zompist bboard

Cedh, thanks for explaining those Gezoro sound changes, and for your very plausible suggestions for where other Plateau Western languages might branch off. It'd be interesting to see your input lexicon with stress marked; if this is the only Western language that has unpredictable stress at its earl...

Cedh, once again, your attention to etymological detail is a treasure to behold. Many ideas for the Gezoran substrate to Shtasa and for new ideas about lexemes / semantic change / etc to ponder in Empotle7a with this new knowledge about Gezoro. Brilliant work! I second this – very cool! (The more N...

Cool! I like the names and the bit of mythology you've come up with so far (and it's nice that you found a way to work in Legolasean's word). I'm not sure about the migration path though; the northern island-hopping route looks more likely to me. (I think the winds and currents are mostly west-to-ea...

I'm no expert either, and I'm sure I made mistakes on that map. Akana's Antarctica does come much further north than where Tierra del Fuego is: its northern tip is about 34° S, roughly the latitude of Buenos Aires, Montevideo, and Santiago de Chile. (In the northern hemisphere, that's comparable to ...

Cool. I just edited the Proto-Isthmus verbal morphology section to put in the new participle and verbal noun suffixes (also reorganized slightly and added a few examples); and I changed a couple small things in the lexicon.

Cool, Cedh! It’s neat to see a really fleshed-out Lukpanic language, and all the interesting things you’re doing with it. (It doesn’t really fit into our old Eastern/Western Lukpanic dialect scheme though—I don’t see any early sound changes that are shared with other Lukpanic varieties—so it seems l...

I will retain - ajije and - ajdze as competing forms. Sounds good to me. Except for two details I didn't notice when I posted that: 1. The first suffix should just be -ije ; the -aj was part of the stem dāraj- . 2. The second suffix should be -ajze because of the last rule in the Proto-Doroh sound ...

I will retain - ajije and - ajdze as competing forms. Sounds good to me. Good work. I wonder if the Doroh will in fact use that causative construction or instead opt for a direct translation of "seed." (looks like rory borrowed that metaphor from Mencius.) Thanks, I had fun figuring those out. (It ...

Great idea, but Mûtsinamtsys philosophy happens over two millennia later! Well, yeah... my idea was that that derivational pattern might survive into Doroh to be used that way. I believe that a Doroh dialect will be the main language of international transmission for Pa'en -- but in fact not the sa...

Is this verbal noun an abstract one like the "the act of ___"? I had some agent and patient derivations from - adi - udi and I wonder if I should switch them to - adja - udja . Yeah, exactly. The -di suffix is supposed to be cognate to Ngauro and Miwan -ti , which forms action nouns; and I've come ...

I guess the question is how much diversity is realistic. In 0 YP the Doroh have been there for around 1300 years (but much longer at the western end of their territory: the Čisse area could be where Eastern Isthmus developed, in the 3rd millenium BP). (If I put in all the lines I drew last night, I ...

I was actually going to suggest an Affanonic-sized case system; but perhaps that could be another dialect. Doroh should preserve some reflexes of the PIsth. 'dative' prefix dza- , though it's not productive anymore: it's supposed to have locative adverbs that historically derive from dza-prefixed no...

I was wrong. I find that I am extremely interested in the Doroh language I'm working on. Fantastic! I will have a lot of questions going forward. Am I to understand that the final - n of the cited Faraghin verbs is the third-person suffix from - njo ? Yep, that's it exactly. I'll try to help as I c...

Sounds interesting! It's really too bad that Radius never got around to describing the Xšali sphere in much detail.

Hmm. Peninsular languages aren't spoken close to the Shtåså homeland – the Mrisaŋfa Peninsula is pretty far to the east. But I suppose they could come into contact at the height of the Anheshnalåks' empire; or maybe loans could be passed through an in-between language (such as Xšali). The Peninsular...

Fantastic! Thanks, Cedh!

That's nice, Cedh! I like the way Hkətl'ohnim turned out. I noticed recently that Radius' web pages are gone... and that led me to a whole project of finding broken links on the wiki and trying to fix them. I've now repaired most of them, but there are a few things I couldn't find backups for at all...

I like your overlay maps for Peilaš, but I think your Tuysáfa ones are a little off if you intend for the climates to match up. Hmm. They don't match up perfectly since the continents are different shapes; that's an issue for Peilaš too, but I suppose the shape of Tuysáfa is less like anywhere on E...

There probably are some unspoken assumptions, especially on my part. Sorry if I seemed disproportionately bothered by the Tuysáfan elephants and tigers, I just really wasn't expecting to find them there. It's not the choice I would have made, but this is a collaborative project... anyway I accept th...

Huh. Well, I do agree that elephants could live in Tuysáfa; I just always believed they didn't, because Isles speakers didn't have a word for elephant until they borrowed one from Lotoka. The same goes for tigers, which I notice several Ronquian languages also have a word for. This bugs me because i...

Pardon me, but... why are there elephants in Tuysáfa? Before, the only languages with a word for elephant were Peninsular, and one Isles language (Thokyunèhòta) which borrowed a word from Lotoka. Elephants were meant to be native to tropical and subtropical Peilaš (along with the other "Asian" anima...

Catdoom, I think that’s a great synthesis. I really like your idea that the original crops of Tuysáfa were legumes, and that wheat, barley, and flax were later arrivals from Peilaš; it helps resolve a long-standing question and also gives the Ultimundic migration a convincing purpose. (I decided a w...

Very cool!

I've just added my notes on verbal morphology to the PEV page, along with some other edits largely inspired by duke's comments here.

How realistic would it be for * a̰s- to be reanalysed as * a̰ s- (distinct preposition and consonant mutation) and for the mutation to then be lost? If the answer is "not very", I will go ahead and make up some more words. (My cautious tendencies do get the better of me sometimes - Meshi will need ...

1 - Because the sound changes make homophones much more likely (and there's not much inflectional morphology to resolve ambiguity), I think the effect of the change will be limited - nasal mutation would lead to a great many words with identical genitives. The pronouns will certainly change, though...