Search found 636 matches
- Wed May 23, 2018 1:12 pm
- Forum: L&L Museum
- Topic: Polysynthesis for Novices
- Replies: 170
- Views: 191893
Re: Polysynthesis for Novices
So one way is treating the incorporated noun like an adverbial, one like a classifier. The transitivity is determined by the person marking of the verb. The incorporated object is analogous to an English adverb, not an English (in-)direct object. With a content verb like "hunt" or "fish", one can sa...
- Fri May 18, 2018 10:48 am
- Forum: L&L Museum
- Topic: Polysynthesis for Novices
- Replies: 170
- Views: 191893
Re: Polysynthesis for Novices
Sorry if this has been answered somewhere and I missed it (so many pages!). Let's take a transitive verb such as from dhok's question from almost a decade ago: "My mom gave me milk". If there's a verb milk-give and you can say a thing such as my-mom she-milk-me-gave , is the verb still transitive or...
- Wed May 09, 2018 1:00 pm
- Forum: Languages & Linguistics
- Topic: Does Germanic have native terms for "cube" and "sphere"?
- Replies: 4
- Views: 5015
Re: Does Germanic have native terms for "cube" and "sphere"?
Icelandic has teningur which means die in the toy sense, or cube in the mathematical/scientific sense. It has three words for sphere-like things: kúla which can refer to any kind of ball that's usually hard, like a bowling ball or a billiards ball, or a sphere in the mathmatical sense, hnöttur / knö...
- Mon Feb 12, 2018 4:03 pm
- Forum: Languages & Linguistics
- Topic: Affricates
- Replies: 10
- Views: 4122
Re: Affricates
Coarticulate = heterorganic cluster that behave as single phoneme
Affricate = coarticulate of homorganic plosive and fricative
So, an affricate is a subset of coarticulates. Coarticulates must be 1) homorganic, 2) stop+fricative, in order to be defined as affricates.
Affricate = coarticulate of homorganic plosive and fricative
So, an affricate is a subset of coarticulates. Coarticulates must be 1) homorganic, 2) stop+fricative, in order to be defined as affricates.
- Mon Feb 05, 2018 5:19 pm
- Forum: Languages & Linguistics
- Topic: Will singular "they" be as acceptable as "you" in formal Eng
- Replies: 44
- Views: 18990
Re: Will singular "they" be as acceptable as "you" in formal
My husband (American born and raised) uses they almost exclusively when talking about someone he doesn't know personally. If he's talking about a celebrity or fictional character, for instance, I've noticed he may use he or she in the first sentence, and then revert to they for all following sentenc...
- Tue Dec 19, 2017 3:31 pm
- Forum: Conlangery & Conworlds
- Topic: Getting rid of grammatical features
- Replies: 12
- Views: 4602
Re: Getting rid of grammatical features
"To school," "to town," "to port"...? I think these are probably relics of the older, pre-article stage of English, rather than recent innovations. What "pre-article stage of English"? English always had a definite article – but the indefinite article is an innovation that occured after there was s...
- Wed Dec 06, 2017 3:27 pm
- Forum: Almea
- Topic: New Almeopedia
- Replies: 29
- Views: 20612
Re: New Almeopedia
Overall, great. I admire your holding on to the HTML4 look—the Metaverse remains a bastion of original web aesthetics that otherwise are almost completely gone. That said, I hope you take the opportunity to make some of the pictures on here (especially maps) somewhat larger and perhaps wrap them in ...
- Thu Nov 09, 2017 4:48 pm
- Forum: None of the above
- Topic: The username thread
- Replies: 16
- Views: 8467
Re: The username thread
My old name was vegfarandi which means pedestrian, or more literally, road goer, in my native Icelandic. It was the name of my Icelandic Star Trek fansite I used to run back in the '98-'01. The conceit of the website was that it was the database of an Icelandic speaking 24th century Star Fleet vesse...
- Tue Mar 21, 2017 3:50 pm
- Forum: Languages & Linguistics
- Topic: Digital Voice Synthesizer
- Replies: 6
- Views: 2885
- Fri Jul 22, 2016 12:49 pm
- Forum: Conlangery & Conworlds
- Topic: I need some help understanding kinship terminology.
- Replies: 7
- Views: 2933
Re: I need some help understanding kinship terminology.
Here's one related question that I haven't found satisfyingly answered. Under Iroquois systems, are there special terms for "real father" and "real mother" or is the family arrangement such that that becomes irrelevant? How does ego's paternal uncle being considered your father work in practice? And...
- Wed Jun 29, 2016 2:38 pm
- Forum: Languages & Linguistics
- Topic: Loss of tone, resulting in...what?
- Replies: 13
- Views: 4358
Re: Loss of tone, resulting in...what?
Tones are typically not codas, but supersegmentals, i.e. features of the vowels/syllables them selves, rather than consonantal components.
- Wed Jun 22, 2016 9:36 am
- Forum: Languages & Linguistics
- Topic: Kinship terms: uncles/aunts
- Replies: 20
- Views: 5111
Re: Kinship terms: uncles/aunts
Icelandic doesn't distinguish aunts from nieces or cousins, or uncles from nephews or cousins, using frænka for the former and frændi for all the latter. You can say frændfólk to cover a group of relatives that fall into these categories. In order to be specific, Icelandic has a productive system li...
