Mark Beadles

@weathervane indeed, the Turkish for "Turk" is "Türk", and most Englishes don't have the <ü> vowel.

@RogerVadim I'd suggest a companion or follow-on question to consider then: Is there a trend toward simplification of verbal morphology in PIE languages? Armenian and Spanish are a couple examples of high complexity in TAM. I'd think any trend toward isolating would need to include simplification of verb forms.

@RogerVadim Your point about complexity is valid, however linguistic complexity is found in many places. A language with low complexity in noun cases might have considerable complexity in verbal conjugation (e.g. Western Romance), in noun gender (e.g. Swahili), in verb phrase construction (e.g. English), etc. Languages with an isolating tendency like English or Mandarin may nevertheless be complex in terms of syntax.

" Can we claim that a language is more mature, if it lost the inflections?" Depends on what you mean by 'mature'. If you are just referring to age, well, all PIE languages are equally 'old'

"Modern Slav languages...less developed than in the Proto-Indo-European." really this is only true of South Slavic and Czech/Slovak; East Slavic and Polish still have complex case systems similar to PIE.

English used to have a cognate to German Reich, the word "riche" which is considered obsolete by the OED. It wasn't used much past c1500 AD. It was also somewhat confused/consolidated with the Norman word riche meaning "wealthy". Somewhere along the way, the usage with the meaning "realm, kingdom, domain" fell out of use. So this left somewhat of a gap as far as a cognate translation of the German word Reich.

"less complicated and more appealing version of it" - that is good information to go into your question, it will help others determine what you're looking for.

Can you help us understand what specifically is wrong with "In the pictures the guys are raising the inner part of their brows"

Your table muddies things up in my opinion. In your first row, "allowed to exist", why do you have a "yes" in the column "exists"? Something that is allowed to exist could just as easily have a "no" in the column "exists". Vice versa, for "allowed to be missing", why do you have a "no" for "exists"? It could be "yes" - the item could be there, it's only allowed to be missing, not guaranteed. In my mind you're confusing the epistemological question with the ontological question.

@Stefan Except that regulation does not apply to almond or coconut milk: "There are some exceptions. Coconut milk is allowed, for example, as are peanut butter, almond milk and ice cream."

@user240918 Indeed, I see for example it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latte_di_mandorla. So I'm not sure if the premise in the question is correct, since the usage is found in both languages.

Well, it's been in use in English since medieval times, e.g. a 1430 recipe reads "Take gode almaunde mylke" so calling it a "trend" is a bit of an understatement. It is interesting that it's different in Italian, but at least in English its been used that way a very long time.

Yes, that's an article published in 2016. The story is repeated a lot, I'll give you that. None of the articles seem to have attributions or sources, though.

I see the "I Love Lucy" story repeated a lot, but the claims are unsourced and non-contemporaneous - I suspect that there is a grain of truth to it, but that the claims are perhaps over-hyped.

Expanding my comment: the word might have been consider distasteful to a TV audience, but that is a very different thing than "taboo". The fact that a TV network would use the word in a title of a show indicates that it wasn't "taboo" at all.

@KannE The AV Club seems to have simply got it wrong on their "CBS wouldn't let them say 'pregnant'" trope. The very next episode after "Lucy is Enceinte" was called "Pregnant Women Are Unpredictable" (springfieldspringfield.co.uk/…)!!

The real world calls, fellow, I will chat with you later

@Cerberus The awareness is similar -- the response may not be :)

It's the "borderline" questions that will cause arguing.

@Cerberus Indeed, it's going to depend on the questions. Since there are as yet none, and we all have good awareness of the "issues", let's deal with them as they come. Truly bad questions are pretty easy to agree on.

@Alenanno ;)

@Cerberus In Tolkien's case, he heavily documented his process, was a trained and working linguist, and based his languages off of real-world ones. So I could see an answer that was rigorous, depending on how the question was constructed

Just based on our chat, I'm almost hoping no one asks a question like these =D

i was thinking more like, what kind of linguistic motiviations did Zamenhof have in creating Esperanto

Questions about linguists I think are on topic, so a question about Tolkien or Zamenhof might be OK?

@Cerberus It may be that we have a distinction without a difference, yes :)

@Cerberus I think maybe I'm not being clear. I do not advocate questions like "help me build my conlang". I am saying, "if conlang is part of the questions, don't close it immediately"

@Alenanno Agreed as well.

@Cerberus It's no different than "I'm studying kiSwahili and.... I want to know what natural languages have multiple noun classes"

@Cerberus I never said such a thing.

@Cerberus I'm simply saying we shouldn't close any question that refers to conalngs as "off topic". We should look at each question case by case.

But Klingon? Not so much.

@Cerberus Yes, I think that would be ok too

So a question about esperanto could be on topic

Esperanto is an actual spoken human language now, for example

@Cerberus That is for the most part what it is, although there are some edge cases.

To be honest...given the very low support for the conlang it may be there is no interest.

@Cerberus That's why @Alenanno brought it up...the proposal died.

I certainly am not going to ask any conlang questions, but I'd be willing to answer them.

But we'll have to see what kind of questions come up, and deal with them.

I do have a concern that simply bringing up "conlang" will make most working linguists simply refuse to answer the question.

eg. mtoto is a child, utoto is childhood

@Cerberus Yes, all marked with separate prefixes

@Cerberus I do not disagree with the first part; the question would have to be edited to not be a list question. @Alenanno is right about the second part; context is important

@Alenanno kiSwahili categorizes people; trees; groups; created things; animals; extended things; and abstractions

@Cerberus Good idea

@Cerberus Right

and when they have a dozen, the no longer call them "genders" but "classes"

But in languages like kiSwahili, they have a dozen or more things that act like genders

@Cerberus Sorry :) Genders in IE languages are usually Masc - Fem - Neuter