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Swedish, få slut på x - literary get end on x. Also, ha slut på x - have an end on x. Also, x can 'ta slut'. (Take end), or . Dialectally, X är all also exists and this also appears to some limited extent in the standard language, c.f. the idiom "nu är (noun)s saga all". Is this in dialects with so...

Shrdlu wrote:Swedish, få slut på x - literary get end on x.

Also, ha slut på x - have an end on x. Also, x can 'ta slut'. (Take end), or . Dialectally, X är all also exists and this also appears to some limited extent in the standard language, c.f. the idiom "nu är (noun)s saga all".

Um, morphosyntax includes syntax. A passive is not a "semantic" construction, and for that matter applicatives are usually morphological. I suspect you're being a bit too strict here; there's definitely semantically weird things going on with passives in loads of languages. Which indicates there's ...

jahtamana would break down as jahta-ma-na = hunt-infinitiveIII-essive, that is "hunt-~ing-'in role of'", so basically "the dog's (object of) hunting", not a 'classical passive' by Finnish standards, where 'häntä jahdattiin' would usually be considered the passive, and that cannot take any agent in t...

Any ideas? I think it would be pretty cool if we had a sample text in English and could compare our translations with it, for example with a result like "1 syllable in English = 1.3 syllables in ..." What do you think? I find it very weird you're saying "if we had " (an unreal condition), consideri...

There are languages with case that do have a genitive that don't use the genitive there! Finnish, for instance, uses the elative ('out of'), in spite of having a genitive. I would've guessed partitive. This is why I will never speak good Finnish! Yeah, from a purely kind of detached linguistic cogi...

I can't agree more with that. A genitive definitely makes sense here, but languages that do have cases but don't have a genitive would use another case, obviously. It all depends on how the case system works. There are languages with case that do have a genitive that don't use the genitive there! F...

Finnish: mielikuvitus (mind illumination), from mieli (mind) and kuva (picture). In Swedish it's fantasi , but you'll have to search for the etymology yourself. :/ EDIT: The verb imagine is föreställa sig in Swedish, literally fore-stand/put oneself. But its noun form föreställning means preconcept...

Terra, go read on "dechticaetiativity" As for 3) and 5), the standard analysis used in grammar in high school for me would have those consist of a direct object and an object complement ('objektpredikatsfyllnad/objektspredikativ' in Swedish). That is, the role of 'John' in "we call him John" is simi...

We are the chorus, and we agree, we agree, we agree! . . . Yes! Everyone, make sure that you read Yng's post and get it's point. Reading into your agreement (and a few other comments on the board from time to time), I am assuming you are bashing complex case systems in conlangs. I am well aware of ...

Maybe I'm preaching to the choir here and you have some actual use for these, but it's probably not worth looking for an exhaustive list. All that two cases in two separate languages having the same name means is that, at best, they share one or two vaguely similar functions. Often it just means th...

finlay wrote:Uh, why do you have dice-rolls in a chess-like game? Doesn't that defeat the purpose a little bit?

Historically not unusual at all - in many medieval European variants, dice roll decided which piece you got to move.

Pthagnar wrote:strong isn't the word. it's just weird.

But... but... but it's awesome. It's the greatest cheese ever.

Still a bit weird borrowing the Swedish name of a city with only 0.5% Swedish speaking population. Well, maybe it's a case of borrowing the name of a place without anyone really emigrating from there. There's also a few Finnish names there from towns with very few Finnish inhabitants - Uusikarlepyy...

Maybe even more relevant for you is the fact that Finnish has a small group verbs with monosyllabic stems ending in an /i/ glide which absorb the plural affix -i into themselves. Thus, on surface these verbs don't seem to make any morphological distinction of tense at all; uin means both "I swim" a...

On a related note, do any languages write the numbers smallest digit first, and if so, do they also say it that way? The direction in which we write numbers was *kept* when they were borrowed from the Arabs, in spite of us and they writing in different directions. Thus, the arabic numbers originall...

Are there any languages that have a third category that is neither count nor mass?

A problem has arisen: how to handle "he was going to work" given the use of high tone in both the past and future tenses? I'd prefer not to have a new suffix for this usage. Well, many languages live along well without such a tense. Finnnish and Russian even go as far as having only two morphologic...

tehranhamburger, do you agree that coordination gaps are a meaningful test for subjecthood? Depends in what way you're actually using them, but in general yes, they can be used to demonstrate alignment, how so? So, it should be possible to coordinate any two predicates with the same subject and omi...

tehranhamburger,
do you agree that coordination gaps are a meaningful test for subjecthood?

TehranHamburger, I suggest you learn how the terminology you use is used by the people who you clearly are misunderstanding.

Tisquantum happened to have been to England following his being kidnapped and an unsuccessful attempt to sell him into slavery, and he learnt English while living in London. Seriously, what do they teach kids in schools nowadays? Ok, but how? Through complete immersion? Did someone else speak Algon...

Has it occurred to you that an even more difficult instance of language learning happens for every human ever, including fully monoglot ones? How can we acquire a language in the first place? If we can do that, learning a second without formal instruction shouldn't be particularly much worse. Our br...

Are there any language features that are more common in hunter-gatherer cultures than in farmer cultures? I ask because I'm creating a conlang for a hunter-gatherer culture. I can come up with features of my own that seem appropriate (like all animals being "neuter" gender because they don't do ani...

In many varieties of Ostrobothnian Swedish, there's rama signifying someone with proper behavior | muscular build suited to manual work, hardiness This never is used in the comparative or superlative for the proper behavior meaning, but the other meaning has the comparative väl`kan (IMD, in other di...