Odd natlang features thread

[CatDoom]

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

It seems like a plausible sequence of changes, though perhaps called into question by the fact that there doesn't seem to be an attested example (at least out of the sample of languages used on the aforementioned site) of a UA language with the vowel inventory /i ɨ u ə a/. indeed, it appears that /ə/ is only attested as a reflex of /ɨ/, and then only in Cupeño. Then again, the /e/ in Luiseño (which comes from /o/) was apparently in free variation with /ə/ for at least some speakers, and /e/ and /i/ apparently merge in unstressed syllables in that language. I have to wonder if the same might be true of Gabrieleño, another Takic language that apparently had o > e.

Incidentally, Gabrieleño (a.k.a. Tongva) apparently has a pretty bizarre consonant inventory, if the uncited inventory on Wikipedia is to be believed. Which it probably isn't... >_>

Perhaps most notably, the page claims that it had contrasting series of bilabial and labiodental consonants, including /ɸ/ vs. /f/, /β/ vs. /v/, and /m/ vs. /ɱ/. I know that at least that first contrast is attested elsewhere, but it's been my impression that identifying [ɱ] as a phoneme in *any* language is pretty controversial.

[Hallow XIII]

Well does it give [ɱ] or /ɱ/? In theory you could analyse something like [ṽ] as /ɱ/ if it fit the series (I am in no position to comment on natlangs, but I do have a conlang that does this).

[din]

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/.

Well, let's see

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HpRXFygoVmA

[linguoboy]

Irish has a series of emphatic pronouns which consist of modified forms of the ordinary personal pronouns suffixed with -se/sa, -sean/san, or (in the case of the 1P) -ne/na. (Front versions are used after front vowels and palatalised consonants, back allomorphs elsewhere, e.g. sinne "us" but iadsan "them".) These suffixes can also be tacked onto ordinary nouns which are proceeded by possessives, e.g. mo choinínse "my rabbit". This much I knew. What I didn't realise is that they can optionally be suffixed to NPs rather than just head nouns. e.g. mo chuidse Gaeilge or mo chuid Gaeilgese "my Irish". (Cuid "portion" is used to express possession with uncountable nouns.)

[CatDoom]

Well, let's see

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HpRXFygoVmA

That's kind of uncanny, actually. Maybe it's just me, but aside from the r's that sounds almost like American English speakers singing nonsense words, or words in an East Asian language they don't actually speak.

As for Tongva, the Wiki page presents 'ɱ' on a table of "the consonants of the Tongva Langauge." I suspect that said chart contains a mixture of phonemes and allophones, but it doesn't provide any indication as to which are which. It does indicate that [m] and [ɱ] are both represented orthographically by <m>, which would seem to indicate that whoever composed that orthography considered them to be allophones of the same underlying sound.

[Nortaneous]

2+3: that last screenshot is from http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/29757812, Wutun source is from a PDF that might not be online anymore and that I probably got from uz-translations

[Neon Fox]

So your language has a syllabary? Cool. The phonotactics are pretty close to ideal for that, it works.

But what's this second syllabary for? To...write foreign words. But it doesn't actually encode any different sounds, it just uses different glyphs. OK, fine, it's a little twee but whatever. Oh, and you write the names of plants and animals in it! Right, right, sure...

Hey, wait a sec, aren't those complex characters from that monstrous system you made up for that other lang? The one with the meaning-radicals and the phonetic bits that have to rhyme in the proto-language? Why the heck are you using them for so many of the content words? And you're telling me you just have to work out from context whether you're going to pronounce any given one like a native word or like you took the original lang's pronunciation and filtered it through your new phonotactics? And the same character can be read both ways in different contexts?

N00b.

[Nortaneous]

wrong thread

Lillooet, if Wikipedia can be trusted, has no high vowels, has /tsʼ ʃ ʂ z/ but no /s/, has four pharyngeals, and contrasts all of /ɣʷ ɣʷʼ ʔɣʷ ɣʷʔ ʔɣʷʼ ɣʷʼʔ/ and /k kʼ ʔk kʔ ʔkʼ kʼʔ/. (I'm assuming that this generalizes to the other obstruents and sonorants, and that they meant to use slashes instead of square brackets.)

[din]

Well, let's see

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HpRXFygoVmA

That's kind of uncanny, actually. Maybe it's just me, but aside from the r's that sounds almost like American English speakers singing nonsense words, or words in an East Asian language they don't actually speak.

