Zompist Bboard Again

Viksen (at least "Viksen 2010 edition", which is the most recent "complete" grammar ... maybe it's time for an official updating) scores about 21 on grammar, though I was unsure on some of the points (because I never explicitly addressed them or because I was unclear whether some...

Dare I ask if staying at a hotel for a couple days would be out of the question? Perhaps with a fellow participant? I think some people have done that in the past. Probably not: I'd be moving all of my stuff out of my student room on the Saturday, and we're just not insured to have all that left in...

Thanks for this; I usually only find out these are happening after the fact. And this one is a couple of miles from my house so I should probably go.

The one big advantage of doing maps on the computer, I find, is being able to use layers to quickly customise the map for different purposes.

I just use Excel or Google Sheets, honestly. Yeah, I used to use LexiquePro as dedicated dictionary software, but now I just do them in Excel. Grammars I do in Word. Why about LexiquePro? Also do you know application to create a conmap? LexiquePro was pretty good, but in the end I just found Excel ...

JT the Ninja wrote: ↑Sat Oct 13, 2018 7:18 am I just use Excel or Google Sheets, honestly.

Yeah, I used to use LexiquePro as dedicated dictionary software, but now I just do them in Excel. Grammars I do in Word.

What I think (probably most of this has been said already): (1) There are a limited set of occasions where the passive is best avoided (because e.g. the active is more concise and/or easier to understand, or because it's being used deceptively to disguise the identity of the agent*). (2) This has le...

In a future English (sort of) I'm working on I collapsed all of English's diphthongs just because they kept interfering with my sound changes, since SCA2 parses <aɪ̯> as <a> + <ɪ> + <◌̯>. I could have gotten around it by rewriting my diphthongs using single symbols (and have done so before plenty o...

Whether or not PIE fits the definition of a consonant-root language is quibbling over terminology which is irrelevant to the point; the degree of variation permitted in the vowels has no bearing on the argument made. In PIE, as in Arabic, the meaning of roots themselves is basically carried on the c...

mèþru wrote: ↑Thu Aug 30, 2018 12:33 pm The problem is that in languages without consonant roots too many roots could have identical spellings.

I am not sure how big of a problem this would be in practice, particularly in a language like Latin whose vocabulary is mostly derived from a consonantal root language.

TBH, it triggers my inner rantor when people complain about the "IE-ness" of languages. IE languages cover quite a typological range, some have split ergativity, some are VSO or strict SOV, it's quite likely that PIE or its preceding stage had active alignment... I'm not sure Dothraki is ...

I agree about phonology and orthography; my criticism is of the morphosyntax. The thirty-odd phrases that appear in the books (source) create a few constraints in this regard, but not many.

I haven't read the book. My impression is that he's a competent conlanger, but hardly of stellar talent. I guess it's easy to feel it rather unfair that he's profited so much from language creation when many others of equal or greater ability have not been able to.

Try Cinque (1999) "Adverbs and Functional Heads", esp. sections 3.1, 3.2. It's on Google Books; there's also a 1997 "working paper" version you can download online somewhere, or at least there used to be.

I think it's often unhelpful to have all the morphology together followed by all the syntax. So you have paradigms for verbs, nouns, pronouns, adjectives etc. before you get around to explaining how any of them are actually used. I'd generally rather have the verbal paradigms followed immediately by...

I'm going to share a piece of data I overheard a while ago and have been (strictly metaphorically) shouting from the rooftops ever since. [...] And with the verb "nut" in the sense of "ejaculate" being a fairly new zero-derivation (as far as I know), it goes to show that this an...

[h ~ ç ~ ɸ] are arguably more acoustically similar than they are articulatorily similar. I think the sound changes that led to this split (and similar changes in other languages, which are quite frequent) happened for acoustic reasons.

"Golden Age" Viksen of a couple of hundred years ago had some extremely strong prescriptivist trends, affecting syntax in particular. For one thing, "simple" or "naturalistic" styles were preferred over the elaborate constructions of previous centuries, but at the same ...