Zompist Bboard Again

clhp'xwlhtlhplhhskwts' (which is a real Nuxalk word from wikipedia) I fear I really need a recording, but even if you can split this monstrosity into syllables, I fail to see how it's physically sayable without vowels. I mean at some point you are surely going to have to at least insert a schwa just...

bradrn wrote: ↑Thu May 12, 2022 7:52 am

evmdbm wrote: ↑Thu May 12, 2022 6:30 am I have finally found an entire book all about the partitive case, so I'm trying to work it into my new conlang.

Sounds interesting. Which one?

S Luraghi and H Tuomas (eds) Partitive cases and Related Categories (De Gruyter Boston 2014)

I reworked the Simbri noun classes, and I finally ended up with a satisfying system: classes.png It's an impressive table, but not sure I understand it. What do the verbal and nominal agreement columns refer to? And how come beer and tax are uncountable? "I drank two beers". "The Kin...

Upon re-reading your post, I see that I managed to misread ‘case-marker’ for ‘affix’, somehow… I thought you were setting case-markers and adpositions up as a binary opposition, as was the case for that Hungarian paper I mentioned.) Is it this one? Afraid system won't let me attach a pdf. http://re...

I'm not sure what the "rules" are in my own head exactly, but I have an urge to add an apostrophe for some plurals. I think it's maybe acronyms or words that usually aren't plural, but even there it's a limited set. An example might be PC's for "personal computers", not "pe...

Obviously he had a work event to attend

I have a moon, but I ignored it... made it just big enough to have tides and then paid no attention in calendars. That was simply because I found a formula - somewhere, can't remember where now - for working out the length of days and years. It turned out there were going to be 352.05 days in the ye...

nly if I were a smartass. As kath says, the prosody indications whether the speaker has failed to complete the thought or not, but even if I heard this sentence with trailing-off intonation, I would assume the next part was another action. I.e. "I put my coat on..." "And then what? W...

I think you've missed the point of positing a class of complex verbs. "to believe in" is not a complex verb because it does not behave like other verbs in the class. You can't insist that a composition must be in the class because the meaning differs from the base verb. That's not how the...

But if that is right, why does sentence 2 mean the same thing and why we can we not just agree on where the separable prefix goes, because it really does look like a preposition in sentence 2. Why would we need to do that? Since put is a transitive verb, there's no ambiguity. For on my coat to be i...

But why is this different for "up"? or "down"
1. I climbed the mountain up
2. I climbed up the mountain

Only sentence 2 is right... but up is directional, like down is...
1. I could climb down the mountain
2. I could climb the mountain down (errm no, I couldn't...)

1, 2, & 3 are all happening at 2. The speaker is speaking at 2 and is looking forward in time to what is about to happen (#3) or or looking back in time to what just happened (#1). The speaker starts "going to fix" at the beginning of the first red arrow (#1) and continues to do so ti...

English has one postposition as well, ago : four years ago . You can easily argue that English has more than one. Words like to and for are so often used at the end of a sentence that we can hardly refer to them as prepositions anymore. So what do we think these things hanging around at the end of ...

Simbri sounds good

[ I hadn't expected that the auxiliaries I used for them would have to be reversed in the passive for instance How does that work? I'm interested in that as well, but might be better in a separate thread so this one isn't derailed from Duriac. I'll tell you what shall I just direct you here https://...

How can you be co-ordinate and subordinate at the same time? Although in fairness I think this might become something of a digression from Duriac grammar I am looking forward to more Duriac and seeing the full grammar when it emerges. Incidentally I too agree that conlanging is discovery; there were...

bradrn wrote: ↑Mon Jan 10, 2022 3:50 pm Ooh, a polysynthetic language with converbs and hierarchical alignment! I’m starting to really like this.

What's a converb? He asked plaintively...

So this could be another of those "A little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing" moments... In Latin there seems to be an -s thing going on with the nominative case. Many of the second declension masculine nouns end in -us in the nominative singular. Some in -er, but mostly -us (servus) ...

Does it count that the Emperor of Cheyaden in my conworld is commander-in-chief of the armed forces and security services. There are elections to a unicameral Parliament with political parties ranging from the right-wing National Party to the more left wing (social democratic really) Front for Democ...

I reduced the number of cases in Vrkhazhian from four to three, thought I don't know what to call the third case, because it functions as a postpositional case, genitive case and secondary object marking case of a ditransitive verb Vrkhazian has six cases here though? Not sure what the relationship...