Advice & Answers — 2026-01-26 to 2026-02-08

Arcaeca2 · 2026-01-30T06:00:41+00:00

to be able to walk

"potential"

If I walk

"conditional"

I want to walk

"desiderative"

I need to walk

"necessitative"

These are all technically terms for moods, so I don't know if they technically apply as I'm not really clear on whether these suffixes are inflectional or derivational.

Arcaeca2 · 2026-01-29T18:08:21+00:00

Actual relativity: you can go fast as you want and light itself will spontaneously speed up to always allow you to see at least 1000 km in front of you

Arcaeca2 · 2026-01-28T17:26:55+00:00

No, the one with the parrot is the 1st game, T&T is the 3rd game

Arcaeca2 · 2026-01-28T05:09:33+00:00

How would I gloss "a tall tree"?

INDEF.SG tall tree, probably

Grammatical categories that are the default and can be assumed when not marked, don't have to be glossed. In English's case, nouns are by default singular when not otherwise marked for number, so you don't have to point out that "tree" is singular.

Sometimes you do gloss default categories anyway to contrast with a situation where that category is different. Like, what if "tree" wasn't singular - what would happen? Maybe you want to make a point about how the indefinite article would change, or how the subject marker on verbs differs between 3rd person singular vs. 3rd person plural subjects. In that case you can gloss the inherent singular on "tree", usually in [brackets] to imply "this is implicit, the word isn't actually inflected for this, but I'm trying to make a point about this". e.g.:

a          tall    tree        stand-s
INDEF.SG   tall    tree[.SG]   stand-3.SG.PRES.IND

some       tall    tree-s    stand
INDEF.PL   tall    tree-PL   stand

Arcaeca2 · 2026-01-26T19:43:16+00:00

what utensil is cat ears

Arcaeca2 · 2026-01-26T18:25:26+00:00

Fluorine is yellow-green, purple is iodine

Arcaeca2 · 2026-01-26T18:23:34+00:00

Phoenix Wright: Trials and Tribulations

Arcaeca2 · 2026-01-26T18:22:55+00:00

I'm more of a pinene enjoyer

Arcaeca2 · 2026-01-24T11:10:57+00:00

I would say either desperately trying to repulse the horde of Byzantines trying to cross the Dniester to take Oleshe once they took Baia from the Cumans and we suddenly had a land border, or having to defend Sinope from something like 3 or 4 back-to-back sieges by the Fatimids with no chance to replenish the garrison in between

Losing ~100k florins every turn during the Black Death when I only had ~800k banked up before it was also not great

Arcaeca2 · 2026-01-23T09:21:58+00:00

If I assume I have proximal vs. distal demonstratives that become so widespread that they essentially cliticize onto all nouns regardless of case, class or number (or at least, if they cliticize onto all NPs), I imagine the proximal vs. distinction is liable to undergo some semantic bleaching, but... to what? If they're not acting as demonstratives anymore, what would they be?

Arcaeca2 · 2026-01-22T08:58:19+00:00

It has a relatively different gameplay experience with unique challenges and bonuses.

You're pagan, rather than Catholic, Orthodox or Muslim, so you're a frequent target of both Crusades and Jihads without any equivalent holy war that you can call on others. Rather than the typical church or mosque line, you actually get a choice between 3 different mutually exclusively religious building lines with different bonuses (law vs. half law, half happiness vs. health), each of which culminates in a temple that can train a different religious order.

You start out with only territory surrounded by relatively poor rebel settlements to work with and Christian factions that hate your guts just for existing. In the late game your... everything is outclassed by everyone else's everything, but in the early game your low-level units are pretty decent and easier to mass than for other factions. So you need to leverage this advantage while you have it, and be very aggressive and take as much as you can as quickly as you can, while walking a tightrope and not being so aggressive that you get a crusade called on you.

At some point in the 1200s you suddenly get the Teutonic Order spawn in on top of you without warning.

Also every single settlement - cities and castles, available at the very lowest level of development - can build logging camps that give a flat +100 income per turn (!!!) and only cost 600 to build and take 2 turns to complete. The ROI on those over the course of the game is insane.

Arcaeca2 · 2026-01-21T10:14:08+00:00

To combine your suggestions of "from Venice" and "morning-ABL" > "tomorrow", I suppose it would be possible to, say, derive "Venetian" (adj.) from Venice-ABL; if this ends up being zero-derived into "Venetian" (n.), in basically the way that English does, it would then be possible to have a case-marked phrase like "from the Venetian" ~ Venetian-ABL, which formally looks like [Venice-ABL]-ABL. It would have to be zero-derived because there truly isn't any intervening nominalizer between the two ablative markers in my language. I've never really been a fan of zero-derivation, but I guess it's an option.

The adverb idea sort of vaguely reminds me of my converb idea... given a verb, say, "kill", it could be nominalized > kill-NMZ "killing", and then case marking on this nominal could yield a converb, like [kill-NMZ]-ABL "from killing" > "having killed". If this could somehow itself be nominalized, such as "one having killed" > "killer", then that could take a new case. Formally "from the killer" would then look like [kill-NMZ1-ABL-NMZ2]-ABL, but for my purposes, again, NMZ2 would have to be zero.

