Zompist Bboard Again

Those examples don't seem to me to be the opposite of factitive verbs. In English grammar, factitive verbs take two objects and transform the first object so that it has the second object as a property. The classic example is "elect" for some weird reason, but more natural/common examples...

Relatedly, of course, glebe , "parcel(s) of land a portion of the revenue of which is reserved by law for the maintenance of the holder of an ecclesiastical post". And on a religious theme, rood , "barrier within a church preventing the laity from seeing the altar and tabernacle"...

In fact, the line seems to be that he won't even ask - rather, he will merely send the letter in which Parliament asks. He's referring to it as 'Parliament's letter', rather than his own - although I think in reality he'll have to sign it. Raphael's not alone, though - not only a bunch of news peopl...

Dear creator of Japanese, what the heck's going one with your vowel devoicing process? Everyone else just uses it on all vowels regardless of quality, but you've linked it to height of all things! What on earth is it about high vowels that makes them more prone to voicelessness than other vowels I ...

syn- is the result of Cowgill's law in Greek, a sound change that raised *o to u adjacent to a resonant and a labial consonant (which could be the same consonant): *som- > *sum-. sam- is the regular zero-grade. Yes, but he's asking why it's syn- and not hyn-, given that s>h normally. Apparently the...

I realise, however, that I forgot to mention a major landmark: two days ago, after three months, the government won a vote! Yes, it succesfully passed the "Environment (Legislative Functions from Directives)" regulations of 2019 - an administrative law that returns legislative and administ...

MEANWHILE! Over in Northern Ireland, there's actually another deadline coming up: October 21st. That's the day when armageddon happens, gay marriage is allowed and the abortion ban is massively relaxed.... unless the DUP is able to restore devolved power by then. This crisis has finally kickstarted ...

Yes. Anyway, some more complications: Corbyn's now reportedly backed down, and there'll be no penalty at all for any Labour MPs who want to vote for the Deal. However, reportedly, the National Executive are now saying that even if Corbyn doesn't withdraw the whip, they'll exclude any rebel MPs from ...

This may come as a shock, but meanwhile in Britain, Brexit continues to be a knife-edge meltdown. A new deal has been agreed with the EU. This basically leaves northern ireland in the EU and establishes a hard border down the irish sea... but says it doesn't (NI will legally be declared to 'remain i...

A site is showing me a headline from Fox News: "Swedish princess shares snap after children lose royal titles".

I didn't know you could invest in royalty.

I'm not sure what "Atlantic-Congo" is, but I'd note that given adam's summary, Güldemann's classification is quite different from Greenberg's! Summary version: Atlantic-Congo is everything with noun classes that doesn't look like it recently borrowed its noun classes. Or in other words, i...

Although I'm not sure that's a universal thought as yet; it's also possible that some of these languages are related and others aren't (I've seen someone argue that Mande is part of the family, but that Dogon isn't). Note, though, that 'Kordofanian' is an areal term. Specifically, the Talodi-Heiban ...

I'm not sure what relative clauses have to do with this anyway. There is no relative clause in "I made that"! As for marking... is there marking normally? North sea west germanic languages (as this clearly seems to be, despite being called 'crimean') aren't noted for their super-strong mor...

Yes that's... the joke. That's how this thread works.

(that was a particularly good one)

...please note that I explicitly said the volcano "in part" destroyed them but that the job was "finished off" by invaders and/or immigrants. In so far as I understand the situation, the consensus is that the ash and tsunami devastated the civilisation; many settlements show exte...

Do you not have the weak vowel merger anyway?

Icelandic has 15 declensions, each with several minor categories, resulting in a total of 96 paradigms :shock: :? :shock: [...] And conjugation is not much better. Germanic is a nightmare in this respect in general. In my Germanic conlang, Old Wenthish, I intentionally tried to simplify things - lo...

Let's see how Tambora language is extinct: A volcano erupts and kills every Tambora speakers. You must be kidding me. Well, actually volcanos are famously good at killing people. After Krakatoa, for example, the only lifeform explorers were able to find in the Krakatoa achipelago was a single spide...

Back on our main theme: Parliament's officially prorogued now.

I wouldn't have thought so - does ER even HAVE a presence in northern ireland?