Zompist Bboard Again

vegfarandi wrote: ↑Mon Feb 25, 2019 2:50 pm In Icelandic it is nema, with non-transparent etymology.

Wiktionary indicates that it's from PG *nemaną ‘to take’, however, whence also German nehmen ‘to take’.

but this looks like it will fill in some details about subjecthood, etc. Thanks! I hope it's useful. It was the most recent theoretical work on this I could find when I tried to finally sort out what my conlang actually does last year. Be aware that this is a manuscript version which contains bloop...

1. Is it correct to assert that a trigger system highlights a particular verbal argument within a clause, by moving that argument's case marker to the verb and replacing it with the trigger marker? That would be the infamous "conlang trigger system" (that my conlang kind of does, too, I h...

In German, it's außer , which literally means something like 'outside of' (although that would be außerhalb von in modern German at least). But anyway, it's very transparently related to außen 'on the outside', and both are ultimately from aus 'out'. Außer as a preposition takes an object in the dat...

This is amazing. Thanks for investing those hours, Ser! Essentially, the pretext to this is me suggesting on IRC that WALS should have a way to compare languages to each other like IIRC CALS has, and that a nice-to-have feature would be to be able to compare feature values to the most common one in ...

If I remember correctly, the general consensus was that while it's not a bad book, it's a bit too much over the place. Like, it should either have been about DJP's involvement as a conlang consultant in various movies and TV series, or about introducing linguistics. Leaving out the entertainy bits w...