zompist bboard

Holy crap. This thread has opened my eyes to what morphosyntactic alignment means. All the wiki articles and peoples' posts here just confused the heck out of me, but these diagrams and explanations finally did it! THANK YOU SANDER! (And, by the way, dechticaetiative is an incredibly horrible word ...

My thoughts are that, depending on their level of technological advancement, it would either be a repeat of the colonization of the Americas by the Europeans (something that always depresses me, even though I'm completely white), or it would be a matter of time before hostilities broke out between t...

A further refinement of the question, with slightly more cynical tone: First, I'd like to point out that art (or music, literature, etc.) is universally divided into (vague) "periods" where the "talented" artists (musicians, etc.) conformed to a set of stylistic norms. Example: During the "Neo-Class...

Te[sic] concept of an "evil race" is a smelly and racist one, and it is the one aspect I dislike most of Tolkien's otherwise rather well-designed world. While I can see where you're coming from, there are certain ways in which an entire species *could* be irreconcilable with the rest of society, th...

Actually, I would be highly interested in this answer as well, for reasons of my own. My Precursor language is supposed to have multilayered meanings, one component of which will be elemental association. Anything with a large pool of elements (36 is only six less than the number of letters I have, ...