zompist bboard

1. Xurno wouldn't have a humid continental climate, IMO. Those mountains to the north and west will probably block most of the rain coming in. Rather Xurno, especially away from the coast, would be semi-arid and quite cold - think Patagonia rather than the Midwest. Actually I think I'm missing some...

1. Xurno wouldn't have a humid continental climate, IMO. Those mountains to the north and west will probably block most of the rain coming in. Rather Xurno, especially away from the coast, would be semi-arid and quite cold - think Patagonia rather than the Midwest. 2. Why is the central Be area rain...

[blad doUn? bIz m{ d{:lEkt Iz bE hEntS baf tINz InI? bB\::::::ap bB\ap]

^ I don't speak like this. The people I hang out with,however, do :/ [jOuks blad]

Did Zomp mix up Pan and Ner on the language map?

Bump, lest this fall off the page.

Hmm, very interesting. We're entering the modern era! A question, though: if Fananak caused plague because of cross-continental disease, why didn't that happen when the Skourenes and Bé crossed the ocean earlier? Because it generally takes a certain amount of sustained contact for diseases to sprea...

Is Ghardze in Siad Bo cognate to Khartsi? in Krwng, by any chance?

Not to mention the fact that both Kebri and Japan have languages that inflect for politeness, emphasize aspect rather than tense, and have -te forms. Japanese does not emphasize aspect anymore (or, more accurately, while the current past form diachronically derives from aspects, it no longer has th...

Uyseʔ - it reminds me of reconstructed Old Chinese. Nah, Old Chinese was much scarier than Uyseʔ :P I think Lé looks more like a Chinese language, given that it's apparently SVO, tonal, and head-final. Omeguese looks, specifically, more like Mandarin, what with the way it makes compound words and t...

Zomp does good syntax - it'd be nice to see him do an isolating language, and of the ones we know a bit about I think either Uyse? or Omeguese would be the most interesting.

Basically, anywhere you see dense populations in tropical rainforest zones, they're agriculturalist populations. (Yes, Yiuel, I made reference to SE Asia's agriculturalists already.) West Africa is an example of this -- and those population densitites have had consequences for the region's ecology,...

West Africa has no volcanoes and no rice but historically quite a high population (especially in like Yorubaland and places).

I really like the biographies of Phwai and Mur - they add a really nice touch and are interesting from an ethnography point of view too. Speaking of which, can I ask the sources you're getting your stuff on economy, life-expectancy, and stuff from? Particularly for the tropical zone; finding out stu...

1. Yay.
2. Needs moar maps.
3. How did some Murtani wind up in Arcel as well as Erelae?

I don't think Erelae can really be called a Sprachbund. Neither can Arcel, especially since by the look of it the only thing Uyse? and Le have in common is the fact they're isolating, which is hardly rare cross-linguistically. It'd be good to see Zomp do an isolating conlang; there don't seem to be ...

On women armies: I really doubt that, in a rainforest, you'd really want to be wearing the kind of armour English longbows were designed to get through - infact most armour would probably be pretty impractical. Actually, looking at warfare in terrestrial tropical areas, I imagine big bows might not ...

That's very interesting. Does the band structure extend to urban life, too (i.e., do whole bands up sticks and move to towns and cities, or do just individual members go)?

Also, pootling about the Almeopedia, I really like the stuff on Nan, too.

Yeah, Elizabeth II is smacked on one side of all Bank of England notes. On the other side you get various important people: Darwin, (Adam) Smith, Elgar, Dickens... each note gets a revamp every few years with a new person. Actually, that raises a question: Does Verduria have a central bank? Or does ...

Muchy - Najważniejszy Dzień

Heh. I'd always assumed that both the Ilii and the Ktuvoks still know how to make some pretty serious weaponry, but the reason that the Ktuvoks don't, say, blow up Verduria with some WMD is because they know the Ilii would then retaliate with technology just as advanced, as they have before (e.g. th...

zompist wrote:I assume they've been in space and explored Almea's system a bit, but not gone into interstellar space.

What made them stop, just out of interest (also, what about the implications like bunkers and stuff still lying around Almea)?

Cheiy has never been to me something like Tibet, they are too knowledge oriented and lack its spiritualism. Somehow, it looks more like a generic frontier country. There is something close to Vietnam with its North and South relation. I cannot place any relation to on or another Earth country. How ...

Personally I think /Dexnam/ and /cel:ax/ both sound quite nice... So far it has a fairly complex verb system, which relies extensively on infixing and consonant change. The primary inflection is rank, rather than number and person. Hm... Sounds a little bit like the Monkhayic languages. Since the Mo...

I'm getting a kind of Persian/Brazilian Portuguese-y vibe from it. This pleases me.

Also:

Cu mul buma na pečrešey xauč šu!

Having problems getting something published ?

About 1,920 public domain (early 1900s, late 1800s) grammars of interesting languages* available for free in full text view and pdf download from Google Books. *Not counting English, Spanish, French, German, Italian or Greek. I've been using google books for a while. Beware the Hausa grammar though...