There are 7 messages in this issue.
Topics in this digest:
1a. Re: Phonological alternation
From: BPJ
1b. Re: Phonological alternation
From: Jyri Lehtinen
2.1. Re: No Coke, Peksi [sic] (was: RE: Typical lexicon size in natlangs)
From: Jim Henry
2.2. Re: No Coke, Peksi [sic] (was: RE: Typical lexicon size in natlangs)
From: MorphemeAddict
3. Re: SSM3 (was Yet Another Simple Self-Segregating Morphology)
From: neo gu
4a. Re: Conaccents.
From: Leonardo Castro
4b. Re: Conaccents.
From: George Marques de Jesus
Messages
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1a. Re: Phonological alternation
Posted by: "BPJ" [email protected]
Date: Wed May 15, 2013 11:33 am ((PDT))
2013-05-14 19:07, Jeffrey Daniel Rollin-Jones skrev:
> Your ex post facto explanation sounds reasonable, but
> I'm not clear on what's unreasonable about mine?
> After all, in Finnish, (by which, some of you may
> notice by my choice of vocabulary - which I intend to
> replace later - my current conlang is inspired, the
> phoneme spelt "d" in the standard written language
> surfaces as/D/,/l/ or/r/ in spoken dialects - all of
> which are very far from the/t/ which appears before
> the consonant gradation giving rise to (written) "d".
Well originally the weak gradation of all of */p t k/
was stop > voiced fricative, i.e. */β ð ɣ/. In the
oldest written records these are spelled with
- /β/ = <whatever contemporary Swedish might use
for v / V_V>,
- /ð/ = <dh>
- /ɣ/ = <gh>
Later on /ɣ/ 'merged with zero', except / u_u where >
/v/ and /β/ > /v/, while /ð/ merged with /l/ or /r/ in
some dialects. The <dh> > <d> change was under
influence of the similar Swedish reform, and [d] was a
spelling pronunciation modelled after what mostly was a
spelling pronunciation in Swedish as well.
I guess you are thinking of the alternation in words
like _ihminen_ ~ _ihmise-_. I don't recall the details,
but IIRC it is thought to be a not-phonetically-
motivated suffix alternation similar to the PIE -n-/-r
stems, like Latin _iter ~ itineris_.
/bpj
Messages in this topic (11)
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1b. Re: Phonological alternation
Posted by: "Jyri Lehtinen" [email protected]
Date: Thu May 16, 2013 4:28 am ((PDT))
>
> Well originally the weak gradation of all of */p t k/
> was stop > voiced fricative, i.e. */β ð ɣ/. In the
> oldest written records these are spelled with
> - /β/ = <whatever contemporary Swedish might use
> for v / V_V>
> - /ð/ = <dh>
> - /ɣ/ = <gh>
>
Actually in the oldest written language you find both <dh gh> and <d g>
for /ð ɣ/ and often in free variation within the same text. Later the <h>
was dropped from both <dh> and <gh> (I think indeed around the same time on
both sides of the Gulf of Bothnia) and eventually also the remaining <g>
for old /ɣ/ since all dialects lost this sound. <d> was spared for the weak
grade of /t/ despite most dialects had developed this sound into /r/ of /l/
or lost it altogether. The modern pronunciation of this element is a
mixture of dialectal influence (obviously varying across the country) and
spelling pronunciation. /ð/ has recently been attested only in a small
patch on the western coast and in Kven in the northern Norway.
The old preferred spelling for both the original /v/ and the weak grade of
/p/ was <w>. This seems to have lasted quite long and even today a way to
make typesetting look old is to substitute <w> for <v> and use blackletters.
You do actually find alternation between /r l n/ and whatever is your
reflex for /ð/ in the infinitive suffix. This is, however, only
assimilation with the last stem consonant:
ui-da "swim"
pur-ra "bite"
tul-la "come"
men-nä "go"
This alternation is not very productive and is rather connected with the
already large amount of allomorphy this suffix has:
pala-ta "return"
juos-ta "run"
piirtä-ä "draw"
But if anything, this all shows how unstable /ð/ can be and that you can
have a lot of fun with it.
