Fair point on the attitude changing towards neologisms.
Well, it was just a cheeky thought anyway.
She's cute until you remember her true vampire form. :D
I see two ways to do so:
- Have multiple agent noun affixes, each for a type of agent. For example I feel like Spanish -dor is more often used for someone who's repeatedly doing something, while -nte is someone doing it now.
- Apply the affix not to the base form of the verb, but to a conjugated form, in a way that preserves tense/aspect/mood information.
So, as an example of #2. Let's say your conlang has the verb "lug" (to do), and here's part of its conjugation:
- indicative perfect past - lugene (they did)
- indicative imperfect past - lugavo (they were doing)
- indicative habitual present - lugien (they often do, they typically do)
- indicative progressive present - lug (they're currently doing)
- [etc.]
And your agent suffix is, dunno, -bor. Most languages would apply it into the base form and call it a day, so you'd get "lugbor"; you could instead do something like
- lugenebor - the one who did
- lugavobor - the one who used to do
- lugienbor - the one who often does; like Spanish "hablador" (one who talks often = talkative)
- lugbor - the one actively doing it; like Spanish "hablante" (one who's talking now = speaker)
- etc.
I feel this would go well with an agglutinative language. Just make sure the distinction between adjective and noun is clear, otherwise your conspeakers will conflate the nominalising and adjectivising suffixes.
Romance languages are really messy in this aspect, and there are multiple competing suffixes:
- -dor; see amar→amador, hablar→hablador(a). The OG agentive nominaliser, in Latin it was -tor/-tōrem. Eventually it got a feminine version, as Spanish -dora.
- -triz; the original feminine of the above, from Latin -trix/-trīcem. I think it isn't productive any more.
- -nte; see amar→amante, hablar→hablante. From Latin present active participles, like -āns/-antem. Originally it was a way to handle the verb as an agent adjective, and more conservative grammars still describe it only like this, but neither Latin nor the Romance languages care too much about the distinction between noun and adjective, so... so yeah.
- -ero/-era, the one you listed. From Latin -ārius/-ārium, -āria/-āriam, -ārium/-ārium. Originally it formed nouns from adjectives, and rarely from other nouns (X-arium = "where you keep X"). People started spamming it in other parts of speech.
I listed them as in Spanish but in the others it's the same deal. And the confusing part is that there's always some subtle semantic distinction; for example an hablador is someone who's talkative, but an hablante is whoever is speaking.
The process is called "agentive nominalisation", and the resulting noun an "agent noun".
From what I've seen most languages with the concept of agent noun do it like English does: start with the verb, remove any potential verb-exclusive affix, add a specific affix for agent nouns. That seems to hold true even for non-IE languages; see Old Tupi and Cebuano. However there are plenty twists you can add to that, for the sake of conlanging:
- It doesn't need to be after the root. A prefix, infix, or circumfix is fine too.
- You could have multiple affixes instead, either for different semantic purposes or different phonetic environments. (I think Irish does the later.)
- As typical for affixes they can also interact with the root; for example Old Tupi does this, if you plop that -sar (agent noun former) into the verb aûsub "to love", the result is not *aûsubsar as you'd expect, but aûsupara (I think /bs/→/p/?)
- Something akin to Arabic vowel alternations seems realistic IMO. Or even consonant mutations.
- Instead of an affix, a separated word. It would be like saying "drive doer" in English, instead of "driver".
Not only hieroglyphs can be used for the meaning and the sounds of a word, they often use both at the same time: the rebus principle, or "represent something by what it sounds like". That's a lot like writing English "I see you" as "👁️ C U".
Coptic, mentioned in the video, is a descendant of Egyptian. That's why Champollion's strategy worked: even if the Coptic translations of the Greek words won't give you the exact sounds Egyptian used, at least it allows you to see consistent patterns, that you can contrast with Egyptian loanwords in other languages.
For reference on dates, Ptolemy V reigned from 204 to 180 BCE. He's the grand-grand-grandfather of "that" famous Cleopatra (Cleopatra VII Thea Philopator).
I'd argue Demotic isn't quite a different language from the Egyptian written in hieroglyphs; both are more like different registers of the same language, written with different writing systems. So it's less like 2025 English vs. Old English and more like "colloquial 2025 English" vs. "a really posh 2025 English", with one being written with Latin letters and another in Saxon runes.
Then I have no idea. (Is it even TTT at this point?)
Gotta agree with Lena, your art is great.
If the grid expands up, O loses; with the right moves they would tie instead.
If the grid expands down, O and X tie. With the right move O could ensure a win instead.
Either way they're really bad at Tic-Tac-Toe. But at least they were nice enough to not force someone to draw an O on their own leg, drawing an X is easier.
I was expecting a s2, they hanged the loose endings in s1's final episode a bit too obvious:
I'm probably watching it, but got to admit the first season wasn't exactly memorable.s1 end
Rune is missing, but she's alive, everyone is travelling to Silk's kingdom, Rain still holds the artifact borrowed from Mastoma, etc.
Yup, it is a refutation. But people seem to be eager to ignore reality, to keep things consistent with the bullshit they believe (in this case, the Copenhagen interpretation):
- what Schrödinger wanted to show - if the cat can't be dead and alive at the same time, then superimposition is bullshit
- what people did with the thought experiment - if superimposition is true, the cat is dead and alive at the same time
Peer reviewed by my neighbour's dog. She'd probably add "even if you see no threat, and even if you don't give a fuck about humans, it's better to bark anyway just to be safe". Except in posh paper speech.