On Oct 2, 2009, at 6:12 PM, Alex Fink wrote:

> On Fri, 2 Oct 2009 15:13:20 -0700, Paul Hartzer  
> <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
>>> From: "[log in to unmask]" <[log in to unmask]>
>>
>>> * 2 cases: 1. nominative/accusative vs 2. dative/lative
>>
>> Subject and direct object are the most commonly used noun roles.  
>> Why not
> distinguish them and yet distinguish "everything else"? Observation:  
> This
> would imply that subjects are required, rather than being inferred  
> from the
> verb (as in Spanish), otherwise "me eat." would be ambiguous  
> (between "I
> ate." and "I was eaten.").
>
> Naw, this is a standard direct vs. oblique case system, and such  
> systems are
> common (Joerg points out Romanian has one, for instance).  There are  
> other
> things that can handle the burden of distinguishing subjects from  
> objects --
> pragmatics, word order, verb agreement or switch reference or the like
> (which I guess this language lacks?) -- and given that they're both  
> pretty
> common roles it seems good and functional to leave them both  
> unmarked, and
> mark more peripheral roles.  (There aren't too many occasions to say  
> "I was
> eaten"...)
>
>>> * 10 basic colors: RGB + CYM + white, gray, brown, black  
>>> (essentially,
> English
>>> -orange -purple +cyan)
>>
>> Reasonable enough, for certain values of "basic." This does slightly
> violate the hierarchy claimed by Berlin and Kay (cyan is less common  
> than
> orange and purple), but that hierarchy only apparently satisfies 80%  
> of
> natlangs. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_term)
>
> FWIW, I don't think I believe in the upper part of the Berlin and Kaye
> hierarchy, where it gets above six colours (white, black, red, yellow,
> green, blue).  There's been so much borrowing of terms like "purple",
> "orange", "pink" from language to language, or canonisation of terms  
> for
> these in languages that formerly lacked them under the influence of
> languages that had them, that it seems to me there's not very many  
> data
> points at all for regarding these colours as special -- maybe in the  
> last
> analysis just one, the Western European sprachbund.  If Russian or
> Hungarian, say, had had a more central position in the last  
> millennium,
> who's to say a lot more languages wouldn't have borrowed or calqued  
> into
> their basic inventories the distinctions between _sinij_ and  
> _goluboj_, or
> _piros_ and _vo"ro"s_?
>
> It does make sense that the six colours {white, black, red, yellow,  
> green,
> blue} would have a priviliged position in their expression across  
> languages,
> though; there are sound perceptual backings for that.  (This may be  
> called
> the opponent process model.)
>
>>> * 7 vowels: /a/ /ae/ /e/ /i/ /o/ /u/ /É›/
>>
>>> * 15 consonants: /k/ /p/ /t/ /h/ /x/ /s/ /θ/ /f/ /v/ /w/ /y/ / 
>>> l/ /r/ /m/ /n/
>>> (so, no voiced plosives, one voiced fricative /v/)
>>
>> /T/ (/θ/) with an otherwise small consonant inventory is usually  
>> a dead
> giveaway that this is an English-based conlang. That particular  
> phoneme
> isn't very common across natlangs.
>
> To me the presence of /&/ (ash) in a system like this suggests English
> influence as well; the English [&] is kinda characteristic.

I'm still trying to get over thinking that [&] is a sound found in  
English and not elsewhere; it still sounds strange to me to hear it in  
Arabic (and, for that matter, in Canadian and British pronunciations  
of loanwords like _taco_).


> (OP Mark:
> http://www.theiling.de/ipa/ in case you're not familiar with CXS,  
> our de
> facto standard for ASCIIfying the IPA.)
>
> On Fri, 2 Oct 2009 23:23:23 +0100, Eugene Oh <[log in to unmask]>  
> wrote:
>
>> Does Chukchi count as base five? It's number forms seem to revolve  
>> around
>> multiples of 5 enough but I'm not sure what the defining criteria  
>> are.
>> Eugene
>
> Perhaps not base 5: by the standard I was using base 5 languages  
> should have
> 25 = 5^2 as their next unit.  But
> http://lingweb.eva.mpg.de/numeral/Chukchi.htm

That looks like a cool site. Thanks!

> suggests I should've counted
> it as base 20 (with a subbase of 5, i.e. used compositionally before  
> we
> reach the base.)  In fact it's purer base 20 than many, given that it
> expresses 400 = 20^2 and doesn't collapse back to decimal till 1000.
>
> Incidentally, I remember thinking the first time I saw the list of  
> Chukchi
> numerals, what's up with [Nireq N@roq N@raq] '2 3 4'?  Isn't that just
> absolutely pessimal for the chance of mistaking one number for  
> another?

That was the thing that first piqued my interest in Chukchi. It's even  
cooler than the ablaut attributed to the native Japanese numerals. I  
have wondered how it came about for a while now; that site shows that  
"three" and "four" in Alutor, Koryak, and Kerek are related by ablaut  
too, but "two" is slightly different.

This might tie in to the fact (given by that page) that "two" in  
Chukchi has different phones in men's and women's speech*. Perhaps  
originally only "three" and "four" resembled each other closely, and  
"two" less closely, so "two" was brought in line by analogy.

* This contradicts other stuff I've read. I remember reading that that  
male/female alternation was not limited to specific words, and that  
the men's [r\`] was pronounced as [ts)] by women; the above page  
indicates the women's word for "two" as _ŋicêq_, but judging from  
other entries, seems to use _c_ and _ɕ_ indiscriminately to denote the  
same sound (something like [ɕ]), which is a separate phoneme from the  
women's-only [ts)].