The CBB

Are there other natlangs that have different forms of adjectives depending on whether they're used attributively or predicatively? I'm sure I know examples, I just can't think of any right now. Are they always a few irregular forms (like English my vs. mine and lone vs. alone) or are there any lang...

Maybe the marker could have some other uses, say object is expressed by the nominative in the end of the clause and with the dative, which has usual dative meanings too, in the beginning of the clause. Sounds very plausible. This would be kind of a split-alignment between neutral marking and nom-ac...

You could say it's differential object marking and accusative is only marked on topicalized objects. Is the fronted-accusative used for anything else? Are in-situ objects unmarked? Could you give an example from your conlang?

People would probabky call it a topic marker or something, maybe object topic marker. Fronting object is often called topicalization independent of the actual information structure status. IIUC, you could call the marker a topic marker. If you are talking about something else, please let me know.

German (and Yiddish?) double letters to show that the preceding vowel is short. For <z> however, the doubled version is <tz> insted of <zz>, i.e. in words like <spitz> the <i> is short.

I'm somewhat tempted to split this project into two: one thread for "Crimean Gothic," which is my reconstruction of the language of the same name, another one for "Gothish" which is less of a reconstruction and more of a real "conlang." I want to do something with all those Cj clusters dangnabbit. ...

How would you call a category in verbal morphology in which you add affixes to a verb stem of an activity you want to perform to express what you need to do first in order to be able to carry out the final action? Like for example: kota = to find kota-ba = to search (find-X) mera = to eat meraba = ...

I'm working on a conlang right now with split ergativity and need some help making sure that this makes sense/is how split ergativity works. It has three cases: Nominative (NOM); Oblique (OBL); and Possessive (POS). In the cases where the alignment is NOM-ACC, S and A are both marked NOM and P is m...

k1234567890y wrote: ↑

29 Jun 2019 09:38

The word for "dictionary" in Azerbaijani, as Wiktionary states, is lüğət

Which is a false friend to German Lüget! lie! (imperative plural)

I would

Vowel tone-to-length conversion may have been touched on before, but I don't feel it looking it up. Is a system deriving current vowel length from past vowel tone, such as [é è e → eː eˑ e], plausible? Something else to think about: contour tones often phonetically extend the duration of their vowe...

Tuyono wrote: ↑

27 Jun 2019 07:41

Creyeditor wrote: ↑

26 Jun 2019 22:33

`baku' can also mean 'standard' or 'core'

Also this one! I can't really imagine how it got both meanings

I guess it had a more body-part related meaning (maybe akin to French `coeur' > `core') once and maybe went a similar route to `body(part)' > REFL grammaticalization

Źilaa Ruńu is nearly two years old and still has no reciprocal construction [:|] I want some kind of adverb or particle to be used for that,but it's hard come up with anything that's not a direct translation of "one another". How do different languages handle this? I know that words for body parts ...

I don't know of any natlang that distinguishes them morphologically between them, but (i) there are linguists that distinguish them and there are languages where ad-sentential adverbs are an open class but ad-adjectival adverbs are a closed class. Btw I am pretty sure that some people have argued f...

I decided this was more a “Linguistics” post than a “Conlangs” post. Are modifiers that modify modifiers, pretty much the same word-class as intensifiers? Do any natlangs distinguish two or more distributional word-classes of “adverbs”? For instance, perhaps: * ad-sentential and/or ad-clausal and/o...

I think the lesser/greater distinction and the paucal/plural distinction should depend on the discourse context. Let's say you are talking about animals. Imagine a situation with 1000 flies, 500 mosquitos, 10 frogs and 3 pigs. Speaker A: Oh no, there are flie-GREATER.PL in the swamp. Speaker B: But ...

Zekoslav wrote: ↑

07 Jun 2019 19:55

Make an alternate Earth based on the medieval T and O map.

Step 1: Exchange longitude and latitude around a point centered on Jerusalem.

Step 2: Reclimatize.

Step 3: ???

Step 4: Profit!

Step 3a: Exchange longitude and latitude for cultural and linguistic parameters

There are several ways, that I see: 1. Onset voicing: high tone because voiceless /k/ 2. Stress(a): High tone because stressed 3. Stress(b): Falling tone because stressed-unstressed 4. Coda voicing: Low tone because voiced /ddz/ 5. Coda manner: High tone because stop /d/ You can go for either option...

Some people claim that there is a difference. I'm not sure if this is true though, for me some very frequent verbs use past tense (`war' and not `ist gewesen') and other verbs use the perfect (`hat gearbeitet' not `arbeitete'). The example usually claimed to differentiate is: Past tense ungrammatic...

I don't think there is a conclusive answer based on natlangs. Not enough data to generalize.