u/Traditional-Light-10

In particular, I don't understand how Kashmiri has (1) long counterparts for each of its 8 qualities, and (2) the qualities [ɨ], [ə], and [ɔ]. I've looked at some words off Wikipedia and Wiktionary. I know Sinhala has a lot of vowels because it lost length at first and reïnnovated it later.[1] Kashmiri might be similar, with short vowels in سٕتھٕر /sɨtʰɨr/ from sūtra and a long vowel in شیٹھ /ʃeːʈʰ/ from ṣaṣti (with an intermediate geminate?), but then I don't there's the short vowel in اۆڈ /oɖ/ from ardha and the long vowel in دٟتھ /dɨːtʰ/ from dūta, which then don't make sense. A lot of it seems be due to palatalization, labialization(??), or umlaut, but it's weird how it ended up so symmetric.

[1] https://www.jstor.org/stable/20006708 "How Dravidianized Was Sinhala Phonology? Some Conclusions and Cautions"

So I just borrowed the book "A Higher Konkani grammar" from my university library. When discussing "accent" systems in Konkani, Janardhan implies that Konkani does not retain Sanskrit's pitch accent and makes it clear that stress is predictable (and explains a few rules that predict the stress). However, Janardhan also mentions a "breathed" or visarjanīya stress accent, written with a visarga, which only exists for short vowels followed by a singleton consonant other than /r/, and doesn't exist in tatsamas. It apparently sounds similar to, but different from, gemination of the following consonant. Some examples given in the first two chapters are:

रःमाक​ (accusative of राम​), गेःलो (no gloss), लःडू (no gloss), चेःली (no gloss), गेःलेलि (no gloss), णःव (nine), सःतरा (17), बावेःचालीस​ (42), एःकशें एक​ (101).

Janardhan claims that this is more common in Southern Konkani. The book doesn't use the IPA, and I haven't found other sources describing anything similar (tho I haven't looked at very many). Does anyone (especially Konkani speakers) know what's being described here?

The Wikipedia page doesn't count, since it uses this book as its source, and I'm trying to improve it.

Edit: Janardhan also says a little bit about this feature's history. Apparently, pre-sixteenth century Konkani pronounced all short vowels this way, and apparently, something similar also exists in Kashmiri, Sinhala, and Sindhi.

So people have invented new vowel diacritics to write Kashmiri, but I don't get why they didn't just use the avagraha for long vowels. Yes, Kashmiri has 15-16 vowels, but they come in 8 short-long pairs, and Devanagari can easily handle 8 vowels with e.g. इ for /ɨ/ or ऑ for /ɔ/. Then, the avagraha is sometimes used for informally extending vowels and sometimes for elision, and in Kashmiri, it's basically useless beyond that. Why not make it an actual vowel length marker? Just curious, I'm not saying it should be changed now

I swear I've seen someone read κτλ as κου του λου instead of και τα λοιπά or κάππα ταυ λάμδα, but I haven't found anything about this since

Cia-Cia phoneme	Adlam spelling
i	𞤭
u	𞤵
e	𞤫
o	𞤮
a	𞤢
m	𞤥
n	𞤲
ŋ	𞤽
p	𞤨
t	𞤼
t͡ʃ	𞤷
k	𞤳
ʔ	◌𞥇
ᵐp	𞤲𞤨
ⁿt	𞤲𞤼
ᶮt͡ʃ	𞤲𞤷
ᵑk	𞤲𞤳
b	𞤦
d	𞤣
d͡ʒ	𞤶
g	𞤺
ᵐb	𞤲𞤦
ⁿd	𞤲𞤣
ᵑɡ	𞤲𞤺
ɓ	𞤩
ɗ	𞤯
s	𞤧
h	𞤸
β	𞤱
l	𞤤
r	𞤪
j	𞤴

Sample text:

𞤀𞤣𞤭 𞤧𞤫𞤪𞤭𞤽 𞤨𞤢𞤤𞤭 𞤲𞤮𞤲𞤮𞤲𞤼𞤮 𞤼𞤫𞤤𞤫𞤱𞤭𞤧𞤭. 𞤀𞤥𞤢𞤲𞤮 𞤲𞤮𞤨𞤮𞥇𞤮𞤲𞤦𞤢𞤫 𞤭𞤢 𞤲𞤢𞤲𞤵𞤥𞤮𞤲𞤼𞤮 𞤼𞤫𞤤𞤫𞤱𞤭𞤧𞤭 𞤳𞤮𞤤𞤭𞤫 𞤲𞤮𞤥𞤮𞤤𞤫𞤽𞤮

Original text, Hangul: 아디 세링 빨리 노논또 뗄레ᄫᅵ시. 아마노 노뽀옴바에 이아 나누몬또 뗄레ᄫᅵ시 꼴리에 노몰렝오

Original text, Latin: Adi sering pali nononto televisi. Amano nopo'ombae ia nanumonto televisi kolie nomoleŋo.

Adlam has a diacritic that disambiguates prenasalized consonants and clusters. Since Cia-Cia doesn't have clusters, I've omitted the diacritic.

