd always believed the non-Indo-European theory of Pictish origins. However, after looking into it more, it seems that Pictish was a P...

Thanks alot! I'll try to get a hold of The Languages of North America, that looks really interesting. Christmas is coming up...

Hello there. I've have an interest in the Iroquoian languages and have been able to find surprisingly little information about them on the Internet. So, I was wondering if there were any books that gave an introduction to the family. I'm aware that this is fairly obscure, but I'm hoping that somebod...