Odd natlang features thread

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Re: Odd natlang features thread

Post by Whimemsz »

Drehet has this phoneme inventory; like a number of other Oceanic languages it has a prenasalized trill (in this case, the only prenasalized segment in the inventory). It also has only one aspirate, /kʰ/. Also, the Arapahoan languages don't have any low vowels, e.g. the vowels of Arapaho and Gros Ventre are /i(:) ɨ(:) ɛ(:) ɔ(:)/ (historical *a(:) changed to *o(:) in Proto-Arapahoan, whose vowel inventory was: */i i: e e: o o:/). Unfortunately detailed stuff on the exact phonetics involved aren't easy to come by (plus Gros Ventre is basically dead now), but it definitely seems like the normal realizations of the latter two vowels are [ɛ] and [ɔ] (except /ɔɛ/ seems to be realized as [ai]??). Gros Ventre also had two palatalized consonants, /tʲ/ and /bʲ/, giving it the consonant inventory: /b bʲ t tʲ ʦ ʧ k ʔ/, /θ s h/, /n/, /w j/.

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Re: Odd natlang features thread

Post by Shrdlu »

I can aswell add this here: In Piitish the determiners are declined with |-a when they end a sentence.
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Re: Odd natlang features thread

Post by Nortaneous »

Drydic Guy wrote:
Nortaneous wrote:Might as well bring this back, since we've got its diachronic equivalent going now also.

Allowed final clusters in Qiang are either the same as or a subset of allowed initial clusters, and the only allowed C1s in a cluster (all clusters are two consonants) are /ʂ x χ/. However, /ʂ/ is realized as [s] before /t d/, and as [ɕ] before /pi pe bi tɕ dʑ/, and there's regressive voicing assimilation. So, you can have both xɬi̯ex (xɬi̯exbuʐ 'loess') and tʂʰexɬ 'sip', both ɣlu 'roll' and əɣl 'upright', etc.

edit: Qiang also has rhoticity harmony:
ʀuɑ + kʰe˞ > ʀuɑ˞kʰe˞
me + we˞ > me˞we˞
(Only /i e ə a/ appear with rhoticity in roots, but all vowels can take it, since the first-person plural marker for verbs is -˞.)
where did you get this

WHERE
The grammar pack.

If you want something even worse, check out the official orthography. <v> is /X/.
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Re: Odd natlang features thread

Post by TaylorS »

Ouagadougou wrote:Reading about the insanities of Athabaskan tongues makes me wonder how they ever got to be that way in the first place.
In non-literate tribal-level societies languages tend to accumulate irregularities and grammatical nuttiness.

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Re: Odd natlang features thread

Post by Aurora Rossa »

TaylorS wrote:In non-literate tribal-level societies languages tend to accumulate irregularities and grammatical nuttiness.
Are you saying that languages among literate non-tribal peoples tend toward greater regularity?
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Re: Odd natlang features thread

Post by Drydic »

TaylorS wrote:
Ouagadougou wrote:Reading about the insanities of Athabaskan tongues makes me wonder how they ever got to be that way in the first place.
In non-literate tribal-level societies languages tend to accumulate irregularities and grammatical nuttiness.
Care to back this up?
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Re: Odd natlang features thread

Post by dhok »

I have heard that once a language become "important" enough in its area that people who didn't grow up speaking it have to learn it, it starts losing its most ridiculous features, because L2s will just ignore them. It sounds convincing, but I don't know how true it actually is, since hunter-gatherers routinely speak four or five languages without losing their crazy features.

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Re: Odd natlang features thread

Post by Shrdlu »

TaylorS wrote:
Ouagadougou wrote:Reading about the insanities of Athabaskan tongues makes me wonder how they ever got to be that way in the first place.
In non-literate tribal-level societies languages tend to accumulate irregularities and grammatical nuttiness.
Shrdlu, on the page before, wrote:
Ouagadougou wrote:Reading about the insanities of Athabaskan tongues makes me wonder how they ever got to be that way in the first place.
Simple. To make the chance of a misunderstanding between two individuals as small as possible.
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Re: Odd natlang features thread

Post by Nortaneous »

To prevent this thread from being eaten by the stupid:

Re: Qiang phonotactics, I probably should've mentioned that the language tends toward monosyllabic words, usually by dropping schwas: (also note final consonant mutation: pʰ kʰ dz dʐ b Cʰ > ɸ~f x z l w C)
sə 'tree' + pʰə 'forest' > səf 'tree/shrub'
me˞ː 'rain' + kʰə˞ 'fall' > me˞x 'frost'
mɑ 'NEG' + dʐə 'able' > mɑl 'not able'
sə 'IMP' + tɕʰə 'drink, eat wet foods' > sətɕ

