Zompist Bboard Again

E.g. German has this with body parts, e.g. one says "die Hände" (lit. "the hands") rather than *"meine Hände" (lit. *"my hands"). Huh? I have no problem with saying "meine Hände". Okay, apparently you can say both "ich wasche mir die Hände"...

Neither language has an alienable vs inalienable distinction. This sort of odd behavior only occurs with words related to the family. Oftentimes family members and body parts specifically have special behavior due to being inalienable which are not shared with other nouns, even in languages without...

This question comes from the observation that both in Italian and Hebrew nouns for family members behave a bit differently from other nouns. More specifically, in Italian, the normal way to express possession is through definite article + possessive adjective + noun (e.g: il mio cane, literally &qu...

This seems like something that is bound to have been discussed at some point, but basically: is there a language out there where there are different types of 'and'? In my mind I keep using terms like 'inclusive and' and 'exclusive and' , but they're probably not very good descriptors. Sometimes and...

This question comes from the observation that both in Italian and Hebrew nouns for family members behave a bit differently from other nouns. More specifically, in Italian, the normal way to express possession is through definite article + possessive adjective + noun (e.g: il mio cane, literally &quo...

Hello. I'm new here and to the world of conlanging at large. I just created the phonemic inventory for my conlang Odnala, but now I'm stuck because I have no idea how to create a convincing set of allophones (keep in mind that I'm aiming for naturalism). Have linguists individuated some cross-lingu...

Hello. I'm new here and to the world of conlanging at large. I just created the phonemic inventory for my conlang Odnala, but now I'm stuck because I have no idea how to create a convincing set of allophones (keep in mind that I'm aiming for naturalism). Have linguists individuated some cross-lingui...