zompist bboard

Vaq’ǫ̂ʔ Nąśą day 9: haq’á /háqʼaː˦˥/ v. “to till (a garden or farm), to argue bitterly, to spread invidious gossip”

< /ʃàqàːʔ/ “to till”

https://kwaco.tumblr.com/post/168363820 ... mber-day-9

Vaq’ǫ̂ʔ Nąśą day 8: káhqhęmá /kaː˦˥hχẽ́maː˨˦/ n. “ravine, stream, brook” < /kàːʔ/ “hill” + /ʃqẽ́ː/ “to whisper” + /(m)òʔ/ “ᴀɴᴍᴢ” lit. “hill-whisperer”. Note that “hill” usually appears in an extended form derived from /kàːʔᵑɡą̀/. /o/ in the agent nominalizer regularly becomes /a/ in this word due to...

Vaq’ǫ̂ʔ Nąśą day 7: warę̈ʔ /wàrẽ́ʔ/ n. “hearth”

< /bàz/ “floor, part of a house.ᴄᴏɴsᴛʀᴜᴄᴛ ” + /ᶰɢẽ̀t/ “north”

lit. “north part of a house”, due to Nąśą custom of positioning the hearth in that location

https://kwaco.tumblr.com/post/168317526 ... mber-day-7

sorry! forgot to post day 6 here yesterday! Vaq’ǫ̂ʔ Nąśą day 6: ésá /eː˦˥saː˦˥/ n. “crops, plants cultivated in a garden or farm and still in the ground or not yet thoroughly processed” < /ʔèʔć-/ “create, rear” + /àʔ/ “ʀɴᴍᴢ” lit. “creation”. https://kwaco.tumblr.com/post/168282526792/lexember-day-6

Vaq’ǫ̂ʔ Nąśą day 5: numbers! 2: ká /kaː˦˥/ cf. ká “to match, to pair” 3: ke /ké/ cf. khe “edge” 4: roh /ròh/ 5: q’ehte /qʼéhté/ cf. q’ehtem “fist” 6: ōt’iʔ /òːtʼíʔ/ 7: wą́ /wã˨˦/ 8: wę́dhoh /wẽ˨˦ðòh/ cf. wę́ʔ “doubled” 9: sāʔ /sáːʔ/ cf. sāʔ “to take away” 10: yar /jàr/ cf. yara “finger” 11: tā /táː/...

Vaq’ǫ̂ʔ Nąśą day 4: tēká /téːkaː˦˥/ n. “plant, edible vegetables”

< /tèːk/ “grow, live” + /àʔ/ “ʀɴᴍᴢ”

lit. “growth”. Does not normally refer to crops (cultivated plants not yet prepared for food) specifically.

http://kwaco.tumblr.com/post/1682129938 ... ur-veggies

Vaq’ǫ̂ʔ Nąśą day 3: qhāhta /χáːhtá/ n. “scrubland, heath, arid lands with some tree cover near a desert” < /qáː/ “not intense, to a low degree, weak, sickly” + /stàː/ “woods” lit. “weak woods”. That this was an early compound is indicated by the shortening of the vowel in the second syllable. https:...

Vaq’ǫ̂ʔ Nąśą day 2: dhązēdh ngó /ðã̀zèːð ŋoː˨˦/ n. “owl”

< /ⁿdã̀ʒéːd/ “night” + /gòʔ/ “dive” + /òʔ/ “ᴀɴᴍᴢ”

lit. “night-diver”

https://kwaco.tumblr.com/post/168140195 ... about-owls

Well, everybody, Lexember is here again. Let's not forget the reason for the season: the expansion of the vocabulary of a beloved conlang ... or, in my case this year, the creation of vocabulary from scratch for a language that did not have a name before today. This year, I have also a created a Lex...

There are many examples: Kazakh, Kalmyk, Scottish dialects of English. Perhaps Proto-Indo-European.

Good point. However, people tend to shy away from that for their conlang, since it starts out with literally 0 people knowing the lexicon. So if there's ambiguity in the orthography, you'll need an additional set of notes with IPA pronunciations or whatever. Not a big deal; I'm sure some people keep...

You could do what the new Kazakh orthography does and just make all the digraphs with `! Seriously, though, it's much easier if the phonotactics are restrictive. But, in a pinch, you can always use ' or - to disambiguate clusters from digraphs. Or, as in one version of the romanisation I like for Mo...

The steppe population that apparently spoke PIE (or possibly PIE-minus-Anatolian) - that is, the steppe population that then invaded Europe and eventually India - is genitically about 50% eastern european hunter gatherers (i.e. the people who were hanging around there already) and 50% caucasians, W...

Yeah, e.g. the loanwords, of which I suppose they have plenty, don't normally do mutations, right? One could do a study to determine whether the presence of those words causes some kind of practical problems for the speakers. I'm guessing no.

And then the 0-grade has a separate cause?

One important later sound change in my model is that sequences of o-o were transformed into e-o sequences. This sound change is one of the reasons that the o-grade in modern PIE looks so much like a secondary development. You see this in the declension of the noun genos (latin genus, generis): gono...

You could do something with different accent patterns in adjectives and then resulting apocope. I've never heard of a language with distinct accent paradigms for adjectives, but there are some with distinctive noun vs. verb accentuation. Maybe you could do something where the adjectives started out ...

That pretty much misses the whole point of why the laryngeal theory was brought up in the first place — namely, to unify the e-grade vowel as *e. Well, yeah. Unifying the e-grade vowel is not an end in itself. I was starting from Carrasquer Vidal's Pre-Proto model where he's already scrapped that i...

I was toying with a similar idea, playing off of Carrasquer Vidal's model. If the basic difference between *ke- and *ka- (so-called plain velars) is the original vowel quality, not vowel coloring, even though both vowels correspond to *e in almost any other position, what if the difference between *...

Thanks, I was actually thinking of https://www.academia.edu/4199002/PIE_a, but the centum-satem paper gives more detail. Just perusing the list of *k- roots at Wiktionary, the idea of a-coloring does appear sporadic at best. Actually *g- has a higher proportion of *a vocalism. Carrasquer Vidal argue...

But this is a weakness of the whole laryngeal theory. You have these magical laryngeals that do vowel coloring and then mostly disappear in the daughter languages. It's definitely a tricky business positing phonemes that have no segmental reflexes. But, on the other hand, is it really so surprising...

I would suggest the bilabial fricative (ɸ) for reconstructing h₃. It is not in the velar region, but why does it have to be? It is less marked than the uvular fricative (X) proposed for h₂, which explains why h₂ has more direct reflexes (the 'h' in Hittite). And it would definitely cause rounding. ...

Well, all of that makes a lot of sense to me, but is there any precedent for a voiced fricative producing distinctive vowel coloring? Yes, see German /x/ vs /ʁ/. Those would appear to have different places of articulation. For that matter, is there precedent for rounding blocking a vowel-coloring e...

Well, all of that makes a lot of sense to me, but is there any precedent for a voiced fricative producing distinctive vowel coloring? For that matter, is there precedent for rounding blocking a vowel-coloring effect? About *kʷ, regardless of whether of not it's a unitary phoneme, there seem to be ve...

On another note, has anyone attempted to reconcile *kap- 'seize, grasp' and *gʰebʰ-, *gʰabʰ- 'give', 'seize, take', 'have, hold'? It seems as if it has something to do with the PIE constraint against TVDʰ and DʰVT roots... On the face of it, wouldn't the simplest thing be to assume either a morphol...