The CBB

That's not a fallacy, though. That's all totally logical. It leaves one premise (the reason to not want something to happen in a certain place) unexpressed, but the argument itself is logical. Premise 1: some people don't like it when other people kiss in public [kind of implied by the very fact of ...

I tend to slightly overcook everything - due to a combination of laziness, poor timekeeping, and paranoia (it's better to slightly overcook and be disappointed than undercook and be vomiting!) - and unfortunately quinoa does not respond well to being overcooked. But properly-cooked quinoa bought fro...

This seems rather over-egged. Playing a noise game - which you can do with a cat or a dog - is not the same as having a conversation. Even if whales can speak, they wouldn't necessarily use speech when playing a turn-taking noise game. I don't have any resources off-hand but you can search for them ...

I think you're kind of coming from the wrong direction and getting trapped as a result. Languages don't work on the principle of "here's a cool label a linguist invented - I guess I'd better work out where it most logically applies!" They work on the principle of "this is what we do, ...

Voiced codas can lengthen vowels, but I wonder if long vowels can voice codas? In my conlang, Middle Wenthish, a Germanic language, I voice consonants after long vowels - and, since this isn't something that comes naturally to me or that I've done in any other language, I presume I had a good reaso...

Another odd thing about having a language from an entirely different biome is stuff like "ribbit". There are no frogs that sound anything like that here, just "gronk gronk gronk", "reeeeeeeeee", "wark" and "ree-kit-kit" ... some that just make a lou...

Do the triggers also have to be back?

Please don't use the word "experiencer" for 'intransitive subject'. It's WRONG . Rather, "experiencer" is a semantic role that may or may not be an intransitive subject. Many, in fact, most intransitive subjects aren't experiencers. [:x] [:$] [>_<] Thank you; I've looked it up, ...

Does anyone have any advice about how to make a reference grammar of a conlang in the style of a real reference grammar? (Aside from reading a lot of real reference grammars.) How should it be organized? What should it include? It should include whatever is necessary to fully describe the language,...

What do you think of this vowel harmony system? Is it plausible? It's /a e i ɤ o ɯ u/ /o u/ are rounded /ɤ ɯ/ are unrounded /a e i/ are neutral /a/ is usually unrounded/back in rounding/backness harmony systems and paired (or re-paired) with a back rounded or front unrounded vowel. Are there any ot...

I don't think anything and everything is the correct answer. I know of no language that uses only word order to distinguish person, number, tense, aspect, modality, or evidentiality. But I might be wrong of course. I can't name any, but I'd be surprised if there are no languages that at least secon...

lurker wrote: ↑13 Mar 2024 20:53 Does anyone miss the "old" internet? I mean before about 2005 or so, definitely before the dot com bubble burst?

FWIW, though, the dot com bubble burst in 2001.

Late 19th and early 20th century Russia was an amazing time period, culturally. Diverse political engagement, and a fantastically rich artistic culture - graphic art, literature, music, architecture. There's various modernists, alongside both conservatives and populists, all in dialogue with one ano...

Another of my 'speculative' questions... How might a language develop an animate/inanimate (or any other binary gender-like) distinction, on demonstratives specifically? I ask about demonstratives, since they are likely one of the first points in the development of a gender system (at least accordi...

I'm a bit confused by the economics/ideology here - is this a totalitarian state of some sort? How have you broken the universal human need for status symbols? If something is expensive, people will powerfully want to own it. In our world, for instance, ownership of white goods, cars, even houses is...

Not an expert, but since we've raised the question, I'd guess there are three reasons why Latin developed mostly-free word order: a) the word order was probably ancestrally never totally fixed anyway. Strong SOV tendencies in the earliest records may be in part a literary decision, a style of "...

Just encountered a beautiful Irish sentence glossed for me: An t-ealaíontóir gur mhór aici an damhan alla agus gur mhór a cuid damhan alla, Louise Bourgeois, fuair sí bás ar na mallaibh. Literally: "the artist that big with her the spider and that big her lot of spider, Louise Bourgeois, found ...

I'm afraid I don't know any syntax (in a linguistics sense, imaginary trees and brackets and anagrams and whatnot), so I probably can't give the sort of answer you want. Thank you very much for this! To be honest, my knowledge of syntax/"linguistics" is very rudimentary, and I favour comm...

I'm afraid I don't know any syntax (in a linguistics sense, imaginary trees and brackets and anagrams and whatnot), so I probably can't give the sort of answer you want. [from my position of ignorance, your business with the complementizers seems counterintuitive, since at least in Germanic and I be...

Yep - well, I don't know if "reduced" is the right word because I don't think the short vowel are centralised, but yes, it's a 3-vowel system with length, historically, but where a quality distinction has been introduced by the long and short vowels shifting slightly. The long mid vowels i...