Zompist Bboard Again

‘Adjective-noun agreement’ is mostly something you find in languages with a noun class (or gender) system. Noun class is distinctive in that it is not overt but marked on other parts of speech, and adjectives are just one of the other elements of the sentence where it can be marked. Suffixaufnahme ...

[...] many languages have case-marking in the form of clitics that attach to entire NP's at a time and which only form anything resembling "declensions" due to phonological effects of the clitics attaching to the (usually) final word in the NP. This is actually closer to what I was ultima...

The below table represents the declension of vowel-final nouns in a WIP conlang (my first, really). I'm looking for advice on how best to organize--to the extent possible--these into "classes." They are organized by proto-vowel endings. An accent mark indicates stress in an unexpected loca...

What characteristics of a language influence how agreement develops diachronically (hopefully I am using this term correctly)? For example, Spanish has adjective-noun agreement, where adjectives and nouns in a noun phrase agree in number/gender, but Basque seems to just stick suffixes on the last wo...

TW: N00b struggling through first conlang. I'm trying to work out a grammatical change where an old genitive case becomes a fossilized ending on nouns that become a closed class of "adjectives" and then the old possessive sense of the genitive is replaced by an old ablative case. I wanted ...

I am hoping to diachronically develop a “light verb” system where there is a small, closed class of inflecting verbs that combine with some other element to form a complex predicate, similar to the indigenous languages of Australia. Assuming this was not the system used in the protolanguage, what ex...

What are some conceivable ways to end up with a T/D/Dʱ series? I found ⁿD > Tʱ in e.g. some Bantu languages . I also found DD > Dʰ in Kiput . Both of these, though, don't seem to be technically [+voiced +breathy] (one is [-voiced +breathy], the other [+voiced +aspirated], and the 2nd (in the real wo...