Zompist Bboard Again

Maybe Mandarin yǔ 語 for a tie? One segment and a tone; but maybe you wouldn't consider it a free morpheme.

Turkish has yaz and kış for summer and winter.

You can incorporate a preposition into the verb. (Couldn't tell you under what circumstances that's likely to happen, though.)

Raising and control, again Rather a long time ago I said that there's no pure raising in Akiatu. (It was long enough ago that I'll repeat myself a bit, but here is the earlier post.) Take this sentence: itamu₁ itakitai mwi ____₁ rawu Itamu seem SS feel.good Itamu₁ seems ____₁ to be satisfied There'...

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Lots of Mandarin one-phoneme examples, though I suppose tone should be counted as well. (In this context I suppose yì 譯 translate and yì 意 idea, meaning might be my favourite examples.)

Are there examples of syncope, or other cluster-producing changes, from highly synthetic and mostly prefixing languages (Navajo, perhaps?) which might be helpful here? The Mayan language Mam has widespread deletion of pretonic vowels and reduction of posttonic vowels to schwa. It's not mostly prefi...

mèþru wrote: ↑Thu Jan 24, 2019 7:44 am New York white supremacist sword attacker pleads guilty (from BBC)
The headline sounds to me like the sword attacker killed a white supremacist, but the supremacist is the attacker.

My first parsing had someone attacking a white supremacist sword.

Pre-nominal relative clauses in a VO language? Not likely. (← All varieties of Chinese known to me.)

Locative subjects Akiatu topics, as I've so far discussed them, are sort of weighty, discourse-pragmatics-wise. That's to say, they're never used just to track the continuing subject-matter of a stretch of discourse, they're used to reorient discourse, or introduce context or background. And this i...

Thanks for the feedback! In a narrative of this size you can showcase or illustrate the syntax and discourse peculiarities of your language a bit. And test! (And force yourself to do some worldbuilding.) The only thing I missed is some extra funky reduplication patterns, as it would have also fit we...

Interlinear commentary Here I'll give a full gloss of the story, with some linguistic and other commentary. The result is stupidly long, though, so I'm hiding it between more tags. ai VOC Attend! ai is used to attract someone's attention, a bit like "hey" (but in a less-marked register). ...

Background and context The story is set a few hundred years before the time I'm currently thinking of as the present (which is the time at which the variant of Akiatu I've been describing is spoken). That's plenty enough distance that a certain amount of anachrony and mythologisation are certainly ...

The first encounter with the slavers It's about time there were texts in Akiatu, here's one. It narrates an encounter between the culture hero Itamu and a group of supposed traders from the society that introduced agriculture to the regions neigbouring the Akiatu River basin. Here I'll give the tex...

ki (the definite determiner) Yeah, that all makes sense to me. Reduplication + diachrony definitely sounds fun and productive. And on to the next thing, the particle ki , which was one of Akiatu's first two or three words. It's accumulated a few adjustments since I last wrote about it, which affect...

I'll take it :) Reduplicants can definitely become independent phonologically, with their own stress and so on, and you can get similar reductions in compounds (I think especially synonym compounds, I've been trying and failing to dig up the examples I thought I remembered). I don't know that they o...

It doesn't have to be about new information, though. Some examples, with italics to mark (narrow) focus: They only criticised Sam's fur coat (and not, e.g., splash paint on it) They only criticised Sam 's fur coat (and not, e.g., Mel's) They only criticised Sam's fur coat (and not, e.g., their leath...

Ah, sorry for misunderstanding, it's a good point. Unfortunately, I think my answer's going to have to be that I'll deal with ambiguities like that on a case-by-case basis. (And they'll no doubt arise even without borrowing, given how simple Akiatu phonology is.) (And thanks for the questions and su...

It's tricky, because those forms do in some ways behave like independent words. But, as far as I know that sort of reduction is always associated with reduplication, even in languages where it also shows up in compounds. The main alternative, I think, is to treat it as a particular sort of compoundi...

It's not fully mapped out yet, but yeah, the idea is that it'll happen with other verbs too---when used as resultative complements, it'll be their reduced (reduplication) form that's used. I think it'll be especially common when using stative verbs as resultative complements to yield a sort of causa...