-Jyri
Messages in this topic (11)
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2.1. Re: No Coke, Peksi [sic] (was: RE: Typical lexicon size in natlangs)
Posted by: "Jim Henry" [email protected]
Date: Wed May 15, 2013 4:31 pm ((PDT))
On Wed, May 15, 2013 at 7:58 AM, Douglas Koller
<[email protected]> wrote:
> ObConlang: How do you say Coke, Pepsi, and Orangina in your conlangs? There,
> now you're covered. ;)
gjâ-zym-byn has {kĕ'kul} for cola drinks, as well as root beer.
{kĕ'kul-cjaj}, with the suffix that specifies out a prototypical
instance of a class, is Coca-Cola; other brands of cola are e.g.
{kĕ'kul pepsi-gam}, with a foreign proper name suffix appended to the
transliterated brand name.
--
Jim Henry
http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry/
http://www.jimhenrymedicaltrust.org
Messages in this topic (53)
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2.2. Re: No Coke, Peksi [sic] (was: RE: Typical lexicon size in natlangs)
Posted by: "MorphemeAddict" [email protected]
Date: Wed May 15, 2013 5:36 pm ((PDT))
All diet drinks taste so strong (and bad) to me that I know in the first
sip if it's diet. And the aftertaste lingers and is hard to get rid of.
I just realized that Saweli-Saxita doesn't have a word for diet in this
sense, although it does have a word that means "diet, a plan or system
guiding what one eats". That doesn't include the sense of what one actually
eats.
"His diet includes diet drinks that aren't part of his diet."
stevo
On Wed, May 15, 2013 at 7:55 AM, Sam Stutter <[email protected]> wrote:
> I tell you what annoys me - people who try and tell me that diet Coke or
> caffeine-free Coke tastes different to normal Coke _and_ is, for some
> reason, revolting.
>
> I can tell the difference between Coke and Pepsi though - Pepsi tastes
> more like Coke than Coke - if you see what I mean. And both are inferior in
> the eyes of Orangina. Wait, what has this got to do with conlangs again? :)
>
> Sam Stutter
> [email protected]
> "No e na'l cu barri"
>
> On 15 May 2013, at 11:31, George Corley <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> > On Wed, May 15, 2013 at 3:39 AM, Elena ``of Valhalla'' <
> > [email protected]> wrote:
> >
> >> On 2013-05-14 at 23:00:59 -0400, Douglas Koller wrote:
> >>> Can a blindfolded taste-test be far behind? Long-shot of our hapless
> >> taster at the mall...The big reveal...The squeal of delight...
> >>
> >> we did an informal one with our friends (poured in another room, brought
> >> to the tasters by somebody else, but then I'm not 100% that the one who
> >> poured did stay in the other room all of the time)
> >>
> >> everybody was able to distinguish between bottled coca cola and bottled
> >> pepsi cola as sold in Italy (I don't know if the taste changes when
> >> using high fructose corn syrup instead of sugar)
> >
> >
> > I haven't had cola with sugar, but I can tell from other sodas that the
> > taste will probably be very different. Cane sugar has a very different
> > kind of sweet from high fructose corn syrup.
>
Messages in this topic (53)
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3. Re: SSM3 (was Yet Another Simple Self-Segregating Morphology)
Posted by: "neo gu" [email protected]
Date: Wed May 15, 2013 7:17 pm ((PDT))
On Mon, 13 May 2013 09:47:18 -0400, neo gu <[email protected]> wrote:
>On Sun, 12 May 2013 16:47:18 -0400, neo gu <[email protected]> wrote:
>>
>> Every word begins with a V- prefix, probably for syntactical function.
>> There may be medial CV- inflectional prefixes (C is a single consonant).
>> Content words end with 1 or more CC(VC)*V roots, e.g. sti, pkalo, mbelitu.
>> Function words have at least one medial but no roots.
So far, this is working out, but I've changed a few things.
>apodmaidockoetegbeaniktabu.
>Nom-Agt-woman Obl-Dat-boy Vrb-Ret-give Nom-Ind-book
>"The woman gave the boy a book."
The new version of this example is
udmaidickoetegbeaniktabu.
u- ergative or instrumental, replaces apo-
di- replaces do- when dative
>a- Nom- nominalizer
>e- Vrb- verbalizer
>i- Obl- oblique
>
>po- Agt- agentive (or ergative?)
>do- Dat- dative (= genitive when used on modifiers)
>te- Ret- relative indefinite past or retrospective
>ni- Ind- indefinite
All conjunctions are now prefixes, not just temporal conjunctions (which are
mostly relative tense markers). The polar question particle qo- is now inserted
into the first word:
eqovaske (uyu) afroqo? "Did you hear the dog?"
aqofroqo (uyu) evaske? "Did you hear the _dog_?"
uqoyo evaske afroqo? "Did _you_ hear the dog?"
uyu (2S.Erg) is often omitted in questions and commands while uvi (1S.Erg) is
often omitted in statements.
