zompist bboard

I used "animal-vegetable-mineral" because it is the set phrase one uses. Who is this "one" you speak of? I've never heard that phrase before in my life. The thing is, people don't really refer to "trees" as "plants" (altho they are "plant-life" or "greenery") What? I would without the slightest sec...

My artlang currently has a separate words for English "vegetable", one meaning "living non-animal stuff", and the other meaning "not-fruit-not-fungus-that-is-carrots etc". DO ANY NATLANGS MAKE THIS DISTINCTION? Or is there always semantic vaguery? You mean, like "plant"? Your whole post absolute pu...

Alright, just an update to confirm that I have in fact been working on this. I was a little too busy to do much in the two weeks or so after I originally agreed to work on this (dealing with moving into a new apartment), but since then I've been able to put a bit of work into it most days. I've now ...

A cheap version of Ket grammar I'm almost done with Stephan Georg's Descriptive Grammar of Ket (from my library, so free). It's not very well written (organization is lacking, even the juiciest morphological peculiarities are presented very dryly), but it has given me a lot of conlanging ideas. Wha...

Nothing where that's the primary distinguishing feature. You do see productive C1 or C2 gemination in some languages, but always as the result of assimilation. For instance, the addition of the definite article *ha- in Hebrew generally causes gemination of the following consonant (C1), but that's ju...

You may want to consider specifying Unicode collation during the creation of your database tables, and then ensuring to specify Unicode when interacting with PHP. This way you'll avoid any encoding mishaps on the server-side for other users who download your code Oh yes, definitely. I learned this ...

Alright, then, consider me officially on this project. For the time being I need to work on beefing up my very basic management page so it'll allow you to manage multiple lexicons and be upgrade-friendly. Then I'll actually release the source so people can start playing around with it and then perio...

Viktor77 wrote:An English grammar and reader of the Even language complete with recordings.

I'm 90% sure I do have a grammar outline (~40 pages) of Even in English (and 100% sure of one in Russian), but I won't be able to give it to you until I get my laptop back from the shop...

That, sir, is awesome. I, of course, can't program worth of shit. how does it work, does it feed off like a sql database or is it hardcoded? A database, of course. Otherwise it would be horribly inflexible and I wouldn't have a great deal available to offer up for this project... And the 'Advanced'...

Hmm. Somehow I missed this thread the first time around. Well, I'd just like to add that I've also been working on my own dictionary software as well! It's been on and off, whenever I've had the time and been motivated to work on it, but I have steadily been adding new features. The current stable v...

Is this attested to in bilingual speakers of English and other languages other than Spanish and other than languages which have "so" or a near equivalent ie. Germanic languages? Viktor, I just explained this. Actively bilingual speakers frequently cross discourse markers from one language to anothe...

I don't think everyone's negativity here is warranted. In bilingual situations discourse particles are some of the first words to be borrowed/code switched from one language to another. And, on top of that, they're some of the easiest words to not realize you've been using; even people who are very ...

But it’s such a strange thing to have dropped out. You sure? :wink: (See what I did there?) And the problem is when you absolutely need to talk about be-ing, you have to use some ridiculous expression like является with the instrumental. Well, it's not like быть just dropped one day and was replace...

Ты что, стал спамботом?

OK, I’ve always wondered why есмь, еси, есмы, есте, суть dropped out of Russian, leaving only есть. Does there need to be a reason? "Be"-loss happens. It didn't really perform any necessary function in the present tense, and so eventually was just lost. Есть alone survived as a frozen particle, mos...

What's odd about this case is that there's really no definable difference between these two binyanim that accounts for all or even most of the differences in what they encode—both are plain, active voice verbs. The one thing that I can think of that can be used to differentiate paʕal and piʕel is t...

My point wasn't that there's anything unusual or wrong about "he gave me the book". In fact, it was that "he gave me the book" is relatively more grammatical/natural than "he gave John it" or "he gave us it". Specifically, to point out that English oblique pronouns can be used naturally in the R sl...

I'm going to have to agree with Travis 100% here.

I've often wondered what that's like-- understanding a language but not being able to speak it. Is it, like, that feeling you get when you can't seem to remember that great synonym for "unapproachable" you want to say in this sentence... but applied to a whole language? Or what? Depends. If you're ...

1) Is there anything in Semitic languages that might allow the elements to be reversed from the standard head-determiner, allowing the determiner to essentially be an attributive noun and appear first? Not as far as I know. You see a reversal of order of constructs in Ethiopian Semitic, but that's ...

Xephyr wrote:Worth looking at, maybe.

An interesting lead, but unfortunately that site doesn't actually have much to say about it. It does seem to have some similarities to the Semitic system, though, albeit in a very limited form.

garysk wrote:I am part way through the above thread, and am learning a lot about TRS languages. One correpondent in the thread asked it TRS-ism existed outside of the Semitic (Afro-Asiatic) family; I did not see a response.

Does any one know?

No, they don't.

The above [EDIT: I mean my previous post] is one of the reasons why I personally am not really happy with what I wrote a number of years back in the Triconsonantal Roots thread. I wrote that back when there was a big "YAY TRICONSONANTAL ROOTS" craze on this board that obviously I myself was caught u...

The biggest issue for you would be explaining how the heck that system came to be in the first place. The so-called "triconsonantal roots" of the Semitic languages didn't just emerge ex nihilo—they ultimately came from a more traditional fixed root structure through some rather complicated processes...