zompist bboard

I think that the kinds of languages characterized by the kind of polysynthesis defined by Baker as TEH polysynthesis (I would prefer a term like obligatorily syntactically headmarking or indexing) by necessity do have a much stricter separation of intransitive and transitive roots - and consequentl...

Legion: I'm not sure if there's any robust correlation; certainly there are some polysynthetic languages with many ambitransitive verbs, though. Apparently in some Arawak languages (like Tariana and Baniwa of Içana), all "transitive" verbs are actually ambitransitive. Unfortunately my source for th...

Ambitransitive verbs may perform quitte different fonctions in different languages (and in iirc the fact that Indo-European ambitransitive verbs do not always perform the same function, depending on particular verbs and arguments, is a notable (though not uniquely) IE feature). I know some language...

Well this depends how we analyse those verbs and what polysynthetic languages can do, which is like I like Whimemsz to tell us: can polysynthetic languages have transitive verbs with null object, used as a generic statement like in Indo-European languages (eg "He's eating" vs "He's eating chicken")...

I've never really thought about the origin of 'anal retentive' before, but it seems to me that there is a semantic link. In the case of the child, they don't want to let go of something or end something. A modern day 'anal retentive', someone obsessed with tiny details, is in the same position with ...

This article discusses some of these claims based on evidence from one Nahuatl variety . Radagast is back! Did you write that article? I remember you doing work on similar things at one point. The way you say that makes it sound like you have access to "Anthropological Linguistics", chris... *Ahem,...

Radagast revived wrote: This article discusses some of these claims based on evidence from one Nahuatl variety.

Radagast is back! Did you write that article? I remember you doing work on similar things at one point.

Hi Chris, I was researching about SVCs and stumbled upon this post. I am interested in the book about Hmog svc that you are talking about. Do you happen to know the title of the book? Thank you :) "Complex Predicates: Cross-Linguistic Perspectives on Event Structure" edited by Mengistu Amberber, Br...

I forgot to also ask if you just wanted languages that at least included marking of core cases, and not just obliques like instrumentals and locatives, but I'm going to assume you meant core cases. AND I'm going to assume you want systems where the case-marking is via affixes rather than clitics wh...

Languages will vary on what sorts of things will even fall into these semantic categories, let alone the syntactic categories. They are not semantic primes that remain constant between languages like theta roles are. For instance we treat "hit" as an action, not a process, taking agents in intransi...

What other polylangs have case? You mentioned several of California and the Plateau region, and I know the Eskaleut languages have case (certainly the Yupik and Inuit branches, and whatever the hell Aleut has that looks like case). Anywhere else? Yimas (spoken in Papuan New Guinea) may qualify and ...

Well, I don't know specifically how the PIE system developed, and I'm not sure anybody does. But the most common way to get vowel alternations is from vowels being influenced by following vowels. For example, if the following vowel is /i/ then the preceding vowel may be fronted and/or raised. Then w...

You might have to define this a little further. Plenty of languages, for example, lack a clearly distinct class of adjectives, treating them either as verbs or as nouns, but there may still be arguments for differentiating "adjectives" from other verbs or other nouns (I know Xephyr has been reading...

As an addendum to your post on noun incorporation, I'd like to add that sometimes, the noun in question may be grammatically incorporated into the verb complex, but phonologically remains an independent word. An example from Zuni: UNINCORPORATED COMPLEMENT: kih ʔi:y-aš-ka ceremonial_brother RECIP-m...

Please shut the fuck up and crawl back into the shithole you came out of. You can't have ejective nasals, nor that vowel system - it's impossible due to the human articulatory and auditory systems You can have glottalised nasals though, and a number of languages with ejectives do. If you just repla...

That can be tricky for languages you do not speak, and to some extent the notion of word boundaries may not even apply fully to all languages. But for the most part is is generally possible to look at some of the behaviors that words display and usually they will line up with each other. The more t...

A lot of irregular verbs in Catalan have a 1s present indicative form ending in -c: tenc, aprenc, sóc, duc... Where did this come from? I can't think of a parallel in any other Romance languages, and certainly not in Latin. Doesn't exactly the same happen in Spanish? E.g. tener -> tengo, poner -> p...

...they do not descend directly from proto-Japonic... ...Did they come from proto-Japonic? ... Perhaps he just means were they present at all in proto-Japonic, e.g. as lexical items rather than grammaticalised politeness markers. Zhen lin presumably means that proto-Japonic did not use the same aff...

But if all that mediates these plosive clusters is voicing, then why don’t we see /t+t/ and /d+d/? It’s a goof. The actual rule should be this one: Plosive || Plosive [α voice β place][α voice γ place] t || p k ⋅ d || b g In other words, just as with fricative clusters, plosive clusters have to be ...

Congratulations to everyone who won.

When something actually is awesome, we tend not to like people who say, "That's crap, where's the rest?" Even if it is crap, I don't like people who just say that and nothing else. Saying why you don't like something and making suggestions is at least constructive. Just snarking doesn't really help...

Basically just this , as far as I know Ah! Thank you. NO! The google books preview cuts out just before getting into the meat of the evidentiality system! I've been looking for a really good analysis of a natlang evidentiality system for a while. Bother. I must go to the University to find this. Al...

Theta wrote:Does Navajo's verbal system from Hell count as an 'odd feature'?

Isn't Navajo one of the saner Athabaskan languages?

If you say "beer can" with a British accent, it sounds like you're saying "bacon" with a Jamaican accent. Is that true? If I try to mimic what I think of as a Jamaican accent, I have a long mid-height monophthong in the first syllable of "bacon". "Beer", at least in my dialect (Nottingham, East Mid...

From what I understand of Aikhenvald's hypothesis, she thinks that it was not only the rampant bilingualism and multilingualism, but also the "taboo" against code-mixing (anyone who, while speaking one language, used a word from a different language, would get laughed at). Yes, it's true that most ...