Search found 195 matches
- Thu Jun 28, 2018 8:38 am
- Forum: Languages & Linguistics
- Topic: Which -an adjective based on "Rousseau" do you prefer?
- Replies: 6
- Views: 7610
- Thu Jun 07, 2018 1:20 pm
- Forum: Languages & Linguistics
- Topic: Quick question about English transitive verbs w/o objects
- Replies: 4
- Views: 5187
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 -...
- Tue Jun 05, 2018 3:58 pm
- Forum: Languages & Linguistics
- Topic: Is German/Japanese sentence structure natural?
- Replies: 10
- Views: 32855
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...
- Wed May 23, 2018 12:26 pm
- Forum: Languages & Linguistics
- Topic: The Grand Phonological Theory of Everything
- Replies: 13
- Views: 9866
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...
- Wed Mar 28, 2018 4:47 pm
- Forum: None of the above
- Topic: Venting thread that still excludes eddy (2)
- Replies: 2639
- Views: 308680
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...
- Wed Mar 28, 2018 1:05 pm
- Forum: Conlangery & Conworlds
- Topic: deriving conlangs, generally
- Replies: 11
- Views: 8564
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...
- Mon Feb 12, 2018 4:08 pm
- Forum: Languages & Linguistics
- Topic: Good syntax books
- Replies: 32
- Views: 16308
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...
- Thu Feb 01, 2018 6:35 am
- Forum: Languages & Linguistics
- Topic: Questions about inflected prepositions
- Replies: 12
- Views: 8076
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.
- 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: 18604
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...
- Thu Feb 01, 2018 6:26 am
- Forum: None of the above
- Topic: Age, Leisure Work and Motivation
- Replies: 24
- Views: 13096
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,...
- Thu Jan 04, 2018 11:57 am
- Forum: Conlangery & Conworlds
- Topic: Hokkanae
- Replies: 11
- Views: 6611
Re: Hokkanae
I can see this being improved with a typeface better designed for this sort of thing.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.
- Tue Jan 02, 2018 3:02 pm
- Forum: Languages & Linguistics
- Topic: Resources on idioms
- Replies: 1
- Views: 1633
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...
- Sat Dec 23, 2017 10:01 am
- Forum: Languages & Linguistics
- Topic: Japanese sample in Advanced Language Construction
- Replies: 20
- Views: 5973
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...
- Sat Dec 23, 2017 9:52 am
- Forum: Languages & Linguistics
- Topic: Internet slang dating: is IIRC a somehow aging abbreviation?
- Replies: 26
- Views: 8459
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.
- Sat Dec 16, 2017 12:37 pm
- Forum: Conlangery & Conworlds
- Topic: Getting rid of grammatical features
- Replies: 12
- Views: 4514
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...
- Tue Dec 05, 2017 10:36 am
- Forum: None of the above
- Topic: Aspies and peer pressure
- Replies: 14
- Views: 8393
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...
- Sat Sep 23, 2017 11:26 am
- Forum: None of the above
- Topic: My poem on Asperger's
- Replies: 11
- Views: 6604
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...
- Sat Sep 02, 2017 2:30 pm
- Forum: Conlangery & Conworlds
- Topic: Vulgarlang.com
- Replies: 13
- Views: 5885
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...
- Fri Sep 01, 2017 7:08 am
- Forum: Languages & Linguistics
- Topic: Masculine-feminine gender systems beyond IE
- Replies: 10
- Views: 3694
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...
- Fri Jun 09, 2017 5:33 pm
- Forum: Languages & Linguistics
- Topic: Is there any good sides to diglossia?
- Replies: 14
- Views: 4359
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.
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.
- Mon Jun 05, 2017 1:17 pm
- Forum: None of the above
- Topic: A Very Brief Explanation of the British Election
- Replies: 323
- Views: 95057
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.
- Wed May 24, 2017 5:45 am
- Forum: Languages & Linguistics
- Topic: Endangered language...
- Replies: 58
- Views: 14221
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...
- Sat Apr 29, 2017 8:03 am
- Forum: Conlangery & Conworlds
- Topic: Making a Draconic Language
- Replies: 10
- Views: 4083
Re: Making a Draconic Language
I like "Dragonic"; it's a bit different and that's good.
- Wed Apr 19, 2017 5:45 am
- Forum: Languages & Linguistics
- Topic: Greek and Roman gods names
- Replies: 18
- Views: 6466
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...
- Tue Apr 18, 2017 1:56 pm
- Forum: Conlangery & Conworlds
- Topic: Is the worldwide popularity of (grape) wine a coincidence?
- Replies: 44
- Views: 11824
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 ...