Messages in this topic (1)
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4a. Re: Conaccents.
Posted by: "Leonardo Castro" [email protected]
Date: Thu May 16, 2013 4:34 am ((PDT))
2013/5/11 Nina-Kristine Johnson <[email protected]>:
> "Nice! And is your conlang spoken with different accents in your
> conworld (if you have one)?"--Leonardo
>
> Well by* World* you mean like Tolkien, fantasy-stuff...no.
>
> But I am making a low-budget, YouTube movie in this language (I'm a total
> amateur!). I have some scenes filmed, already and its going well.
>
> The *World* in this movie is present-day Earth and it plays with "What if
> English was not the dominate language?" (Ehenív takes the place of
> English--English is a minority language).
>
> Yes, I have a bit of a superiority complex. LOL
:-)
I think there's no problem in creating a fictional language that will
conquer the world. Some others have already done it too, haven't they?
>
> Cheers!,
> N. Kristine
---
>
> On 11 May 2013 08:33, H. S. Teoh <[email protected]> wrote:
>> [...]
>> If there are two NPs following the verb, the prosody changes again:
>>
>> tara' sa tapa buta' kei misanan dei bata.
>> tara' sa tapa buta' kei misanan nei bata.
>> 3SG CVY walk hut ORG village RCP FIN
>> [tâ4a? sā tapà butá? keī misânan dej bata]
>> He is walking from the hut to the village.
>>
>> There's a feature here I don't quite know how to represent in the IPA:
>> the high pitch in the NP _misanan dei_ is pronounced higher than in the
>> NP _buta' kei_. One might say that this sentence has 3 peaks: at the
>> beginning of the sentence with the first NP, falling into a valley at
>> the verb _tapa_, then rising to a (lower) peak in _buta' kei_, then to a
>> higher peak in _misanan dei_, then falling back to a low-pitch valley in
>> the finalizer _bata_.
>>
>> Interestingly enough -- and this is what I've only recently noticed --
>> this prosodic contour means that the NP immediately before the finalizer
>> receives more stress than the NP preceding it, which makes it more
>> preferable to place an NP you want to emphasize in that position. So in
>> the example above, "to the village" is emphasized; if we were to swap
>> the two NPs following the verb, then it would be "from the hut" that
>> would be emphasized. This would be the more unusual word order, since
>> generally speaking, one would tend to emphasize the destination of an
>> action more than its origin. IOW, prosody in TF has an effect on word
>> order preference! I was quite happy to discover this emergent effect.
Interesting! Do you think there's something similar to this in natlangs?
---
BTW, by "conaccent" I mean also accents created to speak natlangs,
including one's own native language. For instance, my sister has
conciously changed some features of her Brazilian Portuguese
pronunciation that she disliked, although everybody around her spoke
that way. In her (and my) native accent, there's an intrusive /i/ in
words like "mas" and "três" _ [mais] and [treis] _ but she now
pronounces them as [mas] and [tres]. It's maybe more a matter of
influence of orthography/origin than pronunciation prestige, because
the most widely-broadcast accent (Rio de Janeiro) has [maiS] and
[treiS].
Messages in this topic (7)
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4b. Re: Conaccents.
Posted by: "George Marques de Jesus" [email protected]
Date: Thu May 16, 2013 4:48 am ((PDT))
2013/5/16 Leonardo Castro <[email protected]>
> BTW, by "conaccent" I mean also accents created to speak natlangs,
> including one's own native language. For instance, my sister has
> conciously changed some features of her Brazilian Portuguese
> pronunciation that she disliked, although everybody around her spoke
> that way. In her (and my) native accent, there's an intrusive /i/ in
> words like "mas" and "três" _ [mais] and [treis] _ but she now
> pronounces them as [mas] and [tres]. It's maybe more a matter of
> influence of orthography/origin than pronunciation prestige, because
> the most widely-broadcast accent (Rio de Janeiro) has [maiS] and
> [treiS].
>
I do the same, I avoid that extra /i/ in speech, though I never thought of
it as a "conaccent"
George Marques
http://georgemarques.com.br
Messages in this topic (7)
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