Zompist Bboard Again

A morpheme is an idemtifiable element of a word that changes the meaning driven without the -(e)n would be the base form, not a past participle. Bad example. Without the -en, it’s just /drɪv/. The vowel is altered exactly like write > written. It’s just not shown orthographically because v is tradi...

I get the feeling we're constantly talking past each other. I never said non-productive affixes are part of the stem , I never used that word. We were talking about morphemes , and I do indeed argue that words like <written>, that historically are composed of a stem + affix, are in a synchronic ana...

Also, stem ablauts have little to do with morphemes, or are ablauts now counted as a morpheme?? Yep, and not just "now", they counted already when I studied linguistics over 30 years ago (to be exact, "sing", "sang", and "sung" are three different morphemes).

Where do the imperfect forms of "to be" come from?

Iirc correctly, some languages (was it Slavic ones?) have an unmarked imperfective present and a marked imperfective past, while the unmarked perfective defaults to the perfective past. Slavic languages have varying systems, but the two I know best, Russian and Polish, are very similar in this rega...

Thanks for looking that up!

If I am not mistaken, Tautisca is a Romance language set in present-day Germany, which makes me think that 'Tautisca' is meant to be cognate with Deutsch . Edit: I looked it up and I am mistaken -- Tautisca is not meant to be in any specific actual IE branch. Well, it's meant to be Western IE; *tew...

Does anyone know when travelling entertainers with trained monkeys are first attested? In theory at least, they could already have existed in Roman times and travvelled to Germanic-speaking areas.

Great concept and presentation, I like it!
What I would be interested in is the historical grammar and etymologies; as my main conlang Tautisca is also an Indo-European a posteriori language, I'm curious about what assumptions on IE / Proto-Italic reconstruction you made.

The Romans knew monkeys, and AFAIK the Germanic word referred to both apes and monkeys, as does German Affe still today.

I'd be surprised if that's different to German - your Schwieger-X becomes your Ex-Schwieger-X formally upon divorce, but you may go on referring to them without the "Ex" out of habit, especially, like linguistcat said, when you keep a good relationship with them. A big incentive to switch ...

What did Germanic languages use before they incorporated that one? Apparently English had hlēapan , modern ‘leap’. Gothic had plinsjan , which is a loan from Proto-Slavic. Looks like the Germanic people weren't good at dancing, liked it better when other peoples did it, and loaned their words for i...

Thank you! Still, in some other contexts, "Unterlage" means something that you don't directly work with, such as something you put under the paper you're reading and on which you're writing. Well, words can have more than one meaning... On the original image, see how we also talk about th...

Other one that I just thought of, but because I hear it pronounced a very... "particular" way quite often: how do you pronounce determine ? (And this is especially for non-native speakers.) I pronounce it [dɪˈtʰɝmɪn], incidentally. That's how I pronounce it as well. I guess the peculiar p...

Imralu wrote: ↑Fri Mar 13, 2026 6:53 pm

hwhatting wrote: ↑Tue Mar 10, 2026 2:35 am That's a funny story.
I see that I don't have developed any lexicon in that area (fun, laughing, jokes...) yet... time to get working on that!

Wai ndwa ngo Dyamani.
You are German.

That's a funny story.
I see that I don't have developed any lexicon in that area (fun, laughing, jokes...) yet... time to get working on that!

Thank you for sharing this and for the art your story made you create!

Zi zumba ngai bo ba danyo. My old flatmate wants to be old. Nai ze mu zye. I don't know why. Dei zi ngulo zyeu nai nwimu, mye nai ze. He tried to explain it to me, but I didn't understand. Nu en sam sancunaus dauriaf gantun ennun mochai, yaup tommé somé aiwé dauriais immoi ennun wolt. PRTC 3.M-SG.A...

Cailai a tan senutatun bíten wollantis, nainus sancus ennun néwult. whole-M.PL.NOM to ART-F.SG.ACC old.age-SG.ACC live-INF want-3PL.PRES.ACT, none-M.SG.NOM old-M.SG.NOM NEG.want-3SG.PRES.ACT Everybody wants to get old, noone wants to be old. (Lit.: All want to live to the old age, noone wants to be...

(1) Why does English have separate words for yellow/orange and brown? Why isn't brown simply called "dark yellow/orange" instead? I assume that this was inherited from PIE, because other languages descended from PIE do the same thing. No; it's actually quite hard to reconstruct any PIE co...