zompist bboard

Jesus, guys, it's obvious he meant "Americanist Phonetic Notation," in which <y> is /j/, why is this such a big deal? It wasn't entirely obvious. It's still stupid not to use IPA like everyone else in a forum like this. At least other messages in this thread related to y > u or u > y started becomi...

Well... Piitish failed on every possible point. It changed Swedish definite singular -en to-a(which happens to be the verification in Swedish), got an -e as the verbification, then lost the -er infinitive and finally changed non-infinitive -er to -en. The result is that Piitish when spoken sounds l...

I think he means that by <y> he means /j/, not the normal IPA /y/. This never causes problems because front rounded vowels are almost entirely absent from the Americas- according to WALS, the only one that has them north of Mexico, Hopi, doesn't have /y/, and there are only three others in the enti...

Biblical Hebrew had *y -> w /#_ (word initially; also this is american IPA notation). I have no idea what would cause such a change, but it happened (ie. Ethiopian /wald/, Hebrew /ˈyɛlɛd/ ; child). It also results in odd verb forms where w, out of initial position due to prefixes or different vowel...

Obviously this is unsatisfactory: Bengali and Punjabi but not French or German?

BEGGING THE QUESTION much?

... the ten most important natural languages, what should that list look like? ... The best list I've been able to come up with, as a nice round list, is this: English French Spanish Portuguese Italian German Russian Mandarin Japanese Arabic ...based more or less on historical and cultural prominen...

is -'s and -s' audibly distinguishable in your variety of English?

I wouldn't be surprised if some languages did this by number discongruence, e.g. we could go.sg and eat.sg vs. we could go.pl and eat.pl

Do you mean the interrogative particle ? I think he's just proposing that there is a null interrogative particle which forces the subject to move beyond the verb. Works-ish, I suppose, although given that there are other times that Dutch does not obey V2 order (IIRC) which can't be explained away i...

Those changes seem pretty reasonable to me and I have used them in my own conlanging projects from time to time. Palatal stops often shift to affricates and many languages merge hushed and hissed sibilants, so it seems pretty natural to me. I would expect the resulting phonemes to retain palatalize...

I guess it's about identity - projecting identity as well as maintaining it and making it easy to spot. If they said futon instead of futoi, it's more likely to be misidentified as spanish by a listener passing by, or somesuch. Also, this way maintains some kind of separation that helps ensuring the...

Is there possibly an element of analogy involved in adapting words to Basque phonology? I find I do that with words between standard Swedish and my dialect - loan words that have no gone through a few centuries of divergence are passed through a guess as to what divergences there should be, and come...

Also, even if some people can't whistle, it doesn't mean that the phoneme cannot exist. As long as the majority can pronounce a whistle it's fine. Many Dutch people can't properly pronounce [r], for example. They usually use [ʀ] or an approximant or a flap or somethinɡ. Usage of [ʀ] is, in my diale...

I've heard about those. It's interesting how many spoken languages can be whistled entirely. I'd guess that's the result of some tonal languages having pretty a larger amount of information in the actual tonal contours of the speech than say English has in the CV-part of any syllable. Considering t...

Yeah, in languages that have things like that there's apparently disagreement about the best way to analyze them: I've seen all of [ʔʷ w' wˀ w̰]. Phonologically I'd label them what makes most sense... do they pattern with other labialized/palatized stops or ejectives or glottalized resonants? Just ...

Qwynegold wrote:Yikes! I have /?_j/ and /?_w/ in a conlang project. Are these possible?

To me, it seems rather likely that the labial or palatal components would be perceived as the primary thing for those, and the ?-part would be some kind of secondary thing.

Tis true. Here you get that English verbs may very well be easier to initially pick up but harder to use idiomatically across a full range of use patterns, such that they may indeed be perceived as "easy" in being able to be used in a way that can be effectively understood by native speakers, while...

And this is why, if anyone thinks English is "easy", they are clearly ignorant of the nature of English verbal system... Hell, even people who are quite familiar with English linguistics, who speak it natively, and who generally are not linguistically naive cannot even agree on how it works in the ...

And this is why, if anyone thinks English is "easy", they are clearly ignorant of the nature of English verbal system... Hell, even people who are quite familiar with English linguistics, who speak it natively, and who generally are not linguistically naive cannot even agree on how it works in the ...

And this is why, if anyone thinks English is "easy", they are clearly ignorant of the nature of English verbal system... Hell, even people who are quite familiar with English linguistics, who speak it natively, and who generally are not linguistically naive cannot even agree on how it works in the ...

There's nothing stupid about [ʔʰ] - it's just as likely as with any other stop that voicing onset time would be non-zero for the next sound. The only Google results for it that aren't random data or conlangs are this , which also claims the existence of a nasalized glottal stop, and this , which cl...

Are secondary articulations considered a subset of double articulations? I was under the impression that they aren't, but what do I know. Also, does [ʔʰ] actually occur in any natlangs, or is it just a Dumb Conlang Thing like ɧ and using thorn everywhere? There's nothing stupid about [ʔʰ] - it's ju...

because it leans closer to theory and further from practice. This dichotomy between theory and practice is pretty squarely in the minds of people who don't know what they talk about. This is why I said, "...since the vast majority of language learners are doing it for practical purposes, they reall...

This use of past tense in questions like "what was your name" is interesting and happens to some extent in Swedish and Finnish as well. The idea of projecting the tense onto the awareness-of-the-name rather than on the actual name itself seems reasonable and is something I've been thinking a lot of.

because it leans closer to theory and further from practice. This dichotomy between theory and practice is pretty squarely in the minds of people who don't know what they talk about. Yes, maybe it leans closer to naive theory, but in actual scholarly circles, theory needs to line up with reality, n...