zompist bboard

Nie jest trudne To nie jest trudne / To nie trudne * / To nietrudne * *) according to PWN , it doesn't fall into any of the cases where the separate spelling would be permissible, so nietrudne seems to be the normative spelling, but nie trudne seems to be more common in total; I guess it's one of t...

"needs must" (which makes sense semantically but is nonsense grammatically)? It's perfectly grammatical, since "needs" here is an adverb; it just frequently (read: all but exclusively) collocates with "must", and is homonymous with the 3SG present form of "need", making it sound a bit awkward. I gr...

Just be careful what the actual distinction is. "Perfective" and "imperfective" are wildly imprecise. The present tense in "I am a very tall midget" is quite unambiguous, but there are languages that have aspectual distinctions in the copula in the past tense (Romance). "I was a very tall midget" is...

@elemtilas: that was 92.6% tongue-in-cheek :) (the remaining 7.4% is my own insecurities being projected out) You mentioned you're mostly doing PIElangs, so I suppose this would come up less for you, but still: you will have to invent some words out of thin air. Perhaps mentally accepting this (and ...

I don't know how long you've been at this (glossopoets just starting out tend be angstiest of all, e.g.) Funny, I feel it's quite the opposite in my case. When I started conlanging, as an early teen, give or take 12 years ago, I was very relaxed about all this. I suppose the more I learnt, the more...

I've had a professor tell me that in German the <h> in words such as gehen and sehen was pronounced as a "very weak /h/". She was a native, which was weird. Then, another professor, who was himself not a native but had lived in Germany, told us that was a load of tosh, but that they do pronounce it ...

Nice to meet you, I hope you enjoy your time here. pickles and tea Thank you! backward derivation I've used this approach in the past, but, of course, only in my [ill-fated] attempts at a prioriing a language into existence. Nothing wrong with doing this, but for me diachrony is not a pesky afterth...

Being interested in historical linguistics, I have always been fascinated by words whose origins we can't quite trace back to any one word with any degree of certainty. Some pretty basic words in English have very tentative or incomplete etymologies, e.g. bad , dog , girl . I understand that this is...