zompist bboard

I don't think they're that uncommon. "Let me think" or "let me get that for you" are pretty pragmatically useful.

To my knowledge, the whole perfective-is-past, imperfective-is-non-past thing comes from Semitic, where indeed this change occurred, and early on enough that this one Akkadian grammar I am reading calls the perfective the "preterite". (Of course I am shamelessly stealing this one for Xanínə, where ...

Not sure if I should have added this on to an older thread instead of starting a new one. I think the example sentence Flaiden techyse sidrau should have an accusative sidraut instead? Unless I am missing something. There's an example sentence Se ze ʔyd sammen fichet teen ʔollyd? translated as Where...

Adpositions are rare in Australian languages. Only a handful have them at all. There is however often a quite sophisticated system of spatial deixis. Prototypically, spatial relationships on nouns are marked The locative case morpheme is often formally identical to the ergative and/or instrumental c...

When the Iora people met British settlers in the place that was to become Sydney, they used their word for "clever man", garadigan , to describe the British surgeons. A garadigan is glossed as "doctor or a person skilled in healing wounds, clever man, sorcerer". Pemulwuy, a fighter who led the local...

Similarly, penis and its synonyms tend to be animate even though other body parts don't. I remember hearing in one of my lectures about an Australian language (not sure which one exactly but I am pretty sure it was Jingulu) with a four-gender system: masculine, feminine, vegetable, neuter. It has p...

zompist wrote:Sure: from a verb, like Mandarin bǎ, original meaning 'grasp'.

Or an article. German has this-- the definite article tells case and gender even if the noun does not.

Thank you - the verb in particular is a fun idea to play around with.

It seems that analogy is a good way to develop an universal accusative marker.... "Analogy", narrowly defined, is really the only way you develop a general rule (e.g. "use X to mark accusative"). It's probably more useful to talk in terms of "reanalysis" - instead of a rule that a marks indirect ob...

WeepingElf wrote: There is a parallel development in Bengali, which has an animate accusative -ke which is ultimately from PIE *kʷoi 'whom (dative)'. Both Spanish and Bengali thus turned a dative marker into an animate accusative marker.

Does Bengali still distinguish datives?

I'm thinking of ways a noun marker (either a clitic or affix) designating "object" (either direct or indirect) can originate. A few ideas I can think of: - an accusative pronoun; a demonstrative or deictic marker; a preposition/postposition; a verbal object affix. Are there any other ways that an "a...

Just something for the 50th anniversary of Dune.

You do not "need" passives in ergative languages, because of ambitransitivity. I.e. if with an ergative (i.e. ambitransitive) verb, one can specify it with both an agent and a patient, or just with a patient, by simply specifying or omitting an ergative argument. However this does not mean that one...

Devai řo nkašan. Nkaš e so razum-kekec. Nkaš e soa šuščule ke amete mautruisa cumpogula. Agolretu nkaš esë. Mifmai prezuir tra et er sa et. Er kiam ya prezurete orivmai soa kraitisä yä pro lelen eveda lië. Ktë so nkaš ya lädme řo esme niš. Řo sul se nožuvmai.

Yukulta has no perfect/imperfect distinction: Mood is marked, and tense in a more limited way, but the primary distinction is between realis and irrealis. Sandra Keen argues that the realis/irrealis distinction functions as underlying perfect/imperfect, but it's quite indirect.

You do not "need" passives in ergative languages, because of ambitransitivity. I.e. if with an ergative (i.e. ambitransitive) verb, one can specify it with both an agent and a patient, or just with a patient, by simply specifying or omitting an ergative argument. However this does not mean that one...

In Kuuk Thaayorre, time runs from east to west. Interesting! I didn't know about this aspect of it, though I suppose it makes more sense when you consider that instead of "left" and "right" everyone is oriented with an absolute frame of reference (e.g. north, south, east, west) and speakers have an...

It seems like earlier European kinship systems were in fact Sudanese, or at least Latin and Old English were. avunculus for example, from which we get "avuncular", was specifically a maternal uncle (a paternal uncle was patruus ). It's not hard to see the development of Eskimo kinship in modern Euro...

I think you need to be clear about what you mean by might. Are you saying you intend to do something, or it's merely a possibility? I don't think Kebreni offers you a choice with exactly the same semantic range of might, which I think is one of the more ambiguous English modals.

We don't have an origin for Eteodäole: it's not Cuezi. It's been said to be a human approximation of Ilian sounds but we don't have enough information to say. (I think this info was in the original Almeopedia article but lost during the Great Crash). As for vowel quantities, I wouldn't say it's like...

I don't think the rules have ever been recorded.

Some Australian languages have verbs which are rather lightly inflected, but a clause must incorporate markers in second position that agree with subject and object (sometimes indirect objects) as well as displaying other agreement markers that vary by language. The term for this varies across langu...

Australian languages that I am familiar with, like Wambaya and Yukulta, have separate dative suffixes. However, the ergative merges with the locative for regular nouns. Indirect objects are also distinguished by not triggering the same agreement on auxiliary/clitic complexes as direct objects.

Native Canadians might have something to say about that... EDIT: But I'm aware that I'm wasting everyone's time. The point was that any modern society has some violent tendencies, and that's a given. But some are remarkably peaceful, and we shouldn't ignore those cases as aberrant. If you're trying...

What is the literal translation of господин? Google's translator also tells me it is Mr, but I remember in college, a Russian professor told us it meant gentleman or some such thing. I don't remember exactly how she translated it, but it was something like that, some formal-sounding term which wasn...

Plenty of languages have ways of marking ingroup versus outgroup social distinctions. Are there any that mark it in what could be considered the most straightforward way, through use of pronouns or specialised verbal inflections? I know that "inclusive" versus "exclusive" we is supposedly correlated...