(Conlangs) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

[Salmoneus]

Just concerning the "obstruent influence tone without bearing it"-question. Depressor consonant is a good key word. Onset obstruents can synchronically and phonetically influence tone because they require a certain state of the glottis for their voicing value which restricts the possible rate of glottis vibration on the following vowel. Coda obstruents often phonetically shorten preceding vowels and short vowels are less likely to bear high tones or contour tones in the languages of the world.
Btw, I also edited my post above.

Coda consonants can also do some other things that can mess with tone. Voiced codas can cause lengthening; unvoiced codas can affect voicing of the preceding vowel, which can lead to a change in phonation. All or some codas can receive glottal reinforcement, and voiced codas can be implosive, which introduces another glottalic element. All these things can influence tone.

[Ahzoh]

Just concerning the "obstruent influence tone without bearing it"-question. Depressor consonant is a good key word. Onset obstruents can synchronically and phonetically influence tone because they require a certain state of the glottis for their voicing value which restricts the possible rate of glottis vibration on the following vowel. Coda obstruents often phonetically shorten preceding vowels and short vowels are less likely to bear high tones or contour tones in the languages of the world.
Btw, I also edited my post above.

My conlang's pretonal stage only had short vowels and diphthongs (which did not simplify), so it sounds like the syllables closed by coda obstruent will probably only have atonal/mid or low tone.
On the other hand, Cantonese had short vowel obstruent coda rhymes lead to high tone while long vowel obstruent coda rhymes lead to mid tone, both preceded by voiceless onsets.

[Omzinesý]

In what kind of vowel inventories does /ʉ/ (close central rounded vowel) appear?
Wikipedia has a very short list.

[Ahzoh]

In what kind of vowel inventories does /ʉ/ (close central rounded vowel) appear?
Wikipedia has a very short list.

Ones with rounding harmony and its unrounded counterpart isn't neutral.

[Salmoneus]

In what kind of vowel inventories does /ʉ/ (close central rounded vowel) appear?
Wikipedia has a very short list.

I'm not sure what sort of answer you're looking for. What does "what kind of" mean? What are the options?

In terms of individual languages, the obvious example is (many/most dialects of) English.

Diachronically, I'd expect it to come from rounding of the unrounded equivalent (or rounding and backing of /i/), or from fronting of /u/. Rounding and raising of schwa or other central vowel could be another option.

[Omzinesý]

In what kind of vowel inventories does /ʉ/ (close central rounded vowel) appear?
Wikipedia has a very short list.

I'm not sure what sort of answer you're looking for. What does "what kind of" mean? What are the options?

In terms of individual languages, the obvious example is (many/most dialects of) English.

Diachronically, I'd expect it to come from rounding of the unrounded equivalent (or rounding and backing of /i/), or from fronting of /u/. Rounding and raising of schwa or other central vowel could be another option.

I think the easiest answer is names of languages that have it.
Does /ʉ/ often contrast with /u/ (some Swedish dialects) etc?

[Visions1]

ʉ occurs in some Niger-Congo langs (e.g.https://escholarship.org/content/qt2g06 ... f?t=qtphqp) and some Papuan ones. I'd check them.

[Visions1]

Currently tying to fig. out rimes for Swang. I'm trying to think what the next step backwards should be. So far I have these steps:
viewtopic.php?p=326521#p326521 (ignore step -6)
viewtopic.php?p=327170#p327170

See here
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/ ... edit#gid=0

What do you think I should do?

[VaptuantaDoi]

In what kind of vowel inventories does /ʉ/ (close central rounded vowel) appear?
Wikipedia has a very short list.

Generally it functions as part of an F2-intermediate series between "front unrounded" and "back rounded", so it's roughly equivalent to /ɨ/, /y/ or /ɯ/. Take Natügu for instance:

Code: Select all

 i   ʉ   u
 e   ɵ   o
 æ   ə   ɔ
     a

In Natügu it functions more like /ɨ/, but it can function like /y/ too, as in Ndemli:

Code: Select all

 i     ʉ   u
 e ø       o
 ɛ         ɔ
       a

It can be a "schwa" vowel like in Xumi, not really fitting into a series:

Code: Select all

 i       u
     ʉ
 e       o
 ɛ   ɐ
     a

Sometimes it's just a variant of /u/ – either replacing it entirely, like in Garo or Fife Scots:

Code: Select all

Garo:
 i   ʉ
 ɛ       ɔ
     ä

Fife Scots:
 i   ʉ
 e   ɘ     o
 ɛ   ɜ   ʌ ɔ
     a

Or just as an extra vowel, like in Yemba, where it derives from palatalisation:

Code: Select all

 i   ʉ   u
 e       o
 ɛ       ɔ
     a

Basically, whenever you have /ɨ/ or /y/, you can have /ʉ/ instead; and mostly you can replace /u/ with /ʉ/. It's fairly rare to see a language analysed with /ʉ/, but I think that's more an artefact of how linguists tend to analyse things than actual rarity - probably half the languages which have "/ɨ/" round it most of the time anyway. And often (I don't have any figures but I feel it's true) what's treated as "/u/" tends not to be properly back and might be [u̟] or [ʉ] most of the time.

