The CBB

English corner (a borrowing from Anglo-Norman / Old French, derived from Latin cornū 'horn')
Sanskrit कोण koṇa- 'corner' (a borrowing from Dravidian)

I wonder, does the ezafe Pure Morphological Suffix -e ever co-occur with the indefinite Phrasal Suffix -i? Say, something like ketab-e-(j)i Maryam, 'a book of Maryam's'. If this is ungrammatical, how are 'Maryam's book' (in which book has a definite reference) and 'a book of Maryam's' distinguished...

I don't think I ever do really unusual things, so I've never been asked or felt the need to explain something diachronically. :mrgreen: That said, maybe my standards for something to qualify as "unusual" are quite high? I once had a conlang where I had verbs hold regressive stress (as far ...

English mirror < Old French mireor (literally "watcher") Arabic مرآة mirʔā 'mirror' (formed with the mi- instrument prefix and the root r-ʔ-y, cf. the verb رأى‎ raʔā 'to see') Although French Wiktionary informs me that at least one etymologist (Antoine-Paulin Pihan) thinks the French word ...

This is my favourite recurrent thread. I don't do conlanging anymore so I never have anything to post, but it's still inspiring for me to get things done in my natlang studies.

Sorry, it was really late when I posted the question so I kinda misworded it and what I meant by context. I meant that there's no context of establishing a second-person plural object, not sentences just floating in a void. A second-person plural object may well have been referred to earlier and wo...

Sorry for the incredibly stupid question(s), but... I'm trying to learn Spanish again, now more than just to understand a little but to be able to use it myself in a grammatically correct way, and... If the accusative of ustedes is just los / las depending on gender (and can be suffixed to the verb...

One thing I used for Proto-Skawlas (which has a similar ablaut system) was inpsired by something that Nortaneous had posted, I think, over on the ZBB about a South American language(?) where individual morphemes could be "stressed" or "unstressed" and this then affected the stre...

I should just start calling you hieroglyph man in space. Good work, as per usual...

Hold up there! It's perfectly possible to construct apparently internally-headed relative clauses (IHRCs) with relative pronouns in them (modifying or in apposition to the head). Some people claim that Greek has them. And although the IHRC contains no gap, it's possible for the matrix to have a gap...

Very interesting text with all those comparisons! Just wanted to share this graph about ancient and late antique Rome I saw someone share elsewhere: https://i.imgur.com/VKqTCVW.jpg Source: Twine, Kevin. 1992. "The City in Decline: Rome in Late Antiquity". Middle States Geographer, vol. 25....

Thanks for the write-up! Good to have an idea on the variation that has been published on this.

Creyeditor wrote: ↑22 Jun 2022 08:29I should probably compose a more detailed post and compare a few varieties.

I would appreciate that. Even just a presentation on your opinion on the capital's more prestigious dialect would be interesting for me.

Here's a new question for you: what do you think about stress in Indonesian? Is there a noticeable stress? Are there morphophonological rules to predict it (what are they)?

My remote understanding is that this topic is a bit controversial...?

I've seen both "level" and "flat tones" in ling literature.

Sanskrit नाग nāga- 'snake, naga', Proto-Germanic *snakô 'snake; worm' Hebrew נָחָשׁ nakhásh 'snake' Proto-Bantu *nyókà 'snake', Swahili nyoka 'snake', Zulu inyoka 'snake' Middle Chinese 腳 [kɨɐk̚ ] 'foot', Cantonese goek3 [kœːk̚˧] Chechen ког '(animal) foot, paw', Ingush ког '(animal) foot, paw', Kom...

Arabic شعر ʃiʕr 'poetry, poem'
Hebrew שִׁיר shir 'song, poem'
Chinese 詩 shī 'poetry, poem'

[thought experiment: imagine a society in which social status were extremely important linguistically, and in which the word 'monarch' were feminine. We could imagine similar substitution processes to the above leading to monarchs by default being referred to as 'she'...] This reminds me, I was sur...

Ah, I see. I'm looking at the languages in question, and I see even some famous ones are included: Languages with cases and obligatory use of numeral classifiers: - Burmese (8-9 cases) - Garo (8-9 cases; Sino-Tibetan; in India) - Semelai (3 cases; Austroasiatic; in Malaysia) - Nivkh (8-9 cases) - Ko...

I've been thinking of a system where (like several Asian languages I think) every noun is preceded by a classifier noun such as "person", "animal", etc. Hopefully unlike those languages, while the noun root never declines, the classifier can be inflected for number, case, etc. I...