Zompist Bboard Again

Thanks! I checked on PHOIBLE but couldn't figure out any way of comparing two segments - can you show me how? I'm afraid all I've got is a script I wrote to search through the raw data (which they let you download). I could share it, I suppose, but it's just something I whipped out one day, nothing...

Phoible has 849 languages with ʔ of which 213 lack h. Seems common enough.

Guys, why are you calling the threads for your conlangs "scratchpads"? The original idea behind scratchpads was to have a scratchpad per user to put multiple sketches in, likely of unrelated constructed languages... Ah, I've had the wrong idea myself. (But maybe I could do with one of tho...

Update I made some corrections after the deadline, nothing substantive. In a bunch of places I had ɾ instead of r , and I gave tì=larhe the moon as an example of a phrase with a unique referent---when it's by no means established that the conworld has a single moon. I also corrected a grammatical e...

48 Hours of Bááru This is my go at dewrad's 48 hour challenge---a bit early, but it's time for bed. I'm putting everything in more tags so it's easier to jump around or over. There are definitely inconsistencies and errors, but what can you do? It was fun, and hopefully the results are interesting....

Ah, fond memories of this article, which maybe everyone's seen: Anne Curzan, Slash: Not Just a Punctuation Mark Anymore. It attests some examples with clauses. For example:

I really love that hot dog place on Liberty Street. Slash can we go there tomorrow?

For me it's 9:21am 5/11.

Love doing this sort of thing. I'll adopt my usual rule that I'm not allowed to look anything up, because otherwise I won't get anything done on an actual language.

I think I'd treat them all as singular. (North American.)

In my grammar write-up, I want to distinguish between derivational suffixes that change word class and those that don't, similar to but distinct from the derivational/inflectional dichotomy. So I'm looking for nice little labels. Would transclass(ic) / cisclass(ic) work, if I gave an explanation? O...

Moose-tache wrote: ↑Wed May 01, 2019 7:04 am Akangka was referring to the verbal paradigm, not the pronouns.

Ah, dumb of me.

I read something recently that seemed to imply that you never get gender agreement on verbs (in any person) if adjectives precede nouns. In other words, agreement still mystifies me.

Akangka wrote: ↑Wed May 01, 2019 12:43 am I think your conjugation is unrealistic. Instead of gender marking on every person, you should restrict it to third person.

If a language has gender distinctions in pronouns at all, it's reasonably common for it to have them in first- and second-person. (WALS.)

Thanks! (Though I'm tempted to rebut: and it's very common for languages with prepositions to have a periphrastic applicative voice with a preposition meaning for.---The paper's discussion of this issue on p.7 isn't really satisfying.)

Come to think of it, the only overt applicative I have any hope of using is Mandarin gěi 給, which is also give.

Usually, the applicative is derived from verb meaning to give. Do you have something you can suggest to read about that? It seems plausible, and could certainly explain how one and the same marker can represent both applicatives and causatives, which is supposed to be fairly common, but I mostly re...

Ah, okay. I'm a much more frequent producer of unironic than of ironic bare "nice", but I couldn't say whether that's changed over the past however many years. (Except that fairly recently my primary partner has picked it up from me, which probably has me using it more, too.)

It's not exactly an innovation, but I have the feeling "nice" has come full circle. In my day, it was most often used sarcastically, to the point where I stopped using it to express approval. But now I'm seeing it used more often at face values (e.g. twice by younger friends only yesterda...

I say "aircon." Granted I've lived the bulk of my adult life in East Asia, and had very limited experience with air conditioning earlier in life. (But I feel as if "AC" is the expression I had to learn when I first moved overseas.)

If I'm understanding right, in both of those cases you don't get the object marker on the verb if there's a separate pronominal object. That makes them look more like weak pronouns or clitics than like agreement affixes, imo. (My impression is that it's very common for pronominal clitics to get misi...

"true", "good", "bad", "right", "wrong"---all pretty short, though presumably there are shorter analogues in other languages, and maybe they're not complex in the way you're thinking.

Questions I've got planned several follow-ups to the telicity post, but I still need to do quite a bit of reading before I can finish any of them. So, for the sake of having something up, here's the current state of questions. Do I have to mention that the post is ridiculously long? Some context It...