[Omzinesý]

Thank you!
I think what @VaptuantaDoi said was quite much what I was looking for.
I have check the paper Visions1 linked. Niger-Kongo languages - especially outside Bantu - are very interesting.

[Glenn]

And often (I don't have any figures but I feel it's true) what's treated as "/u/" tends not to be properly back and might be [u̟] or [ʉ] most of the time.

I think that this is true; in my own idiolect of (GenAm) English, I feel that my /u/ may be closer to [ʉ]; at least, it's definitely farther forward than the rest of my back vowels.

In addition, when I was taking lessons/ in Kazakh, I found that the "high front" vowels in the Kazakh vowel system, ⟨і/ı⟩ and ⟨ү/ü⟩ (the equivalent of /i/ and /y/ in Turkish) were significantly centered, and were pronounced more like [ɪ] and [ʉ]. The current Wikipedia article on Kazakh gives these phonemes as /ɪ̞/ and /ʉ/.

(The Wikipedia article on Kazakh has been significantly edited since I last saw it, and the description of the Kazakh vowel system given there now largely matches the pronunciation that i was taught; the biggest difference is that it gives the pronunciation of ⟨ы/y⟩ as /ə/, whereas I was taught it as /ɯ/.)

[zyma]

And often (I don't have any figures but I feel it's true) what's treated as "/u/" tends not to be properly back and might be [u̟] or [ʉ] most of the time.

I think that this is true; in my own idiolect of (GenAm) English, I feel that my /u/ may be closer to [ʉ]; at least, it's definitely farther forward than the rest of my back vowels.

In addition, when I was taking lessons/ in Kazakh, I found that the "high front" vowels in the Kazakh vowel system, ⟨і/ı⟩ and ⟨ү/ü⟩ (the equivalent of /i/ and /y/ in Turkish) were significantly centered, and were pronounced more like [ɪ] and [ʉ]. The current Wikipedia article on Kazakh gives these phonemes as /ɪ̞/ and /ʉ/.

(The Wikipedia article on Kazakh has been significantly edited since I last saw it, and the description of the Kazakh vowel system given there now largely matches the pronunciation that i was taught; the biggest difference is that it gives the pronunciation of ⟨ы/y⟩ as /ə/, whereas I was taught it as /ɯ/.)

This has reminded me of an assignment I once had to complete for a phonetics class that involved, among other things, plotting out and comparing the vowel inventories of English and another language largely based on F1 & F2 measurements. I provided the English data myself as a native speaker who grew up outside of Philadelphia, and I got permission from a then-neighbor of mine who grew up near Istanbul to record him speaking his native language, Turkish. Long story short, my /u/ was practically as far front as his /y/. If I remember correctly, the difference in F2 was less than 100 Hz.

[Salmoneus]

Yes, /u/ is fronted in most English dialects, including but not limited to SSBE, Australian, New Zealander, South African, and Western American. It's probably fronted to SOME extent in pretty much all dialects. It's also regularly derounded. [for me it's derounded phonetically, but I retain phonemic "rounding" through sulcalisation, as in the case of the LOT and GOAT vowels, and arguably CAUGHT].

This is of course an incredibly common change cross-linguistically - c.f. French and Greek for famous examples.

[LinguistCat]

Could an argument be made for including /t/ as a possible coda but not any other stops by saying that the language has a preference for coronal consonants in general? It's for a non-human language but they are fairly humanoid, so I'd like to keep details and reasoning for why things are how they are close to natural human languages, at least for phonology.

[Imralu]

Could an argument be made for including /t/ as a possible coda but not any other stops by saying that the language has a preference for coronal consonants in general? It's for a non-human language but they are fairly humanoid, so I'd like to keep details and reasoning for why things are how they are close to natural human languages, at least for phonology.

Yes, see Finnish. The only consonants allowed at the end of a word are /t n s l r/ and there is also the unwritten /ʔ/ which is generally unrealised utterance finally, appears as a glottal stop before vowels and causes gemination of following consonants. It derives from earlier final /k/ and /h/. Within a word, homorganic nasals are allowed before stops, and also /h/ appears in codas, as in ehkä "maybe". There is definitely a tendency for non-coronals not to be allowed in codas in Finnish.

[Creyeditor]

Isn't Korean like this?

[Visions1]

There's /d/ in Spanish.
Also, I though Korean allowed <-pp -tt -kk> as codas?

[LinguistCat]

Thanks, I thought there were languages doing something similar, I just couldn't think of any.

[Arayaz]

If a language has the vowels /u ʊ o ɔ/, is it more likely for /ʊ/ to merge with /o/ or /ɔ/ upon lowering?

[Creyeditor]

That depends on a lot of factors. Acoustically, [ʊ] and [o] are very close, so they are likely to merge. But this doesn't mean that this is the most likely in all contexts. If /ʊ/ and /ɔ/ share some other phonetic property (e.g. being short (as in German) or having a retracted tongue root (as in some varieties of Yoruba)), then they might be more likely to merge. Shakuntala Mahanta reports in her phd thesis that in Assamese researchers mistook /ʊ/ for [ɒ] even though there is /o/ in between, so this is definitely possible. Disclaimer: Both Yoruba and Assamese have ATR/RTR vowel harmony. Don't know if that makes a difference.