zompist bboard

Salmoneus wrote:Hiya, Trebor!

I don't have anything to contribute to the thread, I'm afraid, but it's still good to see you around here again.

Ahh, Salmoneus, thank you. It's good to run into you again here, too.

Hi again everyone--I'd like to revive this thread to continue looking at how natlangs/conlangs can be given a screenreader-accessible orthography. The first item of business: Vietnamese. I'd like to ask if anyone might be so kind as to provide its consonants, vowels, diphthongs, and triphthongs in b...

Generalizing about "sighted" people is just as stupid as generalizing about the blind. Stupider, even, given that we make up a much larger sector of the population and have correspondingly more diversity. Not all "sighted" people's brains function the same way and thinking they do is racist Studies...

Personally I don't like it, but a lot of people write pinyin in this way. It's possible definitely. And yeah people are different - i think the average person processes a whole word at once rather than letter by letter (proof of this can be found in for instance a famous experiment where you mix up...

It says that five tones can occur on a syllable ending in a long vowel or a sonorant. Thus short vowels in a syllable ending in a sonorant can have five tones, while long vowels in a syllable ending with an obstruent can only have the two. So, Long vowel + ptk: falling, low Short vowel + ptk #: hig...

Thai: Tones: mid 33 low 21 or 11 falling 51 high 45 or 55 rising 114 or 14 although wikipedia has this slightly cryptic aside (great example why i wish people would just use proper terminology): Note that the full complement of five tones exist only on live syllables , those that end in a long vowe...

ok tired now let us know when you need more. Haha. Great, thanks so much for the info you've provided so far. I'd like to submit this assignment by next class on Tuesday or, at the latest, the following one this Thursday. Edit: Have you looked at Omniglot's language-specific pages? They may handle ...

Well, I now have, by my own request, the task of devising Jaws-friendly spelling systems for different natlangs as a small make-up assignment (replacing some random stuff) for my intro to phonetics/phonology class at university. I'd like to ask if anyone would be so kind as to provide the phonemic i...

First Kazakh: Consonants Stops: /p b t d k g q G\/ <p b t d k g q ɢ> Nasals: /m n N/ <m n ñ> Fricatives: /s z S Z h/ <s z x j h> (if /S/ as <x> is good enough for Maltese and Galician, it's good enough for transliterated Kazakh) Taps, liquids, and glides: /4 l j w/ <r l y w> Foreign sounds: /f v s\ ...

Judging by how he always goes on about it and its clicks that may be one of Yng's (early?) sketches of Tsi. Ahh, thanks for the heads-up. On another note, I have transcribed my latest entry into the challenge thread into X-SAMPA. (c) and (v) are consonant and vowel placeholders, respectively. All r...

Nesescosac wrote:Yeah, and in fact one Mayan language (Yucatec?) has a series /ɓ t' k'/.

There's Mam too, which has /b_< t_> k_> k_j_>/ks\_> q_>/.

I was just saying that Elkarîl has implosives, not ejectives.

Right. I wanted to get confirmation/disconfirmation of something I'd read.

Cael wrote:I was thinking of langauges like English, Chinese for CVC/isolating and the Native American languages for agglutinanting/CV languages

Ahh, OK. But there are counterexamples not to be overlooked--in the latter category, Georgian and the Inuit languages come to mind.

http://wals.info/feature/combined/12A/22A doesn't suggest any particular correlation between syllable structure type and morphological type. If one looks even at Bantu alone, one will see that this agglutinative subgroup of Niger-Congo generally has phonotactics limiting syllables to the shapes vow...

Odd question but I am curious. Do you type your input, or do you speak into a microphone? Actually a valid question. :) I was taught keyboarding when I was nine using the contemporary version of the program, Jaws, that I still use now. I could probably get funding for Dragon Naturally Speaking, a p...

Nesescosac wrote:Nope, those are implosives.

Hasn't it been speculated that ejectives and implosives are kindred spirits in a sense? So, if a language develops one through a certain process, it can obtain the other as well.

Now, to continue on from where we left off. Here's a proposed script for Yng's unnamed conlang : Consonants Stops: /p b t c J\ k g q G\/ <p b t c j k g q qg> Nasals: /m m_h n n_h J J_h N N_h N\/ <m mh n nh ny nhy ŋ ŋh nq> Aspirate stops: /p_h t_h c_h k_h/ <ph th ch kh> Fricatives: /f s S s_h C X R/ ...

The Romanization and the phonology threads are two of the most popular threads on the forum. They are also almost entirely in IPA except for some of the earlier work. If someone wants to take a stab at "X-SAMPAizing" people's work, more power to them! It would be quite a task, so a very big "merci"...

Are there any natlangs where relative clauses are marked not by any lexical or syntactic means, but by suprasegmentals (e.g. tone, intonation)? Kinyarwanda : Tones are lexical, morphological and syntactical. Lexical tones differentiate words which look alike segmentally as shown in (a), morphologic...

From my understanding most languages with CVC syllables tend to be isolating or fusional; and those languages with CV syllables tend to be agglutinating or polysynthetic. What are some representative example languages? Does anyone here know of a language that is CV and isolating or CVC and agglutin...

Nortaneous wrote:That's not C: > C’, that's Cʔ > C’. The source is ambiguous, but it looks like ejectives in Yapese come only from fusions of Cq clusters, and q > ʔ occurred in most of Austronesian.

Damn, there goes my cool idea. So, it's more likely to have /lak:aut/ turn into /lakauta/ or something else?

Evidence for diachronic fusion of obstruent – glottal stop sequences is harder to come by, though oblique reference to C÷ sequences being the historical source of ejective consonants is made from time to time in the literature (e.g. Greenberg 1970). Fusion is posited as the origin of ejective stops...

An online course for learning Yoruba can be found here--with both text and audio.

A decent grammar sketch of the language is located here--in PDF.

I'd be interested to know if other high-quality resources are available on the Web for this speech variety.

I wanted to make a language that derived ejectives from earlier non-ejective consonants, but I was told that this was very difficult. It got me thinking about how languages develop ejectives as a result of an areal feature. For example, how did ejectives develop in Ossetian? Is it just through borr...

I would like to bump this as well. I want to work on a language with a bit of non-concatenate morphology and this would be a nice intro before I work on. And I'm seriously considering adding grammatical pitch-accent/tone to my conlang... Plus, I'm interested in finding out more about Bambara, which...

I'd like to ask the OP if you could add the X-SAMPA equivalents after the IPA symbols in your first post. I'm able to convert the latter into the former manually, using this tool , but it's a tedious process. Does Ubykh really have a two-vowel system? Most claims I've heard say three, but one is lon...