Zompist Bboard Again

It's not super common and it's quite jocular, but yes: "Question mark" can appear as a tag question for me, nearly always separated with a pause from the rest of the sentence.

It's harder to say what it should be. The text is 惊爆商品 jīngbào shāngpǐn . Translations of jīngbào include surprising, startling, explosive, unexpected. I suspect it's something like "sensational goods". Reminds me of the "novelties" section in American grocery stores (although t...

Karch wrote: ↑Fri Sep 12, 2025 5:54 pm I do not believe a rightwinger would engrave his bullets with "notices your bulge OwO" or "Hey fascist! Catch!".

I regret to inform you that young right wingers are often both terminally online and fond of irony.

I'm placing my bets on something from Curym this time around.

Is this implying you may be in the market for suggestions for the next language?

‘Polysynthesis’ is, to me, rather too ill-defined to constitute a Sprachbund in and of itself. There are areas on Earth in which many languages are considered ‘polysynthetic’ but there are massive differences between them in how the polysynthesis works, for instance North America or the Arctic. Oh,...

If you'll pardon my insanity... I've been thinking about areal linguistics a fair amount recently and I have a question for Zompist: Have you thought about sprachbunds on Almea? There seem to be two salient examples in my mind: Sarnae, with the spread of VSO word order and rank based conjugation to ...

What does your consonant inventory look like? Out of what you've posted, I imagine č could be i-coloring, and ɣ could be u-coloring. Perhaps the vowels themselves cause a following vowel to assimilate when stressed, e.g. *mati > mate or mata, or something like that. Apocope (loss of final vowels) an...