Zompist Bboard Again

Relative clauses, II This post will follow up on some points that I didn't address last time. Not everything though: there'll have to be at least one more post, on correlative structures. Little relative clauses (This really should have had a mention last time.) Akiatu mostly has stative verbs wher...

I seem to have just learned that I've been pronouncing "deictic" wrong (with three syllables, sort of the opposite of the "albeit" issue).

Relative clauses, I I guess I'm going to commit on this. It'll require a couple of posts. It might help if I start with a review of the process I call argument raising: Preposition phrases, whether giving indirect objects or adjuncts, normally occur after the verb. Direct objects normally precede t...

I can't answer the why question, but as for the claim about Indonesian, you could follow up the citation and see what you think about what it says. That's tricky in this case because the citation is mistaken. In the edition I have of Sneddon's Indonesian: A Comprehensive Grammar , the relevant secti...

Is it supposed to be "purple people eater"? Because otherwise I only get mèþru's reading. (I have to treat "purple" as a noun, but not so much that I'll allow it to be modified by "flying" or "one horned flying" and so on.)

I was actually quite disappointed when I learned the truth about "synecdoche" and "segue."

Lack of cell phone access is a problem all over the world, nothing first-world about it. (It's landlines that tend to have that sort of skew.)

Numbers Cardinal numbers are base five up to twenty and thereupon base twenty. Here they are, up to nineteen: 1 itu 2 ami 3 pai 4 cita 5 haku 6 haku (sati) itu 7 haku (sati) ami 8 haku (sati) pai 9 haku (sati) cita 10 amiku 11 amiku (sati) itu 12 amiku (sati) ami 13 amiku (sati) pai 14 amiku (sati)...

Cool! Doesn't sound like we disagree about anything that matters in this context, so I'll just add some minor and probably tangential comments. Well, historically this just is self-evident to most people: the finite world and the infinity of time are commonplace assumptions in ancient philosophy aro...

But in (my) English "she made him work today" is unambiguous: both the making and the working are today. Whereas "she ordered him to work today" could be ambiguous (though I'd say word order strongly favours an interpretation on which the work was today). The difference is becaus...

Well, I didn't say the argument is terrible. I don't think it's plausible that this argument, or anything much like it, could convert an entire intellectual class or an entire tradition to monotheism, but that doesn't make it terrible. Anyway it doesn't make it more terrible than the cosmological ar...

acuta soon , &c So here's what would've been the rest of the last post, on acuta , sort of a future-oriented counterpart of mikwa already . I've added a few odds and ends at the end. acuta locates a reported event or state of affairs in the future. Its precise sense tends to vary with the kind ...

Akiatu:

wutamwi, a central post in a building. (I'm currently imagining something a bit like Samoan fale, structurally speaking, though I have to make some decisions about technology and social structure before I'll be sure.)

Next: whim, fancy

Maybe a bit cheeky to derive monotheism from eternal return :) One thing that strikes me about the argument is that, given the background, you might expect inferences from regularity to law to lawgiver to be foregrounded somehow; though those are a couple of the points at which the argument (or at l...

Well I'm enjoying it. It's a really nice way to introduce and work through those metaphysical issues, imo, and sets up a believable dialectic. A particularly nice moment for me was in the post on the sophistical regress---I'd been starting to wonder how close you might get to a Mādyamaka view, and r...

tija now , mikwa already , and acuta soon This post will be about the three two title adverbs and their combinations. There are two main complications: interactions with aspect, and the use of these words in adverbial clauses. (Aside: the post was already too long even without acuta , so I'm holdin...

No expert, but as far as I can tell George Hewitt Georgian: A Learner's Grammar says that in the aorist screeves you get split-S case marking but consistently nom/acc agreement markers (especially on pages 103-140, 165).

Edit: oops, for split-S you also need p. 177.

Yeah, could be. I've only encountered it in Hong Kong, as far as I can remember, where it also has the benefit that plenty of people actually won't know pinyin especially well. (And I only ever used it at a time when, at least on the computers I had access to, you couldn't use pinyin input for tradi...

I just thought to check my phone (sometimes I'm slow), and maybe it's worth mentioning that there are also a few methods based on the composition of the character (the strokes that make it up), including Cangjie, which maybe can still give me nightmares. (Which stroke-based methods I'm offered depen...

A question about 21st century Chinese: I think I remember that, long ago, on the predecessor board, a native Chinese speaker explained that writing text messages on Chinese cellphones works in the way that you start to type in Pinyin, and then the phone suggests possible Chinese characters you migh...