"Kitchen Sink" Natlangs

[Friedebarth]

A phoneme /xk/ (what is that even)

Does that really seem unusual to you? Certain dialects of Scottish Gaelic (eg. Argyll) have this as their realisation of preaspirated /k/.

<mac a' bhaca> ("son of the sandbank", I know it doesn't make any sense, just go with it)
/maxk ə vaxkə/

[Thrice Xandvii]

Well, if you look at /xk/ as some sort of backwards affricate, it seems pretty weird. But, when viewed as a cluster in which preaspiration is altered to match POA, well, then it makes a lot more sense (at least it does to me). I'd imagine that Hoskh was viewing it in the former way rather than the latter.

[HoskhMatriarch]

Well, if you look at /xk/ as some sort of backwards affricate, it seems pretty weird. But, when viewed as a cluster in which preaspiration is altered to match POA, well, then it makes a lot more sense (at least it does to me). I'd imagine that Hoskh was viewing it in the former way rather than the latter.

Yeah, it does make sense when you view it as a cluster with the preaspiration matching the POA. Although, that's basically the same thing as a backwards affricate, it's just a backwards affricate that makes sense. Except, in Chechen there's not preaspiration.

[Friedebarth]

Well, if you look at /xk/ as some sort of backwards affricate, it seems pretty weird. But, when viewed as a cluster in which preaspiration is altered to match POA, well, then it makes a lot more sense (at least it does to me). I'd imagine that Hoskh was viewing it in the former way rather than the latter.

But since when are backwards affricates weird? /st/and /ʃt/ occur in quite a lot of languages, including English ("washed vest"). Personally, I actually find /xk/ vastly easier to pronounce than /kx/.

[Creyeditor]

/st/and /ʃt/ are two phonemes each though, at least in all the languages I know of, whereas /x͡k/ or /xk/ is supposed to be one phoneme on its own.

[Ahzoh]

/st/and /ʃt/ are two phonemes each though, at least in all the languages I know of, whereas /x͡k/ or /xk/ is supposed to be one phoneme on its own.

If /ʰk/ is likely to become /ˣk/, I guess /ʰq/ becomes /ᵡq/

[gach]

That is interesting! The thing that most looks like an old orientation marker in Hungarian is a -b– found in the interior cases. Do you know the origin of this (based on function, I suppose it's not related to this pää?) or the Hungarian case system in general?

A huge amount of the Hungarian cases originate from agglutinated postpositions. However, I'm afraid that I don't seem to have a source that would specify the exact source of the b-cases. Someone with with a more thorough treatise on the history of Hungarian might be able to fill in here.

[Prinsessa]

That would depend on how the p got baked in there and when the cases appeared, as the p in pää turns into f in Hungarian. Seems more likely to be a reflex of *mp drawing from what little knowledge I have of Hungarian diachronics. But it could still be from pää if the postpositions were used in a way similar to modern Finnish in the history of Ugric, i.e. base word in the genetive (ending in -n which I believe is ancestral to all of Proto-Uralic), giving *-n pää > *-mpää through assimilation. So could be!

[Aevas]

I also remember someone on this forum talking about how terrible and unnaturalistic the vowel system of Swedish is. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_l ... #Phonology Really, who made all the front vowels be mid or higher?

/ɛ/ and /ø/ have the allophones [æ] and [œ̞] before /r/, and are generally becoming more open in the younger generations, anyway.

Also, what kind of sound is this even. (Honestly, it just sounds like a labio-velarized labiodental fricative to me, but Wikipedia probably just has it wrong on which sound it has, since their example of a voiced epiglottal trill is wrong and for a while the voiceless one was too.)

Based on my Swedish lessons, it's a labialized fricative with a velar component and a coronal(-ish) fricative. Somewhere between /ç̟͡xʷ/ and /ç̟ʲʷˠ/? (/ç/ + ˖, advanced articulation.)
The Swedish-speakers living in Finland pronounce it as /ʃ/ or /ɕ/.

In Sweden, that sound is generally a low friction velar fricative, that may or may not have a labiodental co-articulation (with some lip rounding), or a postalveolar fricative. I think the IPA's [ʃx] coarticulation business stems from some kind of misunderstanding.