Good evening, afternoon, or morning to you, people of r/conlangs. Today's Saturday, and that means it's time for another typological paper! Once again, there will be some prompts for you to discuss in the comments.
Interrogative words: an exercise in lexical typology (Cysouw)
How do the languages of the world handle interrogative words? This paper was submitted by u/Anhilare, many thanks to them. Today's prompts are:
- How do interrogative words and interrogatives in general work in your conlang?
- If it doesn't have interrogative words (e.g. an engelang that doesn't have wh-words), how do you form content questions?
- Which categories do these interrogative words represent?
- If your language was created with diachronics in mind, how did the interrogatives form? Any special unpredicted lexicalizations or grammaticalizations?
- Are there compound interrogative words that were derived from other, more basic wh-words?
Remember to try to comment on other people's languages
Submit your papers here!
So, that's about it for this week's edition. See you next saturday, and happy conlanging!