The CBB

[...] Salmoneus, I find these posts you've been writing in this thread extremely interesting. Do you recommend any particular books or authors where I could read more about the interaction of economics and birthrates, economics and the value of people (men or women, capital-owners or labourers), an...

Old Church Slavonic has many cases marked and distinguished by a single vowel: gradŭ grade grada gradě gradu gradi grady. And there's a bit of syncretism of different case and number combinations, to make matters worse: gradŭ 'the city, of the cities', grade 'oh city!', grada 'of the city, the two c...

And then there's the languages of India, where the numbers from 1 to 99 are so irregular you basically have to memorize them all one by one.

GrandPiano wrote: ↑

12 Jan 2019 23:55

If Latin fūnus comes from the PIE root *dʰew-, then "death" and "funeral" are related.

Along similar lines:
Latin figere 'to pierce; fasten' ~ Spanish hincarse 'to kneel down' ~ English dig

If I recall correctly (I haven't looked at it in many years), the Hanyu Da Cidian uses the traditional 214 radicals. However, it is true that many Simplified Chinese dictionaries use a reduced idiosyncratic inventory of radicals, ranging from about 170 to 200. For example, the Collins Gem Mandarin C...

:chn: Mandarin Chinese, as far as I know, doesn't mark indirect speech. 他们说：“我们在去电影院” Tāmen shuō: “Wŏmen zài qù diànyĭngyuàn.” 3PL say: 1PL PROG go cinema They said: "We are going to the cinema." 他们说他们在去电影院。 Tāmen shuō tāmen zài qù diànyĭngyuàn. 3PL say 3PL PROG go cinema They said that they were g...

Imralu seems to be comfortable with Swahili to a good extent. Maybe you could nudge him to post a guide or perhaps a series of posts of interesting (glossed) bits about Swahili grammar.

I like the overall aesthetics of Ngäliv Ëra, both in phonology and grammar. It reminds me of one of my abandoned projects at least... Although the syntax of Ngäliv Ëra is significantly more f*cked up, in a good way. [:)] I must say I lol'd when I saw Fluffy8x's conlang presentation in actual Markdow...

Each category and spectrum is in its own paragraph. Commas delimit English concepts that are being conflated into a new one. Two lines separated by the letter v indicate 2 points that define a spectrum. "//" means "[repeat the above]" Better? Definitely better. Using "vs." and double quotes to repe...

Erm, sorry for not doing it a few days ago. I ended the day too tired from work to do it. Give me a few more hours today though!! (I'm at work while posting this.)

Yes. I will provide the translation later today~

It wasn't until I had quoted you that I even saw the poem. I was about to write "The following what?" The stupid new look of the board means I can't tell where people's signatures begin, so I just completely blocked out the meat of your post because my brain decided that was a signature. Rahrg! I h...

Out of the necessity for a language credit in school, I decided to take Spanish. I thought it would be a lot more linguistic, but one thing that I've noticed in language classes, including Spanish and English is that they like to explain things in their own way, and they like to cut corners, withou...

It's common to use other prepositions too, but I at least wouldn't quite consider these compounds to be honest, just lexical phrases. Incidentally, you can in fact say arresto por incendio provocado in Spanish. It's worth noting that another way of translating English noun-noun compounds into other ...

I'll participate with my clongo Araya.

How are these " " and ' ' used? I've learnt the standard: "word" and 'its meaning', like "al-kaatib" means 'the scribe'. But sometimes I see them used vice versa. In linguistics, there is certainly some convention of using italics (or, less commonly, “stylized double quotes”) for a word in a foreig...

Not what you're asking about, but Classical Chinese has (optional) subject-VP inversion in exclamations. That is, its normal word order is SVO, but it can be VOS in exclamations. The first example Pulleyblank gives in his grammar outline is from Mencius: 善哉問也 good EXCL ask TOP (Literally, "is good!,...

The phonology of this language is intended to be very simple. Consonants: p t c k m n s r y c is /tʃ/, and y is /j/. /n/ assimilates for place of articulation before a palatal or a velar: /nc nk ny/ [ɲtʃ ŋk ɲɟʝ]. /r/ is [r] at the beginning of a word or intervocalically, and is [ɾ] otherwise (except...

It might help you to know that, although there is a tradition of using "as for" to explain topics in linguistics, in normal English it's more common to use "now the X, ...", "regarding the X, ..." or just a plain "the X, it..." as topic constructions. Now focus, that is a more complex matter in Engl...

clawgrip wrote: ↑

21 Dec 2017 05:33

As far as I can tell, the modern conjunctive suffix -tsutsu also comes from this auxiliary.

What is this "conjunctive" suffix -tsutsu, and how is it used?