zompist bboard

[ʃː] in careful pronunciation, normally just [ʃ]. So horseshoe and whoreshoe are identical

I usually see them go together too, but apparently Kwaza has /ɓṼ/ [ʔmṼ] while /ɗ/ is always oral. Pittayaporn has some outcomes of Proto-Tai, unfortunately the languages he uses as examples all take implosive > preglottalized/voiced stop so it's left to his comments: Southern Shan *ɓ- > m-, *ɗ- > l-...

However, the ejective or "emphatic" stops *t' and *k' could have emerged from other obstruents: *t' < *ts and *k' < *q. Does that make sense to you? Or is it nonsense? I am extremely doubtful of those specific changes. An affricate spontaneously turning into a non-affricated ejective? If anything I...

Voiceless/ejective isn't uncommon, and they are common in the Pacific Northwest - taking a glance, Southern Wakashan, all Salish, Kutenai, Miluk, Gitxan, Chinook, and Alsea, along with elsewhere Nez Perce, Caddo, Itelmen, Kawesqar, Tepehua, Yapese, and with some fidgeting Mayan (single glottalized ...

Voiceless/ejective isn't uncommon, and they are common in the Pacific Northwest - taking a glance, Southern Wakashan, all Salish, Kutenai, Miluk, Gitxan, Chinook, and Alsea, along with elsewhere Nez Perce, Caddo, Itelmen, Kawesqar, Tepehua, Yapese, and with some fidgeting Mayan (single glottalized s...

Verbal/clausal conjunction and nominal conjunction may take different forms . Verbal is generally the same as clausal, but sometimes different, either with a three-way contrast or clausal versus verbal/nominal. It's fairly common to have an explicit nominal conjunction but mark verbal conjunction pu...

With an actual velarized "hard" series, more than likely the hard series is dental and the soft series alveolar. Without that it could *probably* go either way, depending on the specifics of the sounds involved, though I'm guessing at that. A sound that starts out with the tip of the tongue pointed ...

Laminal/apical or dental/alveolar split. Soft velars front forcing the soft coronals to retroflex. I'm not aware of changes specifically to soft labials, but Cj clusters fricativized in Chinese and become labial-alveolar or labial-palatal stop clusters in Greek and Polish, which can assimilate or lo...

I'm near-GA and mine is [kʰɨn~kʰn] versus [kʰẽə̃ɾ̃~kʰẽə̃nʔt̚ ~ kʰẽə̃ʔ]. The former is just depending on how you transcribe the transition between the two tongue positions, I'd say it's phonemically /kn/. The latter depends on what the following consonant it: before a vowel it's flapped, before a cor...

Oh, right, I think it's probably unaccusative I mean then. Sorry about that. The terminology is not particularly straightforward. Unergative is S=A and unaccusative is S=P, but there's also the terms ergative (S=P ambitransitive) and accusative (S=A ambitransitive). So unergative and accusative ver...

Iirc Nort's done stuff like that before when he's annoyed by how unoriginal and/or stupid people are being. If that's the case, I'm not sure what's so offensive here, though.

['tsɪm.ʃi.an], which I think I got "right" by accident: it's not a word + a suffix -an and I don't pronounce it like it was, though I don't think I knew that when I started pronouncing it that way. I definitely say ['krɪmiə], but it's one of those words I had exposure to well before I heard it prono...

Wu? That doesn't sound familiar. Are you talking about the "muddy" consonants? I'm thinking the opposite direction - rather than originally voiced consonants becoming slack/breathy, originally plain (voiceless unaspirated) consonants gaining elements of stiff or creaky voice. If it's not that and n...

The closest thing I've ever heard of to this is Korean's "tense" consonants, which I've heard conflicting descriptions of that mainly agree on their having more forceful articulation than the "tenuis" (weakly aspirated word-initially and voiced word-internally) consonants. Some describe them as wea...

Purepecha/Tarascan (isolate, Mesoamerica) has /r ɽ/ Miunane (from small Amazonian family) has /r rʲ/ Forest Nenets (Uralic) was left with /l lʲ/ after r rʲ > ɬ ɬʲ Xhosa (Southern Bantu) has /l l̤/ natively, plus /r r̤/ in borrowings Nuosu/Northern Yi (Lolo-Burmese) has /l l̥/. I believe dialectical ...

I think this issue is not just the population size. You find plenty of languages that are robust with only ~1000 speakers near other robust languages with only ~1000 speakers, all crammed into a small area, but in places like New Guinea, California, and Indochina, not in tundra conditions.

"Me and your mom... I and your mom." That's funny because as far as I can tell, the second is flat-out ungrammatical for me. Perfectly understandable, possibly pops up in speech when the second person is an afterthought, but is still a poorly-formed sentence. "I" has to either be the sole subject, ...

EDIT: For the record, there is experimental evidence against the "conlang" idea.I remember reading a study where they showed that very young infants couldn't learn languages with "unnatural" grammatical rules in artificial languages, whereas natural rules were easy for them. Since we all know what ...

1a is possible, but I don't get why 1 couldn't happen. So are you suggesting that groups of speakers began speaking new languages spontaneously? Or were you assuming that these were pre-linguistic peoples that first began speaking once in Beringia/the Americas? I don't think you're going to find ei...

See also: the number of misinformed English teachers and self-proclaimed grammar nazis who swear up and down that passive voice and preposition stranding are bad, the latter group sometimes claiming they don't use them. My absolute favorite example, which unfortunately I didn't take down word-for-wo...

Is vowel breathiness > stop aspiration attested? It's one of those things that makes sense, but upon further looking I haven't gotten anywhere seeing if it's actually something that happens, especially with regards to voiceless stops aspirating.

I ran onto the page again and am once again taken aback at how ridiculous the supposed English pronunciation of Uyghur is: /wi.gr/. No, I refuse.

I like a lot of things that are common from a worldwide perspective but rare from a European one. The majority of my languages have multiple kinds of reduplication on different word classes and polypersonal agreement. Common are core TAM marking not being tense-based, no distinct category of adjecti...

i would think Eskimo-Aleut qualifies as fusional What?! Eskimoo-Aleut fusional ? I'm with this. I've heard Athabascan called fusional-polysynthetic, I've said before I think you can make a case for Wakashan. But Eskimo-Aleut? It's up there with Turkish as one of the most regular, least fusional lan...

The Grammar Pile has a couple, though they're still a bit dated and none are in the form or with the density of a modern grammar, clocking in in the 100-page range rather than the 400-500+ with a lot of juicy details like a modern-format grammar will give you.