The Lenovo Duet 3 Experience
I recently acquired a Lenovo Duet 3 Chromebook, and I like it enough as a solution to my specific needs / problem that I wanted to share. I’ve used it heavily since I got it a few days ago, and I think I’ve now accumulated enough experience to give a balanced review. To start with,…
Good and Bad Homophony
One thing about conlanging is that it’s easy to end up with semi-accidentally homophonous words, which can be fine and happens a lot in natural languages, but when it happens with your conlang you need to decide if you’re OK with it in this particular instance or not. And there’s one minor one right now…
The Big Speech of the Andor Finale
This post contains spoilers for episode 12 of Andor. If you haven’t seen it yet and want to, please come back later. I don’t normally post fan analysis, but the posthumous speech that Maarva gave in the final episode of Andor season 1 really was very good and I wanted to try to break down…
Prefixing Synthesis Sketch
Since I mentioned my background conlanging project on Twitter recently, I thought I’d sketch out what I was aiming for here. The general idea at the beginning was to build something that looked a bit like a cross between Mayan and Athabaskan: shared features like synthetic, head-marking, verb-centric, with a broadly Mayan~Mesoamerican phonology and verb…
Grammars of Space
The Sapir–Whorf hypothesis and claims about languages influencing thought are old and widely regarded as falsified. And I think it’s true that the strong version is false, but the weak version about language (and some aspects of culture, which is hard to disentangle from language) influencing thought has some support. And a particularly interesting area…
Vowel Disharmony
This one isn’t a long one, but I found an interesting case of active vowel disharmony in Nora England’s grammar of Mam, a Mayan language. Most cases I know where vowels actively dissimilate are raising of adjacent vowels in hiatus, e.g. in many Basque dialects the article -a triggers raising of an immediately preceding vowel,…
Gestalt Meaning in Murrinhpatha Verbs
I recently acquired a copy of Murrinhpatha Morphology and Phonology, partly because it was relatively cheap on Amazon, and partly because I’ve been interested for a while in the structure of the finite verb stem in similar / related languages. In short overviews (e.g. the chapter of Murrinhpatha in The Oxford Handbook of Polysynthesis), the…
Linguistic Tidbits from the Amazon: Part 1
It’s not so easy to find good books about Amazonian languages, but there are a number of interesting language features that seem more common there than globally. Two which I find quite interesting are nasal harmony and frustrative marking. This post will describe nasal harmony, and part 2 will cover the frustrative. Nasal Harmony Everyone…
Glottal Stops in Sierra Popoluca
I’ve been reading Lynda Boudreault’s A Grammar of Sierra Popoluca, and the behaviour of glottal stops is both interesting and at first a little confusing. I think this is not helped by certain orthographic conventions and the organisation of the phonology chapter, but having gone through it and taken notes I think I’ve now got…
The Syllable Contact Law in Synchronic Phonology
Yesterday I was looking for examples of synchronic processes (e.g. vowel epenthesis) driven by a clear and simple syllable contact law, and struggling a bit. This was partly motivated by this paper, referenced in a previous blog post, which suggests that the distribution of clusters in proto-Algonquian was motivated by such a law. It seems…
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