The CBB

I know; I don't have an answer for the overall question, but I thought I could offer some preliminary insights. You did, thank you. Syntax is not often an area I get into, because my questions tend towards the 'why' (a lot of which are probably unanswerable, but interesting to speculate on nonethel...

AFAIK, the FOFC is supposed to be asymetric, so [V-O]-Aux is banned but Aux-[OV] is okay, contrary to what the name suggests. I hasten to add that this in itself does not explain anything and could only be a first step on the way to a potential explanation. Edit: I had misunderstood (apologies!). B...

Does anyone have any thoughts/ideas on why, in languages that use auxiliary verbs, the order V-O-Aux never seems to appear as a 'default' order, and when alternative orders are allowed, it is exceedingly rare? (Apparently Classical Latin allowed this order, but it was not common, and eventually disa...

Ok, since this is a scratchpad, scratch all of the above on pronouns. I have come up with a system that I like much better. Preverbal Enclitic Chains Let's only focus on 1st and 2nd persons for now, as 3rd person will somehow be 'peripheral'. We have the following subject enclitics: 1sg. = wa 2sg. =...

Pronouns and Pronominal Enclitics A series of (pronominal) clitics often precedes the verb. Clitics are always attached to a 'conjunctive' particle, most often a- , which has no meaning, and serves only as a 'joiner' morpheme. Other conjunctive particles will have semantic content. The order of pro...

Quenya comes to my mind. Interesting! Quenya definitely wasn't an influence here – maybe that's a product of the specific examples. I think it will be less 'mellifluous' and more stop-heavy. I imagine it will look less Quenya once we get to verbs. I like the case paradigm. It's agglutinative and st...

Intro This language is inspired by (Classical) Japanese, the non-concatenativity of Semitic, and a touch of Ancient Greek — mostly just trying out things I like. The name is tentative for now. Phonology I won't focus too much on this right now. Predictably, it has quite a simple phonology: /p t k t...

I have had a question that has been at the back of my mind for a while, so any thoughts, comments, opinions are welcome on the below. The questions is, basically, can morphemes (or rather, 'morphological process') appear ex nihilo ? Obviously, morphemes can mostly be seen to derive either from previ...

Transposition Just to clarify about transposition in Arabic music:

 Does it happen? The short answer is yes, and it’s fairly common. The long answer is, yes, but with some caveats. By transposition, I just mean playing/singing the same maqam/jins, but from a different tonic: For example, transposi...

Man, I'm loving this thread. and yes please do share examples of this or that maqam. there are some things on the web, but it's hard to know which is good and which is fake. Thanks! I'm glad people are enjoying it. Regarding intonation, it's my understanding that when playing maqamat, since they're...

Thank you for this thread! It’s great – I like the inclusion of characters and Pinyin. A lot of the more technical aspects of the theory go over my head, so I may have misunderstood some things but some comments/questions I have: – Is transposition to different tonics/keys common? Especially as you ...

Firstly, perhaps I can add some histoical context here. Grove (my digital copy - I think 2001, but who knows when the specific article was written) talks about an original 4-course oud (a 2-course is theorised but unproven), tuned in pure fourths (modern Moroccan 4-coursers have a different tuning,...

What a fantastic introduction! I can’t wait for your maqamat analysis :) [...] I suspect that the pentatonic traditions that we tend to associate with East Asia (and for that matter the Celtic regions of Western Europe) are survivals following the superimposition at some point in the past of a Grec...

Thank you so much for this! As a layman, it's difficult to find reasonable, layman-level explanations of this topic (everything seems to be either very simplistic (saying very little) or very technical (of which I can understand very little), with not a lot in between...). Thank you for the insight...

Very interesting—I look forward to more! :D Thanks for the glossary, I'm sure it'll be a useful reference. Thank you! If all instruments play in unison, how is improvisation handled? Do all instrument but one stay silent for a taqsim? Yes indeed - usually the taqsīm is performed solo and other inst...

Introduction to Arabic Music & Theory I thought it might be useful to share some observations on Arabic music and theory. I know a few here showed some interest a while back, so hopefully this will be of some benefit to those interested. This thread does assume some basic knowledge of music the...

As for synchronic phonological processes, this is an open question in theoretical phonology. Try googling "morpheme-specific phonology" to get some ideas about it. [Try looking at the data in the purely theoretical papers if they look intimidating.] The two positions are basically: "...

In the words of Reverend Lovejoy: short answer yes with an if, long answer no with a but. No, it's not wise to think of morphemes as dictating their own diachronic rules. However, it's possible to set up regular or irregular sound changes that superficially might look as though that's what's happen...

I have a question about morpho-phonological processes. Essentially: can morphemes "dictate" certain phonological processes limited to themselves and/or "take precedence" over normal sound changes? This means that they don't operate as "ordinary" across-the-board sound c...

When did Persian /ɑː/ become rounded? Less importantly, why? I know the latter can only be speculated on, but... eh. I can't answer regarding the timing of the Persian shift, but rounding (and often raising) of /ɑ:/ is very common (it even raises to /u:/ in some environments in Tehrani Farsi I thin...