zompist bboard

My theory is that it is because we unconsciously gravitate towards vowel patterns that babies prefer. Why babies prefer those vowels is another unknown.

Actually voiceless stops are pretty hard to distinguish, and even voiced stops are pretty hard to distinguish, as the person who showed us the McGurk effect helped me realize. Again, I'm going to use my baby theory, that is, ... humans will distinguish whatever babies distinguish, plus some more inn...

I'm going to use a feature like that in Xap. From now on, Xap will have two genitive markers ... -la for a word, and -axa for a whole clause. I'll do similar things for the other noun cases. I also read the first page of this thread and I want to adopt that redundancy feature found in Chinese which ...

What I didnt mention was that some of those morphemes are themselves little mini-sentences. aputiapa is just a stolen sentence from Moonshine meaning "the older womann claims she is taller than the younger boy" (this language was going to be the SpeedTalk to end all SpeedTalks). It seems strange to ...

Well, I think Xap 5 is borderline poly, and it's definitely a nominal-based language, so here's my input: I built a tall building. xaapa = building aputiapa = tall to build = xa (at least for this kind of build) I = aa PAST TENSE = tata tata aaxa axaapa xaaputiapa . Now thats just the child's langua...

How about using passive constructions for some of them? e.g. "a ______ eats it" or "the ______ live in it" ....?

Somehow, tonal languages developed in the isolated South Pacific in the absence of any other tonal languages, in languages without any serious consonant clusters and only 5 basic vowels. I don't know how it happened, but it seems to me that there must be a lot of different ways to get to having a fu...

I think proto-Chinese had some pretty monstrous consonant clusters, and in nearly all dialects the consonants came to tonalize the preceding or following vowel. For example, voiced consonants caused the preceding vowel to be pronounced on a lower tone. Vietnamese was originally toneless as well, and...

Russian distinguishes animacy, doesn't it?

I made that post mainly because no one else had. I havent thought this issue out as well as I have some other ideas I have ... I have reached some conclusions though. I dont want to eliminate all languages ... I just think it would be beneficial, economically and otherwise, if all the world's people...

I would rather have the whole world be speaking one language. It saves a lot of money in translation and it enables people to go wherever they want without having to deal with foreigners who they can't understand.

Anyone superstitious? This is topic number 666.