Zompist Bboard Again

So, last weekend, someone (not me! I mostly post Digimon XD) posted some tidbits of LCK, PCK and Lexipedia on Tumblr, and it's... kinda ballooned out. It's reached over 20K, of which 10K are reblogs and predictably a lot of people want to know what the books are. So Mark, if you notice an unusual ri...

Some time ago I was proofreading a story for a friend and we ended up in a huge argument because, as it turned out, he was utterly convinced that they could be used as a casual obviative third person in English. This was in a scene with three male characters. Now, he did not have the linguistic voca...

I think I was reacting to something in the poetics page about [paraphrasing] Verdurians not finding highly contrived metrical effects graceful. I'd probably state that more forgivingly today. Verdurians do say that eyurcrivát should be normal speech elevated, not distorted to fit the poetic form. B...

The best grammar there is, I think, is Michel Launey's Introduction to Classical Nahuatl . I use this online dictionary: http://sites.estvideo.net/malinal/nahuatl.page.html It's an excellent French-Nahuatl dictionary, with references, quotes for everything, etymologies when available and additional...

If we contrast these analyses with the emic/etic opposition, I don't think my assertion that they are ultimately baseless speculation (which actually comes through your post, IMO), placing them entirely outside that divide, is entirely unwarranted. ( Plus, it's unsatisfying. I sure as hell don't und...

I was under the impression that stressing them was more likely to be done by adding the moi/toi form? Moi, je fais la cuisine. Which makes it more like Rounin's take on the Spanish/Italian example. That's correct, that.s really the most common way. In fact none of the exemples I listed is very comm...

- To the 'etic' and 'emic' distinction (as I understand, material factors of culture vs. culture understood on its own terms) I'd like to add a third category, when authors speculate on what the culture might have thought it was doing. That is the emic level. Though it's a bit more complicated than...

Of course, we see the suffix -on , as found in Yukon, Oregon, Washington, Cimarron, Trenton, Carson City, Jefferson City, Jackson, Boston, Baton Rouge, Houston, Arlington I like this one a lot... a perfect mixture of actual and coincidental resemblances. What's particularly neat is the reconstructo...

Especially since I actually had an answer typed up back Monday, but somehow never hit the send button for it! Turns out I don't have that much to say because, for some reason, I thought the October 3 post had never been actually sent. (1)Basically, a Mfalen causative (for example) expresses the cau...

I'll throw in that on my favorite aspect of attaching locations and instrumentals to individual verbal arguments is that it makes it so simple to assign separate ones to different participants in an action, something that requires some hoop jumping in all languages I know of enough to make a compar...

Hey guys. There's been a lot of very interesting points and I do intend to discuss my ideas further in response to them, especially regarding complex locatives. However, ADHD is (unfortunately <<;;;) a thing that exist and it seems like it grips me every time I intend to answer. Especially since I a...

Quite a few languages use locative verbs in serial verb constructions for locatives, which could do what you want. So essentially, the equivalent of ‘I’m going to Rome’ would be something like ‘I go be.in Rome’. Occasionally you also see transitive motion verbs, which would make it even simpler: ‘I...

As a feature I want to be in Mfalen, I want to try building it without verbal adjuncts. That is, nouns are either part of a noun phrase, or one of the maximum three arguments a verb can have (Mfalen verbs are explicitly marked for valency). I've already figured out how this affect valency-increasing...

I want to add my signature to the sincere expressions of thankfulness for this. I've taken a casual interest in Nahuatl as a language, but I don't think I've seen as condensed accounts of the culture before. Mexica priests said 'Let us perish, since our gods are already dead.' Another interesting st...

Modern Welsh rejoices in between eight and twenty different methods of plural formation, dependant on the speaker, dialect and analysis. Frankly, this is ridiculous and is more a reason that my native language needs to have a little word with itself than any whingeing about mutation or "not ha...

Doesn't the grammar determine what information is required from the lexicon? In theory, the lexicon and grammar support one another. If the formation of the passive is complicated, one might naturally expect to find the passive forms in the lexicon. I can well imagine that the author of the grammar...

Ah, now this explains the constant mentions that passives and impersonals are not "base voice"... Again, note the incapacity to establish whether a passive is a verbal feature or a verbal derivation : if it is a verbal derivation that any transitive verb can go through, it is fairly self-...

Back onto criticising the book. The more I analyse it, the more I reach the conclusion that a good editor never actually went through the book check for basic readability of its organization and a sensible choice of replacement for the technical terms. Case in point: Chapter 3 on demonstratives. Thi...

So, I've recently started re-reading the book and I have quite a few specific beefs I can voice now as I go through it. While I have commented on Vilike's issue with spelling that "Choosing to use a spelling system that is actually taught in official educational capacities is not exactly the wo...

You also suggest that they're ambitransitive. Wikipedia calls these agentive ambitransitives: e.g. "Mary is knitting a sweater" vs. "Mary is knitting". OK, cool, except that its examples (eat, follow, help, knit, read, try, watch, win, know) don't show the discrepancy you've poi...