Zompist Bboard Again

Googling nonconfigurational serial verb gets some hits, for example some involving an Australian language named Wambaya. It's an interesting case, because (from just glancing at the abstract to one paper) it's serial verbs aren't in iconic order, though it's supposed to be a very robust generalisati...

Cantonese has some sentence-final particles that are maybe a bit surprising, coming from English (or Mandarin!). I'm thinking especially of focus particles jē 啫 only and tìm 添 also ; sìn 先 first, beforehand maybe also counts. (A relevant article I turned up when trying to find the character for jē :...

Yeah, something like that. Prenasalised gb, anyway, attested in a handful of languages. I guess another possibility is ^ŋ͡mg͡b.

I was assuming ŋmgb. (I don't know how to put a tie-bar over four graphs.)

"Who goes there anymore?" sounds completely normal to me. It's also fine in conditionals, I think: "If anyone still goes there anymore, I'll be surprised." Maybe also in the other sorts of context that tend to license any indefinites, like in the scope of "without", or...

I think for tzatziki I have [t͡sʰəˈd͡zi.ki].

Space60 wrote: ↑Sun Jul 21, 2019 8:22 am It is a bad idea I would say for parents to use those pronunciations when speaking to their babies as it makes it take longer for them learn the correct pronunciation.

I was under the impression that this sort of idea had been studied and found not to be true.

Could it be that in both cases you've got a merger of 1s and 2s pronouns? Offhand that seems more likely than either one turning into the other (but I don't know anything about the particular case).

"In Banawá, consonant-initial words have a trochaic pattern, and vowel-initial words have an iambic pattern." (B. Hyde, Extrametricality and Non‐Finality; or via [ahem]sci-hub[/ahem]).

I don't know about transitivity marking in particular. Would it make sense to check whether languages with object agreement show agreement with clausal complements, or languages with ergative case-marking treat complement clauses as genuine objects? (A little googling suggests you'll find both patte...

The term possessed is also used for describing Nahuatl noun. Although, it's not considered a case marking. However, given the other form is named absolutive, it's just waiting a unwitting person to call it "case". And in fact, I thought that as Nahuatl case until I read further. Is there ...

But it's important to note that deixis is a very rich and complex area, which most conlangers completely ignore, presumably because Indo-European almost completely ignores it. Even confining ourselves to spatial deixis, there are many systems far richer than that of English. Where English has "...

It also allows writing intermediate forms to file. (I've mostly been playing with Phonix, and that's a feature I wish it had.)

Nortaneous wrote: ↑Fri Jul 12, 2019 11:11 pm

akam chinjir wrote: Is it plausible for tj to be stable for (say) 100 years? 200? (I ultimately want it to turn into c, but would prefer for that not to happen right away. I'm assuming that if it became tʃ first, which would otherwise be fine, it would be very unlikely to end up as c.)

Icelandic

Ah, thanks.

Is it plausible for tj to be stable for (say) 100 years? 200? (I ultimately want it to turn into c, but would prefer for that not to happen right away. I'm assuming that if it became tʃ first, which would otherwise be fine, it would be very unlikely to end up as c.)

Looking good! A minor thing: people don't normally describe it as split ergativity when a language has erg/abs case-marking but subject (nominative) agreement. Why do you call that verb form adverbial? Syntactically, so far, it looks nonfinite (no TAM or agreement) and it occurs as the complement to...

That's a direct gloss, but the meaning is just "under Heaven". Locatives in Old Chinese are postpositions. It's very often used as a noun, though, and "everyone/everywhere under the sky" isn't a bad approximation. Yeah, sorry, I was unclear— "under Heaven" is a straigh...

My main movie-related tiānxià 天下 memory is from watching Zhang Yimou's Hero in Hong Kong, soon after its release (early 2003?). I have a memory---anyway it seems to be a memory---of a gasp running through the theatre at the key moment when Broken Sword writes those words. A scary moment, a bit echoe...

Seems reasonable. Maybe more like the construct state in Semitic languages, though the colloquial version is at least on the way to possessor agreement. (Could lasson occur with an overt indepentent pronoun? Like Turkish ben-im ev-im 1s-GEN house-1s.POSS 'my house' ( evim by itself would also work).)

I have a quick question which I don't think warrants a new thread: I'm afraid that sort of thing often is just called possessive marking or somesuch. I'm not sure it's ever considered a sort of case: it's a form of head marking, and case is dependent marking. In fact most often what you see is agre...