Zompist Bboard Again

Somewhat unrelated question: why is it important to have a featural analysis here? What can this do that simply listing by POA/MOA cannot? (Then again, I know almost nothing about featural analysis, so I suspect there's some obvious answer here that I don't know...) It can be good to have a handle ...

The heterodox analysis differs notably from how I generally see these sounds described, especially in treating nasality as something added redundantly to sonorant occlusives and ascribing place to vowels. But it does require fewer features and explains some otherwise puzzling patterns in the langua...

Also, the Classical Chinese possessor marker 之 was actually a 3rd person pronoun, and is the precedent of modern Chinese possessive postposition 的, but the meaning of personal pronoun has lost in modern Chinese. But there's not really any reason to think of 之 or 的 as possession-specific, is there? ...

Was watching a tv show (full disclosure: Blacklist ) and one of the characters misattributed to Confucius the saying, "If you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves." The Mandarin subtitles substituted a line from the Confucian Analects : 或曰：「以德報怨，何如？」子曰：「何以報德？以直報怨，以德報德。」 Someone s...

Compounds One update to the last post: it's looking like the complementiser na will be able to take nominal complements, and in that case I think it (like ki ) will be a proclitic. That's to say, for example, Itamu the spear will be itamu na=apatu rather than itamu=na apatu . Here, I'll talk here a...

The phoneme /j/ is quite common. But two things have occurred to me about this phoneme. Many of the languages set on Almea lack the phoneme. Which I think is super interesting. I was curious how many natural languages lack the phoneme. It's been really hard finding any articles at all showing a lac...

Clitics I'm going to put the table up front so it's easy to find. Class Citation form Attachment Variant Allomorphy Free form Detail Interrogative determiners nai proclitic na na / _u (nai) human ti proclitic (tí) other animate cu proclitic (cú) inanimate Prepositions a proclitic h / _V (á) locativ...

Does it ever make a difference which order they go in? The aspect-marking in the first example is maybe enough to make it reversible, but the others seem like maybe they could only go in the order you give them in. (E.g., in all three that give reasons/causes, the reason or cause is given first.)

I happened upon an example of raising from Tongan, which is verb-initial, maybe it's interesting. ʻe  lava        [ʻo   ako   ʻe  Pita  ʻa  e   lea      faka-tonga] TNS possible/can COMP learn ERG Peter ABS DET language Tongan Peter can learn Tongan ʻe  lava         ʻe  Pita  [ʻo   ako  ʻe Pita  ʻa ...

Phonological do-over There are enough little things wrong or incomplete with the previous post that I'm just doing it over again from scratch. (Fun fact: Akiatu has the ridiculously simple phonology and morphology it does precisely because I can disappear for weeks at a time into morphophonological...

vegfarandi wrote: ↑Thu Feb 28, 2019 3:59 pm Imutan’s infinitive can, I use infinitive to refer to a noun-like complementized verb. (Same as Turkish usage).

Ah, then at least you shouldn't have that sort of reason to allow raising.

If it's V1, a raised subject is still going to end up after the verb, so I don't really see that being an issue (but maybe I've misunderstood). At one point I thought Akiatu wouldn't have raising verbs; my most recent thoughts about this are here . The main issue I ended up having with the idea is t...

I had problems similar to Nortaneous's: a conculture without dentists, and no very good idea what to do with "by default." But other points seemed worth thinking about. I decided to stay pretty close to things I've already thought about, I'm not sure how much I like the result. nɛjəˈcɐː.wɪ...

mèþru wrote: ↑Sat Feb 23, 2019 10:39 am Even worse, both ethnic terms are spelled exactly the same as each other in both languages, so that the confusion can occur even among native speakers!

I'm not sure what you mean by spelling in this context, but in Mandarin hàn 漢 and hán 韓 are pretty clearly distinct.

In a language where voice and aspect are both derivational (not inflectional), is there a preferred order I should stick to? E.g. in Pabappa, the word for sing is inherently reflexive . Should "to sing for a long time" be patterned as 1) singing.REFL.DUR , or 2) singing.DUR.REFL ? In eith...

Looks like I'll have to redo the verbal system, then (not that there's all that much to redo). Do you have any idea why this pattern exists? I can't say for sure, but in general objects tend to be more tightly bound to the verb than subjects are. One example: there are lots of verb-object idioms, b...

bradrn wrote: ↑Thu Feb 21, 2019 8:34 pm Interesting! So for affixes after the stem, would the order be verb-patient-agent?

Yeah, that'd be the normal pattern, at least.

Okay, I think I get it. (Another friend came up with cockroaches and zombies, and other horror movie monsters, and agreed it made sense in video games and also wrt the Terminator.) I'm confused now. Can you elaborate on the metaphors involved? The idea is (I think) that these are all cases where it...

Thanks! (I was wondering since it seems to collapse fairly quickly into an erg-abs agreement system if you have any sound change at all at the end of a word.) Thinking about zompist 's Swahili example made me remember something else that might be relevant: when there are both subject and object agr...

[Oh, okay. Is there anything the Cambridge Grammar calls a "headless" relative clause? No. (The only other things you might call that use "whatever" (&c.), and they also call those fused relatives. On page 1036 they have a footnote mentioning that they think the word "h...