Search found 34 matches
- Fri Jul 01, 2016 8:13 am
- Forum: None of the above
- Topic: Request for information: Siberia
- Replies: 8
- Views: 6826
Re: Request for information: Siberia
Ooh, do you have links to the YouTube songs?
- Wed Jun 29, 2016 7:32 pm
- Forum: None of the above
- Topic: Request for information: Siberia
- Replies: 8
- Views: 6826
Request for information: Siberia
Let's say, completely hypothetically, that I was inspired by an XKCD map and a redrawing based on actual geographic projections , and want to set an RPG campaign in that world. It involves people in the far east of the Asian landmass, in Europe and the nearby islands (Wa, Malaya, etc.), traveling to...
- Sat Jun 25, 2016 4:10 pm
- Forum: Languages & Linguistics
- Topic: Poetic words for "sky" and "sea"
- Replies: 33
- Views: 10791
Re: Poetic words for "sky" and "sea"
The Hebrew word for sky, shamayim, is etymologically the word for there (sham) plus a no-longer-productive dual suffix No, it isn’t. The word šām “there” is descended from Proto-Semitic *θamm- (cf. Arabic ṯamma and Aramaic tām ), while šāmayim “sky” is reconstructed as *šamāy- (cf. Arab. samā’ and ...
- Fri Jun 24, 2016 7:59 pm
- Forum: Languages & Linguistics
- Topic: Subjects and agents of verbs about feeling
- Replies: 2
- Views: 1390
Subjects and agents of verbs about feeling
In transitive verbs that describe feelings, the grammatical subject can be the feeler, or the person towards whom the feeling is directed. Examples of the former include love, hate, fear, admire, and pity; examples of the latter include attract, repel, scare, and disgust. Is there any tendency in la...
- Fri Jun 24, 2016 7:54 pm
- Forum: Languages & Linguistics
- Topic: Poetic words for "sky" and "sea"
- Replies: 33
- Views: 10791
Re: Poetic words for "sky" and "sea"
The Hebrew word for sky, shamayim, is etymologically the word for there (sham) plus a no-longer-productive dual suffix; the word takes plural agreement as a result (as do inherently dual nouns like pants, glasses, and scissors). There is no poetic term like heavens or firmament. The Hebrew word for ...
- Thu Jun 23, 2016 7:58 am
- Forum: Conlangery & Conworlds
- Topic: Tagorese - request for comment
- Replies: 12
- Views: 4174
Re: Tagorese - request for comment
I don't really see the river system, though...Dewrad wrote:I'll bear that in mind- I had assumed, however, that readers would in turn (correctly) assume that the Delta is where the river system meets the sea...
- Wed Jun 22, 2016 10:44 pm
- Forum: Conlangery & Conworlds
- Topic: Scratchpad: Far-Future English?
- Replies: 0
- Views: 9048
Scratchpad: Far-Future English?
I've talked about (but not described) a main language I've been working on for 14 years, representing a far-future descendant of English. This is a different far-future descendant of English, starting from American but applying different soundshifts. I imagine this is about a millennium in the futur...
- Wed Jun 22, 2016 1:21 pm
- Forum: Conlangery & Conworlds
- Topic: Tagorese - request for comment
- Replies: 12
- Views: 4174
Re: Tagorese - request for comment
One thing about your introduction bothers me - you bring up the names of a bunch of regions, but the map you include doesn't show any of them. If you're using English region names ("Delta," etc.), put them on the map, so that I can go back to the map and see what is where
- Sat Jun 18, 2016 3:38 pm
- Forum: Conlangery & Conworlds
- Topic: Classical Kao
- Replies: 10
- Views: 3655
Re: Classical Pao
Question: in the s + stop initials, is the stop really aspirated? Or is a lenis stop, as in present-day English, analyzed as an allophone of /p t k/ rather than /b d g/? Of note, in JBR's Futurese, these clusters are reanalyzed as /sb sd sg/ precisely because the fortis/lenis distinction on stops sh...
- Thu Jun 16, 2016 10:20 am
- Forum: Conlangery & Conworlds
- Topic: Game: Let's Reform Languages Other than English
- Replies: 23
- Views: 6345
Re: Game: Let's Reform Languages Other than English
My far-future English conlang has a phase of rapid change in the 25th century, in which it both undergoes rapid internal change (roughly modeled on JBR's Futurese's Great Vowel Breaking) and absorbs a lot of vocabulary from other languages, especially Spanish and Chinese. For this, I had to have som...
- Tue Jun 14, 2016 6:42 am
- Forum: Conlangery & Conworlds
- Topic: Any conlangs with non-Latin natural scripts?
- Replies: 29
- Views: 9473
Re: Any conlangs with non-Latin natural scripts?
You really do not want to know what goes on in the ASB section of alternatehistory.com, then.mèþru wrote:It was so historically inaccurate that using the term ASB seems like an insult to the Alien Space Bats of the successful Operation Sealion.
- Mon Jun 13, 2016 4:29 pm
- Forum: Languages & Linguistics
- Topic: Hapax Phonoumena
- Replies: 36
- Views: 10764
Re: Hapax Phonoumena
In Russian, the sound represented by the letter ы, [ɨ], is in complementary distribution with /i/ (it occurs only after hard consonants), with one exception: in the name of the letter, it occurs as [ɨ], while the name of the letter и is .
- Mon Jun 13, 2016 4:15 pm
- Forum: Conlangery & Conworlds
- Topic: Any conlangs with non-Latin natural scripts?
