zompist bboard

Very good.

I am having some trouble with the alignment of features for words. That is, if I click the edit feature button, the feature doesn't apply to the word for which I clicked the button. I think it may have something to do with the reordering which doesn't seem to happen underlyingly.

You're right, I broke it. It'll be fixed in the next update. Speaking of character encoding, though, you'll need to set Settings -> Force Unicode to import UTF-8 files correctly if you're on Windows (which seems to always assume they aren't UTF-8). Awesome, thanks. I do have that set already. There...

What does the file you're trying to import from look like? Sorry about the formatting code in the export - it was doing that on some of my test dictionaries, but I thought it was an artifact from the old version getting translated over. I'll see if I can fix it. EDIT: Did you import your dictionary...

I am having some trouble importing a lexical set from a txt file right now (it doesn't work). And export the lexicon to a txt file works, but also exports formatting code.

Cool. I'll take a look. I was having some issue with the last version and the dictionary part proper, so I'll let you know if those are resolved. Edit: Well, it does work nicely now adding a phonological parse when I add the word, and I realize that my earlier trouble was from adding words that didn...

I think what is occurring in those two examples is a fronting/raising of a wh- element around the infinitive that would be dependent on a main clause such as "I know" or "John told Sally" If you replace the wh- word with say "thus" and "him" you will see that the infinitive doesn't depend on those w...

Proto-Tlusa *idbitu [iðˈbitu] Hellenic-esque (working name): ispitu [is'pitu]

So I officially finished my Master's thesis today, submitted to my university. I had the basic idea for quite some time now having based it on a short paper I wrote last spring but I didn't really have a good framework for the thesis until about late January/early February. Since today (March 10) is...

In English, demonstratives can stand for whole clauses: They say it will rain tomorrow. I agree with that . So you'd need to think how that would work with gendered demonstratives. You could have a separate neuter gender reserved for such occasions, or perhaps a different word entirely. Or just use...

gach wrote:I need to refresh my Spanish a bit, but aren't these bound to the gender system of the language and obey gender agreement?

The first two are tied to the gender system, but I think the third (with -o) can be used for unintroduced or underspecified things. (not referring to a specific noun that is.)

Spanish might have something like this (my knowledge of Spanish is limited). The demonstratives have three singular forms. este, esta, esto ese, esa, eso aquel, aquella, aquello (I think this one also) The first two are masc, fem. The third is something else, but I don't think it can refer to humans...

So, in a language without grammatical gender, are there examples such as 'that.(human)' vs. 'that.(non-human)'? Is this what you are asking? I don't know of any in particular, but most of my language knowledge comes from languages with grammatical gender anyway. It seems like there would be at least...

kanejam, if you haven't already, I recommend looking at Andrew Sihler's "A New Comparative Grammar of Greek and Latin". It's an updated version of Carl Buck's and while it's focused on the histories of Greek and Latin, he does draw in Oscan material and comment on Proto-Italic forms.

I found a bug with the "…" wildcard, I think. Try using this rule: a/à/_/à…_ on these words akakakakakaka akkakkakkakkakkakka I would expect that only the first "a" would become "à" and the rest would be blocked, but it seems the "…" wildcard matches only one letter in the exception area if it comes...

"The man went therefore the woman went too." This is different. You are no longer joining 2 nouns, but 2 clauses. Examples: (Joining 2 nouns) Good: The man and the woman are hungry. Good: (Either) the man or the woman is hungry. Bad: The man but the woman are/is hungry. Bad: The man therefore the w...

Conjunctions are a terrible category in general. Often there are "conjunctions" related to prepositions (after, before); plus the classical distinction of "subordinating conjunction" vs. "coordinating conjunction". Myself, I would posit at least two categories: conjunctions (joining any two equal X ...

Wow, lots of posts to respond to! :) Thank you all for taking the time to respond helpfully! I especially like the lists and examples, even though I'm not going to respond to them in this post; have to think about them and mentally digest them first. I'll try to answer all questions asked of me but...

It's a bloody big mountain range. I think it's partially due to subduction, like the American Cordillera, but massive volcanism isn't out of the question either. I was asking because the way the high peaks and the plateau are situated in the interior of the continent surrounded by much lower ground...

I don't see why it's impossible to have a list of parts of speech found in all natural languages. There are a finite number of natural languages, and we can even exclude fragmentary ones. Of those, there are probably many cases where two closely related languages have exactly the same parts of spee...

Sure, well like I said, if you haven't read Zompist's stuff yet, do that. (I do recommend both the print Language Construction Kit and Advanced Language Construction (alias LCK2: Electric Boogaloo)). His books are really a good introduction into linguistic basics (and more advanced stuff also). As f...

Sunandshadow, if you haven't already, take a look at what Zompist has written for the language construction kit (online edition if you don't have the book edition). From my perusal of Baker's Lexical Categories , nouns are words which refer to entities or concepts, verbs create predicates, and adjec...

Very nice. I like the tenuous chain of islands between the northern and western continents.

Do you have any tectonics worked out? I always like tectonic verisimilitude, but it can be difficult to arrange with some style.

Apparently, optional categories don't play well coming before non-optional categories in the environment part. Use the following code with the sample to see what happens. T=ptcbdg V/V²/_(T)Tu VT/\\/_(T)u u//TV_ If the code is used as is, you will get fco, jco, and scendo; if you switch (T) and T, so...

Didn't you also change parts of Verdurian (and its sisters and cousins) to better derive from Cadinor and Proto-eastern, Zompist?

Awesome! Thanks for the update.