Odd natlang features thread

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Re: Odd natlang features thread

Post by Radagast revived »

Well that is the problem, it is hard to find a useful baseline for odd.

----
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Re: Odd natlang features thread

Post by ---- »

We can at least say that some things occur vanishingly rarely, or, that some things are very unlikely to occur for some reason or another. But is there any particular reason to expect a language that has a lot of vowels to *not* distinguish /ɔ/ /o/ /ʊ/ /u/?

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Re: Odd natlang features thread

Post by Pole, the »

Hmm, some Mongolic langs distinguish /O o/ and /U u/, but neither [E e] nor , I think. Is this weird enough?
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Re: Odd natlang features thread

Post by Nortaneous »

Manchu:
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Re: Odd natlang features thread

Post by Solarius »

Nortaneous wrote:13 consonants, ɸ~f contrast.

I'm guessing what happened there is that *b *g > ɸ ɣ.
That is just wonky, particularly since the only lateral appears to be retroflex.
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Re: Odd natlang features thread

Post by Cúlro »

Nortaneous wrote:13 consonants, ɸ~f contrast.

I'm guessing what happened there is that *b *g > ɸ ɣ.
The linked source says that b and ɸ are in free variation initially, and that g and ɣ are in free variation in all positions.

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Re: Odd natlang features thread

Post by Richard W »

Seirios wrote:Shanghainese ... has five tones but only two contrast only in unchecked syllables beginning with voiceless consonants.
The 5-way tone contrast includes initial consonant voicing (senso latu) and the unchecked/checked contrast. If you make segmental phones primary, then tone is significant only on unchecked syllables with voiceless initials, where there is then a 2-way tone contrast. Put that way, the system seems unexceptional.

For example, according to Enfield's description of (Vientiane) Lao, unchecked syllables have a 3-way contrast on voiceless stop initials plus the former voiceless stop initial now /j/ (written ຢ) but a 5-way contrast on other initials. For inherited words, this applies to most Lao dialects (though not the rare 7-tone Lao, where it's 3-way and 6-way).

According to the writing system, recent loanwords have established a 5-way contrast on voiceless stop initials in Lao, but I'm having problems tying up the two sets of 5-way contrasts.

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Re: Odd natlang features thread

Post by Nortaneous »

Luobenzhuo Bai apparently has a contrastive uvular nasal, which can also occur as the syllable nucleus.
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Re: Odd natlang features thread

Post by CatDoom »

Nortaneous wrote:Manchu:
Image
To make things all the more baffling, Wikipedia says that /ə/ is "generally pronounced like Mandarin /ɤ/ ," indicating that it's sometimes also a back vowel. However, there's much debate over the exact pronunciation of the vowel given as /ʊ/, which may have been pronounced something like [e] or (to make things even crazier), [ø], [ɵ], or [ɯ] in some positions.

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Re: Odd natlang features thread

Post by jmcd »

/ʊ/ being turned into /e/ is actually less crazy. It makes it a normal five vowels sytem with schwa added in. Sound changes have resulted in an unusually back-vowel-dominated vowel system so the sound change ʊ>ø>e brings i back into something more normal.

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Re: Odd natlang features thread

Post by Chengjiang »

I don't speak Japanese, but I've read in a number of sources that it doesn't have pronouns as a distinct grammatical category. From a syntactic standpoint, there is no difference between pronouns and nouns in general, and there isn't a clear dividing line semantically between pronouns and a large fuzzy group of nouns commonly used as terms of address. Most if not all of its current "pronouns" can be demonstrably traced back to old nouns with concrete non-pronoun meanings.
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Re: Odd natlang features thread

Post by Chengjiang »

With regard to Mongolic languages' vowel inventories: There seem to be a few different smallish language areas or groupings scattered around the world where languages have oddly few front vowels in relation to back vowels. A number of Numic languages, for instance, have a prototypical inventory of /i ɨ u a o/ without /e/, as does Proto-Numic as it is commonly reconstructed.
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Re: Odd natlang features thread