So that might have something to do with the odd cluster thing, although the grammar doesn't take any guesses.
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Re: Odd natlang features thread

Post by Shrdlu »

Whimemsz wrote:- Also, the Arapahoan languages don't have any low vowels, e.g. the vowels of Arapaho and Gros Ventre are /i(:) ɨ(:) ɛ(:) ɔ(:)/ (historical *a(:) changed to *o(:) in Proto-Arapahoan, whose vowel inventory was: */i i: e e: o o:/). Unfortunately detailed stuff on the exact phonetics involved aren't easy to come by (plus Gros Ventre is basically dead now), but it definitely seems like the normal realizations of the latter two vowels are [ɛ] and [ɔ] (except /ɔɛ/ seems to be realized as [ai]??). Gros Ventre also had two palatalized consonants, /tʲ/ and /bʲ/, giving it the consonant inventory: /b bʲ t tʲ ʦ ʧ k ʔ/, /θ s h/, /n/, /w j/.
I'm like obsessed with languages that lack low vowels, because you'd be hard pressed to find anything more unique. I only wish there where like more than a few American Indian Languages.
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Re: Odd natlang features thread

Post by Torco »

Drydic Guy wrote:
TaylorS wrote:
Ouagadougou wrote:Reading about the insanities of Athabaskan tongues makes me wonder how they ever got to be that way in the first place.
In non-literate tribal-level societies languages tend to accumulate irregularities and grammatical nuttiness.
Care to back this up?
There's a few reasons why it might be so: speech communities [groups of people who are likely to come in linguistic contact with each other] are smaller in premodern societies, and more defined as well, I mean, it's quite likely that two random hunter-gatherers living in the same continent will never hear or talk to each other, or come in contact with written material authored by the other. By contrast, you, the reader of this post, whoever you might be, are probably reading this a quarter of a planet away from me, and I've spoken plenty, as with phones and not letters, with native spanishers that live in Iberia, the Caribbean, North America and most of South America, not to mention Oceania. This might well make easier the development of a standard form of the lang, and limit the features of dialectal variations to allophony, since even expressions move through space by osmosis; I use, in my speech, for example, plenty of mexicanisms, argentinisms, and hispanisms. so yeah, Taylor might be rait.

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Re: Odd natlang features thread

Post by Bob Johnson »

Torco wrote:might
can we have some evidence please, instead of philosophy?
please?

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Re: Odd natlang features thread

Post by Torco »

Bob Johnson wrote:
Torco wrote:might
can we have some evidence please, instead of philosophy?
please?
don't ask me for evidence, Bob, I don't care either way, I'm just chiming in, quite unadversarially, I assure you.
and what's wrong with thinking again?

though... Africa seems to have quite a bit more linguistic diversity than the entirety of America [the continent, mind you], And even Europe, where plenty of 'langs are spoken, doesn't seem to have as many per surface unit as, say, the Brazilian rainforest... so there, some evidence.

Want some nice chi square coefficients as well ?

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Re: Odd natlang features thread

Post by TaylorS »

Drydic Guy wrote:
TaylorS wrote: In non-literate tribal-level societies languages tend to accumulate irregularities and grammatical nuttiness.
Care to back this up?
The Power of Babel by American linguist John McWhorter.

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Re: Odd natlang features thread

Post by Solarius »

Nortaneous wrote:Might as well bring this back, since we've got its diachronic equivalent going now also.

Allowed final clusters in Qiang are either the same as or a subset of allowed initial clusters, and the only allowed C1s in a cluster (all clusters are two consonants) are /ʂ x χ/. However, /ʂ/ is realized as [s] before /t d/, and as [ɕ] before /pi pe bi tɕ dʑ/, and there's regressive voicing assimilation. So, you can have both xɬi̯ex (xɬi̯exbuʐ 'loess') and tʂʰexɬ 'sip', both ɣlu 'roll' and əɣl 'upright', etc.

edit: Qiang also has rhoticity harmony:
ʀuɑ + kʰe˞ > ʀuɑ˞kʰe˞
me + we˞ > me˞we˞
(Only /i e ə a/ appear with rhoticity in roots, but all vowels can take it, since the first-person plural marker for verbs is -˞.)
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Re: Odd natlang features thread

Post by Whimemsz »

TaylorS wrote:
Drydic Guy wrote:
TaylorS wrote: In non-literate tribal-level societies languages tend to accumulate irregularities and grammatical nuttiness.
Care to back this up?
The Power of Babel by American linguist John McWhorter.
Okay, but that's not an argument, that's just a source; what's McWhorter's argument in favor of this claim?

