The CBB

To be clear I understand you: - you want to convey possession using a copula/existential/locational-type verb, in a construction sort of like "the box is with him", instead of with a possessive verb like "he has the box"? - you want the verb (/copula) used in this construction to...

If it makes you feel any better, the opening theme of the adagio from Beethoven's piano sonata number eight in C minor (opus 13) is a blatent rip-off of Mozart's 14th. Right down to the key... [Piano Sonata No. 14 in C minor, K. 457] [ Pathetique ; second section of the 457 adagio . (you might think...

...woah. So, maybe a week ago, I heard a snatch of a tune, and I couldn't quite work out what it was [ I have now worked it out]. In the process of thinking about that tune I accidentally slipped into another tune. And for several days last week I kept humming THAT tune to myself, even though I coul...

The vowels need not even be contiguous: once the tone is generated, it can escape the loss of its bearer by shifting to another vowel. So /kánùta/ could become /kânta/. Contours can also be created through sandhi with adjacent tones, or from the phonation of adjacent consonants. Or from the presence...

One thing that may be worth saying is to bear in mind that tones don't really need to be anchored to anything at all. Once a tone, or tonal element, is generated, it can remain fixed to its original carrier, but it can also in many language wander throughout the word, or even into adjacent words. Th...

Synchronically? It mostly means the speaker is from a rural area. Or imitating Victorian language (I find several google links with "swords a-flashing", including a song by Slayer). Diachronically, it derives from 'at', or 'on' (which merged), and it was a prepositional phrase with a gerun...

Well, again, definitions. The world of what we might call "traditionally polysynthetic" languages - polypersonalism, noun incorporation, bunch of other affixes (TAM, directionals, etc) - is relatively narrow. The world of what we might call "statistically polysynthetic" language...

This is largely a question of definitions. "Polysynthesis" is often used to mean a particular style or feel of language characterised by polypersonalism, noun incorporation, and extensive affixation on the verb. Alternatively, [...] Thank you for the in-depth reply! Well, if my question l...

So, I've been reading up on polysynthetic languages. I'm going to keep reading, but if I don't choose to ask questions at some point, I probably never will. 1) Are there any natural polysynthetic languages where the polysynthesis is not driven by polypersonal agreement and other markings on verbs? ...

So, I thought I'd add a small update here for comparison: Emperors of the Qin, Early Han, Xin and Later Han Dynasties. First, a short rant: Wikipedia articles for the Roman and Chinese empires really are night and day! Roman articles are generally closely cited, frequently offer opposing viewpoints,...

I should say, though, that Lynx's reasoning on the nature of the language seems correct - if you did have difficulty being heard, you probably would reduce consonant distinctions first, and use tone extensively. However, I'm not sure they go far enough! I would have expected all details of formants ...

Well, I don't know if it would help much, but you could make your conpeople not just humans with wings, but humans with many other adaptations for flight, such as hollow bones and the presence of air sacs - that is, cavities other than the lungs that are made for carrying air. I was assuming that, ...

My main thought was that I'm not sure if the language could actually be used. I'd imagine that past a certain speed of movement/wind, sound of any form would be lost. It might depend on how fast your speakers are actually moving, how they are positioned in regards to each other and what the weather...

Sumeri famously puts all case endings in one word. Somali also has all the adpositions of the clause before the verb. So, I don't see the discontinuity of NPs such a problem and unnaturalistic that it should have some complicated syntactic analysis. You're assuming that Somali and "Sumeri"...

Factually, it's clear that that sound change did occur (assuming that is the etymology). Because that's the only difference between the two forms. Specifically, the sound change occurred in the process of borrowing from Romance (where the /w/ is retained) into Arabic (where so far as I know it's nev...

The only way I can make sense of it in terms of human languages is that it's VS with clefting and these are all like English "it is" constructions, just with no overt marking of this: Dut si me deses. house COP in us [it is] the house [that] we are in Mizien hi u doteken. ocean COP alike c...

... you're asking how /wandalus/ became /andalus/? Well, I suspect the route was the dropping of /w/.

In theory, one could play in the key of any of the twelve shí’èrlǜ pitches, and any of the seven pitches within those keys could serve as finalis. Therefore, scholars of the Tàng and Sòng recognized eighty-four possible mode-key combinations, or diàozi (調子, chōshi , ‘mode-key combination’), in whic...

Dryer points to Nama, Kolokuma Ijo, Bimoba, Kera, Ngizim, Ingush, Avar, Mundari, Car Nicobarese, Kiribatese, Ponapean, Woleaian, Papago, and Warao. However, he says that some of these may be object pronoun incorporation rather than true agreement (that is, that they're saying "I ate it - the ap...

Right, so I think googling[ "unmarked high" tone phonetics] might give you examples of languages that have been argued to have an unmarked high tone. I haven't googled this, but I know there are even languages in which stress is marked by a lower tone, so I'd have thought it almost certai...