Zompist Bboard Again

I kinda want to have a language where most adjectives are actually nouns meaning "ADJ-ness", and the adjectival usage of these words are accomplished by using possessive structures or adpositional phrases. You find this construct pretty commonly in Semitic languages. Are you sure? I don't...

The man whom Maria kill kattu na Maria a a-ro-gapput-a Man REL Maria 3SG.DIR 3SG>3SG-PRF-kill-DIR.SG Later, since akko refers to katta, it becomes more proximate than Maria. katta na a Maria a-ro-gappud-e Man REL 3SG.DIR Maria 3SG>3SG-gappud-INV.SG I don't quite follow this - I can't see akko in an...

akam chinjir wrote: ↑Thu Feb 21, 2019 8:39 pm

bradrn wrote: ↑Thu Feb 21, 2019 8:34 pm Interesting! So for affixes after the stem, would the order be verb-patient-agent?

Yeah, that'd be the normal pattern, at least.

Looks like I'll have to redo the verbal system, then (not that there's all that much to redo). Do you have any idea why this pattern exists?

Just to be clear, Swahili is nom/acc. E.g.: ni-li-wa-sikia 1s-past-3p-hear I heard them wa-li-ni-sikia 3p-past-1s-hear They heard me. ni-li-jibu 1s-past-answer I answered. That is, the prefix order makes it nom/acc. That's basically the system I was describing, so it definitely must be plausible. T...

Would it be realistic to have a polypersonal agreement system where the same affixes are used for both agent and patient? Sure, this is what Swahili has. Well, almost has: the prefixes are the same for noun classes and 3 of the 6 pronouns. (The prefixes are distinguished by order.) Thanks! (I was w...

Further hypothetical question: Let's arbitrarily say that our language is nom-acc with noun cases, and the system above is used for agreement. Then let's say we have some sound change which applies to the end of words. Now our agent and patient forms are no longer identical: the sound changes appli...

mèþru wrote: ↑Wed Feb 20, 2019 6:01 am It doesn't need to be resolved; there are plenty of natlangs that do stuff like that.

Really? I'm surprised. What languages have different alignment in their noun morphology and verb agreement?

[...] the issue now is if you have an intransitive verb: yes-xe Is this language nom-acc, since this is the experiencer having the same affix as the agent? Or is it erg-acc, since the experiencer is the same as the patient? What if the rest of the syntax doesn't help e.g. if it's SOV? I've just rea...

EDIT: Please don’t use this any more! If you want a highly multilingual keyboard, use Conkey , not this half-baked extension of Finnish Multilingual. If you really still want to use this one, expand the block below. Recently I've been looking for a keyboard layout which can type a large number of d...

Yes, I'm aware of direct-inverse - I quite like them, in fact - but that wasn't actually the system I'm talking about. Consider the following example morphemes: singular plural 1 -xa -xe 2 -si -se 3 -ko -ke . kode to see aman to hear yes to exist Then, in the system I'm describing, all actors (is th...

Would it be realistic to have a polypersonal agreement system where the same affixes are used for both agent and patient? If so, how would you know whether it is nominative-accusative or ergative-absolutive, since it's impossible to know whether an intransitive verb is agreeing with its experiencer ...

At this point I'm beginning to think it's simply a difference in opinion. You think letterforms will continue to change, because they always have; I think that they won't, because the prototypes haven't changed all that much since Roman times. There's no way to know who's right - no-one can predict...

Thanks for all the suggestions everyone - they've really helped! Looking back through them, it would appear that I have a few options: Simply preserve the irregularities (as in Seri or Welsh) Preserve the irregularities, but treat it as disfixation Semantics-based analogy Abandon the morphological p...

But it's just simple disfixation on a singular noun. I suppose it is, but disfixation is rather rare, isn't it... In this case, I think the final vowel on the plural will be treated as suffix. The vowel used is analogized by the semantics of the noun. For example I assign the meaning of each noun a...

In the printing era, I think the prototype is arguably a printed character. You may not agree, but think again about China, where characters are drastically and idiosyncratically simplified when written by hand; the prototype is surely something more like the kaishu hand, which underlies the printe...

I doubt there's any languages where there's literally no identifiable patterns to plural formation at all. This is the problem - it is almost completely random. There are some vague, unhelpful patterns - for instance, words ending in geminates add a vowel to form the plural (but which vowel?), and ...

I would say it is a valid definition though - it seems to work for most writing systems other than cuneiform. (Including hanzi - so-called 'Gothic' fonts use monolines.) On the other hand, if you have a better definition of the meaning of a 'letter prototype', I would be happy to use yours. Eh, jus...

Starting from this, I would define the prototype of a letter as being the form it takes when you try to handwrite it most legibly with a monoline pen. According to this definition, serifs never have consistently been part of the prototype; one effect of this is that most people don't write the seri...

For comparison, serifs have been around since the Romans, and yet they still aren't part of the prototype. I can't agree, when before 1800 every printed font had serifs! Sans serif fonts seemed so odd when they were introduced that they were called "grotesque". (I don't mean people said t...

But gestural interfaces don't have to be dominant to influence font design; really they only need to look cool to font designers. Is this how it works? I would have thought that - at least for body text - font designers would stick to generally-established letter forms for legibility, and would onl...