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What other ways, if any, do languages handle the concept of "becoming an X", where "X" is any noun? So, becoming a fireman, a mother, etc. etc. I've seen a little bit about Lithuanian and Modern Hebrew using an inchoative aspect. Is that common? Do they use it for "becoming a <noun>" as opposed to r...

Hahaha. This is always entertaining to see as a Swede. Glad I could entertain you. :D There are days when I really hate being a native English speaker. Is this because of the "dynamic" vs. "static" passive in Swedish? I just did a quick search on Wikipedia since I don't have much time atm, and that...

That all looks reasonable to me. (Of course I'm not the one it has to look reasonable to! :) ) Good! It seemed that way, but it's always good to have a 2nd opinion. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Navajo_language#Classifiers_.28transitivity_prefixes.29 , if you feel like it; it might interest you,...

I think any verb can be "middleized" by reflexivizing it. (e.g. kill --> suicide) I think any verb can be "transitivized" by causativizing it. (e.g. die --> kill) Those processes may have no morphological, and maybe also no syntactic, parallel in a given language; but the semantic transformations a...

Are there verbs or categories of verbs that can't be in a middle voice/diathesis? Or, perhaps more broadly, are there any verbs or verbal categories that can't be rephrased in a middle voice/diathesis, possibly with a different verb or syntactic structure? If the answer is no or close to it, then I ...

In "Basic Voice" systems the two biggest voices are "active" and "middle". Verbs have a "home voice", which is either the active voice or the middle voice. Some active verbs can be inflected into the middle voice and some can't; some middle verbs can be inflected into the active voice and some can'...

I've been trying to get a handle on some issues in designing my verbal system lately. They touch on many different topics, so I'm not even sure I can come up with distinct questions, but I'll give it a shot here. The issues primarily revolve around stative vs. dynamic verbs, transitivity, valency, v...

...it is well known that locative prepositions and particles tend to grammaticalize from body parts, such as "head" for "on, above, up", or "foot" for "down, below". I know certain mesoamerican languages actually use body parts for position, e.g. I travel it's-head mountain = I went to the top of t...

I posted this link in the L&L Resources thread, but it's buried on pg 12. It may be useful here. Typology of Ergativity by William McGregor To understand ergative languages, I think it's really helpful to compartmentalize the topic into morphological, syntactic, and semantic ergativity. If you under...

Khuzdul - The little tiny bit that exists of this language is what got me interested in conlangs & linguistics in the first place. Kēlen - The most famous all-noun language. I thought about doing an all noun lang, and then found this one. After looking through it, I set it aside for a while. Now tha...

...the perfect "calls a listener's attention to the consequences generated by an action, rather than just the action itself." Perhaps something like... ...the perfect "calls a listener's attention to the present consequences generated by a past action, rather than just the action itself." ....? I p...

Dechcantitive Dechitcantitive Dechticantitive Dechticaetiative. My lang actually is active... I know this because I regularly have intratansitive clauses that treat the Subject like a patient or a Theme, as well as the use of nominalizing infixes to change meaning: Ie Kah "to swim" becomes activise...

I get how all this works, but I read on hear (a few pages back) that one cannot have D=P. I can't find the quote, but I could understand someone saying this. Well, I thought I read on Wikipedia that Dech langs inherintly are so that D=P. AFAICT, you read wrong. I don't see anything on http://en.wik...

www.freelang.net There's a bunch of free dictionaries there, at least for going between English and a bunch of other languages. I'm not sure how accurate it is for each language, but I'm finding this useful for coming up with vocabulary. In my case, I look at 2 langs for inspiration and "shmush" the...