Zompist Bboard Again

Yes, I mean, sort of; it might not always be clear what's marked and what's not. Example, from German: er ist der Hund "he is the dog" er isst den Hund "he eats the dog" Different cases, but you can't immediately see from this example which one is marked, right? A reasonable inte...

what would be the meaning of the sentence if neither the agent nor patient morphemes were present? To me this seems like a tripartite setup, as those are the languages that discretely mark both agents and patients. In this case, that would mean "someone licks someone". Most likely, you'd ...

As I understand it, cases are basically just the practical realisation of semantic roles, kind of how phones are the realisation of phonemes. If your language is completely regular, each role should always get the same case marking. As you probably know, one of the basic questions when describing a ...

My conlang is made to be unambiguous, so there are a lot of things you kind of have to be picky about. When spoken correctly, it can be flawlessly parsed by a simple computer program, but if there were any native speakers, chances are they would soon start dropping little particles, completely confu...

Thanks! Having both tone and length is entirely unremarkable. Okay, sounds good. Could you give me an example of some major language that has both? My natlang Swedish sort of does, but only a little bit of tone... Have a whistled register Yes, those are really cool too. But I was planning to go with...

Suppose I want to make a conlang that's good for shouting over long distances. What phonemes/distinctions would be suitable? I guess tone and length might both work well. (Is it weird to have both? WALS doesn't seem to have any map for length.) A few vowel qualities, certainly, but probably not more...