Lizardsquid, maker of noises @lizardsquid@computerfairi.es

after the optional vowel comes the actual suffix, which (with the exception of the "surprised but believe it's true" form of the Reported evidential ending) is a consonant cluster.

tɬ and ʈʂ are single consonants rather than 2 (voiecless alveolar lateral affricate and voiceless retroflex affricate)

the – before the letters just means that it's a suffix (they're all suffixes)

following that is the optional vowel. This vowel is inserted in between the verb and the rest of the suffix, but ONLY if the vowel's absence would break the pronounciation rules.

Each of the optional vowels has an acute accent above it, which means that it is associated with a high tone. Any vowels without an accent above them have a low tone.

(in this thread, any words that I put with a Capital letter at the start are ones that you can look up on wikipedia and get a fairly understandable explanation)

oh gosh, this looks way more complicated on the screen than it does on paper...

(this is the table of endings for verbs, which indicate Evidentiality and Epistemic Modality)

The BBC can't possibly be making a profit off any of these, can they? Why aren't they in the Public Domain, or on a collection disc?

I still need to track down copies of the old BBC radio dramas:

* Doctor Who and the Pescatons
* Exploration Earth
* Slipback
* The Paradise of Death
* The Ghosts of N-Space

I'm particularly interested to listen to the Pescatons, because the story was "unusual for its depiction of a genocide devised and led by Sarah and the Doctor, without either character displaying even a tinge of remorse."

but yeah, look at this cool alien:

The Draconians are really cool aliens – they have a lot of political flexibility, unlike a lot of other non-human-shaped aliens.

My only frustration is that I was starting to headcannon them as a single gendered species, until suddenly one of them was pointlessly sexist.

Chibnall: Series 11 of Doctor Who will have no old monsters or villains – no daleks!

me: oh cool, that means that the show can go into interesting new directions and stuff

The New Years Special: *definitely has daleks*

me: gosh darnit

Yesterday, I watched Carnival of Monsters – it's fun, but it feels like it should do something more with the political plotline.

Today I'm going to watch Frontier in Space, which is the last story to feature Roger Delgado as the Master before his unfortunate death in an accident. He was intended to show up one last time in the next season, but this never came to be.

goooooood ɱyoɽɳiɲg

woops I spent ages working on a conlang and now it's snooze time

goodnight!

naming things is hard...

I found a long, fascinating, and (seemingly) well researched and cited answer to a question on a forum. The person who posted it is even a Professor!

But it just so happens that I know it to be completely and utterly wrong.

it's important to note: this is only according to what's in phoible's database, it's not a definitive answer (especially since defining segments is.... harder than it seems)

I downloaded the phoible database of language inventory sizes, and wrote some code to calculate the average number of segments in a language:

35.2125

I think I can actually use phoible's database for this...

Actually, I'm more interested in the average number of *phonemes* in a language, which should be much easier to know