zompist bboard

There's no problem with doing a minimal-lang in itself, it's just it would be nice to see things like a laid-out lhonolovy and approaching the grammar in an ordered fashion, instead of just throwing out some random stuff about alignment and voice. Like what is J representing, for instance?

Learned this one at the open day for the MML faculty at Cambridge (I was actually there for the specifically linguistics sections, but you couldn't avoid getting some stuff about the MML as well):

die Waldeinsamkeit "the feeling of being alone in the woods"

Frislandian Consonants p t k (ʔ) s h m n ʋ l j ɾ The glottal stop is essentially a phonetic accompaniment to a word-initial vowel. Stops and fricatives may optionally voice intervocallically and after sonorants. Vowels i ɨ u e o a There is also a two-way length distinction. All non-low vowels are la...

Those aren't all small. WALS defines a "small" inventory as one with under five vowels, which is reasonable as five is the most typical inventory size. But none of them are large either. The defining feature seems to be that they are 'skewed,' i.e. distributed in a suboptimal pattern in which the v...

My question is probably better phrased as: are theses mall, atypical inventories typical only of North America or are they more often found elsewhere? How many languages outside the North-American continent have /i e a o/, for instance?

Note that most NA vowel systems described as /i e a o/ could just as easily be described as /i e a u/, since [o] and are generally allophonic in such languages. Yeah, Ojibwe seems to be like that, while definite /i e a u/ cases include East Cree (coupled with a length distinction which may verge on...

Thanks all for the feedback. It was just something I thought I might like to put out and see what people thought about it.

Silly me, I forgot some of the athabaskan inventories with more back than front vowels. For instance Koyukon Full Reduced i u ʊ ə ɞ æ ɔ Or Sarcee i u a ɒ Note though that these systems are not necessarily typical of the family, with plenty of others having a simple five-vowel plus/minus schwa.

Klallam has no k but k w and e but no o The k thing seems to be a general palatalisation trend of the Central Northwest Coast, also being found in the related North-Straits Salish and in Quileute. North-Straits has the additional interesting feature of having this vowel system: i ə e ɑ There is als...

Has anyone notice that despite the relatively small vowel inventories in the languages of North America, there is still a large amount of unusual inventories? I'll provide a few here to show you what I mean. First off, the typical four-vowel system of most Algonquian languages or Navajo (admittedly ...

I'm living in North Yorkshire but my family is half from County Durham and half from Mersyside, and I generally consider myself to be "Northern". As for languages, I'm native English speaker and did French and German at school (though they seem to be crap at getting you fluent at GCSE). Some of my m...

When I say elves I'm generally meaning Tolkeinian high-elves or wood-elves, not generally dark-elves, though some of my points may still apply.

It's not something I'm interested in that much, but I thought it might be nice if I put out a few of my ideas about fantasy-lang phonologies. By fantasy-lang I mean a language or languages design for a fantasy race to appear in a fantasy setting. In this post I will be focusing on the three "main" f...

Admittedly, yes, but Tlingit is on the northern edge of the Northwest Coast sprachbund, and the ejective fricatives are definitely not seen anywhere else in the region. After all, it is a Na-Dené language, and their phonologies are pretty weird to begin with, but Tlingit seems to have just taken the...

What about Tlingit ? A three-way distinction between unaspirated, aspirated and ejective stops, a labaialisation contrast for velars and uvulars, an (almost) complete ejective fricative series (including a couple which as far as I know are not found anywhere else), five laterals but no bilabials or ...