Zompist Bboard Again

I think it's a generalisation of 'I could have done that', which doesn't really make a lot of sense when one analyses it. This particular construction does make sense to me. You just need to notice that English modals don’t really have past tense forms — so if you want to place a modal in the past,...

Yu kip way Ingles sentms. You omitted the English sentence. At leuthes oʒsa atsʒen harthle bedruiccet, cens thasʒen aull ret? It also sounds rather depressing, are you feeling okay? :? Stili anwase we ni towraŋwgiŋ. (Nortaneous sof Hallow XIII ner rŋay ntaŋwarwoŋsesi.) [stiˈli.an.wa.se.we.ni tow.ra...

"If I had had that cake, it wouldn't've gone mouldy" definitely works for me. This is just standard English, surely? So does "If I had've known, I wouldn't've eaten the cake" (only informally though). Combining those to make 4 only makes it a bit weirder. Maybe the key then is t...

I think it's a generalisation of 'I could have done that', which doesn't really make a lot of sense when one analyses it. This particular construction does make sense to me. You just need to notice that English modals don’t really have past tense forms — so if you want to place a modal in the past,...

But, on the other hand, the presence of -n’t seems to be key here: 3. ?? If I had not have had that cake, it would’ve gone mouldy. 4. * If I had have had that cake, it would’ve gone mouldy. Honestly 4 kinda works for me. Interesting… for me it’s completely ungrammatical, no uncertainty about it.

The idea is that given the situation, there's no place for anything but no holds barred condemnation of Israel and that nothing else will do in stopping Israel from doing what it's doing in Gaza, through pressure from world governments or pressure from world opinion or both. I could go on at some l...

Ares Land wrote: ↑Wed May 15, 2024 3:47 am I didn't really see your point or Torco's and it's now much clearer.

Could you perhaps explain it to me, then? I still don’t really see how any of what they’re saying makes much sense.

Was this by any chance inspired by the conversation with Ahzoh over on the Conlang Random Thread?

Yeah, so its single function is ‘object marking’. And similarly the single function of your nominative and ergative cases are ‘subject marking’. It just so happens that an intransitive argument can align as either ‘subject’ or ‘object’, depending on animacy. That is, what you have here is a split-i...

Here’s a really interesting English sentence I was presented with recently: 1. If I hadn’t’ve had that cake, it would’ve gone mouldy. Neat find, and your initial syntactic analysis is good work. Not actually my find — it was someone else on Discord who presented me with it. Most of the syntactic an...

This seems to actually be an area where my own dialect is syntactically distinct from Standard English, as when approximating Standard English I would never say anything resembling either version of mine, but rather would say: I would have never gotten my system cryptolocked if I had not downloaded...

Other fun in this sort of department are things like: I'd've never've gotten my box cryptolocked if I hadn't've downloaded that "antivirus" program from that site. To me, this feels almost like aspectual agreement! It doesn’t work in my dialect, though: it feels very much like a feature o...

As far as syntax goes, I remember reading that some linguists have proposed that the stigmatized use of "of" spellings in contexts like "You shouldn't of had that cake" represents an actual reinterpretation of the word, where it no longer functions synchronically as a reduced pr...

What? VSO is equally as head-initial as VOS, just that the object in VSO is decoupled from the verb. You are correct here. VSO and VOS are equally ‘head-initial’. I disagree, though I may well be in disagreement with current linguistic theory. In my opinion, verb + object = predicate, and a predica...

Here’s a really interesting English sentence I was presented with recently: 1. If I hadn’t’ve had that cake, it would’ve gone mouldy. This flagrantly disobeys the English prohibition on modal stacking… but yet, it still seems acceptable to me (at least colloquially). Others seem to agree that it’s a...

When Lithuanians sort lists in Lithuanian alphabetically, do they use the same order as dictionaries? I ask because I've seen evidence that some at least consider 'e' and 'ė' as as different as 's' and 'š' (definitely different letters when the brain is engaged), while happily disregarding ogoneks ...

- Again, thanks to Janko, Proto-Macro-Jädewan : *¢órl ('(single) thing') *¢óst ( lit. 'two * ¢órl s') *erka̋ða̋ *êyor *ław *ḱälḱa̋ *¢órli¢óst *¢ósti¢óst *erka̋ða̋y¢óst *êyori¢óst Holy cent-signs batman! Strictly speaking, the correct Unicode character for the letter is ⟨ȼ⟩, with ⟨¢⟩ being reserved ...

The solution to the Middle East conflict will not be found on Threads, or TikTok, or in the streets of any city that isn’t within a 2-hour car ride from downtown Jerusalem. street protests and popular disapproval of the whole thing were important in the dissolution of the south african apartheid re...

What’s more confusing is giving two names to what is essentially a single case with a single function. But it doesn't have a single function. In animate nouns, it marks only an object of a transitive, not a subject of a transitive or instransitive. In inanimate nouns, it marks both the object of a ...

The verb is the head of the phrase, not the subject. So, VSO or VOS word order. Yes, but the object is closer to the verb than the subject, so VOS makes it more head-initial than VSO. "Eating a peach" vs. "(Eating a peach) by me" (where "by" is the ergative). What? VSO...