- Replies: 29
- Views: 9473
Re: Any conlangs with non-Latin natural scripts?
With the exception of the far-future descendant of English, all of my conlangs are written in conscripts. But I usually don't actually work out these conscripts, and just find ways of transcribing them in Latin. In one case, I tried to work out a conscript for a natlang - namely, a Greek alphabet th...
- Thu Jun 09, 2016 6:19 am
- Forum: Languages & Linguistics
- Topic: Hapax Phonoumena
- Replies: 36
- Views: 10764
Re: Hapax Phonoumena
Arabic /ɫ/ only appears in Allah's name, no?
- Tue Jun 07, 2016 9:15 am
- Forum: Languages & Linguistics
- Topic: Regional accents are losing the battle to standard English
- Replies: 17
- Views: 4763
Re: Regional accents are losing the battle to standard Engli
The article shows just two maps, and one of them, the board a, doesn't show much movement since the 1950s.
- Tue Jun 07, 2016 4:45 am
- Forum: Conlangery & Conworlds
- Topic: Aesthetics of a Proto-Language
- Replies: 58
- Views: 14128
Re: Aesthetics of a Proto-Language
What is more likely is that in smaller language communities, trends toward regularization occur more slowly. Perhaps it's less about L1 vs. L2 speakers than about L1 speakers with different dialects. If some phonological feature that encodes grammatical data, e.g. final vowels in IE languages, tends...
- Sun Jun 05, 2016 6:29 pm
- Forum: Languages & Linguistics
- Topic: Grammer and the Train of Thought
- Replies: 4
- Views: 2159
Re: Grammer and the Train of Thought
In Hebrew, I don't think this ever happens. Of course, Hebrew is nonconcatenative, and the only transparent suffixes are agreement with the subject in past-tense verbs (and Hebrew is underlyingly SVO) and plural and feminine markers on nouns and adjectives. I am told that nonnative speakers of suffi...
- Thu Jun 02, 2016 5:52 pm
- Forum: Languages & Linguistics
- Topic: Zero copula
- Replies: 18
- Views: 4800
Re: Zero copula
I'm confused about what you thought I said. I only said that I think Malagasy puts tense prefixes on things that are not verbs including adverbs and prepositions. I never said anything about nouns there. Yeah, I thought it put these prefixes on nouns, too. My bad. "Mali is my cat" would probably lo...
- Wed Jun 01, 2016 3:02 pm
- Forum: Languages & Linguistics
- Topic: Zero copula
- Replies: 18
- Views: 4800
Re: Zero copula
Of course all of this gets a lot easier in analytic languages, because then you don't need to worry about nouns taking verbal morphology and such. Of note, Hebrew, Arabic, and Russian are highly inflected, and don't put verbal morphology on nouns, although apparently Malagasy and Salish do. Wait, d...
- Tue May 31, 2016 8:50 am
- Forum: Languages & Linguistics
- Topic: Zero copula
- Replies: 18
- Views: 4800
Re: Zero copula
Okay, so putting TAM markers on non-verbs acting as predicates can be done? Of course all of this gets a lot easier in analytic languages, because then you don't need to worry about nouns taking verbal morphology and such. Of note, Hebrew, Arabic, and Russian are highly inflected, and don't put verb...
- Mon May 30, 2016 10:01 am
- Forum: Languages & Linguistics
- Topic: Verbal nouns
- Replies: 12
- Views: 3831
Re: Verbal nouns
Bumping this to ask a different question about factitives. In Hebrew and English, they're quite often identical to verbal nouns describing process, as I noted in the OP. In German and Swedish, they're (sometimes) distinguished. Is there any language in which factitives are formed from passive partic...
- Mon May 30, 2016 9:49 am
- Forum: Languages & Linguistics
- Topic: Zero copula
- Replies: 18
- Views: 4800
Zero copula
Are there languages without any copula? Of note, Hebrew and Arabic don't have the verb "to be" in the present, but do have it in the past for predicative sentences ("I was happy"). Also of note, if semantic adjectives are syntactically stative verbs, as in Chinese, but a copula is still required for...
- Sat May 28, 2016 2:29 am
- Forum: Languages & Linguistics
- Topic: Kinship terms: uncles/aunts
- Replies: 20
- Views: 5109
Re: Kinship terms: uncles/aunts
Of course sibling is less common than the gendered terms, and nibling is still obscure. I bring these up because in some languages there do exist common unisex words for sibling: Malay has adik for a younger sibling. However, I don't know of unisex words for a parent's sibling; the Thai examples of ...
- Fri May 27, 2016 12:52 pm
- Forum: Languages & Linguistics
- Topic: Kinship terms: uncles/aunts
- Replies: 20
- Views: 5109
Kinship terms: uncles/aunts
As far as I can tell, no language has a coverall term for both uncles and aunts. This includes languages with coverall terms for siblings (not just English siblings, but also Malay, which distinguishes siblings by birth order primarily and not by gender), niblings, parents, grandparents, etc. Does a...
- Thu May 26, 2016 2:31 pm
- Forum: Conlangery & Conworlds
- Topic: Looking for critiques of my conlang's (tentative) phonology
- Replies: 21
- Views: 7017
Re: Looking for critiques of my conlang's (tentative) phonol
Swedish and Norwegian have word tones. It's not the same as the pitch accent of Japanese or Ancient Greek, in which a word may have an accented syllable/mora, distinguished by high pitch. Systems with word tone, and two possible tones on each word, e.g. Shanghainese and Swedish, are called pitch acc...