The CBB

Somewhat relatedly to the topic of separable/inseparable "prefixes", I learned today that the ancient Roman grammarian Donatus considered the directional verbal prefixes as "prepositions" like the true prepositions... - Quae praepositiones sunt quae dictionibus serviunt et separari non possunt? Di-,...

Although Salmoneus' example is exaggerated, I think the point is that English speakers generally don't mind using very weird spellings for names of languages (and people, tribes, ethnicities, places and countries). Just look at the use of the Spanish <j> in "Navajo", the Mandarin pinyin <x> in "Naxi...

In that situation, you typically provide a separate gloss of each word, effectively showing the literal expression in the object language. For example, "Latin" (the language) in Latin as a noun phrase must sometimes be expressed as two words: linguae latīnae oblīvīscor tongue.SG.GEN Latin.FEM.SG.GEN...

This isn't really true, and I'm not sure Thim actually claims it is. Thim's differences from... well, everybody else on the planet, it seems... actually appear to be more about rhetoric and strawmen than about what actually happened - Thim is anxious to defend phrasal verbs as pure and Germanic, ag...

Once again, I suppose, English (or "SAE") is the exception, not the rule. As Salmoneus just said, it's natural and expected that this would be the case, since the English/French (not SAE) 'to be' includes so many basic key uses that languages may find it important to distinguish. So I would say it'...

I imagine most languages around the world, in fact the vast majority of them, have more than one basic verb to translate different key meanings of English 'to be'. Portuguese and other Ibero-Romance languages have ser vs. estar too. Mandarin uses 是 shì for noun = noun, noun = non-gradable stative ve...

Who is the default agent in verbs in your natlang(s) or conlang(s), or those ‘langs you know? First person? Second person? Third person? In English, the “correct” (i.e. normative) interpretation of an unmarked verb, is second-person imperative. However in colloquial speech (or at least my idiolect ...

German has a whole set of verbs with the prefix ein-, and that prefix is separable in at least some (maybe all?) of them. Makes me wonder if English ever had that, or if it was a German innovation. I cant think of any English verbs with in- that arent loans from Latin. I think you would enjoy Stefa...

No, I don’t think those apply at all. The existence of members of those five classes that happen to be light, doesn’t counter the claim. What would counter the claim would be the existence of contentful words not among those five classes. ...... Did I not state the claim clearly? I’ll have to revie...

So the only words that are so loaded, are among the five categories that are mentioned (even if two of those categories don’t exist in That Other Language.) What Reyzadren said could still be true if other languages can be said to have further categories than those of your list. For example, it has...

My interpretation of the question, though, is just that a noun root produces nouns - by a productive and semantically predictable non-compound process* - and a verb root produces verbs, and so forth. A language then 'has both noun-roots and adjective roots distinct from each other' when there are s...

Among others, I came up with this strategy (in English): The man give book give woman. Is this completely ANADEW? And I'd like to think the second give could get converb marking or something nice like that. I don't know of a language that does this with ditransitives, but Mandarin does that with ad...

1. Does nearly every natlang that has both noun-roots and adjective-roots distinct from each other, have significantly more noun-roots than adjective-roots? 2. Does nearly every natlang that has both noun-roots and verb-roots distinct from each other, have significantly more noun-roots than verb-ro...

I’d have thought to perfect something would be to make it all the way through, while to complete something would be to fill it up. My comment alluded to a difference between Latin and English. In Latin, perficiō was mostly used in the sense of 'to finish/complete sth', and only by extension 'to bri...

Ideally you'd have a proto-proto-lang fully worked out. And a proto-proto-proto-lang, and so forth. Of course, this is physically impossible because of the infinite regress, so you sort of have to work out your own balance between perfectionism (making it as good as possible) and completionism (act...

A bit late, maybe, but your 'imaginary Spanish' is perfectly legit Portuguese in most if not all lects (i'm fairly certain for all Brazilian lects, less so for European ones); qual a coisa is perfectly valid, but i think it is syntactically restricted (more speakers and more systematic info needed ...

Very acceptable in Spanish. Mi desayuno de hoy. Depends what he's asking. [...] Well, I would also accept a more explicitly doubly-marked possession with a human NP: el desayuno de hoy de Elvira, el desayuno de hoy de las enfermeras . It's a rather uncommon construction to use though, because typic...

Are there languages in which the equivalent of "my today's breakfast" would be grammatical? It seems to be a common mistake among English learners, perhaps including young native speakers. The only way to properly express this in English is to take one of the modifiers out of the clause and either ...

There are no reconstructions of Classical Chinese phonology as far as I know, if we define it as the language of the Warring States Period (5th-3rd centuries BC). There are a number of reconstructions for "Old Chinese", which is some pretty abstract system of correspondences and developments, which ...

In Celos nouns always mark for the 1st and 2nd person, while the 3rd person is assumed. It isn't obligatory per say, but if a speaker were to say "The man is me, I killed him" without a person marker it'd literally be "The man killed him". Of course this could be fixed simply with pronouns, but wha...