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Chinese has 3 negative particles as far as I can tell: Zuo3 "to do" Bie2 zuo3. don't do (imperative) Mei2 zuo3. didn't do (perfective) Bu2 zuo3. don't do (imperfective) Bie2, I believe, was originally a word meaning "other" or "to twist around". Mei2 could originally have been an adjective for nouns...

Been reading through adverbial phrases in Chinese. I can't resist posting any more: Chinese, being head-last, (tail-first?), puts the adverb before the verb: Ta1 gao1xing4-de chang4-zhe. He happy-adv sing-prog. "He is singing happily." However, this is NOT how English adverbial clauses should usuall...

Indeed. Thanks for the examples--they did help. I hadn't been thinking so much in terms of two languages merging (although there might be a case or two of that as well), but it did provide food for thought about how they might influence each other and each other's speakers. My example was an Englis...

How about Chinese influencing English? Different enough? ;) Singaporean English is a dialect of English that formed under influence from Southern Chinese dialects. It started out probably as a pidgin of English, Hokkien, Cantonese, Malay and Tamil, but slowly became a full-fledged dialect with plent...

Tekumel looks pretty amazing! It's a bit like what I want my site to be like eventually, but so far my photoshop skills haven't reached that level

Anonymous wrote:Say...anyone know a language where "weird" is a verb?

p@,
Glenn

not yet, but you just gave me an idea.

As for languages, the progress on mine was sluggish for years... (lack of ideas, basically), until I decided to make it weird. Basically, I decided not to let it become similar to any language, anywhere. Although that's not exactly a realistic goal, tt's been turning out great so far. :D Perhaps you...

I've got an ongoing one.

so far, a few maps and an ongoing grammar. It's a lot deeper than it looks, but most of the stuff is still in my mind...

but I'll be updating it.

Those of you who had their worlds for some time, you'd probably know what I'm talking about: as the years go by, all of your countries are slowly modified and remodified until your original world has been totally replaced. So, here's a question to Z what did your world look like back then? What did ...

Mmm, well this thread seems to expand my mind quite a bit, especially the tidbits coming in about Uralic languages or Quechua... anyway, I've already started converting my half-baked conlang from a stress-system to a hybrid "tone-pitch-stress" system. It's getting very interesting so far. well back ...

Yeah, you can say that all nouns are pretty much mass nouns. Ma3 means "horse" in the same way "water" means water and not bottles of water. On the other hand, there's a weird phenomenon in Chinese involving these counters, basically making mass nouns even more "mass-like": Ma3pi3 horse-horsecounter...

Nice link, butsuri! I'll certainly be looking over it. Anyway, here's the next tidbit(s): First of all, the counters. Some of you might know this, for those who don't: all Chinese nouns are uncountable. Yes, that's right. To count air in English, you need to measure it by liters or something, you ca...

I think that in English, "short sleeves" kind of pops up in the mind as one concept, since it's so common... It's like we just hear it as one word, and the mind skips over the process of combining our concept of "short" with our concept of "sleeves". In a culture where short-sleeved garments are no...

Well I have to say it's the same thing as the English pair of: I've gone to the shop. I went to the shop. They don't really differ, except that the first seems to emphasize the "completeness" while the second stresses the "pastness". I guess that doesn't really make sense, yet we can instinctively t...

Well, I wouldn't exactly say it's that clearcut. It's more of a matter of "feel"... like, "are you being specific? or descriptive?"

darn... forgot to sign in. Anyway, that previous post was mine, plus the quotes are butsuri's and not Z's.

da4 yu2 big-fish (a 'fused mental image' according to my grammar) da4de yu2 a fish that happens to be big Uh... well that isn't exactly part of the Mandarin that I speak... dialect differences maybe? As far as my Mandarin goes, de is used thus: duan3 xiu4zi "short-sleeve" - fused * duan3 chen2mo4 "...

Swedish has just two tonal contours, which can be seen in ?nden 'the duck' vs. ?nd?n 'the spirit'. (The accents aren't indicated in writing... unfortunately for foreigners.) Are there word pairs like that in Japanese, where they're distinguished only by tone contour? For example, if you say kokoro ...

heh, before reading this I would never have imagined how "different" non-IE tongues were. ;) Just wondering, does anyone know about the characteristics of the Altaic language family? I believe Turkish is a member, and the most I know about it is that it is the most "regular" language in the world. ...

Tones per se, no; but Swedish, Serbo-Croatian, and ancient Greek are all pitch-accent languages like Japanese. What exactly is pitch-accent, though? Not so true for the Germanic languages, at least... English can easily turn nouns into verbs, and the other Germanic languages tend not to distinguish...

While you're talking about features of non-IE languages, one question: What, on the other hand, are typical Indo-European features? Are there things that all IE languages have in common? The numbers sound distinctly familiar in almost all of them, and the European ones have borrowed a number of pol...

Here's tidbit #2. It's shorter, I promise. In Chinese there's a structure showing you how successful an action is. Often, a verb can't survive without this structure: * Ta1 kan4. He read "He reads". Ta1 kan4 de wan2. He read affirmat. finish "He can finish reading it." Ta1 kan4 bu wan2. He read neg....

Nice stuff, Ranskaldan. Are you Chinese yourself, or just studying the language? I'm Chinese myself. Naturally, I know next to nothing about its grammar (since I learnt it as a child). I probably know more French grammar than Chinese grammar, which is why I'm making my way through a Chinese grammar...

I'm making my way thru my volume of modern Chinese grammar, and am, as usual, amazed by how different it is from IE. Since I can't seem to find some of these features in any conlang, I can't resist posting some tidbits. I hope that these ideas will get out into the conlang community and create more ...

Dream of Red Mansions - about the lives of several rich families and their various spoiled sons and daughters What, one of the most important works of Chinese literature is about the spoiled children of rich families? Don't Asian leaders always claim that the whole phenomenom of people being spoile...