Zompist Bboard Again

I finished developing glyphs for family terminology and a novel way to render various relatives. Nice! For each of the family terms, the glyphs actually seem to be functioning both as ideographs and as syllables. E.g., taya husband = ta + ya , but also = tlaka male + ntaya spouse . Is the idea that...

Secondary predicates To make this whole thread a little easier to navigate, I've put a table of contents in the first post, as well as a link---which I'll continue to update---to the most recent main post. In the last couple of posts I talked about nonfinite clausal complements. Using mwi for same ...

術名也。
It's a technical term

Kwa̰ Mɨɨrts ---finally came up with a big inventory I like. p t ts tɬ k kʷ pʰ tʰ tsʰ tɬʰ kʰ kʷʰ p' t' ts' tɬ' k' kʷ' ʔ f s ɬ xʷ m n ɲ ŋʷ mˀ nˀ ɲˀ ŋʷˀ r l ɫʷ j w ȷ̃ w̃ i ɨ u e ə o a Phonemic /p'/ is phonetic [ɓ] /xʷ/, /ŋʷ/, and /ŋʷˀ/ (but not /ɫʷ/) have unrounded allophones, and maybe could go in th...

(I wish I could remember the details or the source, but somewhere Asimov has a relevant discussion of "Do not go gentle into that good night"---which, if you take "gentle" as a manner adverb, seems to be wishing someone an unpleasant death.)

On preview: akamchinjir may be on to something, but I'm not convinced these simply modify the subject. E.g. Sal may be tall, German, and rich, but you can't say *Sal walked to the door tall/German/rich. At the least the modifier has to be relevant to the action. Yeah, to make the examples work you ...

Does anyone have a good syntactic test for determining whether "bright" is an adjective or an adverb in "it shines bright"? I can find arguments in favour of both treating "shine" as a copular verb and "bright" as a bare-form adverb. Not a direct answer (no s...

That's gorgeous. About speakers of mutually unintelligible variants writing more or less the same---very conservative spelling is something, but I wouldn't have thought it'd get you all the way. Example: to bring it about that Chinese is written more or less the same by speakers of different Chinese...

That's not how antipassives work, since they still decrease valence. It could work, I think. Start with something like this: Sal[NOM] was-eating[ACTIVE] the-rice[ACC] by-Sal[INST] was-eaten[PASSIVE] the-rice[NOM] Reinterpret NOM → ABS, INST → ERG, ACC → OBL, ACTIVE → ANTIPASSIVE, PASSIVE → ACTIVE: ...

How does nounlike adjective works? Probably because of my native language, I associate adjective as verb. As I want to make Rkou grammatically strange, I decide to make adjective nounlike. (In contrast of Asent'o that adjective is conjugated for person, number, aspect, and mood). However, Rkou's de...

/m n ɲ ŋ/ <m n nj ng> /p ʰp b t ʰt d c ʰc ɟ k ʰk g ʔ/ <p hp b t ht d c hc gj k hk g ʔ> /f v s z ʂ ʐ ʃ ʒ ɕ ʑ x ɣ h ɦ/ <f v s z r rz sh zh sj zj x xz h hz> /l j w/ <l j w> /i y ɨ u e ɤ o æ a/ <i ü ï u e ë o ä a> hC is preaspirated C. Cj is a palatal. Cz is a voiced fricative. The umlaut indicates chan...

What do you call this relativization strategy in my Asent'o language. Yeah, relative pronouns: if you've got postpositions moving with the pronoun to the head of the clause, that's the same as case-marking as far as relativisation strategies go. (WH-movement, pied-piping included, is what's suppose...

And a very quick google tells me that Hindi gets its ergativity from passives. (I wonder if that pattern---passives giving rise to ergativity---seems odder than it really is to some of us who've been shaped by Strunk&Whitey rhetorical traditions.)

Might be worth being explicit what you mean by a "to be" sentence, since languages vary a lot in the uses to which they put their copulas.

Anyone have an idea if there are comparable dicta in other rhetorical traditions? (I seem to recall an awful lot of passives from my dalliance with Sanskrit.) Favourite somewhat related example, though middly rather than passive: a guide at the National Palace Museum in Taipei mentioning the time (b...

I don't think it ever occurred to me that people from Phoenix might be called Phoenicians. (I've got schwa in the first syllables of both "Phonecian" and "phonetics.")

Other nonfinite complements; "na" In the last big post I talked about sentences like this one: itamu₁ kamaisu mwi ____₁ pahupahu papa Itamu begin SS be.angry REDUP(INC) Itamu was beginning to get angry Here, the semantic subject of the subordinate clause shows up (only) as the syntactic s...

I thought of an interesting case. In Mandarin, to avoid a comparative sense you'll often add hén 很, which is conventionally but not really accurately translated as "very." (You do the same thing in Cantonese but with hó 好.) So it can seem that the basic meaning is comparative, while the no...

Not aiming for it to seem Austronesian, though. (Don't know enough about Austronesian languages even to try it. Seems like an unreasonably broad target, anyway.) On particulars, I decide for /ɲ/ over /ŋ/ (and didn't want both). Comparatives will be parasitic on motion/distribution constructions; loc...