Zompist Bboard Again

Can I ask a related, but tangential question? Telicity is often defined in terms of presenting an action as being complete, and perfective verbs carry the meaning of completeness (or boundedness). I'm struggling to see the difference - although there obviously is one. Telicity can be marked by diff...

Icelandic retained -s in the copula well into the second millennium: ek em, þú est, hann/hún/þat es… The Sagas were mostly written in the 1300s and some of them have these forms vs. the -r forms. At least according to Jackson Crawford, the 2sg form *est is actually not attested in Old Icelandic man...

Another famously strange feature of PIE is its vowel system: /i/ and /u/ basically pattern with the nasals/liquids, […], so the only vowels which are actually necessary to reconstruct are /e ē o ō/. Such a vowel system would surely be extremely unstable, and I find it hard to see how it could reali...

I seemed to recall that Wikipedia had an article about the ”Nullar number” at one point, and indeed there once was an article for ”Nullar” which was apparently merged into the article for ”Grammatical number” in 2006: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Nullar&oldid=39870330 The mention o...

But there's apparently a homonymous verb 'to dwell', attested in Latin colō 'to live, to inhabit', in-cola 'inhabitant', in-quil-īnus 'tenant'. De Vaan derives colō from *kʷelH- "to turn", but annoyingly doesn't give the semantic motivation. I'd say a development "to turn" > &qu...

Is he saying that languages with a diminutive for nouns will often also use the same diminutive affix on verbs to indicate repeated small actions? Or just using that term for a different meaning than what Im used to? The others dont seem like they'd match up with noun affixes at all. No, these are ...

Okay. I don't really have an opinion on whether it's an aspect or not. However, I don't see much similarity between the iterative/frequentative and intensifiers. It is actually pretty common for markers of repeated action to be extended to marking more intense action. After all, a single intense ev...

Thanks for clarifying! So, if my understanding of what you’re saying is correct: if the number of events is unbounded, iterativity can imply atelicity, which in turn is correlated with imperfectivity (often in a language-dependent way). Is my understanding correct? Yeah, that seems basically correc...

But that being said, there is a somewhat complicated association between pluractionality (including iteratives and frequentatives) and the imperfective aspect. That sounds a bit like what I was looking for — do you have any more details? I can try to give an explanation, but despite this being a pr...

One clarification: is a frequentative just another aspect along the same lines? Your explanation mentions distributives and iteratives, but not frequentatives, and those PDFs you linked also don’t seem to mention frequentatives, all of which makes me suspect that frequentatives may have somewhat di...

Follow-up question: what’s the difference between distributive, iterative and frequentative? Or is this just another instance of the same thing getting lots of different names? I think it’s both an instance of the same thing getting different names, and different things getting the same name. You m...