So Cia-Cia is the language that gets a lot of attention for switching Hangul despite little connection to Korea. And I am happy that the community was able to decide on an orthography, and the attention it did get may have helped with preserving the language. However, in my opinion, Adlam is a much better match for Cia-Cia.

The Hangul orthography uses a digraph for /l/ that Adlam doesn't need to use, as well as digraphs for the prenasalized consonants that both use. When these digraphs appear word-initially in Hangul, an extra unpronounced 으 gets inserted so it fits Korean's syllable structure, which I find rather clunky (and there is no equivalent of this in spoken Cia-Cia). Also, for /w/ [β], Hangul has to bring back the old letter ᄫ. As you can probably tell, this doesn't render very well in practice.

Cia-Cia speakers were probably drawn to Hangul because of its built in 3-way distinction in the stops, as opposed to Latin's 2, so Korean [p p͈ pʰ] kind of map onto [b p ɓ]. However, Adlam has the same 3-way [b p ɓ] distinction as Cia-Cia, and both asymmetrically lack *[ʄ] and *[ɠ], making it a better match even in this regard.

However, Adlam has some drawbacks as well (it's right to left and takes up more space). Lmk what you think

Are there any examples of complete sentences where using "it's" instead of "its" or "who's" instead of "whose" (not between quotation marks) changes the meaning? When "it's/its" is replaced by a noun in this kind of sentence, is there any way to show the difference?

Edit: examples of complete grammatical sentences

There are some languages, like English, Bengali, some dialects of Spanish, etc., where the only glottal consonant is a /h/ that doesn't contrast with [x], and there are others, like Serbo-Croatian, where /x/ and /ɦ/ form a voiceless/voiced pair and alternate as such. Thus, it should occasionally be slightly useful to have one term for velar and glottal consonants (and everything in between, but not palatals), rather than having to write "velar/glottal" or put them in different columns. Does such a term exist? My understanding is that "dorsal" includes velar, uvular, and palatal consonants, but not glottal ones.

As you probably know, Greek has 6 ways to spell /i/: ι, υ, η, ει, οι, and υι. Furthermore, before a vowel, these are ambiguous as to whether they are pronounced as a vowel /i/ or as a consonant /ʝ~ç~ɲ/ (or palatalization). However, these distinct spellings often preserve valuable morphological and etymological information, so I wouldn’t spell them all the same. These are the changes I would make:

​Sample text (UDHR Article 1):

Όλοι οι άνθρωποι γεννιούνται ελεύθεροι και ίσοι στην αξϊοπρέπεϊα και τα δικαιώματα. Είναι προικισμένοι με λογική και σινείδηση, και οφείλουν να σιμπεριφέρονται μεταξί τους με πνεύμα αδελφοσίνης.

There is some ambiguity between /i.V/ and hypothetical /e.i.V/ and /o.i.V/, but the latter sequences are very rare, so it shouldn't be a problem.* I wasn't sure about whether /i/ or // j // should be marked, but since there is a contrast between /ʎ/ (< // lj //)and /ʎʝ/ (< // lɣj //)(as in ήλιο vs Βέλγιο), I went with the former.

I'm less sure about υ. I decided to get rid of its /i/ pronunciation because it doesn't appear in any grammatical suffixes other than -υς and -υ (which could easily be -ις and -ι), and because it doesn't give much etymological information (the way η and ει sometimes come from words with ε). Obviously, it's still used in αυ, ευ, and ου.

Please let me know if you have better solutions.

*Edit: I forgot to mention that εϊ, οϊ > εη, οη, in addition to saving a diacritic, also makes these sequences even rarer.

I agree with a lot of people that Duolingo should focus on improving their existing language courses, but they’re probably going to add another course eventually.

Icelandic was mentioned a lot on the previous thread about the same topic, but I didn’t make it an option because Reddit only allows 6 options and Icelandic has the fewest speakers by far. Feel free to comment which language if you vote “other”.

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I don't know if this is the right sub, but I'll ask here anyway.

https://www.reddit.com/r/linguisticshumor/comments/1ugyv1m/a_bit_confusing_imo/

In a reply to "is there any language that has a contrast between apical post-alveolar and true retroflex?" (one of the comments on the thread above), someone claimed to have insider knowledge that the IPA might discuss removing retroflex as a place during their next conference. Would anyone else know anything about this?

It might be linked to a proposal I've found where the term "retroflex" is replaced by "post-alveolar". Or, this proposal might've had no influence at all, but I couldn't find anything else similar.

If they can, is there a good way to tell these phrases apart from the nominative for neuter nouns? I think the possessor always comes immediately after the possessee, but I could be wrong.

As far as I know, Sylheti has developed tones by losing distinctions in consonants that are still different in most dialects of Bengali, like k and kh or b and bh. However, I don't know how the tones are pronounced. Could you explain how the tones are pronounced in these words?

ꠔꠣꠟ tal 'rhythm'

ꠕꠣꠟ tal 'plate'

ꠀꠔ (h)at 'hand'

ꠙꠣꠌ fas 'five'

ꠝꠣꠍ mas 'fish'

ꠌꠥꠞꠤ suri 'theft'

ꠈꠣꠟꠤ xali 'empty'

ꠙꠣꠑꠣ fata 'goat'

Wikipedia actually contradicts itself when it comes to these words

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