Zompist Bboard Again

Yeah, it's not actually a great test with foodstuff nouns, because of how easily we swap between mass and count uses.

Which sounds more natural, "That was too much crab rangoon," or "That was too many..."?

If someone asks you to pass the crab rangoon, are they asking you to pass one crab rangoon, or are they not specifying how much/many they want?

Does anyone know of a case where the subject of an embedded clause is marked as a possessor using morphology (or whatever) specific to inalienable possession?

In English, if distance is being measured in travel time, directions will be cardinal. "It's four hours that way" (pointing). I'm actually failing to come up with a direction expression that works with "It's four miles _____" but not with "It's four hours _____." (But ...

You seem unsure of what to call your eternal tense. Maybe it's like what's sometimes called the gnomic aspect, used in same languages to state (purported) timeless truths? (Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnomic_aspect.)

Ah, I should've been clearer---when he said "Chinese" he was referring to Cantonese (this was in Hong Kong). It was the manager (owner? not really sure) of a shop, he described one of the salespeople as able to speak Chinese, Mandarin, and English.

Yeah, you can do the same in Mandarin; "讀" tends to refer specifically to reading aloud. Earlier this week heard someone (primarily a Cantonese-speaker, but speaking English) distinguish between Chinese and Mandarin. Now curious how common that is (speaking here as someone who can get a bi...

If I'm understanding right, pre-Proto-Yonut was (morphologically speaking) purely ergative, but then there were two changes. First, transitive clauses with 1p and 2p pronoun subjects were replaced with intransitive clauses, with the semantic object demoted to an oblique case. Second, transitive clau...

Yeah.

Hmm, thinking about it more, and maybe it's not so odd after all. "Play" is ergative, in the sense that you can say both "music is playing" and "so-and-so is playing music" (with the subject of the intransitive having the same semantic role as the object of the transiti...

English has "put on" for the second case but not the first.

Isn't it a bit odd to have a word that covers both cases the way "play" does? (Maybe we get it because recorded media are relatively new.)

Chapter Two of Joan Bybee's Morphology: A Study of the Relation Between Meaning and Form has a lot on this, if you want some detail and can get your hands on it.

Here's a slightly longer discussion of the Zoque case, that treats it as (just) palatalisation rather than metathesis: https://books.google.com.hk/books?id=3_ ... lpg=PA1950.

Ah, okay. Anyway the wīc > wich case, and the Bantu case that missals remembers, should work.

Wouldn't that be the "e" triggering palatalisation to its left?

I took a quick look at this: http://linguistics.berkeley.edu/~merrill/files/Merrill_prospectus_consonant_mutation.pdf. The only mention it makes of palatalisation is in Chaha (Semitic, Ethiopia), where it affects words from the right but you can get cases like "k’am (eat)" vs "kʲ’am (...

Or you could just make "it" the object of the serial verb "kick fall": "I kick falled it." Seems to me it works. (Maybe it helps that the "it" is the patient of both verbs.) I recently saw a case (pretty sure somewhere in Shopen, Language Typology and Syntacti...

I can't help you with Old Japanese, but "xianli" (or "xiānlí") is correct for "仙狸" in Mandarin.