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Thanks.
Both http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_glossing_abbreviations and http://www.eva.mpg.de/lingua/resources/glossing-rules.php say to use "INS" for Insrumental.
I'll edit my previous post to comply.

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I am not responsible for the accuracy of my sources; they're responsible for their own mistakes, if any, and also responsible for defending their own statements if you disagree with them.

Apart from 1st person recordings,
Has anyone tried TTS (text-to-speech)ing their ?
I know some phonetic inventories just aren't handled by standard TTS.

I like to use or TTS to hear Rozwi, although lacks all the consonants.

I also have used TTS voices to render Iveriki, my .

Has anyone else tried? What were your experiences?

Yes I've tried that (using my L1 (french)) for my conlang => test it (mediafire.com/?f0bqe9dsfm6ueun) (cut and paste to address bar)

I just had an idea and was wondering if anyone knows if it occurs in any natlangs or seems plausible enough.

Mychai has several cases and nouns are declined based on their final sound, so nouns ending with S decline differently than those ending with L and so on. My idea is to erase the differences between all declensions and have a "relative clause declension" so that any noun occurring within a relative clause would be marked differently than if it were marked in a main clause.

Thoughts?

Say, a conlang has two harmonizing groups of vowels, /a i/ and /a u/. You could one analyze it as /a/ being a neutral vowel.
Would it be credible to be the harmony bound with to lexical units that one word having solely neutral vowels, e.g. /tata/ takes only front suffixes and another, e.g. /nana/ takes only back vowels, that a given lexical unit takes always the same group of vowels?

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Języki sztuczne i lingwistyka, po polsku.

Isn't that what vowel-harmony is?

Basically, find pairs of vowels such that no word ever has both vowels in it.

The Rarity Cabinet has an example of a language whose vowel-harmony is interior vs peripheral. A "peripheral" vowel is any front unrounded or back rounded or open vowel; an "interior" vowel is any vowel that isn't peripheral (front rounded not open, back unrounded not open, central or near-front or near-back not open).

Harmony could be front-vs-back, where all words either have all front or central vowels, or all back or central vowels, but no word has both a front vowel and a back vowel.

Harmony could be close-vs-open, where all words either have all close or mid vowels, or all open or mid vowels, but no word has both a close vowel and an open vowel.

And I don't see why any combination you could come up with would necessarily be theoretically impossible.

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I am not responsible for the accuracy of my sources; they're responsible for their own mistakes, if any, and also responsible for defending their own statements if you disagree with them.

It is, but I mean what happens when all vowels in a word are neutral. (E.g. Finnish in such cases treat them as front: ilve-ttä, not **ilve-tta. The same with Hungarian.)
I ask how much is it plausible that the frontness of attached suffixes would depend on the word itself. In other words that there would be some neutral-vowelled words taking always front suffixes and some taking always back suffixes.

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Języki sztuczne i lingwistyka, po polsku.

Maybe /a/ is the result of a merger of two earlier phonemes, say /ɑ/ triggering back vowel harmony, and /æ/ triggering front vowel harmony.

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constructedlanguages.net

Is it just me or [ɹʲ] really is hard to pronounce?

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ãĩ lãĩk nãzãl vãwẽlz

IMO that is a super-cool idea!
But I have no clue whether or not such a thing is attested in natlangs. I don't see why it wouldn't be.



Maybe what Xing said, for instance.

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I am not responsible for the accuracy of my sources; they're responsible for their own mistakes, if any, and also responsible for defending their own statements if you disagree with them.

1. What is the term for the noun, adjective, pronoun or whatever when it has an adposition (as in to me, to fat cat, to Garfield)?

2. Is there any language that contrasts postalveolar and dental stops? I think that there may be one in Australia, but I don't have enough time to search Wikipedia to find is there any.

Don't know, I can hardly do this but I have in general problems with the plain alveolar [ɹ].


Adpositional complement.

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Języki sztuczne i lingwistyka, po polsku.

Thank you! I thought the term was referent, but I wasn't sure.
I can pronounce [ɹ] without problems, but i can't pronounce [ɹʲ] easily.

Maybe because they are both approximates.

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"Wait for the starvation of glaciers, chicken hamburger Noel Weber Arthur."

= | = | =

It's possible, but difficult for me. The /ɹ/ tends to become an /r/ for me, though.

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Banami bhjaddhos rafi mau cy vyaja cecerror.
Fools do not see the sun nor sail the seas
-Azenti Proverb

It's quite easy for me to pronounce, because my normal English /r/ has post-alveolar contact.

The noun (phrase) that is modified by an (ad-,pre-,post-)position can also be called its object, though nowadays complement is used much more.

Object of Preposition is an accepted term that's more specific, though. Complement is pretty general.



I dunno about dentals, but a quick search of UPSID says Hixkaryana contrasts alveolar d with postalveolar d.

EDIT: A more thorough search says there are indeed several Australian languages which contrast postalveolar stops, but all of them seem to contrast them with normal alveolars rather than dentals.

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Some Australian languages have a four-way contrast between dental, apico-alveolar, palato-alveolar (I suggest that something like this is what you mean by "postalveolar") and retroflex sounds.



If you include retroflex sounds in "postalveolar", you have many languges of India contrasting dental and retroflex stops.

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constructedlanguages.net

To be specific:
UPSID's online-searchable form lists four natlangs with / t̪ t t̠ ʈ / (that is, in Z-SAMPA, / t_d t t_- t` /); namely, Yolngu (Dhangu), Arrernte (Aranda), Nunggubuyu, and Yanyuwa (Anyula or Yanyula). All four are Australian, and the first two are Pama-Nyangan while the last two are "ungrouped".
Ngiyambaa, another Pama-Nyungan language of Australia, is also listed by UPSID as having / t̪ t t̠ / (that is, in Z-SAMPA, / t_d t t_- /).

Garawa, a Garawan (big surprise) language of Australia, has / t t̠ ʈ c / (/ t t_- t`c /) -- alveolar, palato-alveolar, retroflex, and palatal -- all phonemically contrasted with each other.

As for voiced stops. OTOH, the story is different, at least in Frankfurt University's searchable UPSID. None of their languages is recorded as contrasting dental to palato-alveolar, nor retroflex to palato-alveolar, nor palatal to palato-alveolar, in voiced stops. (But 24 languages have alveolar and palatal voiced stops; 12 languages have alveolar and dental voiced stops; and 5 languages have alveolar and palato-alveolar voiced stops. Three languages contrast alveolar with retroflex voiced stops.)

On the ZBB, user "2+3 Clusivity" recommended Dravidian languages to me, in particular Malayalam and Toda. I imagine those must be some of the Indian languages Xing was referring to. Their Wikipedia articles show what he was talking about.

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