Zompist Bboard Again

One thing the Wikipedia page doesn't mention is that in the article it's based on, Haspelmath distinguishes particle comparatives from ones based on locatives---so "bigger from X" wouldn't count as a particle comparative, for example. Seems a bit dubious to me, to be honest. (The article's...

Or a milder version, where there’s like 50 categories on the animacy hierarchy and most of the time agenthood can be presumed Maybe the system could interact with discourse prominence? Like, if the two arguments are in the same animacy class, the one that's more discourse-prominent gets treated as ...

For more of an answer than you could possible want, you could look at Geoffrey Pullum's Fear and Loathing of the English Passive . There are two main sorts of complaint against the passive, I think: that people often use it to avoid having to attribute responsibility, and that English passives (most...

Interesting, thanks!

Tangential and insignificant question: what are you thinking of as the humble proximal demonstrative in classical Chinese? (寡人?) The writing system looks really interesting to me. The only real-world logographic (or whatever) system I know is the Chinese one, which no doubt limits my perspective. Th...

Thanks for the comment! It's definitely part of my plan for this language to keep the phonology simple so I can concentrate on syntax and such. (I can get bogged down in phonology and morphophonology, which I seem to love but not be very good at.) In general I want longish words so that they can col...

ki wañimuki=wati ahwaicu a janaki papai=wati DET opinion=DIST lie.down LOC person many=DEIC Many people think that. hau miwa ijau wañi aja na kasumuki 1s NEG sit(IPFV) say out( PFV ) DS correct ( I'm not saying it's correct. ) wañimuki opinion is from wañi think, say and (the reduced form of) pumuk...

linguistcat wrote: ↑Thu Oct 04, 2018 7:23 pm In my cat lang based on (Old) Japanese, I decided to drop a lot of /a/s. Why? I wanted to keep /i/ and /u/ as much as possible because cat sounds.

That sounds like a good reason though.

Subject control; "mwi" This post is about mwi , a complementiser used with nonfinite subordinate clauses in same-subject constructions (I gloss it with SS for same subject ). Put another way, it's about subject control. To fix ideas, I'll start with an English sentence: Hjaci decided to g...

Perhaps, but it feels intuitively weird to treat "the man pushes the broom" and the "water erodes the riverbed" as fundamentally different constructions. They are both actions in which one entity acts on another and changes or moves it somehow. The ease with which English expres...

why do some native american languages with /ts/ spell it with a goddamn cent sign instead of something sensible like <c>? I suspect it's because their orthographies were not developed by linguists, or if they were, they were developed sufficiently long ago that modern conventions didn't exist. The ...

/ʒ/ = ? /dʒ/ = j /tʃ/ = ch /ʃ/ = sh If you've got <sh> for /ʃ/, then <zh> for /ʒ/ makes sense. /x/ = ? <x> isn't terrible; <kh> is also traditional. /ts/ = ? am i remembering correctly that the romanization of the /ts/ sound from chineese is often represented as zh?<br/> /dz/ = ? Pinyin <c> is /tsʰ...

I do something similar in my conlangs (all of them so far). But it may not solve the problem of transitive verbs where both arguments are inanimate. How would languages of this type express a sentence like "the electron absorbed the photon"? Yes, that is precisely the problem I am facing ...

Someone at a bar I used to go to would play Take Five on the erhu.

I spent years of my life not sure if it was supposed to be "laptop" or "labtop."

Mandarin
性別友善
xìngbié yǒushàn
"gender-friendly" (≈ unisex, I guess; on the door to some public toilets)

bbbourq wrote: ↑Mon Oct 01, 2018 10:56 pm Next: anomaly

Akiatu:
ɲihjaisa: anomaly, eclipse
ɲihjaisa ahwita: solar eclipse (with ahwita, tall, high, honoured)
ɲihjaisa siwi: shooting star (with siwi, small, young, subtle)

Next: to give sacrifices in honour of

My wishlist for an Ultimate SCA (naturally I'm in the process of rolling my own) makes some non-trivial demands of the rule parser, especially involving the use of features (including syllable- and word-level features, and features on the right hand side of a rule) and conditions (ones that go beyon...

I seem to be making significant decisions about a conworld based on what I come up with for example sentences, in the Akiatu thread and offline. (Need a ditransitive? Hmm, what nouns do I have? ...And suddenly it's a significant part of the Itamu tradition that she got her spear from her antagonist ...

That's awesome.

I think my favourite alt-food thing is Norman Spinrad's La Cuisine Humaine (here).