Post by gach »

Primordial Soup wrote:With regard to Mongolic languages' vowel inventories: There seem to be a few different smallish language areas or groupings scattered around the world where languages have oddly few front vowels in relation to back vowels. A number of Numic languages, for instance, have a prototypical inventory of /i ɨ u a o/ without /e/, as does Proto-Numic as it is commonly reconstructed.
I'd suspect that the /a/ here has a much more frontal articulation than /o u/. Then you can achieve a more balanced functional grouping for the vowels with as many back as central vowels and only one less front vowel:

Code: Select all

i ɨ u
  a o

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Re: Odd natlang features thread

Post by Hallow XIII »

Khalkha Mongolian is currently trying to become Manchu by shifting <э> to either /i/ or /ə/ based on something arcane and possibly random. <а> in return turns up as something between central [a] and [æ].

The future(?): [æ æː ə əː i iː ɔ ɔː ɵ oː ʊ ʊː u uː]
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Re: Odd natlang features thread

Post by CatDoom »

gach wrote:I'd suspect that the /a/ here has a much more frontal articulation than /o u/. Then you can achieve a more balanced functional grouping for the vowels with as many back as central vowels and only one less front vowel:

Code: Select all

i ɨ u
  a o
Not necessarily; the Numic /a/ seems to be fairly consistently described as a back vowel, and most of the Numic languages have "balanced" their vowel system by developing either a phonemic /e/ or the diphthong /ai/. In fact, these two sounds alternate allophonically in several languages.

With regard to Manchu, I was mistaken when I said that /ʊ/ occurred as [e]. I misread a section of the article describing Manchu's system of vowel harmony, in which the back vowels /ɔ a/ alternate with the "front" vowel /ə/. /ʊ/ is unusual in that it seems to participate in vowel harmony as a back vowel in some cases, but co-occurs with /ə/ in others, in which case it might be realized as a front rounded vowel like [ø].

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Re: Odd natlang features thread

Post by Nortaneous »

jmcd wrote:/ʊ/ being turned into /e/ is actually less crazy. It makes it a normal five vowels sytem with schwa added in. Sound changes have resulted in an unusually back-vowel-dominated vowel system so the sound change ʊ>ø>e brings i back into something more normal.
CatDoom is right that that's not what happened (it ended up merging with /u/), but that's still less crazy than Ukrainian, which had o > i in closed syllables.

Japhug shifted voiceless plosives to voiced fricatives in the coda, except for /t/.
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Re: Odd natlang features thread

Post by CatDoom »

Yurok has rhotic vowel harmony; non-high vowels assimilate to /ɚ/ in a word containing /ɚ/. For instance, the root /nahks-/, "three," becomes [nɚhks-] in the word [nɚhksɚʔɚjɬ], "three (land animals or birds)."

This example highlights another oddity; Yurok has an elaborate system of agreement in its numerals, which must take one of around two dozen class suffixes to agree with the noun they modify. Examples of Yurok numeral classes include humans, land animals and birds, boats, houses, flat objects, round objects, and "bushy" objects. Verbs and adjectives also inflect for agreement, but mark fewer classes, including a class for water-related nouns that has no equivalent numeral class.

As an aside, the Wikipedia page on Yurok is terrible and everything on it should be taken with a generous helping of salt. :p

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Re: Odd natlang features thread

Post by Nortaneous »

Sorbung: /e e: o o: i i: u u:/ [ɛ ei ɔ ou ɪ i: ʊ u:]

...demonstrating that there's a Tibeto-Burman language that sounds even more American-accented than Angami does.

edit:
Firstly, we note that in general, PM (Proto-Miao) *a :> /i/, *æ :> /e/, *ei :> /ai/ and *in, *æn :> /a/.
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Re: Odd natlang features thread

Post by Nortaneous »

Enggano has nasal harmony, and is spoken on the other side of the world from South America.
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Re: Odd natlang features thread

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Nortaneous wrote:that's still less crazy than Ukrainian, which had o > i in closed syllables.
I was recently looking at this handy website dedicated to Uto-Aztecan studies, and I noticed that at least two UA languages have o > i as an apparently unconditioned sound change. Proto-Uto-Aztecan itself is reconstructed with a fairly unusual vowel inventory (with more back than front vowels), which is retained in several attested languages: /i a u o ɨ/.

