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A coffee mug for the high +ATR vowel, a telephone for the high -ATR vowel, a yin-yang symbol for the low +ATR vowel, and a soccer ball for the low -ATR vowel. theyactuallypublishedthisinallseriousness seriouslyyoucan'tbeserious This is fukken awesome. Hale and Reiss are phonological renegades. If O...

Random question: If I have only one phoneme for schwa-schwi, with the default realizations of [ə̝] initially, [ɨ̞] medially, and [ə] morpheme-finally, what should I consider its form as a phoneme? Should I call it /ə/ or /ɪ/? That's when you go neutral and use hearts instead. /♥/ If that kind of re...

Novial anybody? ^^Created by a professional linguist, Idist, English philologist and eventual co-developer of interlingua, Otto Jespersen. (Notably a Romance Germanic hybrid...like English.) I fell in love with Novial after finding Jespersen's book outlining its grammar and the reasoning behind tha...

Cool stuff! Here's a few comments. There is no vowel harmony as Finnish has, but diphthongs only form when the otherwise non-useful vowel harmony would not be violated. Diphthongs don't form at morpheme boundaries. Are there any height restrictions on diphthongs? Are both rising and falling diphthon...

This is great! My grandparents and some of my extended family speak Levantine Arabic (they grew up in Lebanon and Syria). I'll be following these lessons, though quietly, since I'm super busy these days and I'm also learning Chinese. A couple comments: It's interesting that 3ArAbiyyè means "wagon, c...

I don't think either of the major word orders can effectively be reduced to the other without sacrificing the clarity of analyzing languages with one of the orders. I think a VO/OV parameter is useful here. At any rate, at least this universal SOV business is a nice cudgel to whack Kayne's Linear Co...

The only substantial think I've ever written was a Master's Thesis on Chukchansi Yokuts Morphophonology... Available online? Should be. Try googling it... I've only found a paper in Santa Barbara Papers in Linguistics, dunno if it's yours. Like most papers written in the optimalist language, it quo...

Basilius wrote:

kodé wrote:The only substantial think I've ever written was a Master's Thesis on Chukchansi Yokuts Morphophonology...

Available online?

Should be. Try googling it...

Naelector Dark wrote:Kodé, use IPA please?

Uh, I was using Ullovan orthography. But, [mmpsjawnst] is the same in IPA; [nlqcwujmchk] would be [nlqts)_hwujmtS)k] (using X-Sampa since I can't be bothered to use IPA.

Good start! I only have a couple comments/questions: - It's really, really weird to only have aspirated stops in the interdental point of articulation. The only way I can see it happening is through some weird diachronics. - Is the voicing assimilation progressive (left-to-right) or regressive (rig...

Good start! I only have a couple comments/questions: - It's really, really weird to only have aspirated stops in the interdental point of articulation. The only way I can see it happening is through some weird diachronics. - Is the voicing assimilation progressive (left-to-right) or regressive (righ...

The syntax of Proto-Ginösic is completely head-final, like Japanese. There may be hints of V2 ordering, especially in late Proto-Ginösic. V2 is used only in informal speech, and is pretty much standard in the southern dialects, that later evolve into Ziilbel, where the verb may even move to first p...

I don't, and it breaks a universal. Of course not all "universals" are truly universal, but as far as I can remember I've never heard of this one being broken in a natural language: that, disregarding schwa, no height row on the chart has a greater number of distinct vowels than the row above it. (...

I- ni- luha ni= Nena ang= pagkawala ng= alahas niya. CF- ?- shed.tears A= NAME T= loss GEN= jewelry 3S Ik<in>a- luha ni= Nena ang usok. CF<GF?>- shed.tears A= NAME T= smoke Is this analysis correct? What are the -ni and -in- affixes doing there?! Are they in fact instances of the goal/object focus ...

Yokutsan languages (Penutian, Central California) have a similar structure (two or three root consonants+one vowel quality). Valley Yokuts, IIRC, allows two different vowel qualities in a root if one of them is high. And the vowels have a definite position in the word, so it would be kind of pointl...

A strange bit about the verbal system: Verbs in Ginösic languages are a closed class. There are only two verbs: tri "be" and go "do". Since these verbs are extremely common, they are irregular. So this is basically like Basque, but to the extreme. Really what you have are two conjugatable auxiliari...

Did you omit /k'/ on purpose? From a typological perspective this is weird: /k'/ is the most common ejective, and if one ejective is missing from a series, it's usually /p'/, not /k'/. On to the morphology. The plural form is -s . There are no exceptions like English foot~feet . Diachronically the -...

Barnacle [ˈbäːnɪkəɫ] Hydrogen [ˈhɑedɹɪdʒən] Talking about dissonances between orthography and pronunciation, let us not forget all those nouns and adjectives with [ɪt] represented as "-ate": palate, vertebrate , etc. This doesn't mean that there aren't lots and lots of nouns and adjectives with [eɪ...

So the root for "star" in Adunaic is G-M-L + i. No other Semitic-style language, natural or constructed, uses this feature for roots to my knowledge. Old Skourene roots are like that. Yokutsan languages (Penutian, Central California) have a similar structure (two or three root consonants+one vowel ...

Those links looked fairly comprehensive. I doubt you will find anything better easily. This is due in part to developments in theoretical phonology since the rule formalism was popular. In the mid-70s, autosegmental phonology became popular, which use diagrams more than rule formalisms. Following t...

I think the analogy of word classes to rooms in a house makes sense (though many laypeople might not know that houses have different arrangements and structures cross-culturally, so some examples might help). I do think you could argue that one would need to know how the whole house was set up befor...

When we talk about epenthetic vowels, we usually mean to say they're inserted because of the particular structure of a word. But if the location of a vowel can be predicted taking on account the structure AND the part-of-speech of a word, can we still call it epenthetic? Or is the part-of-speech to...

You definitely sound Armenian! Don't know if I'm biased due to already knowing you're Armenian, but you sound like most native Armenian speakers who have acquired English as a second language. On that note, your English sounds very good (by which I mean intelligible to a native speaker) on a first h...

vecfaranti wrote:I feel like there needs to be some kind of Information system where you "advertise" the new big articles.

The Almea Forum does a pretty good job of this: the three years I've been here, all the big additions to Virtual Verduria/the Almeopedia have had a corresponding thread (or two) in this forum.

Torco wrote:Tip from a spanisher: say /e:/ then lick your alveolar ridge, repeat.

(that's just behind your teeth, BTW)

Tried it, got a raised alveolar approximant/voiced alveolar non-sibilant fricative. Lucky for me, I've been doing alveolar trills since I was a wee lad...