Perfectives: Beginnings and Endings
There’s something I’ve found interesting about the semantics of perfectives in different languages, but which I don’t think is mentioned very often or paid much attention in general writing on aspect. Specifically, it’s about the interaction of perfective aspect with telicity, and the extent to which the meaning of a perfective clause depends on the…
Non-Recursive NPs
I recently read Foley’s grammar of Yimas, and I wanted to share one particularly interesting aspect of it. I’ve got a pretty worn copy of Foley’s The Papuan Languages of New Guinea, which I’d strongly recommend for an overview of the region’s languages, and I’ve always found him to be very good at simple, readable,…
Why Noun Sandwiches?
This post is a bit chain of thought, so apologies if it doesn’t quite reach a firm and justified conclusion. It’s another indirectly conlanging related one… Ch’ubmin so far also has incorporated nouns sandwiched between the coverb and verb root, but I’m still not sure why that’s the “right” position for them. The next topic…
Light Verbs Two: Electric Boogaloo
This post follows on from my previous post on light verbs and classifier constructions in Algonquian and Australian languages. For my current project, I’m very interested in which non-semantically empty light verbs different languages use, especially languages with small and/or closed verb classes. By non-semantically-empty, I mean those languages where the choice of light verb…
Word Order Indecision
I’ve spent the last couple of weeks stuck on the main clause word order principles for Ch’ubmin (my current conlang). Ch’ubmin is a synthetic language, mostly verb-initial, with polypersonal agreement and incorporation, and somewhat inspired by Mayan and some other native North American languages. The thing I’m most certain of is the function and structure…
The Lenovo Duet 3 Experience
I recently acquired a Lenovo Duet 3 Chromebook, and I like it enough as a solution to my specific needs / problem that I wanted to share. I’ve used it heavily since I got it a few days ago, and I think I’ve now accumulated enough experience to give a balanced review. To start with,…
Good and Bad Homophony
One thing about conlanging is that it’s easy to end up with semi-accidentally homophonous words, which can be fine and happens a lot in natural languages, but when it happens with your conlang you need to decide if you’re OK with it in this particular instance or not. And there’s one minor one right now…
The Big Speech of the Andor Finale
This post contains spoilers for episode 12 of Andor. If you haven’t seen it yet and want to, please come back later. I don’t normally post fan analysis, but the posthumous speech that Maarva gave in the final episode of Andor season 1 really was very good and I wanted to try to break down…
Prefixing Synthesis Sketch
Since I mentioned my background conlanging project on Twitter recently, I thought I’d sketch out what I was aiming for here. The general idea at the beginning was to build something that looked a bit like a cross between Mayan and Athabaskan: shared features like synthetic, head-marking, verb-centric, with a broadly Mayan~Mesoamerican phonology and verb…
Grammars of Space
The Sapir–Whorf hypothesis and claims about languages influencing thought are old and widely regarded as falsified. And I think it’s true that the strong version is false, but the weak version about language (and some aspects of culture, which is hard to disentangle from language) influencing thought has some support. And a particularly interesting area…
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