Zompist Bboard Again

Because this isn't how morphosyntactic alignment is determined? Hmmm... I do see now that English doesn't show ergative-like behaviour in coordinated verb phrases. * i I burned the book and turned to ashes /i doesn't work if you want to say the book turned to ashes. Same if I use two labile verbs: ...

Richard W wrote: ↑Wed Jan 01, 2020 4:10 am What springs to my mind is the Sanskrit and Pali iti 'thus', which is used to mark quotations.

That's where I went, too.

Huh, I've just been reading grammars of Skou languages. (I really like the I'saka one by Donohue and San Roque.)

Yes, I can't imagine recipients being ever "pseudo" incorporated really, because of typical animacy and topicality patterns. Ah, I was actually thinking that if applied objects can be pseudo-incorporated, you should be able to get at least beneficiaries. Maybe a sufficiently institutional...

I like it! I just refereshed my memory a bit by scanning a few pages of Clemens, Prosodic Noun Incorporation (the most recent thing I read about this stuff). One thing it mentions is the in Niuean, it's not just themes that can be pseudo-incorporated (p.5)---applied and instrumental objects can too,...

Vijay wrote: ↑Sun Dec 22, 2019 11:36 am Why, are you in Taiwan?

Yeah, Taipei.

That's awesome!

Maybe there'll be a ZBB Taiwan meetup someday after all

My (very shallow) understanding of the literature on Spanish agrees with Ser, that the word order variation in question doesn't result from topicalisation or focus movement or anything like that. (To use the lingo, it's not A-bar movement.) There at least used to be a view that in some ("polysy...

How do you pronounce you in "I love you", "He gives you a present", etc? Is it informal to reduce it? Also, Is pronoun reduced after a preposition in "I'm doing this for you" or "I'm sleeping with her"? Reducing "you" from [ju] to [jə] is pretty mar...

Thank you!

Cantonese has a sentence-final particle jē (I think 啫) only.

Ser, what are you counting as your best English>Mandarin dictionary?

Edit: For that matter, Mandarin has sentence-final éryǐ 而已 only, and that's all.

I guess I now feel what my classmates in a linguistics class once felt when we were asked about where the primary stress was in "conversation", and about 60% or 70% of the class chose the "con-" option. The professor stared back at us seriously, and said, "no, it's on - a t...

(So much for magic.) A while back dewrad posted a 48-hour speedlang challenge, and I sketched a language I called Bááru. (It had a short-lived thread here, 48 Hours of Bááru .) There were some things I liked about it, but I ended up not taking it anywhere, and some of the things I liked about it hav...

To me at least, people are incredulous, not things. So, something like "the plan was incredulous" wouldn't make sense to you? It's fairly obvious what it's meant to mean, but it's not how I'm used to the word being used, no. I'm not sure I'd know what that's supposed to mean, out of conte...

Surely the place to learn a positive meaning for "homely" is Tolkien, and the Last Homely House.

They send me a lot of spam too, I think that's just something they do. (Admittedly I've never checked who all those supposed mentions are actually mentions of.)

I guess you've probably made this connection? But in case not, Backspace is ASCII 8. (Not that I know how that would explain your problem.)

Boards with lots of Americans often slow down over American Thanksgiving, I think.

Sorry for the delayed response! A couple of week-long conlang challenges arrived at the same time, and took all my focus. I've juts got a few little questions. In something like ex.21, where you've got a locative noun ( taìli ) as sort of an unselected indirect object, can you also have locative phr...

I've got Wittgenst[ɪ]nian , fwiw. I wouldn't be shocked to discover I also have Einst ɪ nian as well, come to think of it. (But it's Wittgen[ʃ]tein and Ein s tein , for some reason, no doubt because I've been party to more conversations about Wittgenstein where English-speakers sort of nod in the di...