The CBB

I decided to write down some notes for adding a retroflex nasal into Proto Inaki since the previous consonant inventory was still uncomfortably close to the Proto Uralic one, just without the funky continuant series δ δʹ x . The new inventory is /p t tɕ tʃ k/ - p t ć č k /s ɕ ʃ/ - s ś š /m n ɲ ɳ ŋ/ ...

Also I'd imagine if a language with a small inventory developed dental fricatives it wouldn't want to get rid of it's allophonic dental fricatives because of the small amount of consonants and then additionally (over time) because of it became a phoneme ... I'm not sure if this argument holds up at...

Interesting breakup of the word classes. How do you treat adverbs? These are easily a subclass or inflections of nouns but since you also say that nouns always need to occur with a classifier, do you mean that in sentences like Swallows fly fast. or The sun rises daily. the words for fast and daily ...

Good job having both noun classes and classifiers. I like when languages grammaticalise more than one type of nominal classification. I know very little of classifiers. Not even what they are really. If you want to say 'I saw an apple.' would you use a classifier, or do you have to specify 'I saw on...

Aside from Celtic and Semitic, are there additional languages or language families with regular series of inflected/conjugated adpositions? Having these seems natural to me whenever a language has possessive suffixes and its adpositions are structurally relational nouns. They are commonly found acr...

Do Uralic langauges have other elements meaning 'from' than the tV-element that is the partitive in Finnic? Not that I know of, -tV seems to be the only ancient ablative element in Uralic. If you want some variation, it's best to get it by letting a new formation replace the old ablative. You could...

Masculine-feminine gender distinctions are a common sight in Papuan languages, either as the only gender opposition or as a part of a richer gender system. The Sepik and Skou families are two good places to look for languages with a simple MASC vs. FEM system. I'll leave it to you to judge how fusoi...

How unnatural would it be for an analytic language to have vowel harmony? Many of them have tones, which you can argue that is a form of inflection. You can have vowel harmony as long as you have something where the harmony shows up. The typical case is that you have affixial morphology where the a...

I'd still call them noun classes since that's how they function grammatically. If you start to describe the locative classes as cases, you'll end up making statements along the lines that these cases still look and function like the regular noun classes. Inventing such a terminological divides isn't...

You better read the Wikibooks entry on importing graphics in LaTeX . The graphicx package is the way to include graphics in LaTeX documents. I use it all the time to do larger figures, mostly from graphic files in the PS or EPS formats, but I see no reason why you couldn't use it to typeset short sn...

The closest I've seen to a present/non-present dichtomy in a natlang is the Papuan syncretism of "yesderday" and "tomorrow", but in that case the verbal tense system still makes a definite distinction of past vs. non-past. For more of this check for example Tent (1998, Sect. 5.1...

I'm still a little bit unsure of how this works; How are you to determine the flow velocity and the characteristic length? At least, what are those variables on Earth? The Wikipedia article gives some illustrative examples (from tornadoes to ordinary low-pressure systems). Different flow phenomena ...

Just discovered the equation governing atmospheric/oceanic circulation. Apparently it's based off of Navier-Stokes equations. d=v0/(2ΩsinΘ) That looks not too different from a definition of the Rossby number Ro = v /( d ⋅2ΩsinΘ) as a function of latitude Θ on a rotating sphere (e.g. a planet). Here...

The distinction is also found in most Ndu languages, where /β/ or /v/ is commonly also the only voiced fricative phoneme. I've always found this setup as somewhat surprising, but there you go.

In Finnish kunta meaning "municipality" could be an extension of its meaning of "a group of people with a shared feature", e.g. ihmiskunta ‎"humankind", äänestäjäkunta "electorate", etc. The meaning of kunta as "municipality" is definitely an extens...

Yes, instrumental is a natural choice for marking oblique agents, making it an easy source for grammaticalising ergatives. Slightly off topic but still relevant, another common source for ergatives is genitive. It's quite common to derive new finite clause types from older nominalised clauses where ...

If there is a real noun-verb asymmetry in purely tonemic morphemes, it has to have some motivation. Thus far the sample of such morphemes in mutually unrelated languages looks too small to make any rigorous conclusions. If it is more common to have tonemic morphemes on verbs, and if this is more tha...

From what I gather, tone/pitch accent seems far more likely to be doing grammatical work on verbs than on nouns, and I'd even propose an implicational hierarchy to the effect of 'if grammatical functions on nouns are encoded at least partly through tone changes, then grammatical functions on verbs ...

Absolutely possible, there's no intrinsic connection between the grammatical types that you list. What you are experiencing is sampling bias due to exposure to Indo-European and possibly Afroasiatic languages. Both are large families full of fusional languages with nominative-accusative alignment an...

Nuclear power in an urban area sounds like an excellent way to make people nervous. Remember that when things go wrong with it they can really go wrong, no matter what sort of a reactor you are using. It's also quite at odds with how you described the community before: It's isolated from the rest of...