In Cuvok, the proposed labial prosody turned out to be easily described as a phonetic process involving labialized velars
Not that I have ever looked beyond Cuvok for this, but the whole analysis stems from the late 1960s when this kind of prosodies were in vogue, and I wonder if alternative explanations with just spreading of a feature anchored in a specific segment (such as e for palatalization) are also possible
I can imagine a lot of situations with epic scale neutralization (like in Cuvok) and still no need to assume prosodic palatalization; I guess the best argument for that would be if there are both vowelless morphemes that trigger palatalization and such that don’t
Thanks!
Have you read Ndokobai’s Cuvok grammar? I think he makes a convincing point that there are basically two vowels there, /e/ and /a/ and that palatalization spreads leftward from /e/.
No idea if this would also work in other CC languages.
www.lotpublications.nl/grammaire-cu...
Btw where do you have this from? It looks great!
A map of Tifinagh alphabets by Jean Loïc Le Quellec :
Green : Archaic alphabets
Blue : Classical alphabets
Red : Transitional alphabets
The transitional alphabets are more recent than the others, and it's these alphabets that gave the Tuareg Tifinagh script .
I think there is quite some uncertainty as to archaic vs classical and which one came first.
Basically, archaic is what is written on rock faces or in caves, and classical is what is written on stelae and similar stuff
Now wondering how to hear the difference between voiceless [ɪ̙] and voiceless [e]
It would also explain the pharyngealization of the l, as a way to get to the [e] sound I guess.
After all, just using a dot for -atr is most practical: ị
Fun Tarifit toponyms/demonyms:
Antwerp: Anbias (< Anbirs), from French Anvers
Germany: Aliman, from French Allemagne, with the initial a reinterpreted as the voyelle consonante a-. An older toponym that once also included the Netherlands
the French (collective): afransis
BUT
Frenchman: afransawi
Maybe aliman is from Spanish alemán?
Amerolqis was, indeeed, not easily bored. He had a very extensive vie galante (incl. with a young elephant cow). But could not get children. Fascinating stories.
Yeah, the ultimate trickster I guess.
(the tradition also says that Amerolqis invented writing to court the ladies)
To complicate things, some traditions have Imrulqays (amerolqis) as the inventor -- I kind of suspect that the narrator swapped his name instead of Iblis, who is also a well-known candidate for culture hero in Tuareg culture, but maybe not what you would tell on record.
It certainly plays a role, and there is a definite role in courtship too. But in all its low context uses, it is also very prestigious as one of the major inventions by the ancestral culture hero and a major symbol of identity.
The lack of “high culture” usage nowadays may be related to the unfair competition with Arabic
Script and its association with Islam.
Tbh it is questionable that Tifinagh were invented for only these functions. Their ancestor, the Libyco-Berber scripts, are the stuff of gravestones and (rarely) official inscriptions.
+ graffiti; all the rest has not survived
I thought the headline was weird, but then the article mentions in passing a
“donation of 21 kilogrammes of gold to pay for the maintenance of its ageing water system.”
🤯
Rumor has it that Nature is also considering charging authors 'evalution costs' to submit papers.
They must be hurting for money: they've only published 101 Open Access articles to date in 2026.
This means Springer-Nature has gobbled up $1,281,690.0 of science funding this year.
#openaccess
My daughter tried this (there are even devices for this). Knaagje was not convinced.
Ramadan in Tarifit:
ramadan = arrendan
the fast = aẓummi
iftar = řefḍua
suhoor = ṣṣḥua
fajr prayer = řefjaa
dhuhr prayer = ddhua
asr prayer = řɛaṣaa
maghrib prayer = řemɣaab
isha prayer = řeɛca
It looked so nice! And indeed, I am too myopic to look further east than Siwa. (what's that little wadi over there? you call it a Nile???)
Fish doing the Lord's work.
I fell for it :(
Fascinating language fact #8: in Mparntwe Arrernte (spoken in Australia), you can indicate complaint or compassion with the same particle, according to Wilkins (1986). You simply add a suffix -iknge, meaning ‘something keeps happening and I feel it shouldn’t’:
it could also be a tree that bears syntax fruit of course
I would say syntactische boom, by the way. I think my interpretation of syntaxisboom would be a tree that generates the syntax of a language, not one that represents some specific sentence. No idea why I have this intuition 🤷♂️
