Search found 195 matches

by Curlyjimsam
Thu Jun 07, 2018 1:20 pm
Forum: Languages & Linguistics
Topic: Quick question about English transitive verbs w/o objects
Replies: 4
Views: 5066

Re: Quick question about English transitive verbs w/o object

Beth Levin in her book English verb classes and alternations calls this the "understood reflexive object alternation". This PDF has a good summary of the various alternations Levin discusses: there are other meanings which can arises when an object is omitted too, depending on the verb in question -...
by Curlyjimsam
Tue Jun 05, 2018 3:58 pm
Forum: Languages & Linguistics
Topic: Is German/Japanese sentence structure natural?
Replies: 10
Views: 31575

Re: Is German/Japanese sentence structure natural?

You could argue there are good reasons for putting the most important information at the end - when someone first starts speaking, it might take their hearer a little bit of time to attune themselves to their voice. Anyway, what's most important is very relative to context. It could be that "who's f...
by Curlyjimsam
Wed May 23, 2018 12:26 pm
Forum: Languages & Linguistics
Topic: The Grand Phonological Theory of Everything
Replies: 13
Views: 9705

Re: The Grand Phonological Theory of Everything

Rory clearly knows more about this than me. Based in my work on syntax, though, I'm not sure a formal theory of phonology that overgenerates is necessarily a problem provided the unattested patterns can be ruled out by other, non-formal means - e.g. a particular system that is formally permissible m...
by Curlyjimsam
Wed Mar 28, 2018 4:47 pm
Forum: None of the above
Topic: Venting thread that still excludes eddy (2)
Replies: 2639
Views: 301276

Re: Venting thread that still excludes eddy

I think most Americans don't even know about the Orange Order and related stuff, even if they are of Irish descent. I would agree here; most Americans, ones of Irish descent included, wouldn't know the significance of dressing up in orange on any given day. I remember reading an article a year or t...
by Curlyjimsam
Wed Mar 28, 2018 1:05 pm
Forum: Conlangery & Conworlds
Topic: deriving conlangs, generally
Replies: 11
Views: 8318

Re: deriving conlangs, generally

I think I tend to have a mix of having specific end goals in mind and just letting the sound changes run their course. An example of this would be the language family whose sound changes I worked on most recently, where I wanted one set of daughters to have more fricatives and front vowels, and anot...
by Curlyjimsam
Mon Feb 12, 2018 4:08 pm
Forum: Languages & Linguistics
Topic: Good syntax books
Replies: 32
Views: 15969

Re: Good syntax books

My syntax students, studying minimalism, seem to prefer Carnie, various Cambridge University Press books by Andrew Radford, and Understanding Minimalism by Hornstein et al. I think Bresnan's Lexical-Functional Syntax might be good for the LFG approach, and I'd second looking at Goldberg on Construct...
by Curlyjimsam
Thu Feb 01, 2018 6:35 am
Forum: Languages & Linguistics
Topic: Questions about inflected prepositions
Replies: 12
Views: 7976

Re: Questions about inflected prepositions

A plausible development, if you already have agreement marking on adjectives and determiners, is those same endings simply getting extended to the prepositional class.
by Curlyjimsam
Thu Feb 01, 2018 6:34 am
Forum: Languages & Linguistics
Topic: Will singular "they" be as acceptable as "you" in formal Eng
Replies: 44
Views: 18401

Re: Will singular "they" be as acceptable as "you" in formal

The gradual extension of "they" to more singular contexts seems extremely likely to me - indeed, if I had to predict anything about the future of English this would be near the top of the things I'd think most probable. I don't think it's necessarily got much to do with "wokeness", really. English h...
by Curlyjimsam
Thu Feb 01, 2018 6:26 am
Forum: None of the above
Topic: Age, Leisure Work and Motivation
Replies: 24
Views: 12721

Re: Age, Leisure Work and Motivation

It's not the most precise measure of productivity, but in 2004-2008 (my last few years at secondary school) I created an average of 199 new files each year on my world and its languages. By 2013-2017 that figure had fallen to an annual average of just 35. I've been doing more of other stuff, though,...
by Curlyjimsam
Thu Jan 04, 2018 11:57 am
Forum: Conlangery & Conworlds
Topic: Hokkanae
Replies: 11
Views: 6538

Re: Hokkanae

Travis B. wrote:I know you like putting slashes on just about any vowel letter possible, but I have to disagree with their aesthetics myself, <ø> aside.
I can see this being improved with a typeface better designed for this sort of thing.
by Curlyjimsam
Tue Jan 02, 2018 3:02 pm
Forum: Languages & Linguistics
Topic: Resources on idioms
Replies: 1
Views: 1610

Resources on idioms

(A question asked to aid conlanging, but technically about real languages, and interesting enough in its own right, so I suppose it should go in this forum ...) Does anybody know of any good resources listing idioms in various languages? Ideally grouped by semantic fields - e.g. a list of idioms fro...
by Curlyjimsam
Sat Dec 23, 2017 10:01 am
Forum: Languages & Linguistics
Topic: Japanese sample in Advanced Language Construction
Replies: 20
Views: 5896

Re: Japanese sample in Advanced Language Construction

Heard. Especially: Japanese elides implied words. Never understood, practically. Me, seems every word serves functions; sentences hardly make sense, eliding. Not sure about you, but I could hardly understand that post without looking at my original post. This is very largely just an experience thin...
by Curlyjimsam
Sat Dec 23, 2017 9:52 am
Forum: Languages & Linguistics
Topic: Internet slang dating: is IIRC a somehow aging abbreviation?
Replies: 26
Views: 8359

