Zompist Bboard Again

Are there any intransitive stative verbs that aren't adjectives? This is a great question I hadn't noticed. Are there any? Now I'm wondering about intransitive uses of zhù 住 live, be fixed in place : 我住在台北 I live in Taipei , and so on. It might make sense to distinguish words that are taking argume...

China has quite a long history of religious movements being or supporting rebellions. The ongoing persecution of Falungong often gets thought of in this context, for example, I think. And I guess the Taiping Rebellion is still relevant to attitudes towards Christianity (which I suppose is what's mos...

I think it's pretty unusual to have valency-adjusting things (voice, causative, applicative) outside of TAM, though I don't know that it's unheard of. Some with incorporation. (A lot of the time morpheme order corresponds to the semantics in an intuitive way. Like, for V+CAUS+PAST you get in the pas...

I recommend this Haspelmath paper on "Escaping ethnocentricism in the study of word-class universals" https://www.academia.edu/2244681/Escaping_ethnocentrism_in_the_study_of_word-class_universals An alternative link for the Haspelmath paper , for anyone who doesn't want to deal with acade...

What is the difference between anticausative and passive? I think generally with a passive you've still got an implication that there's an agent of some sort, whereas you lose that with an anticausative; like the difference between "the house was burned down" and "the house burned do...

*My /r/ is labiodental instead (except in /tr/ and /dr/ clusters). It does however often have secondary sulcality and sometimes other subtler tongue-shaping stuff to enhance the rhoticity. How are you thinking of rhoticity here? (One of my reasons for being interested in this general topic I've got...

I don't have much useful advice for most of that, though you should be able to ameliorate the internet situation if you make sure you have access to a good VPN. I think for me the most daunting particular thing would be looking for a place to live. Do you know people who live there or who've lived t...

I doubt Beijing is more dangerous than New Jersey

Why are the feelings contradictory?

I'll have a go. Dependent origination we declare to be emptiness. It is a dependent concept; just that is the middle path. There being no dharma whatsoever that is not dependently originated, it follows that there is also no dharma whatsoever that is non-empty. For us, "non-empty" means no...

I read (in WALS article?) the reason for that is because language with SVO order can parse the sentence easier. In language with neither head marking or dependent marking, it's pretty difficult to parse whether "man stone break" means "A man breaks stone" or "A man stone br...

for me the postalveolar constriction is usually laminal rather than apical, at least in initial position That makes it sound awfully close to j . Taking this as a reference, [j] is produced by constriction between the forward part of the tongue body and the hard palate, while laminal [ɹ] is produce...

Thanks for those! Yeah, I did end up concluding that some of the best examples had ɹ as an allophone of /ɾ/ or /r/. I got a bit frustrated trying to follow up on the Ladefoged and Maddieson examples, though maybe those are good too. (Latest frustration: they say Murinhpatha has three rhotics, one of...

From a design perspective, the main differences between agglutinative and analytic languages could be as simple as that in an agglutinative language, the functional morphemes associated with (e.g.) the verb have a fairly strict order and usually cannot be interrupted by arguments or adjuncts; you om...

But why are you sceptical about their existence? Not every English speaker uses a bunched r. For my part, I don't know enough to justify scepticism, but recently I've come across a bunch of cases where something that's described as an apical coronal approximant ends up having other stuff going on a...

Nortaneous wrote: ↑Mon Oct 28, 2019 8:04 am Otherwise why not write it as ɻ? But it probably doesn't matter - do either of them exist?

Yeah, I'm still wondering. There are some cases where it's given as an allophone of /ɾ/ where it seems plausible, maybe.

Nortaneous wrote: ↑Sun Oct 27, 2019 3:56 pm True [ɹ] (i.e. a laminal alveolar approximant) is irrelevant if not fake

Why would true [ɹ] have to be specifically laminal?

Pabappa wrote: ↑Wed Oct 23, 2019 9:23 am The term "becausative" appears in a grammar of Inuktitut, used for constructions like "I went to the store for milk" and "I was screaming because i lost my toe".

Inspired by Aristotle's four becauses?

Raphael wrote: ↑Tue Oct 22, 2019 1:59 pm What was the stuff erasers were made of called before it came to be called rubber, then?

caoutchouc (according to my quick and easy googling, anyway)

The little bit of checking I did on that suggests the history goes something like 'rubber', any of a number of tools for rubbing → 'rubber', eraser → 'rubber', the stuff erasers were made of → 'rubbers', rubber boots → 'rubbers', condoms I hope I understood the last step right, and it's true! (Has a...

EDIT: I actually have yet another question now: how does a toneless syllable differ from a toneful syllable with mid tone? I can't speak for the particular language, but in general, a syllable with a mid-tone will have a particular pitch target, where's one with no tone will get whatever pitch 'fit...