I know, right? That was pretty much my reaction when I heard Angami. That's why Nort said "...demonstrating that there's a Tibeto-Burman language that sounds even more American-accented than Angami does."

[Qwynegold]

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.

So, just like Japanese and Chinese.

[CatDoom]

Similar to Chinese classifiers, yeah, though these are bound morphemes that interact more, phonetically, with the numeral they're attached to.

[Chagen]

Except Chinese and Japanese make no sense and are far more laborious. There's no other representation of noun classes in either language and the amount of counters is absurd, especially when they have vague boundaries and others are absurdly specific (then again Asian languages seem to love bizarrely specific words).

There's a specific counter for lives in a video game in Japanese (though it is also a counter for...aircraft? Huh?). Not even joking about this, it's 機 ki and also means "chance", "oppurtunity", and..."machine" and "aircraft". God dammit Japanese.

[CatDoom]

Except Chinese and Japanese make no sense and are far more laborious. There's no other representation of noun classes in either language and the amount of counters is absurd, especially when they have vague boundaries and others are absurdly specific (then again Asian languages seem to love bizarrely specific words).

There's a specific counter for lives in a video game in Japanese (though it is also a counter for...aircraft? Huh?). Not even joking about this, it's 機 ki and also means "chance", "oppurtunity", and..."machine" and "aircraft". God dammit Japanese.

Interesting. I was about to ask if it had something to do with Space Invaders or something, but I guess it's another example of the wild number of homophones in Japanese. The explanation I've heard is that there are a ton of Chinese loanwords in Japanese, but Japanese isn't tonal, so a lot of words that are pronounced differently in Chinese ended up sounding the same. I know very little about Japanese, but it seems like, for whatever reason, it tends to use a lot of single-kanji, monosyllabic words, while Chinese has a preference for disyllabic, two-character compounds.

Incidentally, my favorite term for lives in video games is the seldom-used but adorable "mans."

[CatDoom]

wrong thread

Lillooet, if Wikipedia can be trusted, has no high vowels, has /tsʼ ʃ ʂ z/ but no /s/, has four pharyngeals, and contrasts all of /ɣʷ ɣʷʼ ʔɣʷ ɣʷʔ ʔɣʷʼ ɣʷʼʔ/ and /k kʼ ʔk kʔ ʔkʼ kʼʔ/. (I'm assuming that this generalizes to the other obstruents and sonorants, and that they meant to use slashes instead of square brackets.)

There are apparently at least a few varieties of Yokuts (Gashowu, Tachi, and Yawdanchi, though I may be wrong about a couple of those) that have /ʃ/ and /ʂ/, but no /s/. What's possibly odder is that proto-Yokuts, based on a number of disparate peripheral varieties, seems to have only had /s/ and /ʂ/; proto-Nim-Yokuts, a common ancestor of most Yokuts varieties, seems to have unconditionally palatalized /s/ to /ʃ/ while leaving /ʂ/ unchanged.

[finlay]

Except Chinese and Japanese make no sense and are far more laborious. There's no other representation of noun classes in either language and the amount of counters is absurd, especially when they have vague boundaries and others are absurdly specific (then again Asian languages seem to love bizarrely specific words).

There's a specific counter for lives in a video game in Japanese (though it is also a counter for...aircraft? Huh?). Not even joking about this, it's 機 ki and also means "chance", "oppurtunity", and..."machine" and "aircraft". God dammit Japanese.

Interesting. I was about to ask if it had something to do with Space Invaders or something, but I guess it's another example of the wild number of homophones in Japanese. The explanation I've heard is that there are a ton of Chinese loanwords in Japanese, but Japanese isn't tonal, so a lot of words that are pronounced differently in Chinese ended up sounding the same. I know very little about Japanese, but it seems like, for whatever reason, it tends to use a lot of single-kanji, monosyllabic words, while Chinese has a preference for disyllabic, two-character compounds.

Incidentally, my favorite term for lives in video games is the seldom-used but adorable "mans."

Single-kanji words in Japanese tend to be multisyllabic, using the native reading. Chinese borrowings in Japanese tend to be two kanji, and these are often two syllables each (i guess morae if you wanna be technically accurate). Counters are generally borrowed from Chinese and are suffixes, so not single-kanji words. In some ways it's easier to think of them like the same way we'd use counting words in English like five bottles of water instead of five cups of water, but while in English we only need them for uncountable/mass nouns, in Japanese you need them for everything.