Re: Internet slang dating: is IIRC a somehow aging abbreviat

Very impressionistically and possibly entirely wrongly, I'd hazard that these sorts of abbrevs in general are used less often than they used to be, maybe even on sites like this one.
by Curlyjimsam
Sat Dec 16, 2017 12:37 pm
Forum: Conlangery & Conworlds
Topic: Getting rid of grammatical features
Replies: 12
Views: 4447

Re: Getting rid of grammatical features

"To school," "to town," "to port"...? I think these are probably relics of the older, pre-article stage of English, rather than recent innovations. Actual instances of article loss occur in creole genesis, so maybe you could explain it through a partial creolisation scenario. You could also imagine...
by Curlyjimsam
Tue Dec 05, 2017 10:36 am
Forum: None of the above
Topic: Aspies and peer pressure
Replies: 14
Views: 8034

Re: Aspies and peer pressure

Huh. Never encountered the idea of "underage" in an alcohol context, other than regarding the US. The legal drinking age in the UK, incidentally, is 5, other than for medical or emergency purposes.* How odd - I'd regard "underage drinking" as pretty much standard UK shorthand for "purchasing and dr...
by Curlyjimsam
Sat Sep 23, 2017 11:26 am
Forum: None of the above
Topic: My poem on Asperger's
Replies: 11
Views: 6362

Re: My poem on Asperger's

It's a bit reductive, given that plenty of people with Asperger's syndrome don't have all of these traits: in fact, I suspect quite a few people with it have hardly any of them. Risk of contributing further to unhelpful stereotypes? Particularly unsure about the "obese"/"cheese" thing - are these re...
by Curlyjimsam
Sat Sep 02, 2017 2:30 pm
Forum: Conlangery & Conworlds
Topic: Vulgarlang.com
Replies: 13
Views: 5821

Re: Vulgarlang.com

It's fairly impressive, but it has more than its fair share of bizarre stuff that you can't imagine a competent human conlanger engaging in more than very occasionally, and there's a lot of stuff it doesn't do (at least not in the free version). I don't think it's going to be replacing human conlang...
by Curlyjimsam
Fri Sep 01, 2017 7:08 am
Forum: Languages & Linguistics
Topic: Masculine-feminine gender systems beyond IE
Replies: 10
Views: 3664

Re: Masculine-feminine gender systems beyond IE

What are described as masculine/feminine systems may not necessarily correspond terribly well to the typical IE model - e.g. you could have a system which distinguishes masculine/feminine for humans/animates only (English basically does this), which is somewhat different from the typical IE system w...
by Curlyjimsam
Fri Jun 09, 2017 5:33 pm
Forum: Languages & Linguistics
Topic: Is there any good sides to diglossia?
Replies: 14
Views: 4316

Re: Is there any good sides to diglossia?

One possibility:

You can't stop language change - but in some situations (which lead eventually to diglossia) you can arrest it somewhat for the "standard" or "high" language, which means texts from centuries past continue to be widely accessible for much longer.
by Curlyjimsam
Mon Jun 05, 2017 1:17 pm
Forum: None of the above
Topic: A Very Brief Explanation of the British Election
Replies: 323
Views: 93263

Re: A Very Brief Explanation of the British Election

My question is: why the big surge for Labour since the election was announced? Corbyn's (previously very vocal) detractors within the Labour Party seem largely to have decided that going on about how awful he is all the time might not be the best idea just at the moment, so that might be part of it.
by Curlyjimsam
Wed May 24, 2017 5:45 am
Forum: Languages & Linguistics
Topic: Endangered language...
Replies: 58
Views: 14078

Re: Endangered language...

I don't think this has anything to do with linguistic relativity. If English were to die out, this would mean everything that had ever been written or recorded in English would become a lot more inaccessible. Even if translations were available, they wouldn't be able to capture every nuance (e.g. rh...
by Curlyjimsam
Sat Apr 29, 2017 8:03 am
Forum: Conlangery & Conworlds
Topic: Making a Draconic Language
Replies: 10
Views: 4051

Re: Making a Draconic Language

I like "Dragonic"; it's a bit different and that's good.
by Curlyjimsam
Wed Apr 19, 2017 5:45 am
Forum: Languages & Linguistics
Topic: Greek and Roman gods names
Replies: 18
Views: 6384

Re: Greek and Roman gods names

Except for Hercules. He's the one exception. Mars, Vulcan and Saturn might be others that people are still more familiar with the Roman names? Google Ngrams, while obviously only a blunt instrument, suggests that some of the Greek names (Zeus, Aphrodite, Athena, Dionysus, Poisedon) started to becom...
by Curlyjimsam
Tue Apr 18, 2017 1:56 pm
Forum: Conlangery & Conworlds
Topic: Is the worldwide popularity of (grape) wine a coincidence?
Replies: 44
Views: 11661

Re: Is the worldwide popularity of (grape) wine a coincidenc

At least with the drinks I'm familiar with, fruit-based alcoholic beverages tend to be sweeter and have higher alcoholic content than grain-based ones, which works in their favour. Although that by itself doesn't explain why grapes are the fruit of choice much more frequently than most of the other ...