Zompist Bboard Again

I suppose the cool thing about Esperanto for me is that it shows how loads of people will happily learn a conlang regardless of how linguistically broken it is. On the contrary, the fact that loads of people will happily learn Esperanto, despite almost no benefit from doing so, simply shows that yo...

There's something mentioned in Dixon and Aikhenvald's The Amazonian Languages that might be what Sal's thinking of? In Aryon Rodrigues' chapter on Macro-Jê he writes: I've got that book and I completely forgot about the Macro-Jê stuff. I remember reading elsewhere an argument that is has a similar ...

Turns out the Oceanic languages have reduplicative detransitivisation: Some canonic languages also have detransitivising morphology, although its role is much less significant than the transitivising and causativising morphology discussed above. It takes three forms. Two are straightforward detrans...

The verb agrees with both arguments, but there are two problems. The first is that that only works if all of the patient agreement morphemes are overt. If one is zero, or there is any form of differential patient agreement (conditioned by animacy, definiteness, ...) then there is ambiguity between ...

I've been consuming far too much cheese and port in recent days to have been able to concentrate enough for this thread. Even now, it's going to take me a considerable while to get through it... Can also feed the benefactive applicative: kaas 'run' -> kaas-nč -> kaasınč 'run to/for (him/her)' So wha...

That's greatly of interest, thank you, and somewhat reassuring. Although now I'm curious about the special morphology (particularly on the noun itself - you mean, like, case marking that only shows up on fronted arguments?) and the "other changes"...

I didn't watch Bird Box last night. That's two hours that I'm not getting back either. ----- frislander: she did And Then There Were None , and then the next two years were Witness for the Prosecution and Ordeal by Innocence , but I'm not sure which way around they were, and this year it was The ABC...

So, the new Poirot: no. It was, of course, lavishly decorated and very attractively directed and shot (other than the terrible CGI now and then). And although it will be divisive, I thought Malkovich was a very good older Poirot - a faded version of, as it were, a real-life inspiration for Suchet's ...

I've been thinking a lot recently about valency alternations in Sint, and I thought maybe some of this might be interesting to other people. Originally I had planned to have a class of ambitransitive / labile verbs, but the issue was that Sint is head-marking with no role marking of core arguments ...

To clarify: nothing is known about pre-IE languages of Europe. Except that, presumably, there once were some. Our most solid lead is the apparent borrowing from substratum languages into IE languages; however, we don't really know when or where this might have happened. Our most concrete evidence, t...

Is this a lexical weirdness for just this word, for all you people, or is it a general trait of, for instance, prerhotic vowels?


[For me, /E/, /E/, /I/ and /E/, although the first, third and fourth can be schwa; if I had to lengthen the second vowel, it would be to /E@/, not to /I@/.]

The idea of evidentiality interests me, but I've never seriously used it - possibly because I feel it's something I want to do properly if I do it at all. Rawàng Ata does, I think, however, have a dedicated idiomatic structure for evidentiality, employing topicalisation (because everything ends up e...

HazelFiver wrote: ↑Thu Dec 27, 2018 5:28 am Does anyone else pronounce "experiment" with /iː/ for the second vowel? I haven't found this anywhere. I already know I don't speak proper English, and I've given up trying to. Just wondering.

I haven't heard this.

My guess could be wrong, but I'm increasingly inclined to believe it has nothing to do with any English tune; apparently, it was composed by someone in the 1900s, possibly from the village where my dad spent his early childhood. It may be that "English tune" in this context originally mea...

So anyway, having re-watched the first season of Veronica Mars, I've now accidentally watched the second season too, as well as the third season, and the film. Short version: S2 is an interesting contrast with S1. In terms of proficiency, it's probably better made, week to week, than S1 - a slight c...

Spending the day off ploughing through Salmoneus' book review. If I ever allow myself to move out of the Russian literature section, sure I will get my recommendation from him. That's very nice of you to say! I'm glad someone's getting some value out of those reviews - sorry they're so rambling! Vi...

I guess what I'm trying to say is that, for a theory to be useful, it needs to do at least one of the following: 1. Illuminate rather than obscure the phenomena it's trying to describe 2. Make non-trivial predictions that other theories don't It's not obvious to me that any current formalism adds m...

Several of your objections may be obviated by recontextualising your understanding of chomsky. The key point here is that Chomsky's objectives were primarily philosophical, rather than linguistic in the conventional sense (or, let us say, they were meta-linguistic, or concerned with the philosophy o...

("reify"? I've only ever heard that word in distinctly Marxist contexts. Is this a subtle reference to Chomsky's politics?) I doubt it. Reification is just treating things as though they are real (i.e. with properties like haecceity and number and whatnot). I.e. things that make philosoph...

Incidentally, do you version control your grammar? I have all the source LaTeX files in git... Whereas I keep things in Word files, multiple versions of things sequentially, hopefully chronologically but not always, in the same file, and then twenty other almost-identically named files that I can't...