zompist bboard

Is there a name or technical term for the way English treats transitive verbs like "to feed", whereby they usually take an object ("The bird feeds its young"), but when it takes no object it's understood as having an unstated reflexive object ("The bird feeds"; i.e. "The bird feeds itself")?

I'm reading up on the concept of pluractionality, which I only learned about recently, so it's still rather confusing to me. The general sense is that the verbal action itself is plural (either involving multiple referents or a repetition of action), but that it also crosses over somewhat with ergat...

Comparative Siouan Dictionary

Download link in upper right. The main page also contains links to PDFs of papers related to the reconstruction.

Are you sure there is no distinction between an intervocalic position before /r/ and being directly after /r/ for this sound change? If there is a distinction, the second seems like plain, one step fortition. Don't know about the other one. Admittedly, 'murther' was the only example of the latter I...

In the history of English there was a change whereby [ð] <> [d] in the vicinity of <r>. Thus, fader > father , but murther > murder . In effect, <th> and <d> switched places with each other in the same environment. I was wondering how this was possible and what the intermediary steps were, if any.

Proto-Algonkian (i.e. Algonquian) roots and word-formatives Careful with this one- Hewson's tastes run towards the abstract, so he often reconstructs underlying forms that aren't actually attested anywhere, and sometimes he gets things wrong. I know this because I took him at face value before my c...

A Comparative Grammar of the Semitic Languages

Written before the discovery of Ugaritic, but a good summary nonetheless.

I've been reading up on the various ways languages can acquire tone, but haven't found much on how they can lose it. I know a simple tone system like high/neutral can equalize the tones and leave an effect on the vowel, such as length, but what about a complex system like that of Chinese? Or, to put...

Frederik Kortlandt: The Indo-Uralic Verb

The Austronesian Languages, by Blust

http://pacling.anu.edu.au/materials/Blu ... nesian.pdf

Die althochdeutsche Lautverbindung sk wurde zu sch . So entstand zum Beispiel aus dem althochdeutschen Wort scōni die mittelhochdeutschen schōne und schœne (beide Wörter – schon und schön – haben im heutigen Deutschen dieselbe Herkunft). Der Konsonant s wandelte sich zu sch, wenn er vor l, m, n, w,...

What was the reason/mechanism whereby certain *s became <sch> in modern German?

PSl. *norvъ 'custom' > OCS nrav (loaned into Russian as nrav , coexisting with native norov ), Bulgarian and Slovene nrav , Macedonian and Serbo-Croatian narav , Polish narów , and Czech and Slovak mrav with dissimilation from earlier nrav . So you can either block reduction of the original vowel a...

In a language which undergoes liquid metathesis, like what the Slavic languages went through, what might happen with a word like *norto or *nolto? Is it realistic that they fully metathesize to *nroto/*nloto (with a subsequent change to eliminate the initial cluster), or would it be more likely that...

I only dimly recall my first conlang. I remember it was a blatant Quenya-clone, but nothing else. The oldest conlang I still have the files for was called Galáthir. It wasn't just a Quenya-clone, it threw in a lot of Sindarin as well. Originality! The nominal and verbal inflections were invented on ...

An Overview of Uto-Aztecan Grammar: http://www-01.sil.org/acpub/repository/21478.pdf

The link I posted, however, contrasts the "inflected infinitive" -anne with the "gerund" -enne.

I've only ever seen the Old English gerund suffix -enne mentioned by one source*, and I can't recall ever having seen it used in a text. I've always assumed that -ing/-ung was the usual gerund suffix. Was -enne common, and did it differ in usage from -ing/-ung ? *This one: http://www.utexas.edu/cola...

I apologize if this has been asked before. Are there any good books or online resources that list native English words (i.e. Anglo-Saxon words) that were displaced by borrowed words? For example, how the English word "ruth" (Old English hrēowð) was dropped in favor of "pity".

I'm trying to incorporate some evidentials into my language. I think I'm going to go with the following four: Visual: tarho Non-visual sensory: scó Hearsay: rahon Inferential: mif All are particles: the first three are derived from archaic verbs which were replaced by others, while mif was originall...

I guess it depends entirely on the language in question. External possession is just a mechanism to raise the possessor to a more central syntactic position within the clause (from an attribute into a recipient in the German and Yimas examples and into a patient in the Guaraní example). It's up to ...

In my understanding external possession or possessor raising often has to do with the focus of the action being on the possessor of the object rather than on the object itself. In the German example the more relevant information is that the neighbour gets her car washed, not just that someone's car...