Search found 34 matches

by Alon
Fri Jul 01, 2016 8:13 am
Forum: None of the above
Topic: Request for information: Siberia
Replies: 8
Views: 6320

Re: Request for information: Siberia

Ooh, do you have links to the YouTube songs?
by Alon
Wed Jun 29, 2016 7:32 pm
Forum: None of the above
Topic: Request for information: Siberia
Replies: 8
Views: 6320

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...
by Alon
Sat Jun 25, 2016 4:10 pm
Forum: Languages & Linguistics
Topic: Poetic words for "sky" and "sea"
Replies: 33
Views: 9851

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 ...
by Alon
Fri Jun 24, 2016 7:59 pm
Forum: Languages & Linguistics
Topic: Subjects and agents of verbs about feeling
Replies: 2
Views: 1354

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...
by Alon
Fri Jun 24, 2016 7:54 pm
Forum: Languages & Linguistics
Topic: Poetic words for "sky" and "sea"
Replies: 33
Views: 9851

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 ...
by Alon
Thu Jun 23, 2016 7:58 am
Forum: Conlangery & Conworlds
Topic: Tagorese - request for comment
Replies: 12
Views: 4070

Re: Tagorese - request for comment

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...
I don't really see the river system, though...
by Alon
Wed Jun 22, 2016 10:44 pm
Forum: Conlangery & Conworlds
Topic: Scratchpad: Far-Future English?
Replies: 0
Views: 7348

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...
by Alon
Wed Jun 22, 2016 1:21 pm
Forum: Conlangery & Conworlds
Topic: Tagorese - request for comment
Replies: 12
Views: 4070

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
by Alon
Sat Jun 18, 2016 3:38 pm
Forum: Conlangery & Conworlds
Topic: Classical Kao
Replies: 10
Views: 3561

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...
by Alon
Thu Jun 16, 2016 10:20 am
Forum: Conlangery & Conworlds
Topic: Game: Let's Reform Languages Other than English
Replies: 23
Views: 6171

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...
by Alon
Tue Jun 14, 2016 6:42 am
Forum: Conlangery & Conworlds
Topic: Any conlangs with non-Latin natural scripts?
Replies: 29
Views: 9264

Re: Any conlangs with non-Latin natural scripts?

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.
You really do not want to know what goes on in the ASB section of alternatehistory.com, then.
by Alon
Mon Jun 13, 2016 4:29 pm
Forum: Languages & Linguistics
Topic: Hapax Phonoumena
Replies: 36
Views: 10521

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 .
by Alon
Mon Jun 13, 2016 4:15 pm
Forum: Conlangery & Conworlds
Topic: Any conlangs with non-Latin natural scripts?
Replies: 29
Views: 9264

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...
by Alon
Thu Jun 09, 2016 6:19 am
Forum: Languages & Linguistics
Topic: Hapax Phonoumena
Replies: 36
Views: 10521

Re: Hapax Phonoumena

Arabic /ɫ/ only appears in Allah's name, no?
by Alon
Tue Jun 07, 2016 9:15 am
Forum: Languages & Linguistics
Topic: Regional accents are losing the battle to standard English
Replies: 17
Views: 4629

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.
by Alon
Tue Jun 07, 2016 4:45 am
Forum: Conlangery & Conworlds
Topic: Aesthetics of a Proto-Language
Replies: 58
Views: 13704

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...
by Alon
Sun Jun 05, 2016 6:29 pm
Forum: Languages & Linguistics
Topic: Grammer and the Train of Thought
Replies: 4
Views: 2114

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...
by Alon
Thu Jun 02, 2016 5:52 pm
Forum: Languages & Linguistics
Topic: Zero copula
Replies: 18
Views: 4595

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...
by Alon
Wed Jun 01, 2016 3:02 pm
Forum: Languages & Linguistics
Topic: Zero copula
Replies: 18
Views: 4595

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...
by Alon
Tue May 31, 2016 8:50 am
Forum: Languages & Linguistics
Topic: Zero copula
Replies: 18
Views: 4595

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...
by Alon
Mon May 30, 2016 10:01 am
Forum: Languages & Linguistics
Topic: Verbal nouns
Replies: 12
Views: 3751

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...
by Alon
Mon May 30, 2016 9:49 am
Forum: Languages & Linguistics
Topic: Zero copula
Replies: 18
Views: 4595

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...
by Alon
Sat May 28, 2016 2:29 am
Forum: Languages & Linguistics
Topic: Kinship terms: uncles/aunts
Replies: 20
Views: 4980

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 ...
by Alon
Fri May 27, 2016 12:52 pm
Forum: Languages & Linguistics
Topic: Kinship terms: uncles/aunts
Replies: 20
Views: 4980

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...
by Alon
Thu May 26, 2016 2:31 pm
Forum: Conlangery & Conworlds
Topic: Looking for critiques of my conlang's (tentative) phonology
Replies: 21
Views: 6849

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...