Zompist Bboard Again

don't know and haven't decided are easy possibilities. If you use a verb, it might be one that gets a dative subject or something like that, if your language has such things. Or if yours is a language that uses possession constructions for psychological predicates, you could do that here: I don't h...

Ah, looks like I was served American data (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_(given_name)).

How would “I asked Charlie but the guy wouldn't help out” behave in that situation, from the perspective of a native English speaker? Well, I picked "Charlie" in part because the internet assures me it's now thoroughly ungendered, so "guy" is maybe a bit off, but other than that...

Besides honourifics there are also pronoun-y uses of pejorative terms: "I asked Charlieᵢ but the jerkᵢ wouldn't help out." A test: if you replaced "jerk" with a non-pronoun-y noun like "doctor," it couldn't corefer with "Charlie." (A pronoun but not a referrin...

Resultatives, again A general note: the Akiatu lexicon is going through a slow but fairly major iteration, so if you read newer posts alongside older ones you might stumble over some changes. That said, I've been doing a bit of reading about resultative constructions, and it's time to revisit this ...

...wukau matai mwi waɲi kuu jaku tired reach SS think not.manage sit ...You are so tired you cannot think wahi kja miwa cau na hwati na suwasu wasu but COMP NEG what REL give DS sleep REDUP(INC,PFV) But nothing can help you sleep ki=ani=wati wai, sai imakau "kahi" wai, aiti waɲi saka jaku...

sati hau ma kwasu, ijau niwa pumuki
COM 1s SUB QUOT sit PER current
It makes sense to me

Turkish water is "su."

Yalensky wrote: ↑Sat Feb 02, 2019 9:08 pm Not an error, but the Old Hanying word for the Collapse--Dafakap--has an etymology meaning "great ruin". I chuckled.

大fuckup?

Possibly the most pedestrian dream I've ever remembered: something (don't remember what) made me late, and everything was already closed, and wouldn't be opening for at least another week, because of Chinese New Year (that's Taiwan for you). The dream ended with me wondering what I was going to do f...

Ahh, misunderstood, sorry.

Okay, I know most of my vocabulary in my joke of a conlang is just English or whatever, and I totally understand throwing French words into conlangs set in former French colonies, but whoever created Persian: Seriously? Your word for 'to serve' is serv kardan ? I dunno, I like systems that are heav...

I'm pretty sure they're not using the expression "double object construction" the same way Haspelmath is in WALS: they're talking about a certain type of syntactic structure, and the WALS article isn't about that at all. (This presumably isn't the place to go into detail, but if you want l...

- using word orders other than SVO as the basic word order, or using SVO basic word order with mostly postpositions instead of prepositions. (... snip ...) - using strategies other than having a verb meaning "to have" for predicative possessions I recently happened upon the generalisation...

Plenty of languages have a marker that can be used in verb chains instead of repeating TAM and person marking. Turkish -ip is an example. ---Though if I remember right these show up with actual clause chains, not serial verbs. I agree with Akangka that your use of the word "applicative" is...

I think I noticed a couple.

Pronounce č as [tʃ], ž as [dʒ].

The table just above implies that ž is [ʒ] and j is [dʒ].

Yu det kan nyuhai.
You did kàn nǚhǎi.
你䙷看奴孩。

Is 奴 supposed to be 女?

Maybe you could also have widespread vocabulary shifts in different politeness registers, and then have polite verbs reinterpreted as second person forms, and humble ones as first person.

libgen?

Is there a term for this occurrence, where two words of similar meaning form a phrase with no or very little added meaning. For example, bunny rabbit , which came up in this thread: http://www.verduria.org/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=137 Failing a term, can anyone cite any other examples? (Also of inte...

I don't think so, except I guess in set phrases, like in Mandarin, I guess. I was wondering about waah 話, which is common as a verb, but it's two segments as well as a tone (the h marks tone). (But my instincts about this sort of thing are pretty skewed by classical Chinese.)