zompist bboard

Is this from the same world as Estotiland? I don't think so. I mean I guess it could be, if I wanted it to be. If I have any new Estotian stuff I'll post it here and let the original thread fall off the page. --- I'm thinking that this language originally used postpositions, which eventually develo...

It feels a bit spammy now, but I often get somewhat-well-developed ideas for conlangs, and instead of making a new thread for each of them (like with the Estotiland thread), this will keep myself from making more clutter in the long term. For a while I've been fiddling with a Finno-Ugric/Uralic-insp...

I have a problem in that I often have my head filled with ideas for conlangs which don't really come to fruition or get fully developed. Right now I'm obsessing about making an Algonquian-language (based on a previous effort), probably placed in Montana, and I have some sound changes to derive it (...

I'm thinking something similar with the Christianity on Frisland. The natives did already have beliefs which made them more receptive to Christianity, strong monotheism in particular. I do, however, have a slightly different reason for the loss of contact: the island periodically disappears off the...

I'll be honest, everything I wrote about the island's history is just a big handwave, and subject to further change. In fact, I do not understand how the island could be settled in the first place by a mixed Neolithic European/Paleo-Indian stock at the stated time period. A lower sea level during th...

Orthography If the historical phonology section didn't confuse you, maybe this will clear some things up. The letters of the Estotian alphabet are as follows: Aa Bb Dd Ee Ff Gg Hh Ii Jj Kk Ll Mm Nn Oo Pp Rr Ss Tt Tjtj Uu Vv Yy It includes the following digraphs: aa ee oo ai au sj hj Now, an explana...

I initially read this as "Estonian." Anyway, cool stuff, I look forward to reading more about Estotian. Yeah they kind of have a Slovakia-Slovenia thing going on. Though luckily it isn't too bad since it's Estoti land and not Estoti a . It's a good thing you didn't put it on Frisland because that's...

Phonology Glossing over some dialectal differences, the Estotian phoneme inventory can broadly be said to consist of the following: Vowels /a ɛ eː iː (yː) u oː ɔ/ - /yː/ has merged into /iː/ in most varieties. /ai̯ au̯ (əi̯)/ - historical /iː/ diphthongizes to /əi̯/ or even merges with /ai̯/ in som...

In the North Atlantic Ocean, about 500 miles south of Greenland and 550 miles east of Newfoundland, lies an island country called Estotiland. Settled as early as 10,000 BCE by people of disputed genetic stock, perhaps an admixture of the earliest Paleo-Indians and Neolithic Europeans, it remained is...

This is perhaps less of an innovative usage than an aberrant usage, since I'm the only (??) instance, but I've got this to confess - my entire life I've pronounced "thanks" with [ð], and only found out today that it's supposed to be pronounced with [θ]. Has anyone else ever observed this phenomenon?...

I honestly think this is the first time I personally have ever seen "rather" used as a verb: The party's opponents rathered to deal with Adams than Hamilton. A pretty common phenomenon - and dating back centuries, apparently. I think it's a very odd but very interesting example of syntactic change....

I've personally witnessed it on a number of occasions.

I like it! Reminds me also of the Tuscan gorgia. Thanks! And you're right, it is similar, I didn't think of that. Does /dj/ not palatalize? That's a bit odd, although I think it does have precedent somewhere. Oh, wow, that's a big mess-up, I just realized. No, /dj/ definitely becomes [d͜ʒ], I don't...

A very simple thing I came up with, somewhat inspired by Hebrew spirantization: Phoneme inventory Nasals: /m n/ <m n> Stops: /p b t d k g/ <p b t d k g> Fricatives: /s/ <s> Approximants + trill: /l r/ <l r> Semivowels: /j w/ <y w> Vowels: /a e i o u/ <a e i o u> Syllable structure Syllable structure...

There's the super-long shift of t > θ > ð > d > t from PIE to High German, as in *ph₂tḗr > *fadēr > Vater

Richard W wrote:

WeepingElf wrote:And Germanic ablaut is an entirely different thing

I think Porphyrogenitos meant umlaut. Now, umlaut is something we also see in Brythonic and, to a small extent, French.

Oops, yeah, I meant umlaut. I find it easy to get the terms mixed up...

This may be better for a thread on its own, but does anyone happen to know what the current view is on the initial mutations in Proto-Celtic? i.e. were they present in some form in Proto-Celtic, or were they a parallel development like Germanic ablaut? (If that's even a correct understanding of Germ...

Is Vh > ə plausible? Probably, assuming it's before a consonant or word-final - I bet it'd go something like this: Vh > Və̯ > ə Or (though this would affect vowels before all consonants) vowels in closed syllables could shorten, and then all short vowels could reduce to /ə/, and then /h/ could drop...

Travis B. wrote:does anyone here know any examples of a palatal or alveolopalatal turning into a velar?

Didn't Egyptian Arabic turn /dʒ/ into /g/?

On which note, I have a language that has ejectives in which I plan to use the Aramaic/Arabic ejective-to-pharyngealized shift. However, said language already has /q q'/ and I don't want to merge historical /k'/ and /q/ (i.e., I want to change /q/ into something else first). One possibility, of cou...

The introductory linguistics textbook I was reading today specifically states that while the existence of minimal pairs does indicate that two phones are phonemic, the lack of a minimal pair does not mean that they are not phonemic. It's just a convenient shortcut for figuring out if two sounds are ...

The article is in Russian, but what I know from Wikipedia and Reddit comment sections is: In 1938, some stone tablets were excavated in the city of Mangup, Crimea. They bore inscriptions illegible to the discoverers, and were assumed to be Greek. After sitting in a Russian museum for eighty years, i...

Apologies for the double post - the tentative phonology of a somewhat unnaturalistic conlang I'm working on: Consonants Nasals: /m/ /n/ Stops: /p/ /t/ /k/ Fricatives: /s/ /h/ Vowels Front: /i/ /e/ /ø/ Central: /a/ [using the IPA <a> just to represent a generalized low vowel whose value tends toward ...

Have you actually googled for ʀ͡ʙ? Three items total come up, and they are all pertain to conlanging, i.e. this is not a real speech sound. 1. Kalahŕi is an exolang, ie. not spoken by humans. It is spoken by a species, that, yes, has a human-like vocal tract, but are not human. The universals of hu...

I know that in the descendants of PIE, when a laryngeal followed a vowel, it generally colored and lengthened the vowel. But what happened when a laryngeal followed a long vowel? I haven't seen this situation addressed in any of the articles I've read about PIE and its daughter languages. And appare...