The CBB

/ɛ ɔ/ are lax mid vowels and /e o/ are tense mid vowels. Thank you. Sorry, I hadn't noticed yet that this is based on PHOIBLE's own system of features. Their whole approach as a whole is not quite what I'm used to. About your last point, when you said "/ɲ/ and /h/ also frequently cooccur with ...

[...] [*]Lax mid vowels frequently cooccur with voiced fricatives. Maybe an effect of Bantu? [*]Voiced stops frequently cooccur with tense mid vowels. No real idea for an explanation here. [...] Could you clarify which mid vowels you mean, exactly? I'm afraid I'm not familiar with the lax-tense cla...

It took a whole lot longer than intended, but I think I finally assembled a particular function for my sound changer / conlanging app, although further debugging and testing will be required, as well as perhaps implementing some additional mechanisms. It's a tool that collects all segments that conf...

Here's some more info about the first two you noticed. The coocurence of /ɮ/ and /ŋɡʷ/ is all down to 16 Afro-Asiatic languages in PHOIBLE's data. The exact languages are Bana, Besleri, Buwal, Dghwede, Gavar, Hdi, Mbuko, Merey, Mofu-Gudur, Moloko, Ngizim, Daba, Tera, Vame, Wandala and Wuzlam. It's m...

It's not described as such, but that's a possibility, yes - after all, what would even be the distinction between harmony and a phonotactic constraint in the case of roots? Again, the data provided in the paper doesn't really give us enough to go on there. The original source might have more insight...

@Nel Fie: I am still not sure if I understand the relation between the concrete data and the high-level abstract generalizations. But I can't think of many concrete questions. Going back to my answer to the original question: Does /a/ alternate in these languages or is it neutral? @Sal: I think, yo...

Can it do -@? So only apply if feature values don't match? It couldn't yesterday, now it can. Thank you very much for suggesting the idea! I hadn't thought of it yet, but it's a good feature to have and was not overly complicated to implement. As a result, one can now provide a pattern such as C[@1...

It took a bit of work, and maybe more testing and debugging down the road, but ostensibly my sound changer can now handle feature matching. Which is to say, aught one would typically notate as a feature preceded by an alpha, e.g. C [α place] . Due to wanting a simpler formatting, it is notated with ...

Do the triggers also have to be back? Right, the table didn't specify that so I forgot to include it. Apologies. The adjoining text provides some clarification: In Shuluun Hˆh (Svantesson, 1985), like other Mongolian languages, rounding harmony is observed as long as the trigger and target agree in...

That's where I read about Shuluun Höh. I encountered some Sibe data in a more computational paper. But the original sources are cited in the source you give, IIRC. Right. Based on a quick read-through of the above paper (not the original source), their rounding harmony operates as follows: Sibe: Ta...

[...] Doesn't Navajo have a whole thing with word order? It doesn't seem to mark anything, but it seems to organize things. From what I remember, it uses the order of nouns (or maybe just arguments?) to mark hierarchy in a gender system. Higher ranking nouns have to come before lower ranking ones. ...

[...] No, compared to languages with front rounded vowels and also backness harmony. Shibe and Shuluun Höh have systems with rounding harmony only in back vowels but they are pretty complicated and I don't really understand them. Out of curiosity, I looked them up and found this paper which mention...

This is an interesting question, and it's also interesting to consider why word order isn't used for "anything and everything". [...] So basically my intuition is that people are 'hardwired' to use word order primarily for argument & information structure, with some slight (and more s...

Clothes are much more "shareable" and more on the side of "leased" or "borrowed" items Not owning the literal clothes on my back doesn't sound very fun, but maybe that was your point? This isn't exactly what I meant. My apologies for not explaining it sufficiently. In ...

I don't think there is an easy asnwer but here are some functions that I know of. 1) The difference between the two arguments of transitive verbs. Happens in English (and probably many other languages). 2) Information structure, so things like topic and focus. Happens in many languages including En...

I don't know if it's a worthwhile addition, but a trend in my conculturing is taking inspiration from anti-consumerist ideas: rather than being mass-produced (and often cheaply made) personal items, clothes are produced as high-quality, handmade and highly individual items; and they are broadly perc...

A current curiosity of mine: for how many grammatical functions do natural languages employ word order? And what are those functions? Though I'd wager the answer will probably be 'everything and anything', so perhaps a more specific question - among the languages anyone here might know about, which ...

I adjusted my previous misgiving about syllable blocks by including the syllable break in post-syllabic tests, so that users can choose whether to skip post-syllabic elements by simply adding a syllable break after the block (i.e. '<s>al' will be valid for 'kis.tal', but '<s>.al' will not - it would...

After a whole lot of rewriting and some further debugging, polishing and testing, my sound changer's syllabic testing process seems now fully functional, and implemented into the main comparison process. So, for example the following pattern: k<s,z>{ul,al} ... will be correctly recognized as startin...

Thank you all for taking the time to answer, I hope you will not think ill of me for not responding at length to each of your thoughts, for I found the answer to the riddle, and it is in fact another thing altogether. Salmoneus was on the right track: "siever" is a typo indeed, but not for...