Zompist Bboard Again

One of the few languages that have a specific masculine suffix would be Swedish (-e), but I guess you know that...

I mostly use Numbers (the Apple equivalent of Excel). I've tinkered with making a dedicated program, but just chucking everything in a big table usually works out to be easier than the stuff I create. Maybe I should try again.

Maybe sort of an example: One of the words I most miss in English is what in Swedish is ju (German uses ja ; it's not the same meaning as the interjection ("yes"), but cognate). It's an adverb basically meaning "I don't mean to imply that you don't already know this". English wou...

I've also noticed on some international food packaging, the word Keks on what in English would be called "cookies" or "(sweet) biscuits", depending on where you learnt it. Swedish kex and Finnish keksi do come from English "cakes", and mean cookie. In Swedish it can al...

When you think about it, conjunctions in (for example) English are not quite logical. If you say "I like cats and dogs ", this is in terms of set theory a union of sets. The set of things being liked is the combination of the set of cats and the set of dogs. But if you say "I like cat...

Apparently I was wrong to assume that wohnen and bo are related, despite the similarities. Interesting! A wider search also reveals that both have English parallels, or at least used to. Maybe I should start using "to bue"? It is after all the queen's English, even if it happens to be quee...

Indeed it is, but this is not the case for the word I was talking about. As far as I can tell, English never had that particular word, even though its relatives do, and even though it has both the adjective form and the noun form ("bond", in the sense "tenant farmer; serf; head of hou...

Well I mean, "sit" in English wouldn't work, since it can also be used as Pabappa mentioned. But that's just how some similar words happen to work in English, that "to X" used transitively actually means "to make something X". Generally, would it make sense to have for ...

For conlang purposes, but mostly a natlang question, so here goes: How unusual would it be to let words like "sit" take a regular object instead of a preposition phrase? So instead of "I sat on the chair", you just say "I sat the chair". Another example off the top of m...

In "he stands there", we get state but no agent. In "she stood the plant in the window", we get agent but not state. In "he stood for parliament", I guess it works, if we consider parliament to be the patient. As nouns, they (like most nouns) don't have an obvious agent...

Thanks for your answers! So predicates are inflected by mood/aspect, of which the most common are state ("be") and transition ("become"), and actors (noun phrases) are inflected by role/case, of which the most common are patient, agent and receiver/experiencer. There is no lexica...

Like a lot of non-naturalistic conlangs, mine doesn't distinguish nouns/verbs/adjectives. It does however distinguish patient/agent/receiver (so basically cases) and dynamic/stative ("lay" vs. "lie", "redden" vs. "red" etc.). Now, I'm working on a little book ...

I like to define natural behaviour as that which would likely occur without cultural influence, in some hypothetical experiment where a bunch of babies grew up on their own in the wilderness. It's a little hard to test for humans, but I think it works as a starting point. By that definition, it seem...

Rejäl is an interesting word, kind of similar to "fair", or "proper". So in an older sense it could almost sort of fit "fair trade" – "good, appropriate, trustworthy" – but today it would mostly be interpreted as "large, sturdy". So I (as a Swede) w...

In the thread about profanity, It also feels a lot more awkward to me to talk dirty with Indians, at least in theory. It's the same for me – both sexy or romantic expressions can easily get awkward in any language, but for me it's much worse in my natlang Swedish than in English. Similarly, when I w...

I'm working on a text which deals with various types of relatives (in more of a mathematical sense, but anyway), and so I needed a gender-neutral term for "aunt" / "uncle". I came across a few linguistic abominations like "parsib", "pibling", or "auncle&q...

English distinguishes θ/ð from s/z, and has gendered pronouns but not gendered nouns.

English Must "Fresh pressed fruit juice" Typically used in English for grape juice that you're about to make wine from. But it delights me, because we use the same word in Swedish, with a slightly different connotation; basically "high quality juice, particularly apple juice". I...

Concerning things that have been around longer than one might think: When playing in rock bands, I've found it fascinating that the company Zildjian, the biggest manufacturer of cymbals, is 401 years old. It was founded by an Ottoman alchemist, in an attempt to make gold. As for the thing where film...

Hah, yes, technically Richard is of course correct in that the possessive/genitive forms are marked, more so than the accusative. It should be fairly obvious that I wasn't trying to claim otherwise. So we should restate the rule. How about: "In accusative languages with a marked accusative, the...