zompist bboard

Agreed. It's just that, over nearly 20 years of online or in-person conlanging contacts, I've often seen people struggling to apply the standards of Latin philology to Proto-Nostratic (so to speak), in order to develop a "rigorous" a posteriori conlang. I've veered that direction myself on many occa...

Feel free to develop your own East Asian nation and language! I'm more than interested to see more of similar projects :) as they may inspire me in different aspects. I've retired an Altaic altlang (housed in an alt-Kamchatka) that I'd been playing with for over a decade, and am now kicking around ...

Jumping in rather late here (apologies if this verges into thread necromancy) -- I just wanted to say I appreciated reading the earlier post here suggesting the 'success' or 'reward' of working up a conlang from a reconstructed (nat-)protolanguage lies in the ability to compare and contrast it to it...

D'ni and whether we are all or in part stupid and lame aside, my question for the OP is, what was the movie you found this in?

It would be interesting though to have a list of features 1) common to the different Altaic languages 2) not shared with other north-asian languages (notably Uralic ones) 3) which are not the most common thing languages do in this case (eg: all Altaic languages use gap constructions for relative cl...

It would be interesting though to have a list of features 1) common to the different Altaic languages 2) not shared with other north-asian languages (notably Uralic ones) 3) which are not the most common thing languages do in this case (eg: all Altaic languages use gap constructions for relative cl...

I apologize for chiming in about Urbanan -- I thought it (and its ilk) were more widely known among linguists & linguophiles, and that the joke would be obvious and not derail the actual thread to the degree it has.

To give a quick and dirty answer, if Japanese is the language you know best and are using as a default model of 'Altaic', then it might be easiest to get yourself a grammar of, say, Mongolian or Sakha or Kazakh and try to use _that_ as the basis for formulating morphosyntax et al. IOW, just start fr...

Drydic Guy wrote:Yeah call me skeptical.

Of Urbanan? Everything I've found about it comes from a festschrift for James McCawley, so I think it's pretty reputable ;|

(Apologies. It's just whenever I come across a thread or discussion like this one, I flash back to this 40-year-old collection...)

Urbanan, while (presumably) extinct and poorly documented, seems to have been rich in these: /kak/ 'penis (one's own)' /kax/ 'penis (of another)' -- but these are single morphemes; the -k/-x alternation doesn't seem to appear with this semantic distinction elsewhere. /o/ 'prime minister' and 'DNA' (...

Also checking for what I could find for Tungusic, at least Udihe and Evenki including Solon definitely conjugate their finite verbs for person and number. Yes, definitely. All the Tungusic languages but Jurchen-Manchu have full or partial systems of person/number marking on verbs. Many Mongolian la...

Honesty? Honesty? OK, I'll give you honesty. I despise speech sounds. All of them. Filthy phonemes, cluttering up the air, causing earwax, making people sputter and flap their yaps and spread disease and distraction. Don't get me started on sign languages, either. Abominable! Marginally less environ...

Hubris Incalculable wrote:Høy cʲertʲeʏn ar ju øf ðʲe øbdʒʲectyvyti øf ðʲat?

Absolute certainty! I'm inclined to attribute the bizarre and saddening belief in the subjectivity of linguistic aesthetics to, yes, palatalization toxicity syndrome.

While everyone is entitled to their personal opinions, I prefer to limit my hatred to objective facts, e.g., that front rounded vowels and palatalization are evil and wrong.

Ars Lande wrote: I wonder if anyone tried to derive a conlang from Gaulish with historical French sound changes.

Yes.

(Failed/lost interest )

In Devanagari, the 'top bar' is written after the letters themselves have been written -- i.e., it's an added final step in Devanagari which other (related) Indian scripts don't have. Mongolian (and Uighur, Manchu, etc.) don't actually have a single-stroke 'spine' like that -- the apparent 'backbone...

Man that sounds awesome. Did you manage to publish your research? What I'm really saying is where can I read it? :) No, I never got very far. Long story, combination of departmental/program/university issues and my own bad attitude. In terms of the project itself, I realized pretty quickly that in ...

We started grad school at Harvard at the same time, and were dorm-mates for a year or two. We were just casual acquaintances... but I remember talking to her really made it clear to me that I was in the wrong department for what I wanted to do (which was, roughly, looking at the implementation and e...

I think "rare" and "endangered" are actually quite different beasts, so it's not unreasonable for there to be some (apparent) conflict in people's answers. There are a lot of languages -- like, say, Icelandic or Welsh -- that are "rare" (at least outside of conlanger/fandom fetishistic circles) but ...

I have studied Even, Evenki, and Nanai, all of which are rare and endangered. But I never became anything like fluent and have not tried to keep them up... which would be difficult, logistically, in any case. Manchu was a major focus in my academic career and I still putter around with it for fun. B...

Wow. There really isn't any thread topic here that doesn't degenerate into IndoEuropeanist squalor, is there?

;p

Kim

To Tungusologists (Tungusicists?), Nivkh seems to be chock-full of loanwords from Tungus language(s)... admittedly not that apparent given the fun & games that Nivkh phonology gets up to, but clearly there once you're alerted to look for them. I have doubts about many of the Nivkh lexical items in t...

I'd like to make technological development a lot clearer; Please don't! The current balance is fine. (If anything, I'd rather read less of the gears of history and more synchronic sociocultural description.) [t]his is something lacking in most fantasy worlds I think. Really? In published (mass medi...

after all, if, say, Australia or America had been inhabited by nonhuman species instead of just other people, they would have been wiped out just the same So, would that be "wiped out" as in "leaving behind millions of living descendants" -- like the RW, Homo sapiens, natives of Australia and the A...

Don't forget that before Almea and the LCK came around, the *sole* example of non-European conlangs were either Klingon, or thought experiments like Lojban. Hardly. Just for starters, how about Tsolyani? Extremely detailed and non-IE conlanging and conworlding from, depending on what you believe, t...