[CatDoom]

Good to know. This is why I shouldn't talk about things that I don't really know anything about. XD

[Qwynegold]

There's a specific counter for lives in a video game in Japanese (though it is also a counter for...aircraft? Huh?). Not even joking about this, it's 機 ki and also means "chance", "oppurtunity", and..."machine" and "aircraft". God dammit Japanese.

うそ!
No way!

Chinese borrowings in Japanese tend to be two kanji, and these are often two syllables each (i guess morae if you wanna be technically accurate).

Not sure what you mean exactly. Counting only two kanji words, there's still lots of variety in number of syllables and mora:
kaji (fire) - 2 syllables, 2 mora
chizu (map) - 2 syllables, 2 mora
benri (practical) - 2 syllables, 3 mora
jouzu (skillful) - 2 syllables, 3 mora
Touyou (Asia) - 2 syllables, 4 mora
kanzen (complete) - 2 syllables, 4 mora
sentaku (laundry) - 3 syllables, 4 mora
shokudou (cafeteria) - 3 syllables, 4 mora
mokuteki (purpose) - 4 syllables, 4 mora

Okay, 3 syllables consisting of 3 mora, and 4 syllables consisting of 4 mora seem to be rare.

[finlay]

I mean the majority of on-readings are two-syllable/mora each. Also, when the on-reading is one-syllable it's relatively unpredictable, but if it's two syllables, the second tends to be う、い (lengthening vowels), or ん, or one of つくちき, representing the other coda consonants in the original borrowings I guess?

[Qwynegold]

Ah. You need to be careful because syllables are not the same as moras. @_@

[finlay]

Do I really, though? Here's my "don't care" face.

[Nortaneous]

SIL says Moloko has only one phonemic vowel http://www.silinternational.com/silewp/ ... 08-003.pdf

[Arzena]

Adyghe's voiceless bidental fricative

[Qwynegold]

Do I really, though? Here's my "don't care" face.

ಠ_ಠ

[Trebor]

I'm beginning to study Somali in a serious way now, and have done research into it before. Below I cite the work "Somali Textbook" by R. David Zorc and Abdullahi A. Issa, 1990.

Here are some unusual features displayed by this Cushitic language:

- The consonantal inventory has one or more phonemes at almost all points of articulation, including one retroflex stop: /b m f t_d d_d n s r l d` S tS~dZ j k g x~X w q X\ ?\ ? h/.

- Voiceless stops cannot occur word-finally: e.g., arag 'he saw' ~ arkay/arkey 'I saw'.

- The orthography gives the impression that there are ten "pure" vowels, short and long: /i i: e e: a a: o o: u u:/. But the reality of the spoken language is more complicated: another feature distinction, still unclear to me, has a role to play. Depending on the source to be read on the matter, one set of vowels mostly appears in verbs and another in nouns, or one set mostly appears in imperative forms and another in person-specific forms.

- Somali has a system of vowel harmony which is nothing like the varieties found in Finnish, Hungarian, and the Turkic languages (front vs. back, unrounded vs. rounded); Igbo (tense vs. lax); or Akan (+ATR vs. -ATR). I'd like to know more about it, but can't decipher the most relevant parts of the paper: its phonetic transcriptions are impossible for my screenreader to convey accurately.

- The language does not have independent articles or demonstratives, but attaches these determiners to the end of the noun. Further, two kinds of definite article exist: the first "used to mark new information or something just being introduced in a conversation" (-ka for masculine nouns, -ta for feminine nouns), the second used after "something has been introduced or if it is generally known" (-kii for masculine nouns, -tii for feminine nouns) (p. 31).

- Somali has a lot of morphophonology. A glimpse of this phenomenon was seen above with the verb 'to see', but here are some more examples, using nouns:
1) buug 'a book' + -ka = buugga
taksi 'a taxi' + -ka = taksiga
buste 'a blanket' + -ka = bustaha
suuq 'a market' + -ka = suuqa (pp. 39, 40)
2) dayuurad 'an airplane' + -ta = dayuuradda
lo' 'cattle' + -ta = lo'da
waddo 'a street' + -ta = waddada
mindi 'a knife' + -ta = mindida
dabeyl 'wind' + -ta = dabeysha (pp. 47, 51)

To be continued.

[----]

I've read about Somali too, and the sources I found actually did describe the vowel harmony as a +/- ATR thing, but the vowel qualities involved are very different from what's typical of those systems. According to this webpage here it's /i e { } 3\ / vs. /I E a u o/.