Zompist Bboard Again

I'll eat what you give me "Eat" can't take a clausal complement; "what you give me" is just a noun phrase. Maybe "what" is a relative pronoun, I'm not sure (the Cambridge Grammar doesn't think so). You can replace it with "that which," suggesting it has the r...

Further hypothetical question: Let's arbitrarily say that our language is nom-acc with noun cases, and the system above is used for agreement. Then let's say we have some sound change which applies to the end of words. Now our agent and patient forms are no longer identical: the sound changes appli...

Sorry, I'm so confused about this myself, and I get more and more confused the more I think about the issue. :? Let me ask another question, and maybe I'll be able to work something out myself; is the word what in the sentence "I want to work on Liu again, but I'm not sure what else to do to g...

Would it be realistic to have a polypersonal agreement system where the same affixes are used for both agent and patient? If so, how would you know whether it is nominative-accusative or ergative-absolutive, since it's impossible to know whether an intransitive verb is agreeing with its experiencer...

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.) ...and I found my source, here . The claim there is that Mandarin accomplishment verbs don't imply culmination---which ...

I recently came across the sentence 我殺了John兩次，他都沒死 I killed John two times, he's still not dead ---which was claimed to be good Mandarin, shā 殺 not implying culmination, unlike English "kill." (I don't have my own instincts on this one, and only remembered to ask one friend about it, and t...

So then I thought that maybe I can use relative clauses instead. But the way Liu handles relative clauses is already so complicated, it just fries my brain when I try to think about how to translate "I want to work on Liu again, but I'm not sure what else to do to get the grammar more complete...

Some morphophonology EDIT : this post has been entirely superseded by the following one . Akiatu phonotactic constraints have force not only within roots but also in morphologically complex words and across clitic boundaries; so adjustments are frequently required. This post sets out some of the mo...

LISP?

Stress This is a little update---I'm planning posts on clitics and compounds, and those'll mention how clitics and compounds affect stress, so I thought I'd put something up about how stress works in simpler cases, since that's changed since my initial phonology post (which is here , though increas...

Isn't the whole point of a causative verb that it promotes the cause to the subject case and demotes the old subject, generally to the object? But the question was about case-marking, not about whether you get a new subject and so on. I mean, in plenty of languages the experiencer argument of certa...

bradrn wrote: ↑Sat Feb 16, 2019 6:33 am The problem is that the plural ending can be completely random - for a significant chunk of words there are no patterns. More specifically, the plural ending for many words is the last vowel of the ancestor, which is unpredictable.

How do they form the plurals of newly-borrowed words?

Here's one to get things going. It's meant to be an Akiatu elder stereotyping the upland-dwelling Hrga̰nje and the island-dwelling Iqę́hhǫ, who get referred to as the Bird People and the Fish People, respectively; a bit of world-building (and rhetoric-building, and maybe also philosophy-building). m...

Here's a thread where you can share occasional texts or translations, when you don't feel they need a thread of their own and they don't really fit anywhere else but you'd still like to share or solicit feedback. I've sometimes wanted a thread like that, hopefully others will find it useful and fun ...

This is not a development I'm familiar with, but you're not providing any counterpoint since the original construction was still not a causative. The idea was that it would become a causative, once the topicalised because of X phrase got reinterpreted as a subject. Once it became the subject, that ...

bradrn wrote: ↑Sat Feb 16, 2019 3:46 am Even on the tiny screen of an Apple Watch, a quick Google seems to confirm that the easiest way of inputting text today is to use a keyboard.

Is this true for Chinese as well? (On phones and tablets I mostly use handwritten input, but I don't really know how common that is.)

If there were a thread for random short bits of translation, would people use it? (I semi-regularly do texts that I think are interesting enough that I'd like to post them, and ideally get feedback on them, but they're not substantial enough for their own threads and don't really fit anywhere else. ...

直男癌 zhínánái, character by character it's straight male cancer, but actually it's mansplaining.

Retaining the subject markings on the original subject is entirely possible (there are languages that do so), however, no language marks the causer in a causative with a nonsubject marking (because of the above definition). If you do, the construction may be semantically a causative, but syntactica...

I don't know how it would work with causative marking on the verb, but if you allow ablative (or whatever) cause phrases, and then let those be topicalised, you might get pretty close to what you want. (Something like I died → I died of hunger → Of hunger I died .) ...But I don't know how well that ...