zompist bboard

I pretty strictly call the evening meal supper, though I do know quite a few who call it dinner. Except Sunday dinner is always lunch for me, and there would definitely be confusion if someone said Sunday dinner with the meaning of evening meal.

Unconditional *k(ʰ) to tʃ(ʰ) is attested in, I think, one of the Mayan branches, but with *q turning to /k/ to follow up. Off the top of my head, Eastern Mayan kept around /q/, Yucatec merged q>k, and Huastec and most Western Mayan "satemized" q>k>tS. The Chujean branch only has partial k>tS though...

I pointed out elsewhere that palatalization of one VOT without palatalization of the other is, as far as I'm aware, unattested. If anything happened, I'd expect aspiration and palatalization to reinforce each other, such as pʰʲ tʰʲ kʰʲ > pɕ tɕ kɕ.

look at what athabaskan did with its *interdentals For a specific example, South Slavey maintains interdentals (tθ tθʰ tθ' θ ð), while Northern Slavey changes them: Mountain has labials/labiodentals (p pʰ p' f v), Bear Lake has labiovelars (kʷ kʷʰ kʷ' hʷ w), and Hare has a mix of both alongside a m...

Welsh ...Don't like: Dd and f sound the same to me half the time. Th and ff sound the same to me half the time. Ch and ll sound the same to me half the time. For the first two its possibly people carrying over Southern English sounds changes. The second one is probably people having a hard time dis...

Tis true. In my own dialect Cj clusters are more common than they apparently are in GA (e.g. I pronounce Tokyo with [kj]), and I have no problem with nyet or Nyanza or Pama-Nyungan myself. Thanks to this, I just realised that I say "Tokyo" without /kj/ but "Kyoto" with, probably because I learned i...

EDIT: Okay so I made a super-quick search through the roots with *a in the lexicon. *a is definitely far more common around *m, any plain velar (very rare next to labio-velars), *l, and the labial stops of all things (though it is almost non-existent around *w and *y). Perhaps *l once had a velar-a...

Related empirical question: does anyone happen to know of languages other than Danish that contrast all four of /ɛ œ ʌ ɔ/? Maastrichan has /ɛ œ ə ɔ/ that are just above the cardinal mid-open line, though /ə/ is limited to unstressed syllables so I'm not sure it's fully contrastive. Cantonese appear...

- only one gerund, preference for finite subordinate clauses not sure. These seem to be two different ideas merged into one. Three years late here, however I thought I'd bring it up. What he says exactly: European languages tend to have just one converb (Art. 83) (cf. Nedjalkov 1998). For instance,...

A few zero-copula examples I know of: Nuu-chah-nulth: The morphological distinction between nouns and verbs is almost non-existent, and nouns can take tense, mood, and perfective marking just like verbs. Other examples of nouns taking the inflections include Salish, Guarani, and at least some variet...

Naxi uses A mɔ33 ni31 B, which appears to be derived from mə33-ni33 NEG-COP, which is available for nouns only. Nouns can also use A lɑ33 B (the conjunctive coordinator), making conjunction and disjunction identical. Verb disjunctive coordination uses A nɔ33 B, and clausal uses A B nɔ33. In addition...

Perhaps the most borderline case in your examples is "gonna", where the contraction does have a notable vowel change in some dialects (though for be it's mostly /goUnt@/, with the /t/ sometimes elided in rapid speech, and /goUNt@/ and /goUINt@/ both still found in non-marked, non-emphatic circumsta...

It's /tɬ/, not /tl/, unless /tl/ was an intermediary for another sound. Chukchi doesn't have any laterals but /ɬ/. In fact the Chukchi grammar in the Grammar Pile gives the rule instead as ɬ > t / _ɬ.

Nynorsk/Bokmål aren't something that's a part of my normal spoken vocab so I can't say for sure I'd nativize them if they ever came up, when reading my "mental voice" doesn't.

Friulian: fɻˁʷɪʉ̯ɫiɨn
Nynorsk: nʏno̞ʂk ~ nɪʉ̯no̞ɻsk
Bokmål: buk̚mo̞l ~ bɒk̚mɒɫ
Belarus: bɛɫəɻˁʷʉʊ̯s

zompist wrote:Berbers yes, but the Arabs weren't in North Africa at the time...

Not at the time, no, but my suggestion was assuming they stayed in the area of Carthage during the Arabization of North Africa.

If your Neo-Carthagineans are still located around Carthage, I'd consider Northern Berber and Arabic over Aramaic for convenient filling-in-Punic-gap loanwords (and possibly from Vandal via Gothic and African Romance, if you feel up to extrapolating a bit more). Though come to think of it, I'm not s...

Its very probable that I'm mistaken - I learned linguistics mainly from David Crystal's Cambridge Encyclopedia, Wikipedia and zompist.com, which are not the best places to learn about how accepted a theory is. My understanding, which granted isn't much better sourced than your own, is that the majo...

[/həɁ˧˩˧/ or perhaps /h̩Ɂ˧˩˧/ (tentative agreement, indeed, etc.) /əɁ˧˩.həɁ˩˥/ or perhaps /əɁ˧˩.h̩Ɂ˩˥/ (stronger affirmative, agreement; the faster the rise on the second syllable the more conclusive or firm the agreement is) I think it's interesting you don't nasalize these, if I do that it sounds...

"Huh. / Huh?" and hee-haw (donkey onomatopoeia) are also obligatorily nasalized, at least for me.

Do almost-but-not-quite single instances count? Chechen and Ingush have a voiceless trill in the numbers seven /vʷor̥/ and eight /bar̥/, found nowhere else in the language. The Bats cognates are /vorɬ barɬ/. Ingush apparently also has [o:] that pops up in Russian loans (regularly replaced with nativ...

when i started learning arabic (MSA), i pronounced the emphatic consonants as retroflexes. it took a while to master the pharyngealization/uvularization (depending on who you speak to). I still can't decipher or consciously form pharyngealization--despite having it in the form of /ɹ̠ˁ/. The best wa...

If you have TAM material as distinct words it's easy enough to have zero-copula and still distinguish TAM. I'm pretty sure this crops up a lot in Southeast Asia. Nuu-chah-nulth doesn't have a copula. The compliment just takes all the inflectional material (except maybe aspect?), as most of it is in ...

fur [fɻ̍ˁ] lure [lʶʉwɻ̍ˁ] floor [flʶo̞ɻˁ] flurry [flʶɻ̍ˁ(ɻˁ)i] lurid [lʶʉɻˁɨd] fluorine [flʶo̞ɻˁĩn] Three [θʷɹ̠ʷˁɪi̯] Arthritis [əɹθʷɹ̠ʷˁəɪ̯ɾɨs] Asthma [æzmə] They [ðeɪ̯] Brother [bɻʷˁəðɹ̠̍ˁ] All /r/s are slightly rounded, those with [ʷ] are almost as rounded as /w/. There's some intermediate, as th...

When I try and make a sound like the OP describes, it seems like the interdental part may be incidental. I can't get it quite as they describe, there's laminal-alveolar or laminal-postdental contact that seems to be making the majority of the sound, as it makes for a drawn-out, noisy release. There'...

Construct state outside of Semitic is sometimes sensitive to adjectives. Iraqw (South Cushitic): waahla > waahlár ur python > big python It adds -ú for masculine nouns, -´r for feminine, and -á for plural. In Kotoko (Chadic), there is instead an intervening word between the head noun and the modifie...