Oct 30, 2017
German is such a logical language
But isn’t it though??
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German is such a logical language
But isn’t it though??
Circassian
why | not my type | convince me | i might learn it | plan to learn it | learning it | ok im not bad at it | #1 target language | native language
put a language in my ask and ill rate it
Language evolution as an inherently destructive process.
Yeah I thought I'd give this site another go. This time I'm gonna try some 'in-universe' blogging over at @ukedhirijkudebolivakk as well, and keep this for other things. Not gonna be anywhere near as active as I was on the old frislander blog because PhD (moving on in life aren't I?).
Quick question about Proto-Uralic phonotactics. I know the traditional reconstruction has 8 stressed vowels and 2~3 unstressed vowels, but I also get the impression that there are further restrictions on which unstressed vowels can follow a given stressed vowel, and I'd just like to ask what those are.
The generally agreed on constraint is just vowel harmony. If both *-a and *-ä are reconstructed, then this means allowing the combinations *i-ä *ü-ä *e-ä *ä-ä on one hand, *u-a *ï/ë-a *o-a *a-a on the other. Some widespread examples: *śilmä ‘eye’, *ďümä ‘glue’, *pesä ‘nest’, *tälwä ‘winter’ — *muna ‘egg’, *mïksa or *mëksa ‘liver’, *kota ‘house’, *kala ‘fish’. So unstressed *-a and *-ä can be considered, for the most part, complementary variants of a single archiphoneme *-A. We could in principle simplify the notation, and perhaps the phonological interpretation, to just *-a for both groups.
A few reconstructions have extended vowel harmony to the non-open unstressed vowels: *-e versus *-õ (Björn Collinder in the 60s) or *-i versus *-ï (Juha Janhunen in the 80s). But this is less securely established. *-a ~ *-ä harmony is continued productively within word roots in most Finnic languages and in about half of the Samoyedic languages, within suffixes a bit more widely including Hungarian, Southern Mansi and Eastern Khanty, and both have left a variable amount of traces in most of the rest of Uralic. To my knowledge only Samic has lost vowel harmony without any traces. Any hypothetical *-i ~ *-ï harmony would be however continued only in Votic and South Estonian, i.e. just two Finnic languages, and lost almost everywhere else. My opinion is that it’s more parsimonious to treat this as a local innovation and to stick mainly with a three-way unstressed vowel system: *-a ~ *-ä versus *-ə.
If the third should be reconstructed as *-e or *-ə or *-i is unsettled, and I think i might be a source of confusion for people trying to figure out Proto-Uralic reconstructions, since most sources do not spell out that these are just three different notations for the same thing.
There is one main snag to this though. /i/ is neutral to vowel harmony within Finnic, e.g. Finnish sisar ‘sister’, tina ‘tin’. Most of these cases are loanwords, but there is a small residue where these seem to have cognates across the rest of Uralic. They can be either front-vocalic or back-vocalic, too:
Fi. ilma ‘air’ ~ Udmurt ин /in/ ‘heaven’
Fi. hiha ‘sleeve’ ~ Erzya ожа /oža/ ‘id.’
The first type is very rare, and it may just involve single cases of a word drifting from front harmony to back harmony. There are similar examples of irregular front/back correspondences even within Finnic, such as Fi. seka- ‘mixed’ ~ Estonian sega- < *sekä- ‘to mix’ (*seka- would give Es. sõga-).
But the last type is a bit more common, and dealing with them is an open problem. There are two main theories: either *i was harmony-neutral to start with, and so we should be reconstructing also the combination *i-a beside *i-ä; or there was some kind of an earlier back vowel *ï, either already inherited from Proto-Uralic (if so, then the “standard” back unrounded non-open vowel would have to be mid *ë) or developing later from the other PU close vowels *i *ü *u.
Other unstressed vowels have been proposed too. Most recently Zhivlov (2014) proposes splitting *ë-a and *a-a into two different combinations, one of them with *-a₁, the other with *-a₂; Aikio (2016) proposes original *a-o. None of this has been met with wider acceptance so far though.
More of a meta question about the blog, but what's the process for adding new mods?
First two posts HERE!
What are the capacities/max load sizes of the washing machines? (I'm going to Selwyn if that matters)
No idea, but they’re pretty massive - I’ve never been able to completely fill one up!
Do you plan on releasing grammatical information on your conlang(s), because I am enjoying what I see here (an apparently polysynthetic language with Japanese phonology)?
A polysynthetic language with Japanese phonology, you’ve described Numi perfectly!
I have documentation for it here: http://conworkshop.info/view_language.php?l=NMI (scroll down to the bottom to find the articles, which is where the grammatical info is stored). It’s all still in progress - some I haven’t figured out yet and other parts aren’t yet public - but the major information is there.
Thanks for the ask!