Zompist Bboard Again

akam chinjir wrote: ↑Mon Aug 19, 2019 9:18 am Thanks for the questions!

No problem. It's good fun thinking about the consequences of seemingly simple grammar design choices.

I'm going to leave these underdescribed here, but =saj could use a bit of clarification. A while back I was trying to come up with a simple evidential system, and thought it would be cool to have an evidential that you'd use when the very act of making a statement guarantees that the sentence of tr...

Actually NWC's not so bad, the worst one's Ndu - you can't just put square your vertical vowel system with your lackluster consonant system by putting glides everywhere. Except, as I like to point out, I haven't ever seen a detailed modern description of a Ndu language that would support the vertic...

I don't have any good advice, but maybe some perspective: there's no need to make a conlang perfect, because it won't look perfect anyway once you've done several of them. I find it useful to think that after a while no natlang will look perfect either. They have grammatical processes that are less...

Touching on the ever returning discussion on musical styles, I've always enjoyed music that doesn't try to keep within narrow predefined limits but is instead written or performed simply to be good music. That's vague, I know, but it catches the sentiment of approaching music as artistic expression ...

I hadn't heard of Blake's case hierarchy before, but as a first impression I'm not that convinced by the concept. Isn't it common to have a direct case that merges nominative and accusative while having other cases? The hierarchy is certainly not strict and it's easy to cook up and justify exceptio...

1) It's interesting that it's "be" instead of "have". None of these languages have a word for “have”. They all express possession periphrasticly with “be”. Isn't the past tense in question also derived from the past active participle, so the semantic role of the subject would ne...

One thing I have always wondered: how does rhyming work in languages with significant inflection and agreement? Consider a language like Latin where nouns and adjectives agree in number, gender, and case. It seems like rhymes would frequently turn into repeating the same inflectional form in succes...

Raphael wrote: ↑Tue Feb 05, 2019 9:27 am How do you call, on the one hand, the numbers one, two, three etc., and on the other hand, the numbers first, second, third etc.?

Cardinal and ordinal numbers.

I agree, except that there are a few more situations where you can lenghten a word: When you are calling out to someone, and when you are speaking hesitantly. Yes, indeed. Interestingly the lengthening seems to behave differently in all these cases. When you are dragging out someone's name when cal...

When a language has a length distinction and a speaker wants to emphasise a word from a length minimal pair by lengthening it (as in nooooooo! or do you heeeaar me? ) how is the contrast maintained or is it not? I'm not sure I understand the question. I'm trying to think how we do it in Finnish, bu...

Imagine a babysitter saying, at the end of her work, to the mother of a couple girls: hoy se portaron bien tus niñas ~ hoy tus niñas se portaron bien 'your girls behaved pretty well today'. I tried these out on my wife, who's Peruvian. She thinks there's a very slight difference. Partly topicalizat...

Just as a quick one to start with: in S-type binary systems, when the secondary gets nearer to the primary (and the planet), does it mean that the planet heats up more because of the two stars? Is it additive or exponential, do you think? It seems that you've already figured an answer to this, but ...

We mostly have very limited knowledge of the syntax of reconstructed languages and constructing stories in them is in itself unlikely to provide new insight on the matter. It can be used to demonstrate how much of the basic grammar you have figured out, or think you have, which has its pedagogic use...

If you are interested in translations of the actual Schleicher's fable, there's this recently published manuscript, https://www.academia.edu/38068156/A_Song_of_Sheep_and_Horses_eurafrasia_nostratica_eurasia_indouralica It collects attempted translations into a wide selection of reconstructed proto-l...

I'm planning rhythmical stress, pretty much exactly like in Uralic. I just read Helimski 1995, and have a little better understanding of how that affects gradation. Before, I thought open syllables w/ secondary stress had strong grade consonants, but apparently they actually get weak. However, that...

It's always nice to see different people's takes on consonant gradation systems. I can think of a couple of suggestions you could think abut. The lenition in the gradation systems is in principle no different from lenition in other contexts. That means that while leniting voiced stops into nasals mi...

In its current state Kišta has two composite reportatives based on the finite conjugated imperfective and irrealis participles. The irrealis form marks reported information that's counter to the speaker's expectations. It can also be used as a simple direct mirative but I'll probably make that kind ...

I haven't used Celestia in ages and rather than go and install it in order to give a quick answer, I'm going to be terrible and go by memory. My recollection is that it gives you apparent coordinates of any selected target wherever in space you move yourself – at least in some coordinate system that...

No, I don't have a citation for that '95%' - I don't even know how you'd operationalise these terms for a rigorous study. It was impressionistic, a way of saying 'not universal, but close to it'. The point being that even without explicit numerical values, stating that something is "close to u...