- Tue Jun 21, 2016 3:28 pm
- Forum: Languages & Linguistics
- Topic: Regional accents are losing the battle to standard English
- Replies: 17
- Views: 4764
Re: Regional accents are losing the battle to standard Engli
The longer I've lived in the US, the more perceptive I am of dialectal differences here. The minute differences in a-sounds and o-sounds in particular that make such a huge difference here in America. That said, I barely ever hear people with a "New York" accent around me – occasionally with Jews an...
- Tue Jun 21, 2016 3:15 pm
- Forum: Languages & Linguistics
- Topic: Past participles ending in /ən/ in dialectal English
- Replies: 11
- Views: 2928
Re: Past participles ending in /ən/ in dialectal English
So is this mostly a US phenomenon? What's the geographic distribution of this? I can't say I've noticed this but I will for sure now. (I never noticed "youse" until I read an article about it).
- Tue Jun 07, 2016 2:52 pm
- Forum: L&L Museum
- Topic: Teach-Learn Polarity [mostly on causatives]
- Replies: 19
- Views: 15279
Re: Teach-Learn Polarity [mostly on causatives]
Own–give are interesting in this regard to, and similar verbs of possession and possession transfer. I created a whole system around it in my conlang Imutan.
- Wed Jun 01, 2016 2:21 pm
- Forum: Conlangery & Conworlds
- Topic: Spontaneous collaborative conlangs
- Replies: 5
- Views: 2410
Re: Spontaneous collaborative conlangs
Cedh and I collaborated heavily on Proto-Ronquian/Rompian, along with our team on the relay which included Nort, Dhok, Nerulent, CatDoom, Pogostick Man, Click, Vortex and ObsequiousNewt. It kind of just happened that Cedh and I took charge once the phonology and core features of the grammar had been...
- Fri May 13, 2016 11:02 am
- Forum: Conlangery & Conworlds
- Topic: Conlang relay [relocated] (aka "The Cursed Relay")
- Replies: 2538
- Views: 900088
Re: Akana Conlang Relay 2011 (The Never Ending Relay)
Proto-Leic so far boggles my mind. Although the recent work done by Cedh and some others made it a little easier for me. I'd love to get on it again soon.
- Fri May 13, 2016 8:53 am
- Forum: Languages & Linguistics
- Topic: Language "not confined to specific areas" of the brain
- Replies: 1
- Views: 1577
Re: Language "not confined to specific areas" of the brain
Interesting. So far, essentially all we knew about this stuff was what could be learnt from Wernicke's aphasia and Broca's aphasia, but I've always figured it was more complex than that.
- Fri May 13, 2016 8:51 am
- Forum: Languages & Linguistics
- Topic: Exotic Conditional Clauses
- Replies: 9
- Views: 3656
Re: Exotic Conditional Clauses
Algonquian languages have separate inflection paradigms for verbs in independent clauses (the independent order) and those in subordinate clauses (the conjunct order). (This is a bit misleading as there are other orders depending on the language, and not all conjunct verbs are subordinate, but this...
- Thu May 12, 2016 10:09 am
- Forum: Conlangery & Conworlds
- Topic: Conlangs and copyright
- Replies: 17
- Views: 6979
Re: Conlangs and copyright
The thing is, Paramount has always allowed fan-made movies to exist without trouble. Axanar is the first one they've sued and I think the reason is, it's looking to actually be really really good. It has a shitton of Star Trek veterans, actors and crew on board, all working on a voluntary basis. The...
- Tue May 03, 2016 2:21 pm
- Forum: Languages & Linguistics
- Topic: Exotic Conditional Clauses
- Replies: 9
- Views: 3656
Re: Exotic Conditional Clauses
Cool. How does Greenlandic handle counterfactual conditions?
Also, is seqinner "sunshine" in the example given a verb or a noun? Anyone know?
Also, is seqinner "sunshine" in the example given a verb or a noun? Anyone know?
- Tue May 03, 2016 2:19 pm
- Forum: Languages & Linguistics
- Topic: Grammar resource for 1,362 languages
- Replies: 21
- Views: 26897
- Tue May 03, 2016 2:16 pm
- Forum: Languages & Linguistics
- Topic: How are conjunctions handled cross-linguistically?
- Replies: 13
- Views: 3798
Re: How are conjunctions handled cross-linguistically?
There's and and there's and . Not all conjunctions are equal and the nuances can be quite tricky to point down. Icelandic has no independent conjunction akin to English "yet", conflating it with en which primarily means "but". But Icelandic en can be used to form semi-dependent clarification clauses...
- Tue May 03, 2016 1:55 pm
- Forum: Languages & Linguistics
- Topic: Exotic Conditional Clauses
- Replies: 9
- Views: 3656
Exotic Conditional Clauses
Are there more exotic ways of handling conditional clauses than the if-like subordinate clause? Are there languages that exclusively use verb marking with no conjunctions involved, similar to English "Were he to go, I would disown him"? In such cases, is the protasis considered a dependent clause? A...
- Tue May 03, 2016 1:17 pm
- Forum: Conlangery & Conworlds
- Topic: Conlangs and copyright
- Replies: 17
- Views: 6979
Re: Conlangs and copyright
A language in and of itself probably is not copyrightable. I could see how word lists, however, were copyrightable. That it would be difficult for a third party to create, say, a dictionary based on that word list, since the original lexicon by the creator is the only source. Unless the author engag...