zompist bboard

It's also found in Lebanese - "rain" is shitti . So "shitti weather" is a pun you sometimes may hear among anglophones in Beirut.... And, according to our teacher, the military school recruits he taught Arabic (for 10 years or so? I'm not sure) found this immensely funny when a Lebanese teacher tau...

I can think of some Arabic ones that change consonants instead of vowels, e.g. ثعبان \ تعبان tha3baan 'snake' vs. ta3baan 'tired' قلب \ كلب qalb 'heart' vs. kalb 'dog' (for people who don't manage the uvular q very well, our teacher has actually suggested to just use the colloquial pronunciation ?al...

As long as I'm not scheduled during Christmas break (I'm going somewhere where there's no Internet). That pretty much eliminates the second half of December. Any other time would probably be okay. ! Forgot to mention I'll be away between 19th and 25th December as well. I'll have internet, but proba...

Well, I think it would be nice to have conscripts, but it should be merely optional, because many people might not have conscripts and it takes a lot of trouble to write in them and translate from them. Very conveniently, though, most of the languages I offered have the Latin alphabet as (at least ...

I'm in if you'll take me. I'll be translating into High Eolic.

In Slovene, dež is the noun for rain, with the corresponding verb deževati (imperfective dežuje , in the third person singular, ie. "[it's] raining"). Similar for sneg - snežiti (although it takes a different stem form for some reason - probably related to fossilized morphophonological derivational ...

Slovene: zveniš kot... sound.IMPERF.2.SING as But zveneti is kind of a weird verb, since it doesn't have quite the same implications as "to sound" in English - it's a bit more naturally used for sounds as such, and only barely covers e.g. opinions. Also, it sounds slightly formal / non-colloquial to...

Is the participle used only as an adjective (such as "the old man") or can it also be used as a predicate? Which "participle" do you mean here? I don't think that they even exist (or if they do, they are not used) for the root in question, which is not surprising. The standard pattern for attributi...

naw man don't give up surely there's got to be some way to understand it ... I mean, it's a kind of animacy hierarchy controlling the valence here, and bumping people up or down the language's animacy scale based on social class is pretty easy to imagine a culture doing Yeah... I mean to me, it doe...

Part 3 now available! See here: http://jonafras.conlang.org/?p=435 I (maybe only I) don't understand it. I have no other criticism to make of it; it appears well-written, I just don't get it. Basically you use "wrong" valence particles in order to convey non-standard contextual meanings (relative s...

Part 3 now available! See here:

http://jonafras.conlang.org/?p=435

By the way, this method of describing roots is a feature of the Medieval Basran school, which understood the verb as the "root," while the Kufan school argued for the masdar (the truth is probably somewhere in between, but more to the side of the Kufan school in the case of primitive roots). !!! Th...

I take it that, traditionally, a form I verb is usually taken as the representation of the root (heck, if not the root itself!). Is there any sensible reason why we should take that a form I verb in particular is the most basic surface form of the root, specially for cases like s-w-d where a form I...

I'm currently working on a semi-long passage in High Eolic... a religious text, actually. Hopefully ready in a couple of weeks or so.

I had some proper stories in Trurian, but in an earlier form of the language... no longer current.

WeepingElf wrote:Nice, very interesting! Rock on!

Thank you. The last post will probably be the most interesting one - I don't remember seeing a lot of linguistic anthropology on this board.

What's the rationale behind the different National Bank "offices"/branches?

High Eolic honorific/participant reference marking, as well as valence (the same valence affixes have different implications depending on the transitivity of the verb they're affixed to). Trurian adverbial constructions - they're very neat, user-friendly, and form a specialized sentence slot/word ty...

UPDATE: Part 2 is now available: http://jonafras.conlang.org/?p=418 This deals with valence adjusting operations, including a number of causative constructions, and even applicatives and antipassives! (Passives are in there too - they just aren't all that interesting.) Comments and suggestions, agai...

In my own experience, flashcards are useful for being able to recall the meaning of words if you see them on a flashcard , but not for much else. I quite enjoyed Anki for a while, but later I realized that I didn't remember most of the words outside of seeing them in Anki... which makes them complet...

I have also just noticed; how would you deal with tetravalents, etc.? They just aren't marked. There can be any number of obliques, or whatever, present; the valence marker just has to agree with the core arguments, and any Class 2 Oblique (of course, if it is relevant to the specific class alignme...

UPDATE: Part 3 now available! See below: Part 1/3: http://jonafras.conlang.org/?p=415 Part 2/3: http://jonafras.conlang.org/?p=418 Part 3/3: http://jonafras.conlang.org/?p=435 On my blog... can't really be bothered to reformat here. As always, feedback welcome, etc. There will be two more posts in t...

The word for Japanese in Arabic, يبني، /jabani:/ [jEbEni], sounds exactly the same as "fucking" (adj., as in "that fucking guy") in Slovene/Serbian/what have you. (This was an in-joke between me and my first-undergrad-year Arabic teacher, whose wife was from Bosnia.)

Done - very interesting indeed! Although I forgot to mention that a basis in linguistics helps enormously, in all fields... but maybe that's kind of self-evident. :P I'm not sure how true I think this is… I don't think any explicit knowledge of linguistics makes much of a difference beyond the very...

VLC can't play it either.

EDIT: whoops, sorry, it can; you just have to open it from within the APPlication.

The language sounds cool, even though I can't understand a word of it... apart from "Skype" and "telefon numer" (?)

Done - very interesting indeed! Although I forgot to mention that a basis in linguistics helps enormously, in all fields... but maybe that's kind of self-evident.