Zompist Bboard Again

[...] 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...