Interesting, I had no idea the chess sense was the original. Id heard the chess etymology before but disnt know it was the same word. And, is it possible that instead of "the king is amazed", it's actually "the king is dead"? /mawt/ means death but I'm not sure how to get a participle even with wikt...

Kēlen is the name of a conlang which has only four verbs, and therefore verbs are a closed class and thus quite unverblike. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kēlen It can be said to have no verbs at all.... Sotomayor says that the language is perfectly naturalistic in all ways except that it has no ve...

Old High German used <z> to represent the laminal /s/ derived from PG. *t, while using <s> to represent the apical /s̺/ derived from PG. *s, which later becomes /ʃ/ in word-initial consonant clusters. That could be used as a precedent for writing /s/, /ʃ/ as <z>, <s>, if your orthography was establ...

DesEsseintes wrote: ↑

Sat 06 Oct 2018, 17:30

Next: wítaxáí-
An adjective that can be used to describe people

prone to surrendering easily during fights and joining in the pleasure of the winning side

Next: larakhi type of refined material (pronunciation as in IPA )

It would be odd for a plural marker to appear after a case marker, yes. Maybe the morpheme that becomes the plural marker can itself have different forms for different cases, though you'd said you didn't want fusion and that setup would likely cause fusion.

Poswa and Pabappa derive all of these from the same root: friend, respect, love, cooperation, influence, neighbor. The bare root didn't survive so none of these words is more basic than any other, but this may give you some ideas. There are also compound words for friends derived from the verbs for ...

I'd love to see details either here or elsewhere if you ever feel up to it... it sounds very interesting. When you say there's much to learn, do you mean you yourself haven't yet found answers to questions the people want to know?

Perhaps dwarves and fairies are the same species, with an extreme sexual dimorphism - the dwarves are the males and the fairies the females. (I think this idea is not new. I can't give a reference, but I am pretty sure that I have seen it in some book about European folklore.) Thanks for the idea. ...

i may have misunderstood, but i want to popst this reply even so in the hopes that its helpful: Are there any languages for which the alienable-inalienable possession distiction is allowed only for animate things? {...} In my mind, animate things can have inalienable things, like qualities and parts...

I'd be interested in this too, though I can attest that in 20 yrs of making SOV conlangs I've never felt that something was wrong with how I order other parts of speech. Adjectives are verbs and thus always follow their heads, but I also use predominantly suffixing morphology, with some infixes but ...

One problem is the size of the glyphs. if you have a large number of glyphs in the language, most word roots will consist of just one or two glyphs. But what size are you going to use to indicate the inflections? Suppose your word for "slap" is a single glyph, but you have dozens of verb inflections...

Outside of the linguistic world (in the world of lay English speakers, that is), it's pretty universally recognized that the word "moist" is unpleasant. [....]How much of the revulsion is due to the sound vs. the meaning or is it just the perfect balance of unpleasant sound and meaning? Wiktionary ...

something to avoid mentioning; taboo word/idea Poswa: pobapie , lit. "Don't say it!" , from poba "speak" plus the negative imperative. Pabappa: possibly popep posu along the same lines, but this is hypothetical because the language does not have the same means of zero derivation from inflected verb...

How do I turn /a ə ɨ/ into /a ɒ e ø i y ɤ o ɯ u/? I have tried many strategies but nothing seems to work to the intended effect and I am at a complete loss. Additionally the later inventory is supposed to have vowel harmony with all vowels having front harmony with the first vowel of a word. You ma...

I forgot to mention that some species of penguins on planet Teppala can fly, but are less efficient swimmers than the flightless penguins. Yet they recognize each other's shared traits and live together as allies against their cruel natural environment, just like penguins on Earth whose habitats ove...

i think that rule is begininng to break down. Wikipedia article http://enwp.org/ich-laut says that Frauchen is a word, which has the suffix after a vowel, pronounced with /ç/, and yet does not trigger umlaut. If this pattern is consdiered standard, one can also create the word Kuhchen , diminutive o...

I think there are a tiny number of exceptions , such as Ache, Kuchen, etc, which have [x] and is a unit rather than e.g. ach + /-e/. Kuchen is perhaps a loan but a very early one. Wiktionary says it's native.

One exception to the sonority hierarchy in clusters is affricates . Often, a language will allow coda /ts/ but not /ps/, /tf/, /kś/, and so on, even if those others are allowed in the onset. Here, the affricates behaves as a single phoneme with one sonority value rather than a sequence of two with d...

I'm not doubting you but 1) it could be a false affectation of an accent, like how some people think brooklyn NY switches "er" and "oi" when it's just a merger 2) the spelling of middle English could just be a variant along the lines of German randomly picking f or v for the same sound. But I think ...

The first poster of this thread now has a banner ad for hugedomains.com as an avatar. I don't remember it being that way before. Did something happen? He's long gone so I doubt I'd be able to contact him.