Zompist Bboard Again

Probably humanity's biggest achievement of the time though was the exploration of a place known as the Dodecaverse -- a 12-dimensional region of closed spaces and pocket universes. Of particular interest were spaces that had both parabolic/flat geometry and self-illumination since they'd be able to...

Oh, WTH, I'll do Irish, since it's undergone less levelling in this regard than Scottish Gaelic. stem class nominative singular nominative plural gloss ā-stems beann beanna 'horn' o-stems mac mic 'son' i-stems flaith flatha 'prince' u-stems cath cathanna 'battle' n-stems altra altraí 'foster father...

[In fact, boundedness I would say is the number one characteristic of perfective. Bounded and unbounded might almost be better terms than perfective and imperfective. Perfective/bounded means the event in question is conceptualized as having a beginning, middle and end – i.e. bounded in time, a who...

Agree that the complexity of human thought puts an important lower bound on how complex language can be. I don't think it imposes an upper bound, though. But why be loads more complicated than necessary? I mean there's room for manoeuvre so expecting perfect counterbalancing is silly, but at some p...

Am I missing something? Because, coming to this late, it occurs to me that all languages have the same problem which is how to express the complexity of the thoughts that we as humans have. Since the complexity of the thoughts that need putting into speech are not really simpler if you're Russian, B...

I hope the "Boiling Sea" is not literal. Otherwise I'm not going there for my post-lockdown holiday. If I had to come up with something better, I'd say that the universe behaves kind of like a gigantic cellular automata with a kind of underlying 'data storage'. Both planets have a lot in c...

Could I say "Vardelm filnjåd lah chæmayd"?

to mean Vardelm walks to the park, or indeed just add Vardelm to the start of all these sentences - or do I need an extra particle (æq I assume)? As it stands these sentences are not merely intransitive they're also impersonal

Yes, Päri is an example of this. (I thought I was pretty clear that it was an example: ‘Päri has a split between imperative and non-imperative clauses’. But maybe I should make this clearer by mentioning Päri when I first introduce the split.) But note that Päri has a marked nominative system, so t...

For instance, one somewhat common modal split is a situation where the imperative gets accusative marking, but non-imperative moods get ergative marking. This split has a clear explanation: the imperative emphasises the fact that S or A is in control of the activity (and thus can be ordered to perf...

Ploughing through this - up to chapter 4 on the noun phrase, but it does worry me that you have 139 pages and claim it's not finished! I felt quite pleased with myself at 20 or so pages for Vedreki and Cheyadeneen

I should add that "everything should be clear from the verbal form" is not what a "polysynthetic" language is. All a "polysynthetic" language is is a language with a lot of synthesis. There's a number of traits that tend to cluster together in those cases, including po...

Not sure I follow. There's quite a lot of syncretism here eg the 1st person sing pres of rahé turns out to be the same as the 2nd person sing of the past, and the 2nd person sing pres is the same as the 2nd person future and 3rd person future masculine. Normally I would say "So what? Just add t...

So what causes the stem alternation in the second conjugation? why ella bebbe, but noi bevemo? It's not the following -e causing it or we would have ella beve.

I like this, but God it looks a nightmare to learn as a foreign language, unless you know the sound changes from Latin

That was what was confusing me - I do think of voice as valency changing. If therefore you delete the subject and promote the object to subject-hood, it's the passive - not the middle. If you don't, it's the active - not the middle. Affectedness does make sense and although I'd noted the extensive s...

Does anyone know of a good description anywhere of the middle voice? I know there is one in Ancient Greek, and doubtless in other languages too but can't get my head round the idea. Not sure how you can have something that is mid-way between passive and active.

I think you’re misunderstanding how active-stative systems work. Generally, active-stative systems use verbal agreement affixes rather than case markers (as both akam chinjir and I mentioned). There are two sets of affixes: one set is used for both A and S, while the other is used for both O and S ...

So split ergativity gives me a headache. Let me explain why. Apologies if this is really basic, but I genuinely struggle a bit here. Hypothetical language - Ergativish. Ergativish is a split ergative language with an animacy hierarchy and let's assume that the split is between humans and other anima...

Preferences, preferences... I do like noun case systems and agreement. It makes things nice and compact. One day I am going to do a mammoth case system with a bunch of locative cases as well, as in Finnish or Hungarian. With luck I can get rid of prepositions altogether

I think evmdbm wasn't asking about the the featural side of Moya and Omyatloko, but rather was asking about how easily the vowel marks are distinguished in Moya (regardless of whether these are featural or not). Yes, so the Omlatyoko vowels do seem easy (or easier) to distinguish from each other as...

So a return to the scratchpad that you probably thought was done... Well world-building is never really done, is it? I have been thinking about the global economy and how the Vedreki and Cheyadeneen fit in with that. This has some linguistic relevance as I am imagining that much commercial, economic...