zompist bboard

As I was not finding working on a North Germanic language to be sufficiently interesting, I started a new project, Laqar, for which I am currently working on a proto-language, Proto-Laqar, or shall we say, ˈlæːqʰæɾ. (Sorry, there is currently no usual romanization for Proto-Laqar, so it is written in IPA.)

I like the phonology.

Aspirated consonats lose aspiration before other aspirated consonants.

By this do you mean allophony or sandhi? That is, does /pʰ/ shift to [p] or to (or something else)? Im guessing allophony based on how you spell the words. But I guess Im still curious, when you say "before other aspirated consonants" do you mean only when theyre directly adjacent, or does it also apply across a vowel in the manner of Grassmann's Law?

Are there any forbidden consonant sequences other than those involving the glottal stop? I would suggest a rule against /qk/ & /kq/, which I know exists in Inuit and probably most of the other Eskimo-Aleut languages. Perhaps also avoid voiced stop + /h/, unless that would simply change into a voiceless aspirate.

I just noticed the lack of plain velar fricatives, which I think is unusual given that you have uvulars (and labiovelars), but Im guessing you did this on purpose. Was there a historical sound shift youre imagining that peeled previously existing velar fricatives away towards the alveolopalatals and labiovelars?

Soap wrote:I like the phonology.

Aspirated consonats lose aspiration before other aspirated consonants.

By this do you mean allophony or sandhi? That is, does /pʰ/ shift to [p] or to (or something else)? Im guessing allophony based on how you spell the words. But I guess Im still curious, when you say "before other aspirated consonants" do you mean only when theyre directly adjacent, or does it also apply across a vowel in the manner of Grassmann's Law?

Aspirated consonants become unaspirated voiceless plosives when directly preceding an aspirated plosive; this occurs both word-internally and across word boundaries, so it is allophony and sandhi. This does not occur when aspirated consonants are separated by vowels.

Soap wrote:Are there any forbidden consonant sequences other than those involving the glottal stop? I would suggest a rule against /qk/ & /kq/, which I know exists in Inuit and probably most of the other Eskimo-Aleut languages. Perhaps also avoid voiced stop + /h/, unless that would simply change into a voiceless aspirate.

I have added new rules pertaining to these.

Soap wrote:I just noticed the lack of plain velar fricatives, which I think is unusual given that you have uvulars (and labiovelars), but Im guessing you did this on purpose. Was there a historical sound shift youre imagining that peeled previously existing velar fricatives away towards the alveolopalatals and labiovelars?

The real reason is that no contrast exists between velar and uvular fricatives; I just arbitrarily chose to represent them as uvular, because they are somewhat more likely to show up as such, but in reality they can go either way.

Before I make further changes to Proto-Laqar and Old Laqar, I need to figure out how the whole inflectional morphology of Old Laqar is really going to play out, as from first look it seems as if it is pretty complicated for at least certain classes of stems (at least stems ending in "weak" consonants, i.e. /w j/). For Middle Laqar languages I am going to need to clobber Old Laqar's complex system and turn it into things that are more manageable.