zompist bboard

But that's because you speak English, do you think I was relieved to learn English didn't have gender agreement? Nope, I thought things would just be impossible to translate from my native Spanish. It can be quite useful to have to make indirect references to gender all the time. Don't confuse "sim...

Thanks. i'll add that to my document. So... how do you plan to tackle an auxlang out of that when the languages are so different? E.g. should verbs have agreement with their subjects? Five of the six do, but they vary wildly on how much they do it, from Arabic full-on person-number-gender agreement ...

Feles wrote:Also browse http://wals.info/ .

Oooh. Bookmarked and saved to Delicious. Thank you!

MadBrain wrote:Rough ratings from about 1 to 5:

Woah. Awesome, thank you.

The first four ones are Indo-European, so there may be many genetic similarities. Other two, Arabic and Mandarin (the most popular of the Chinese languages), have numerous dialects. That's been a problem with that list. It doesn't specify dialects. So i'm hoping to learn what those genetic similari...

English, French, Spanish, Russian, Arabic and Chinese. For instance, what is the most common word order? Are they mostly agglutinating or gluten free? i'm wondering if there are user affordances i could use to my advantage, or traits to completely avoid. The order of the list indicates the relative...

I think you're asking what do other languages do in lieu of the English 'to' in terms of the infinitive? Exactly. Do they have them at all? Do they use a word that has another use (like English)? A specific word just for that? How do they solve the same issues? -- i'm considering: making the infini...

How do other NatLangs handle the function of the infinitive to ? "He likes to skate." (as opposed to the prepositional "He skated to the store") Likewise the existential there ? "There's going to be rain." And what would be a IAL* friendly way of handling these? * to be more specific... in an IAL th...

Do any of you have a special way in your conlang to represent the difference between the two? Do you have different conjugations? Are there two different words of each? Is there no difference? In mine, I decided to represent a transitive verb by adding a specific suffix, while adding a prefix when ...

I've been thinking of determiners too. My conlang uses articles, which is all fine, but it have the same boring old distinctions English has, pretty much. Except that definite plural is the default, and there is no option without article, so you would say "he likes the cakes" rather than "he likes ...

TomHChappell wrote:What is a "determiner system"?

How a language handles determiners, i'd guess. The difference between "a cat" and "the cat". Some languages handle it like an adjective, some make it a suffix. Some determiner systems have a structure/pattern, some appear more arbitrary.

What are the dimensions/arguments of determiners?

1) definiteness

My favorite determiner system? Well, I suppose that would have to be what I did in one of my own conlangs, Jamna Kopiai. In that language "Determiner" is not a word class, but rather a syntactic position, to which all sorts of elements can be moved that would otherwise be postnominal modifiers. Dei...

Fascinating stuff. Thanks for the replies so far.

One option is inline diacritics:

o:
n~
,c
e'
d^

Before for below, after for above.

Hey folks,

What is your favorite system for determiners, from either Nat or Con langs?

Thanks!

Hi all! I am working on an alphabet in which the consonants have three different forms (initial, medial and final) rather like Arabic. I want to be able to type this using a customized English keyboard layout (I use MSKLC for this). Anyways, I am having no end of trouble finding out how to make a f...

A girl I used to know, from the US, had a habit of using "yes" to confirm negative questions, and vice versa, which is the opposite of what I'm used to. If I asked "so you didn't see her today?" and she said "no", she meant that she did see her. I know this is how it works in Japanese, but I can't ...