zompist bboard

I won't make claims to be especially knowledgeable on this subject, but I have never seen any analysis of German indicating that its "affricates" were really consonant clusters. Everything I've seen falls in line with HG having /pf/, /ts/, /tʃ/. I'm really curious about the theoretical justification...

In my experience, negative categories (and a couple operators enabling the user to merge/subtract categories) are extremely useful. Things like "^V-´" ("neither vowel nor accent mark") appear in, like, every second line in my SC's. I'm not totally comfortable with doing this myself. I just tend to ...

The one technical problem I've run into is that the Unicode CJK range seems to have a maximum character width, but many of my glyph compounds are much wider, so I can't set the spacing properly. You may need to use the Supplementary PUA in U+F0000..U+FFFFD, though I don;t know if the application yo...

(1) Add a secondary stress mark to every third unstressed syllable nucleus in an arbitrarily long sequence of posttonic syllables, counting left-to-right. Assuming a CV(N) syllable, I think the following should work - it turns out to be less straightforward than I originally thought. Also, you'd ne...

ObsequiousNewt wrote:What's the best way to implement cheshirization, like this?

I have no idea what you are referring to, and I don't understand the rules described there.

(1) Add a secondary stress mark to every third unstressed syllable nucleus in an arbitrarily long sequence of posttonic syllables, counting left-to-right. Assuming a CV(N) syllable, I think the following should work - it turns out to be less straightforward than I originally thought. Also, you'd ne...

do like

Sweet! I've been looking for a good SCA, and hopefully this will cover what I need it to do. Thanks for the work you put into this. Thanks, I hope you find it useable. Is it supposed to work with Mac? I tried opening the jar file but nothing happens. Yes, as long as you have the JRE 1.6 or later in...

Plusquamperfekt: nice, and good work. It hadn't actually occurred to me to do some stats. But it does show that some of my suspicions were right, viz. that 50% is a low score, and 30% is a very low score.

I guess we'll need more data.

Counter to Rusanov's position, I'd say that the test may be perfectly valid, it's just not entirely clear what "70%" actually means, outside the parameters of the test. I think there needs to be an actual scale showing what languages score where, especially from different families. After all, from w...

EDIT: Updated Link - updated documentation and additional features to follow in a few days, hopefully. This is the successor to my old ASCA program that nobody asked for. It is, however, much better tested - I've been working professionally as a computational linguist for the last year and have lea...

ObsequiousNewt wrote:So... why not just say "7 phonemic vowels"?

This might be interpreted to include contrasts on the basis of length, pharyngealization, ATR, phonation, or whatever.

The latter needs to be clarified: does it only apply to languages that have voicing but no other phonation distinctions? Is aspiration counted as a "phonation" for this question? What about no phonation distinctions? I think for Kuma-Koban, I did count aspiration as a phonation distinction, even th...

I has tumblr
Requires Heavy Wizardry

Ya'll remember this? SOON

Not much to show right now because I'm working on trying to nail down all the variant forms of each letter I'll need so that I can make any potential conjunct. It's difficult because Tocharian has some pretty unwieldy conjuncts that necessitate a lot of slight glyph variations. Here are just a few ...

Chibi wrote:Thinking about it more, the second example you provide doesn't sound *too* strange, but the first example sounds flat out wrong to my ears

This is also my impression. Second is perfectly normal; first is strange and I don't think I've ever heard that uttered.

hungh! I did not realize it was actually that messy. Thank you for the heads up. I might have notes or slides from Dryer, I'll have to check my old coursework folder. But he's written extensively on this subject, which is not surprising given his involvement in WALS. I'll update this post with a Go...

Thank you also for the suggestion regarding mapping WALS features against each other. That's really the only thing you can do. I took a typology course with Dryer once, and this is basically what he spends the whole course talking about. What are the correlations, are the influenced by family or re...

Three years later... I got a copy of that Macuch grammar Dewrad mentioned through interlibrary loan, and made a pdf out of it as best as I could manage: http://www.speedyshare.com/V8Hyw/Mandaic-Handbook-of-Classical-and-Modern-Macuch.pdf Seems to have been a pretty good job. I've always had trouble...

When you compare it to my original idea of making each conjunct as an independent glyph, which Richard W rightly pointed out was a waste of time, it seems like less trouble. Plus, most of those variations are not big variations, just minor adjustments to allow them to join up. It's not much worse t...

So far, I've only found this - even if relevant, uses a very different writing style than you have, than appears in many manuscripts. http://haedusfc.no-ip.org/files/images/quellen03k20.jpg At least Dunhuang has some very clean images to base the forms of conjuncts on, even if the transliteration wo...

There is Dunhuang:
http://idp.bl.uk/

Or for Khotanese.
http://idp.bl.uk/database/search_result ... ndom=32556

No sign lists, but lots of good document scans.

I'm not sure I have anything on this, but I'll have to check my archives. There was a time when I was really into Tocharian, so I'll see if I have anything interesting or informative lying around.

Thanks. Another person told me something similar. I changed some settings in the command prompt and ran it from there and now it's in English with normal menus. Cool. Pay close attention to the manual, because the FF is weird - it starts to make sense after a while, but it's OpenType support isn't ...

maybe someone can just tell me which blank spaces to click on so I can see opentype stuff! The dialogues are a bit complicated, but I'll give it a look. Also, FF reads your environment variables, so you might be able to tweak these for the language issue. http://fontforge.org/cliargs.html#Environme...