zompist bboard

I like this idea. If I were to make a degenerate "i dont like it" language from one of my own conlangs, I would do something very similar. I'd keep all of Poswa's verbal endings, which are often two or three syllables long, but have some of them merge with others due to sound changes in such a way ...

Grammar: Design Principles Munutuni's grammar is designed to maximize morphology necessary for agreement while minimizing morphology that elucidates meaning and could lead to words being left out due to context providing the necessary information. To that end, most inflectional paradigms, while lar...

Here are the revised personal pronouns, with segments somewhat re-randomized to fit the new inventory. I've decided, at least for the moment, to use v q x for the linguolabials, as above. fanufa - 1st person singular masculine fiseke - 1st person singular feminine niqemu - 1st person plural masculin...

OK, thanks for the suggestions, everyone. I've decided what I want to do. I'm adding the following three consonants and one vowel: /n̼ t̼ θ̼/ v q x or nm tp sf /ə/ e These bring the number of legal syllables to 40, nearly doubling it and bringing it somewhat above Central Rotokas's 35 legal morae* a...

I'd prefer to keep this one fully naturalistic. One small expansion I was considering for the phoneme inventory is linguolabials. They've been found in small natlang inventories, don't have any obvious phonological prerequisites, and I kind of dislike them because I find them difficult to distinguis...

I'm also a bit concerned I may have overdone the "small number of distinct syllables" thing. 21 possible syllables is substantially fewer than any natlang I'm aware of has, and I'm concerned it would necessitate an unreasonably fast rate of speech. I'm considering expanding the segment inventory a l...

So I'm stalled on making Chavakani because I wanted to make heavy use of serial verb constructions, but I'm struggling at making them interestingly different from those found in the southeast Asian sprachbund, i.e. those found in Chinese and languages sharing regional influences with Chinese. What a...

I realized that since much of this project will involve using features I've rarely used, I may have some typological concerns. My first one concerns verb conjugation. I think what I want to do with verbs is have them conjugate for gender and pluractionality, but not for person. Does this seem typolo...

Serial verbs: Comparison This ends up sort of being an extension of the post on adjectives, but I didn't cover some important things then. In phrases comparing entities' qualities, the structure is is A ADJECTIVE MODIFIER B for verbal adjectives: Fúi sachí mbrê Túvi. "The horse is smarter than Tuvi...

Thanks, all. To be honest, the main thing that's actually ugly to me about this phonology is the rhythmic effect of rigidly equal-timed CV syllables, and it's something I don't get from syllable-timed languages in general. Something about specifically both being syllable-timed and never having codas...

And I'm curious about the root for nine. Is it from "almost" or "without" or any such thing? Since it doesnt seem to be related to the root for four. (This was more or less my strategy. I had basic noncompound roots for 1 to 5 and for 10, and derived the word for 9 from the word for "almost". I bel...

Ha. This actually looks like a language I might like. Even the name caught my eye, until I realized where it came from. I am interested to see the grammar, since your least favorite features seem to line up a lot with my favorites. Then this should be very interesting indeed. I was kind of hoping s...

Last night, madness struck me. I was thinking about how there are features from natlangs I find aesthetically pleasing that tend to be overrepresented in my conlangs, as discussed in this thread . What if I challenged myself by setting out to build a naturalistic conlang out of features I dislike ? ...

Does it occur in native vocabulary in any environments that aren't word- or root-initial? I seem to recall PIE *bh *dh became in most non-initial positions.

Do you have separate pronouns? Are the markers agglutinative, fusional, suppletive with one another? While High Lulani does not have verbal agreement, its pronouns seem to be similar to those you've described, so probably neither of us are the first to think this way. Yeah, that's what I'd want to ...

So I've been thinking about color terms lately and I wanted to check whether this made sense. While most words are introduced in a "central" example of their color, the terms referring to white, light yellow, and light green or blue weren't legible so they're shown in black. Chavakani has the follow...

I'm wondering if there are any natlang examples of affricates deaffricating at one POA while remaining affricates at another, e.g. alveolar affricates deaffricating while palatoalveolars are preserved. Spanish says hi. If you're talking about the source of modern Spanish ch , I thought that wasn't ...

Really! Does that include the fricative as well, then?

Granted, I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that proper palatal stops would have exclusively sibilants (palatoalveolar or otherwise) as reflexes in modern Indo-Aryan.

Asymmetrical deaffrication by POA? I'm wondering if there are any natlang examples of affricates deaffricating at one POA while remaining affricates at another, e.g. alveolar affricates deaffricating while palatoalveolars are preserved. I know there are examples that are asymmetrical by voicing, usu...

These are just normally reconstructed as alveopalatal sibilants, right? I more often see them transcribed with the characters for true palatals (occasionally even the fricative!) but I thought they were being used as shorthand for sibilant affricates as they are by some linguists. Am I correct?

French primarily marks noun number on preceding articles and is moderately synthetic. (Most of these nouns still have distinct plural marking in writing, but, well, that's written French for you.)

I'd also be very interested in this.

Proto-Semitic relies too heavily on Arabic in exactly the same way that Proto-Indo-European relies too heavily on Greek and Sanskrit. Absolutely. The only thing that even makes me hesitate in saying that the "interdentals" were a sibilant series is Aramaic reflecting them as stops; I'm not aware of...

More specifically, unconditioned palatalisation of the voiced velar stop while the voiceless equivalent remains velar. This isn't an explanation so much as a more detailed description of what happened. What caused this palatalisation? Why was it unconditional? Why did whatever caused it not affect ...

Medial /pp/ can come from Kluge's law (pp < pn, bʰn, bn I'm not behind the times as to PIE /b/, am I? Is there actually confirmation that /b/ definitely existed now? Sorry, I just wrote "bn" there automatically since part of the idea of Kluge's law is that all of the phonation contrasts were neutra...