Zompist Bboard Again

With a couple of those ("precisely," "partially... mostly") the adverb could be part of the object, not a separate constituent.

I'd expect to hear those from someone whose first language is French. (Can't be the only language with that order, of course.) Update : should've refreshed before posting, I guess. I'm actually quite frustrated by what I've been able to find on adverbs and word order, cross-linguistically. This must...

Some initial ideas I'm just going to start with a sentence, and take it apart. (Anything I say in this post might change tomorrow.) Here's the sentence: íhmne čegšed Imne sang . I don't know anything about Imne yet, though I'm pretty sure it's a man, and I guess he sings. I'm thinking of the verb r...

Orthography I've settled on an orthography, at least for now. Phonological details are the same as in the initial post, except that after the exchange with Pabappa I got a bit more sensible about what happens when you combine high tone with creaky register. (Which is not to say I've decided what yo...

New idea: use h to signal the lower register (borrowing this from the Yale romanisation of Cantonese), and also after a nasal to signal glottalisation. Then [+creak, +high] can be just áh , for example. And the only diacritic on vowels will be the high-tone acute (and maybe an occasional breve or so...

Thanks! That's very helpful. You might find ample study material in the Austro-Asiatic family, where languages such as Khmer have acquired creaky and breathy voice, and perhaps other suprasegmentals ("registers"), under the influence of nearby tonal languages. This suggests that registers ...

Phonology This won't be complete, but I want to include enough to give some context to the points I'm least sure about. (You can skip to the end to see the particular issues that right now strike me as most up in the air.) And anyway, it's long enough even if it's not complete. In case you're inter...

Kwa̰ Mɨɨrts It's too early for a proper thread on Kwa̰ Mɨɨrts, but there are some basic things that might be complete nonsense, so I figure I'll put something up and maybe get a needed reality check. That'll come in following posts. I'll mostly reserve this post for a table of contents and such, on...

The intended reading was more like I added a single nothing , though; I thought of marking maimija ahiwa one nothing as focus ( =su ) to make it clearer, but decided that wouldn't be right. (Though I'm not really sure it counts in a language's favour if it gives you easy ways to use indefinite prono...

au sai iti hau=su oh EXCL AFF 1s=FOC Oh! It's me. ikau pamatu i sama right grateful DAT 2s Thank you! hau hwika... maimija ahiwa tapiru mawa 1s only nothing one add find(PFV) I just added a space. (I don't remember why, but when I first signed up for the site, I didn't think to put in the space, bu...

Nice! I agree about the quality of that wikipedia article. Haspelmath actually has a whole book about indefinite pronouns, worth checking out. I agree with your interpretation of that point. Having distinct indefinite pronouns for negative contexts is totally normal, what's distinctive is not also n...

Yeah, they're great.

I use the Kindle app on a tablet, they show up nicely on that.

There are supposed to be languages without relative clauses at all. I think Pirahã is supposed to be one? (I don't remember exactly what Everett's claim that Pirahã lacks recursion is supposed to mean, but surely it entails that there aren't any relative clauses.) You're right that it'd be interesti...

Oh, good point! First, a confession: I've done a really meagre amount of research on languages that use correlative clauses of a roughly similar sort---I looked at some examples from Hindi, that's about it. So it might be weird to put them in a topicalised position, and it certainly does seem to rul...

miwasu, kiwi kajani na ki pilausapi ukatai=su ukatai no 3p activity DS DET philosophy quarrel=FOC quarrel No, they are fighting about fighting about philosophy (I don't really have and don't plan to develop a word for philosophy in Akiatu, pilausapi will have to do. Though it's a bit tempting to sa...

Relative clauses, III: Correlatives This post is about what I'll call correlative clauses. These are often typed as a sort of relative clause, and that's why I introduce them in this context. They do often correspond to restrictive or headless relative clauses, especially ones headed by free choice...

Cannibalism never occurred to me, but I did wonder if they might have related ideas of where the bugs come from if some grain gets infested.

Great, rich image regardless, lots of things you could do with it.

ki jarika=wati wai ijau wikura DET life=LOC TOP sit banks añikitami=wati wai miwa ijau wikura knowledge=LOC TOP NEG sit banks kasu a mija na watiwi miwa ijau wikura follow LOC thing REL there NEG sit banks niwa mija na watiwi ijau wikura aka INST thing REL there sit banks TOP ikau akwani=su just da...

Hey, thanks! I definitely have lots to learn, about many languages. (I do know just enough about Japanese to occasionally avoid word forms that strike me as sounding somehow too Japanese.)

your 'iwasu', 'aiwa', looks like how Indonesian works, though. Oh, interesting. I guess that sort of pattern isn't too unusual? (I'm trying to do a fair bit with path verbs like iwasu and locational nouns like aiwa , though it's not very apparent in what I've posted so far, I think.) Fwiw, the most...