Search found 364 matches
- Sun Jul 03, 2016 3:25 am
- Forum: Languages & Linguistics
- Topic: Estonian is a conlang.
- Replies: 17
- Views: 4853
Re: Estonian is a conlang.
IIRC Finnish has a few words with similar origins, i.e. inventions of 19th and early 20th century enthusiasts. Alas, I do not recall any specific such words at the moment.
- Thu Jun 02, 2016 11:54 am
- Forum: Languages & Linguistics
- Topic: Most Logical Word Order
- Replies: 19
- Views: 6131
Re: Most Logical Word Order
My conlang is also designed to be what you might call "logical", so I've given this some thought too. As mentioned, VSO is the standard in formal logic, and many other kinds of formal languages. More generally, we tend to write the operation first and the argument later, like f(x), for example. Nat...
- Wed Apr 06, 2016 11:01 am
- Forum: Languages & Linguistics
- Topic: Haida and Na-Dene
- Replies: 161
- Views: 65474
Re: Haida and Na-Dene
One thing, though, that I absolutely have to cling to is how "language" in Haida is "kil". I mean, that's some straight-up Ural-Altaic shit right there; Mongolian "хэл", Finnish "kieli", Estonian "keel", Chuvash "чĕлхе", Kazakh "til", Turkish "dil", etc. I know it's probably a coincidence, but I th...
- Mon Sep 22, 2014 11:43 pm
- Forum: Conlangery & Conworlds
- Topic: Grammaticalization Quickie Thread
- Replies: 94
- Views: 39415
Re: Grammaticalization Quickie Thread
How about a definite marker becoming a perfective marker? In Old Albic, I have a definite article a , which is of West Hesperic vintage. The same language also has a perfective prefix, the "augment" °- (a vowel that assimilates to the root vowel). Both reflect Proto-Hesperic *a . I think this could...
- Sat Sep 06, 2014 5:53 am
- Forum: Languages & Linguistics
- Topic: Lexical ultra-conservatism
- Replies: 53
- Views: 17351
Re: Lexical ultra-conservatism
(Who among us is aware of the original meaning 2000 years ago of the word "America" anyway?) Well, "America" wasn't even a word 2,000 years ago. The name is a Latinate derivation from the first name of Amerigo Vespucci, a Florentine navigator. A couple of letters allegedly written by him and publis...
- Tue Sep 02, 2014 8:06 am
- Forum: Languages & Linguistics
- Topic: Allophones
- Replies: 7
- Views: 2083
Re: Allophones
Best way of organizing it:
a table of places and manners of articulation. A really blunt stick to point at it with that won't point at less than maybe a dozen cells at a time.
a table of places and manners of articulation. A really blunt stick to point at it with that won't point at less than maybe a dozen cells at a time.
- Mon Jul 28, 2014 3:25 pm
- Forum: Conlangery & Conworlds
- Topic: Con-Astronomy for my Con-World
- Replies: 6
- Views: 2033
Re: Con-Astronomy for my Con-World
An entirely unrelated question, but since gach's here I figure I might as well butt in: is there any chance for a habitable planet to have two or even three moons with visible disks of sufficiently large size that some features could be visible in them from the planet's surface? Say - at least half ...
- Thu Jul 03, 2014 4:51 am
- Forum: Languages & Linguistics
- Topic: Swedish färst
- Replies: 13
- Views: 3104
Re: Swedish färst
I find it hard to believe that (as she claimed) it's a "language hole" in Swedish I think language holes are really a gradual thing. Much like there are very few "real" synonyms, there are very few (useful) things that you really can't say, but there are some things that don't have a convenient wel...
- Thu Jul 03, 2014 4:29 am
- Forum: Languages & Linguistics
- Topic: Swedish verb musings
- Replies: 25
- Views: 5942
Re: Swedish verb musings
I came up with an other one, nyck , thought I only ever used the plural nycker . One translation I found is "ideas" thought it doesn't quite capture the word because it means more like "one who constantly gets strange ideas and the need to do them" with a positive or negative interpretation dependi...
- Sun Jun 15, 2014 4:45 am
- Forum: Languages & Linguistics
- Topic: Language Complexity
- Replies: 29
- Views: 6914
Re: Language Complexity
There's even more complicated systems in existence.KathAveara wrote:Many languages express the genitive with neither an adposition or a case, but simply by placing the two nouns next to each other.
- Wed Jun 11, 2014 1:20 pm
- Forum: Languages & Linguistics
- Topic: Regular and Irregular Languages
- Replies: 36
- Views: 8161
Re: Regular and Irregular Languages
Russian (and Slavic languages in general) put a great emphasis on the aspect system, yet you basically have to learn the aspect-pairs as *pairs*, no single rule can be used to generate the perfect from the imperfect or vice versa. You are talking about the perfective and imperfective . The imperfec...
- Wed Jun 11, 2014 7:14 am
- Forum: Languages & Linguistics
- Topic: Regular and Irregular Languages
- Replies: 36
- Views: 8161
Re: Regular and Irregular Languages
Russian (and Slavic languages in general) put a great emphasis on the aspect system, yet you basically have to learn the aspect-pairs as *pairs*, no single rule can be used to generate the perfect from the imperfect or vice versa. Should we count this or not? Whether we decide to do so or not, we're...
