zompist bboard

I think closer to the Trail of Tears (at the latest) is likelier. By the time of Little Big Horn, the policy of Indian removal and the reservation system were well established; this was the period of "Utes Must Go!". It's unlikely to come up with a scenario where large-scale Euro-American settlement...

Thanks for your perspectives. It's sort of my premise that you can't learn a language by studying it, you just have to slowly acquire it with lots of comprehensible input and expressive interaction. And while formally studying grammar and noun declension tables is a way of supercharging the normal a...

So, I've never learned a language with a robust noun declension system, mostly having studied French, Japanese, and non-European languages. But I've decided to learn Czech, which has a pretty intense declension system . This is probably an area where systematic study would be rewarding, but most of ...

I've always loved the parallel between Polish notation is Lisp and VSO languages. It seems much more logical, to me. If I was making a conlang with a con-programming language, that's what I'd do.

Polynesian has the three-vowel sequences but no tone, and Japanese has three vowel sequences, but I'm really looking for something more tonal than a simple pitch-accent system. EDIT: This might help Right, that's a good idea. I've never quite figured out how to make WALS dance that way. Simple tone ...

It has non-diphthongic vowel sequences of 3 vowels long (like Japanese aoi ); moreover, these are very common. It is tonal, with a two- or three-tone system (only level tone, not contour tone). Bonus points for non-pulmonic consonants. Piraha fits, and I'm thinking there should be plenty of other go...

Back around Gencon, I happened upon some information about the Microscope RPG (review) and its spinoff Kickstarter project, Kingdom, which seem like tools for collaborative conworlding. Has anyone else heard about these or tried them?

I've also heard native speakers say that before, that they didn't know that the particles were separate from words until they went to school, they had thought they were part of the word. I think it's a common perception among Japanese, but we're always taught they're short words called particles. So...

Yep. Japanese has been borrowing heavily from English recently, but previously it used to borrow more from other European languages, German especially. So パン pan "bread" is from a Romance language, while アルバイト arubaito "part-time work" is from German Arbeit . I was looking up the Japanese words for ...

I've been meaning to proofread some of this for you, but I got a bit overwhelmed ;) http://constructed-language.org/arka/e_index.html It is, however, very difficult and tiresome to create whole vocabulary from scratch, so most of the conlangs have a posteriori or small a priori vocabulary. to create...

Ainu probably isn't the most polysynthetic language in the world. But it handles relative clauses in much the same way Japanese does. Japanese, of course, is a dependent-marking, strongly head-final language: the verb comes at the end of a clause, and a verb that precedes a noun forms a relative cla...

finlay wrote:Yeah, I wasn't very clear. I was wondering if you would be able to find that in other languages or not.

I've always thought it was very analogous to some forms of suggestions in English. "Why don't we go to Qdoba this time?"

Yes, I was thinking that Arya vs. Ariya is an issue of unpredictable stress. It's easier to say as two syllables if you stress the second one, but then that sounds like "Are ya?"

I have two examples in Japanese, is the latter noun incorporation? It wouldn't be polysynthetic, I'm just trying to learn more about NI. 目が覚める me ga sameru (to open the eyes, to awaken) 目覚める mezameru (to eye-open, to awaken) [this has dakuten sound changes] Johanna Mattissen has an interesting disc...

If I had been forced to guess, I'd have guessed that "skosh" was a Yiddishism.

Here's a woman using "skosh" while cooking, at about 1:20.

Pazmat: Sceptconya ("to have an epiphany/finally gain true understanding of something", from "Sceptya (to realize)" and "Conya (to think)") This isn't noun incorporation. NI is a kind of noun-verb compound in which a noun that is the patient, location, or instrument of a verb becomes incorporated i...

O ja. I don't know how many thousands of words all of that is, but it's a lot! That was a ton of work to put this together for us, and it's a huge contribution to us, and to the forum. Thanks!

He is paperfolding a crane. He doctor recommended me a new allergy medication Both of those are entirely ungrammatical to me. "Doctor-recommend" can only be used as a past participle modifying some sort of medicine: "these pills are doctor-recommended." And English doesn't have classificatory NI. A...

It's significant, though, that all but one of your examples are substantivized. English is certainly very flexible with deverbal compounds, but not really so much with "NI". Consider: My cousins deer hunt all the time out in the country , He doctor recommended me a new allergy medication , Polysynt...

The last thing I read on the lack of a noun-verb distinction was something talking about Austronesian languages, in which a language was argued to have not made a clear distinction among them. But even if this was the case, it argued that a more general universal is true: that every language makes a...

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=sukoshi+cognate Hilariously, the top Google result for "sukoshi cognate" is this thread. I've known Japanese for years and never connected "sukoshi" with "skosh". By far, the hardest problem with Japanese is picking up vocab. But I think that if you continue with it, you'll fin...

Aha, neat. I spent the last week on a big writeup on polysynthesis that I was going to post, but you've covered most of what I had and more. Definitely the two most interesting papers on this were Marianne Mithun's 1984 paper "The evolution of noun incorporation", which is available in JSTOR, and Jo...

There's a scene in "The Linguists" in which one of the guys makes light of how "Birhor" sounds in English.

I vaguely recall from the papers debating recursion in Piraha. IIRC, Everett conceded that while there was no evidence of those structures in the language, that it may exist in the tonal system, which was imperfectly understood. But that's what I sorta recall from reading these several years ago.

Not that I've read it or anything, but Heike Wiese's Numbers, Language, and the Human Mind looks really interesting.