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Re: Odd natlang features thread

Post by Whimemsz »

Also:
In another thread, I wrote:[In] Huamelultec (aka Lowland Oaxaca Chontal), [the] only ejectives/glottalized obstruents are: /fʼ sʼ ɬʼ xʼ/. The phonetic realizations vary pretty widely, but in part because they alternate morphophonologically with corresponding plain fricatives, Ian Maddieson, Heriberto Avelino, and Loretta O'Connor analyze them as basically glottalized/ejective fricatives. (Based on the frequency of the realizations of each one, it would also be reasonable to analyze them as respectively /fʼ tsʼ tɬʼ kʼ/).

NE: Source: Maddieson et al, 2009, "The Phonetic Structure of Oaxaca Chontal", IJAL vol. 75(1): 69-101

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Re: Odd natlang features thread

Post by Acid Badger »

Whimemsz wrote:
In another thread, I wrote:[In] Huamelultec (aka Lowland Oaxaca Chontal), [the] only ejectives/glottalized obstruents are: /fʼ sʼ ɬʼ xʼ/. The phonetic realizations vary pretty widely, but in part because they alternate morphophonologically with corresponding plain fricatives, Ian Maddieson, Heriberto Avelino, and Loretta O'Connor analyze them as basically glottalized/ejective fricatives. (Based on the frequency of the realizations of each one, it would also be reasonable to analyze them as respectively /fʼ tsʼ tɬʼ kʼ/).

NE: Source: Maddieson et al, 2009, "The Phonetic Structure of Oaxaca Chontal", IJAL vol. 75(1): 69-101
Oh, that's interesting. Upper Necaxa Totonac, another Mesoamerican language, has /sʼ ʃʼ ɬʼ/ as its only ejectives, plus /tsʼ/ occuring in a few sound symbolic words ("/sʼa̰ta̰/ small > /tsʼa̰ta̰/ itty-bitty"). Apparently they correspond to consonant + q in other Totonacan languages (*/q/ turned into /ʔ/ in UNT unconditionally).

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Re: Odd natlang features thread

Post by TaylorS »

Whimemsz wrote:
TaylorS wrote:
Drydic Guy wrote:
TaylorS wrote: In non-literate tribal-level societies languages tend to accumulate irregularities and grammatical nuttiness.
Care to back this up?
The Power of Babel by American linguist John McWhorter.
Okay, but that's not an argument, that's just a source; what's McWhorter's argument in favor of this claim?
he claims that in small tribal communities irregularities are less likely to be eliminated by analogical leveling because of the "everyone knows everyone" effect of such small communities making it less likely for misunderstandings.

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Re: Odd natlang features thread

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Torco wrote: the entirety of America [the continent, mind you]
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Re: Odd natlang features thread

Post by 2+3 clusivity »

Voiced aspirates! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southeastern_!Xung

*face-palm* Even Ladefoged and Maddieson find it valid.
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Re: Odd natlang features thread

Post by Xephyr »

Why wouldn't they? (Those aren't even technically voiced aspirates, they're voice contours, as the description says. You see the same thing in !Xoo clicks.)

I recently learned, however, that true voiced aspirates (not breathy voiced either-- voiced stops with a delayed VOT on the vowel) do occur in some Austronesian language. Can't remember which.
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Re: Odd natlang features thread

Post by Whimemsz »

Xephyr wrote:Why wouldn't they? (Those aren't even technically voiced aspirates, they're voice contours, as the description says. You see the same thing in !Xoo clicks.)

I recently learned, however, that true voiced aspirates (not breathy voiced either-- voiced stops with a delayed VOT on the vowel) do occur in some Austronesian language. Can't remember which.
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Re: Odd natlang features thread

Post by Nortaneous »

Saanich:
2.2.1. ∥-í∥ ‘persistent’.
1. This is an aspectual morpheme opposed to unmarked ‘non-persistent’. It indicates that the activity expressed in the stem to which it is attached continues past inception as a state. The absence or presence of this suffix allows differences in meaning comparable to the differences in such English pairs as ‘figure out/know’, ‘look at/watch’, and ‘take/hold’.
This affix is morphophonemically unusual in that it has qualities of the radical morphological processes (see §2.3). It is classified here as a suffix since it always follows and never directly affects the root phonologically. But it does directly affect other suffixes. ∥-í∥ ‘persistent’ is what might be called a "parasitic" morpheme. Its placement requires the presence of another suffix having an underlying /ə/ that acts as "host". This /í/ assumes the position of the rightmost /ə/ of a host suffix that is not preceded by a suffix with a non-schwa. This morpheme has never been recorded occurring without another suffix having an underlying ∥ə∥.
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Re: Odd natlang features thread

Post by Nortaneous »

Pacoh has its creaky vowels lowered in comparison to its modal vowels, such that there are no low modal vowels and no high creaky vowels. (Modal and creaky vowels only contrast in the mid height.) This even extends to the diphthongs.
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