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Re: Odd natlang features thread

Post by Cedh »

CatDoom wrote:
Nortaneous wrote:that's still less crazy than Ukrainian, which had o > i in closed syllables.
I was recently looking at this handy website dedicated to Uto-Aztecan studies, and I noticed that at least two UA languages have o > i as an apparently unconditioned sound change. Proto-Uto-Aztecan itself is reconstructed with a fairly unusual vowel inventory (with more back than front vowels), which is retained in several attested languages: /i a u o ɨ/.
The shift o > i makes a lot of sense in a context like Uto-Aztecan actually: First, [o] is centralized to [ə], which makes the vowel system symmetrical. This [ə] then gets fronted and raised a bit to something like [ɪ], which sounds quite similar to both /i/ and /ɨ/, so it could easily merge with either.

(I don't know if that's the actual development in the relevant UA languages, but it seems quite plausible to me.)

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Re: Odd natlang features thread

Post by hwhatting »

Cedh wrote:
CatDoom wrote:
Nortaneous wrote:that's still less crazy than Ukrainian, which had o > i in closed syllables.
I was recently looking at this handy website dedicated to Uto-Aztecan studies, and I noticed that at least two UA languages have o > i as an apparently unconditioned sound change. Proto-Uto-Aztecan itself is reconstructed with a fairly unusual vowel inventory (with more back than front vowels), which is retained in several attested languages: /i a u o ɨ/.
The shift o > i makes a lot of sense in a context like Uto-Aztecan actually: First, [o] is centralized to [ə], which makes the vowel system symmetrical. This [ə] then gets fronted and raised a bit to something like [ɪ], which sounds quite similar to both /i/ and /ɨ/, so it could easily merge with either.

(I don't know if that's the actual development in the relevant UA languages, but it seems quite plausible to me.)
For Ukrainian - its clear from the history that this went through a stage /u:/, and /o/ > /o:/ > /u(:)/ is quite frequent in Slavic languages and dialects.

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Re: Odd natlang features thread

Post by Nortaneous »

In Wutun, /sʰ/ is much more common than /s/, which "has a very limited distribution, occurring only in a few Tibetan borrowings, for which reason it seems to be losing its phonemic status". The only retroflex fricative is aspirated -- there's /ʂʰ/ but no /ʂ/ -- but /ɕ ɧ/ have no aspirated counterparts.

Yes, /ɧ/. A "dorso-palatal approximant with a central constriction extending from the alveolar to the velar region, and with considerably reduced sibilant noise".

Anyway, /s ɕ/ have voiced equivalents, but the others don't seem to. And /ɧ/ is analyzed as the voiceless version of /j/ in the (gapless, if you ignore /s/) consonant inventory:

Code: Select all

ʰp  ʰt  ʰts  ʰtʂ  ʰȶ  ʰc  ʰk
ⁿb  ⁿd  ⁿdz  ⁿdʐ  ⁿȡ  ⁿɟ  ⁿg
ʱb  ʱd  ʱdz  ʱdʐ  ʱȡ  ʱɟ  ʱg
 p   t   ts   tʂ   ȶ   c   k
 pʰ  tʰ  tsʰ  tʂʰ  ȶʰ  cʰ  kʰ
 f   ɬ    sʰ   ʂʰ  ɕ   ɧ   h
 v   l    z    r   ʑ   j   ɣ
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Re: Odd natlang features thread

Post by Nortaneous »

Image
Those sure are some sound correspondences. And one of these dialects has aspirated ɧ, prelabialized ɧ, and preuvularized ɕ.
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Re: Odd natlang features thread

Post by 2+3 clusivity »

Nort, what source are you getting that tangle of an inventory from?
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