zompist bboard

Wait, do the Inuit languages, Ainu, Nivkh and/or Yukaghir have tones...? :o Or did you mean Haida? Because in Ket, glottalisation is one of the tones. No Eskimo-Aleut language I'm familiar with has tones, and I'm not familiar enough with Ainu, Nivkh, or Yukaghir, but Haida does indeed have tones. H...

It sounds like he's asking about having a language with uvular fricatives but no uvular stops, which I'm not sure is actually attested. It seems to be a European trait to have the fricative(s) without the stops, but in those European languages there are either no contrasting clear fricatives, or th...

I see - I guell I'll just debuccalise the pharyngealised plosives, then, thanks! I have another question, though - If I wish to add another plosive series to my final phonology's voiced-unvoiced ones, how could I obtain it without involving pharyngealisation? The conlang at that point has plenty of...

Easiest thing to do with the pharyngealized labials is merge them with the plain labials. Another option would be to lenite the plain labials (P > F) and let the pharyngealized labials become plain labials. And I really have no problem buying any sort of Cˤ > ʕ, and /ʕ/ is a phoneme that is really p...

What if I make it /n̪ˤ/ > /ɲ/ >/ŋ/? The likelihood of a pharyngeal spontaneously palatalizing strikes me as extremely unlikely, since they're essentially opposite processes (cf. how pharyngeal spreading has a tendency to be blocked by palatals, sibilants, and high vowels). /n̪ˤ/ > /n̪/ > /ɲ/ >/ŋ/ c...

Most of it looks fine to me, but I have a bit of trouble buying /n̪ˤ/ > /ŋ/. Why not /n/ > /ɲ/, /n̪ˤ/ > /n/. If you don't like /ɲ/, it could easily become /j/ or even /ŋ/.

Conversely, in the English here, historical /ʊr/ tends to be tensed to /ur/ except for in very few words (e.g. Moorland Rd. here in the Milwaukee area being an example that comes to mind) where it becomes /ɔr/, except when preceded by /j/ or a consonant palatalized by historical /j/, as /jʊr/ norma...

"Chasten" I've occasionally heard a /t/ I think. ISTR hearing the spelling pronunciation [ˈʧæstnˌ] before. Hearing both a /t/ and an /ey/ would be jarring. "Hasten" and "soften", where the derivation is clearer, usually don't have /t/ but often do and I certainly wouldn't blink when hearing it. Bot...

Well, speaking of songbirds specifically, most of what they're saying is either, "My territory, keep out" or "Heeeeeey, pretty lady." :p

Quick version of the question -- which grammatical categories carry (for you; in your opinion; generally speaking) the most meaning. Which are the most dispensable, which the most mandatory? Well, hypothetically all you need are verbs and maybe a few particles--this is how some linguists analyze ce...

Vijay wrote:"Every language I make I go to use it"? Does that mean something like "I go to use it every time I make a conlang so that it can help me with making that conlang"?

Nope, that was me posting while distracted. Should have read "Every time I go to use a language I make I realize..."

Nothing to contribute, but I will insta-buy this book. Every language I make I go to use it and realize that my grasp of syntax is enormously deficient compared to phonology or morphology.

quagmire [ˈkʷʰwægmaɪ̯ɹ̠ˁ]

Basically, my question is where do they come from? Or where can they come from? Using Welsh as the example, it has many inflected prepositions which I cannot find any etymological information for, only for the base form, i.e. the preposition i comes from Proto-Celtic *de ; o comes from Proto-Celtic...

Mandos was the closest analogue I could think of to the "gatekeeper of heaven" role in the original story. I would have said Manwë, as the one closest to the mind of Ilúvatar. Mandos decrees fate, and the Elven dead rest in his halls (as do the Dwarves, according to Dwarf lore, but the Elves disput...

I see what you're going for. There are the bird-headed humanoids Apkallu. Enki created them in Abzu. They came to earth and taught humans the arts of civilization, laws, writing and architecture. Before the flood, they served as advisors to kings. After the flood, Enki banished them back to Abzu. I...

Second the idea that Greek "balsam" must necessarily represent a lateral fricative is stupid: it's cognate with Arabic /basam/ "pleasantness", a correspondence which gives Proto-Semitic *š rather that *ś, so it should have therefore been /ʃ/ in Hebrew as well which was just badly transcribed becaus...

The Nephilim do not receive a particularly supernatural treatment in the bible, right? My immediate impression of an Assyrian minor deity is the Lamassu, but they aren't humanoid. I thought about Nephilim. They would probably be my go-to for trolls, but probably not Elves. The lamassu/shedu is an i...

I wonder whether I can help you with the Indian mythology part! :P Possibly, actually. I was reading about gandharvas, which actually sound more like Tolkien's Elves than most of the supernatural beings I've read about...except that they're exclusively male and the counterpart of female apsaras. Th...

I'd go with ʾork and duvarp instead of ʾorq and dūʾarp Agree on duvarp , but Medieval Punic follows traditional Punic/Phoenician practices of borrowing non-aspirated consonants as emphatics (since non-emphatic consonants are aspirated). Akkadian did this as well, and I think Biblical Hebrew did, to...

I don't think translating names of mythological beings by mapping them onto beings of a different mythological tradition works well, at least not in general. Much less so with beings that are the invention of a specific author. Tolkien's Elves are based on a specifically Germanic mythological conce...

Loss of lateralization for [ɬ] is very realistic - it happened in much of Semitic Well that does depend on whether you actually think that Proto-Semitic should be reconstructed with laterals in the first place, which I don't. But apart from that, yeah, loss of lateralisation is realistic (see also ...

Is India too far afield? Because there's plenty there: gandharvas, yakshas, vidyadharas, nagas, and on the mostly evil side, rakshasas. Some Sanskrit loans made it into Syriac (usually via Middle Persian), and my Medieval Punic is flush with Syriac loans, so...definitely on the fringe of what I'm l...

I remember reading years ago that an early translation of the Hobbit glossed "Elves" with צַפְרִירִים, from a cognate of English zephyr that was used (in some Talmudic source?) to refer to "spirits of the dawn". I can't find anything on that now and the present term seems to be בני לילית, lit. "son...

Does anyone know of any Semitic (or even broader Near Eastern--Sumerian or Egyptian is fine) supernatural beings that might be seen as roughly equivalent to Norse alfar , Irish sídhe , or Greek nymphs/dryades/naiades/sylphs/etc.? Basically I'm looking for something higher on the chain of being than ...