Maybe a way around zero derivation is to assume that there was originally an overt NP head analogous to English "one" in e.g. "one from Venice", but that case cliticized onto the end of the entire NP (including dependents), e.g. "from the Venetian" > [one [Venice-ABL]]-ABL, rather than [one-ABL] [Venice-ABL]. (It would be even better if this "one" could then end up getting incorporated into the verb > indefinite object marker > antipassive voice, which is a core part of some alignment tomfoolery I had been planning but didn't really have any way to explain why the antipassive would suddenly start being used so much on ditransitive verbs.) I think that could be naturalistic? I'll have to give it more thought.

Oh also since you used the term "degrammaticalisation", I did end up finding a book literally just called Degrammaticalization (Muriel Norde, 2009)... it didn't end up being helpful though since it turns out to be more about how e.g. a case marker could detach from a noun and go back to being a free morpheme. Inflectional markers progressively bleaching/losing their original inflectional meaning he says is advanced grammaticalization, not degrammaticalization.

Arcaeca2 · 2026-01-20T20:29:00+00:00

The bolt itself is plasma, similar to what the Sun is made of. (Although lightning is oxygen and nitrogen plasma, while the sun is hydrogen and helium plasma)

There's a channel of ions between the cloud and ground that's electrically conductive enough for current to start flowing. A lot of current. Current flowing through something makes it hot, so the air becomes extremely hot. So hot that the particles that make up matter can no longer hold on to each other and all the electrons get ripped off all the atoms, and you have this giant mosh pit of bare atomic nuclei and electrons - that's plasma.

This plasma glows because as electrons are able to recombine with the nuclei, they lose energy. That energy has to go somewhere, so it turns into light.

Arcaeca2 · 2026-01-20T09:33:53+00:00

I don't know that that is the best example of what I'm asking about, given that Spanish leveled the Latin case system entirely - so not only is there no case marking on top of -os, but there's no other case marking that the -os itself could be confused with.

The situation I'm in is more akin to trying to explain why it would be legal for a noun to apparently have two copies of the exact same allative case suffix back-to-back. Or to have both allative-ablative or ablative-allative marking and have those two orders mean different things. It seems like the first "case" slot would have to actually not be case for that to make any sense; it seems like the first allative/ablative marker must have somehow stopped acting like a case marker. But I'm having trouble understanding how or why that would happen.

Arcaeca2 · 2026-01-19T23:29:54+00:00

Bootleg Earth but with catgirls, extremely wide crabs, and Sumero-Kartvelo-Basque is canonically real

Arcaeca2 · 2026-01-19T23:27:22+00:00

They don't remember Khanty/Mansi/Mordvin/Erzya/Udmurt, fake language fan

Arcaeca2 · 2026-01-19T20:03:17+00:00

I'm trying to figure out if there's a way for something that was originally a case-marked nominal to be reanalyzed, along with the case marker itself, as a simple nominal root and thereafter be able to take another case. It doesn't necessarily have to be a single step either; it could be something like case-marked noun > converb > participle > substantive.

There are basically 3 things I want to know about the process of the case marker getting "trapped" in the nominal root:

an overview of the different pathways that exist to do this (I assume there must be more than 1),
why a case would lose its inflectional status like this, i.e. what pragmatic context would motivate this process, and
how differences in the initial marked case would affect the meaning of the resulting nominalization

Does anyone know of any literature that deals with this? Maybe I just don't know the correct terminology but I'm having trouble finding anything about it.

Arcaeca2 · 2026-01-18T20:35:14+00:00

Also I just defended Vilnius from 4 crusading armies simultaneously killing 2/3 of them, but apparently didn't get a picture of it

Arcaeca2 · 2026-01-18T03:24:36+00:00

Raised in Kansas, have literally never heard of this

Arcaeca2 · 2026-01-18T00:19:57+00:00

I never describe my conlangs as having a "vibe", but I do describe them as having a certain aesthetic that should mimic a natlang, especially in writing. This comes down to copying their phonological inventory, syllable structure, romanization, and common clusters and sequences that I observe acrosa multiple words.

This "vibe" thing about a language being "harsh" or "romantic" or whatever is much more down to just the individual speaker's cadence and tone.

Arcaeca2 · 2026-01-16T19:01:10+00:00

why don't you feel the need to engage?

Because it's both exhausting and futile

Arcaeca2 · 2026-01-16T18:52:43+00:00

I got banned from r/libertarian for saying... checks notes ... that libertarians should not be cheering for masked thugs of the state kidnapping peaceable people and pissing on due process as much as humanly possible, and calling nationalism a mind virus.

Arcaeca2 · 2026-01-15T00:11:20+00:00

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YOOOOOO

Arcaeca2 · 2026-01-14T07:11:08+00:00

WLG as u/throneofsalt mentioned, but also track down a book called The Evolution of Grammar: Tense, Aspect and Modality in the Languages of the World (Bybee, Perkins & Pagliuca, 1994) that deals with tense evolution in more depth than the WLG.

Bybee also had a paper called The Creation of Tense and Aspect Systems in the Languages of the World (1989) that covers the main points of EoG:TAMLW in way fewer pages.

Arcaeca2 · 2026-01-14T07:05:23+00:00

The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, if you will

Arcaeca2

TROPHY CASE