Zompist Bboard Again

Tom Lehrer managed to rhyme "orange." You need the Boston accent, though, and some maybe weird syllabification.

"Eating an orange
while making love
leads to bizarre enj-
oyment thereof."

They'll be independent phonological words. Some of them will also be able to show up as complements to other verbs, if that makes a difference. (There are languages with a reduplication pattern that's also used in some compounds---like, instead of using the whole word for the second element of the c...

You can mark number using a separate word, fwiw.

It's also not hard to imagine noun classifiers of the sort you get in Chinese evolving into a gender system. Again, it wouldn't be necessary to have them turn into affixes.

Mandarin allows it. Agreeing I think with Sal, I'd say conditionals provide a good way to indicate the relevance of some state of affairs without asserting that the state of affairs obtains. I wouldn't be surprised if lots of languages do it about the same way. Topicalisation could also work, if the...

Partial reduplication Just a quick note to say I'm changing how partial reduplication works. The existing system simply copies a word's final foot, so far just to form inchoatives from stative verbs. (For example, suwasu be asleep → suwasu wasu fall asleep .) But---if I've been learning the right l...

Likely partial reduplication should also count, and it's super common.

alice wrote: ↑Mon Jan 14, 2019 4:30 am Back to Bad Conlangs: I get the impression from people's replies that it's probably impossible to create a conlang which everyone will consider to be Bad. Although it might be an interesting exercise (but not for me!)

Relex Esperanto?

A few quibbles... I find WALS pretty frustrating in cases like these. It's really hard to believe that they've just forgotten about English "'s" or are getting basic facts about French wrong. Probably it comes down to convoluted definitions and finicky judgments about particular cases. Bu...

There is an example in English of a verb that does this in many dialects: 'to learn' (equivalent to either 'teach' or 'learn' in standard english). But I think that the former is obligatorily bivalent? That is, you'd say "I learnt [s.o.]", and "I learnt" by itself would almost a...

Yeah, I was assuming that with the to give birth meaning, it'd be transitive. (So you could only find that sort of an alternation where transitivity isn't somehow indicated on the verb.)

About the verbs: it wouldn't be too strange to have some verbs that are imperfective by default, and others that are perfective; and it also wouldn't be too strange (I think) to have the imperfective turn into a nonpast and the perfective into a past. So that'd give you something like the split you'...

Zaarin wrote: ↑Thu Jan 10, 2019 8:02 pm Perhaps it's a British thing? I've only heard Teddy as a diminutive of Theodore and indeed associate it overwhelmingly with a certain President Roosevelt.

Ted Kennedy, though.

Focus, II: The how Just to repeat the bare minimum: to focus the direct object of a verb, append the clitic =su along with a high boundary tone, and move it to a position higher in the clause. itamu ihjaisa=su piwa Itamu bat =FOC eat Itamu is eating *bat* (I'll use asterisks to signal focus, they'r...

I've been working on an analytic conlang over on my Akiatu thread. It's been loads of fun. My impression is that conlangers tend to be a lot more interested in phonology and morphology than in syntax, probably for lots of reasons, and the fun in an analytic conlang is going to be largely about the s...

Focus, I: The why Ugh, I already think I got causatives wrong. Or at least incomplete. But there's no time for that now. This time I'm talking about focus---specifically the uses to which it can be put. I'll say only the bare minimum about how you actually signal focus. (The next post will be all a...

Hm, what about "all-places"? Or "all-lands"? That makes sense to me, so long as your quantifier is a constituent of the noun phrase (which isn't the case in all languages). A nearby alternative would be to have a particular high number that's conventionally used to mean all . (A...

Fwiw, Chinese 天下 world is (etymologically and in classical Chinese maybe actually) under the sky. As far as I know it's never been used as a word for a planet. (I'm most used to it referring specifically to the human world.)

But if you look solely at verbal agreement, which can occur in combination with dependent marking, he does suggest that languages with applicatives are more likely to have agreement with two participants than languages without: Average number of arguments agreed with in sample languages with applic...

IIRC, in some Oceanic languages, any fully general object (i.e. more indefinite that you'd use an indefinite article for) to an otherwise transitive verb leads to the loss of any transitivity marking on either object or verb. In effect, while the two words remain phonologically distinct, they form ...

(Even 'have to' and 'used to', both of which strike me as semantically weird.) Using "have" for a modal of requirement or necessity and "used" for a past habitual is weird. I assume the "to" in both of those is part of the verb infinitive, which I have always felt was ...