Challenge: Person-like Things

Person is quite common in conlangs, but we can even almost find other person-like structures in human languages - some Asian pronoun systems rather may be ranked by social stature than by speaker > listener > other.

We could imagine some other system, though - the simplest being some way of adjusting how social stature is determined (age, with gender as tie-breaker? gender, with age as tie-breaker? some other type of social structure than any known human structure); maybe to some not entirely 'ordered' type of ranking (so it's more of a social network than a social hierarchy).

Suggestion: come up with a different system than person, and post in a comment.

Challenge: "Inverse" Adjective or Noun Marking

Challenge-time again! Come up with a grammaticalization path that creates a single morpheme that both turns adjectives into nouns and nouns into adjectives. Restriction: no sound change shenanigans.

Challenge: A New Frame

A partial dichotomy that often is presented is that between verb framed and satellite framed languages. Obviously, this is a spectrum, and I doubt anyone even questions that.

Verb-framing languages express the type of motion with regards to a location by using different verbs (enter, exit, approach, ascend, descend, etc); satellite-framing verbs use particles of some type to mark the type of movement, and this often frees up the verb to mark the type of movement (running, walking, rolling, skipping, jumping etc).

For the challenge itself: come up with other things about motion than manner and direction with regards to the location that could be pushed into 'satellites'. Come up with other things that could be more central for what verb to pick.

(Wikipedia has a suggestions already: type of noun involved. So, that one's not going to cut it for now.)

A main reason why I post this is to get a challenge for myself as well - finish some things about framing in at least one of my conlangs before someone else suggests the same idea.

Challenge #2: A Source of quick grammatical change

In many Australian languages and other languages thereabouts, there has been a historical taboo against words sounding like recently deceased people. This has lead to great changes in vocabulary over short times, especially as loans have been a common way of solving the problem of taboo words. Apparently, tribe elders have planned ahead for the death of different tribesmen and women in at least some tribes.

 Could a taboo likewise arrange for quick grammar change? I am not just thinking of replacing a morpheme with another, but of readjusting the use of a morpheme, the structure of a phrase, where markings go, typological details, merging cases, merging tenses, splitting cases, readjusting how the case-space is split, etc etc.

How would such a taboo work? Would something other than a taboo be better at achieving this effect? The social context in which I imagine this would be a pre-literate, probably even hunter-gatherer-type tribe. A larger community would probably not be able to keep up with the pace of grammar change I envision without a very efficient modern school system, and that's a bit beyond what I'd like for this.