- Wed Jun 04, 2014 5:01 pm
- Forum: Languages & Linguistics
- Topic: reflexive verb marking (current: ergative subjects in Hindi)
- Replies: 27
- Views: 6190
Re: reflexive verb marking origins
With reflexive possession, something a bit like this happens in Finnish: hän romutti autonsa = 3sg trash.past3sg car.his = he trashed his ( own ) car.3sgposs hän romutti hänen autonsa = 3sg.nom trash.past.3sg 3sg.gen car.poss = he trashed his car (where his refers to some other third person) This s...
- Wed Jun 04, 2014 7:56 am
- Forum: Languages & Linguistics
- Topic: reflexive verb marking (current: ergative subjects in Hindi)
- Replies: 27
- Views: 6190
Re: reflexive verb marking origins
hän romutti hänen autonsa = 3sg.nom trash.past.3sg 3sg.gen car.poss = he trashed his car (where his refers to some other third person) Do people actually use grammar like that in any part of the country? In the Finnish varieties I'm familiar with the 3rd person possessive suffix isn't used for refl...
- Wed Jun 04, 2014 3:40 am
- Forum: Languages & Linguistics
- Topic: reflexive verb marking (current: ergative subjects in Hindi)
- Replies: 27
- Views: 6190
Re: reflexive verb marking origins
Are there any languages that use a genitive case on pronouns to indicate reflexivity, rather than having a separate set of reflexive pronouns? So, you would have something like this: he.NOM hit.PERF he.ACC = "He hit him (someone else)." he.NOM hit.PERF he.GEN = "He hit himself." With reflexive poss...
- Tue Jun 03, 2014 4:15 pm
- Forum: Conlangery & Conworlds
- Topic: Are allophones in big phonological inventories less likely?
- Replies: 8
- Views: 3220
Re: Are allophones in big phonological inventories less like
You are aware that you'll never perfectly recreate your mouth's setup when uttering the same phoneme twice? That falls under allophony, even though it may be so fine-graded that it's barely measurable.
- Tue May 20, 2014 1:22 pm
- Forum: Languages & Linguistics
- Topic: Swedish verb musings
- Replies: 25
- Views: 5942
Re: Swedish verb musings
bre - spread (eg. condiments on a slice of bread) There's the form breda to account for this one, still the form preferred in more formal language. klä - clothe; (clothes) suit someone kläda strö - sprinkle ströa is common enough in some spoken varieties to be worth mentioning (if gothenburg-specif...
- Fri May 16, 2014 9:51 am
- Forum: Languages & Linguistics
- Topic: Nationalism and fringe linguistics
- Replies: 46
- Views: 9698
Re: Nationalism and fringe linguistics
Whatwith the nationalist party having made some gains in the elections in India, it wouldn't surprise me if more money is channelled into fringe linguistics in India
- Wed May 07, 2014 5:48 am
- Forum: Languages & Linguistics
- Topic: Segment
- Replies: 10
- Views: 2598
Re: Segment
But given that in consonant mutation in Welsh the mutation is grammatically triggered (and in some cases marks a semantic distinction!) could we even say that it begins with a segment? A more common way of describing this I think is to refer to them as "allomorphs" or "morphologically conditioned a...
- Wed Apr 30, 2014 7:25 am
- Forum: Languages & Linguistics
- Topic: Topic markers and adpositions
- Replies: 4
- Views: 1937
Re: Topic markers and adpositions
I don't know the specific case of Quechua, but I think case affixes usually originate from adpositions and ultimately from adverbs, nouns or verbs as the head of the construction. In any case, Quechua -qa attaches enclitically to the topic and is thus "on the same side" of the case suffixes. Other ...
- Wed Apr 30, 2014 4:50 am
- Forum: Languages & Linguistics
- Topic: Topic markers and adpositions
- Replies: 4
- Views: 1937
Re: Topic markers and adpositions
Where do Quechua suffixes originate from?zompist wrote:Quechua -qa presumably didn't derive from adpositions, because the language has none.
- Mon Feb 17, 2014 4:13 pm
- Forum: Conlangery & Conworlds
- Topic: Where are the African conlangs?
- Replies: 62
- Views: 21856
Re: Where are the African conlangs?
I have the intention of making an african-inspired lang, but as always, ... my plans for when to complete it keep being adjusted.
- Sat Feb 01, 2014 10:13 am
- Forum: Languages & Linguistics
- Topic: The plurals of deer-like animals in English
- Replies: 25
- Views: 8496
Re: The plurals of deer-like animals in English
Hmm, the phrase "Look at all the X!" seems to fit most animals, the exceptions seem to be harder to find. You could say "Look at all the lobster!" refering to an aquarium or something full of live lobster, or "Look at all the vulture in that field!" but not when talking about pig or shark. I kind o...
- Thu Jan 30, 2014 2:32 pm
- Forum: Conlangery & Conworlds
- Topic: Performance arts of my conpeople and yours
- Replies: 15
- Views: 3642
Re: Performance arts of my conpeople and yours
A notion just struck me - how common has sex as a (somewhat respected) performance art ever been in human cultures? In the modern world, recorded sex performances are a kind of cheap entertainment, but how about, I dunno, acrobatic renditions of stuff from the racier parts of the Kama Sutra, perform...
- Wed Jan 29, 2014 4:57 am
- Forum: Languages & Linguistics
- Topic: Case and morphosyntactic alignments
- Replies: 4
- Views: 1701
Re: Case and morphosyntactic alignments
You're probably both right - you're essentially talking about different things to which we happen to stick the same label.