Zompist Bboard Again

These looks like cases where it might be helpful to distinguish semantic from syntactic subjects. In English, infinitives often have semantic subjects. Like "I" is the semantic subject of "shoot" in "I want to shoot the rabbit": to understand that, you know that it's ab...

No, sorry, it's a discussion specifically about palatalisation.

I've just noticed that Hall, The Phonology of Coronals, 77, calls x → ʃ / _i, e common, fwiw.

Great, thanks!

I finished my bit. I gather I wasn't supposed to send the results directly to zompist?

Omigod, the Old Chinese is going to be difficult enough. Also, please don't write in seal script. Fortunately seal script would be beyond me! I don't even know enough about the reconstructed phonology to give it to you that way. You're basically going to get a text as if redacted in the Han dynasty...

If we're allowed to recommend dictionaries to each other: akam chinjir, you might find tureng.com useful if it isn't too late and you didn't already know about it. I use it a lot for Turkish. Thanks Vijay! I did look at it a bit. Now though I'm at the point where I've got to figure out how to say a...

Currently working on Turkish → Classical Chinese. Er, my Turkish has seen better days. (That's supposed to be part of the fun, right?) I actually have a rules question. While part of me likes the idea of following Warring States punctuation and whitespace conventions (that is, a single big block of ...

Moose-tache wrote: ↑Fri Sep 13, 2019 6:14 am I'll make sure there are plenty of adverbs.

Going back and forth amongst Germanic adverbs and Cantonese/classical Chinese ideophones could lead to some fun.

All I can add to this is that it's a curious feature of the modern Celtic languages that verbs only take 3P agreement with pronominal subjects. Plural NPs take singular agreement, e.g.: It looks to me as if in the examples you give, it's an alternation between, first, a full NP subject and no subje...

Do you know any sound change applier that can handle suprasegmental phonology? (My language is tonal, and vowel dropping don't just make the tone disappear) More or less as Sal said, I think you're probably going to have to fake it. Of the ones I've tried, Phonix probably comes closest. With it, I ...

I should be able to translate from Mandarin, Cantonese, classical Chinese, French, and Turkish, though the results might vary wildly with domain.

It might be fun to try translating into classical Chinese. In a pinch I could probably also come up with some Mandarin that's not complete nonsense.

Nortaneous wrote: ↑Sat Sep 07, 2019 9:12 am I've seen this get linked around.

Thank you! That looks very useful.

It appears that it's less common than I thought. Either that or I'm lousy at getting information out of PHOIBLE. I haven't checked much, and the only one I've found that's a perfect match (/ts dz/ and no other affricates) is Chamorro. Malagasy has those two plus prenasalised variants, but no affrica...

That's common.

I believe this sort of thing is attested in quite a few languages, and that it can be a significant issue in making syntactic sense of agreement---since it seems to imply that agreement relationships can be determined by linear order rather than structure. (Which is partly to say that it's only a mi...

Antipassives aren't limited to languages with ergative morphosyntax, though. (They might be more obvious given that the subject's case will likely change in an antipassive.) The WALS chapter lists 17 languages, one of them Chamorro, as having antipassives without ergative morphology.

Yes, that happens. WALS has 12 listed (as opposed to 19 that have antipassives without passives), you look here ; presumably those aren't all errors. I'd expect the active/passive/antipassive distinction to be made overt somehow, otherwise I doubt they'd be counted as distinct voice. (There are case...

pork wrote: ↑Sun Sep 01, 2019 5:35 am Most of the contents above are taken from https://io9.gizmodo.com/7-deadly-sins-o ... -998817537

An understatement, imo.

bradrn wrote: ↑Sat Aug 31, 2019 7:39 pm Unfortunately, those books aren’t freely available online, but if you can get access to them they may be worth a read. (Disclaimer: I never actually ended up reading them.)

Both are on libgen, so free-as-in-beer, at least, for people who are okay with getting books that way.