zompist bboard

awesome. i'm finally getting back to my noveling and world building so this is extra great to hear. i might actually be able to regularly contribute again

Tad William's Tailchaser's Song It is a work of fantasy about a cat, with bad conlanging but great conworlding. Humans are strange eldritch creatures, the cats have their own myths that tie into the plot, and the closest things to other "races" are other species of animals that Tailchaser runs into ...

I'm surprised that no one's brought up starve (to die from lack of food) > starve (to be hungry), tho I can't say i can think of other words in the "death in a certain manner" group having gone through similar changes. Though several terms for mental disorders have gone through a similar change. Dep...

I've heard it in my part of Southern California

DePaw wrote:Insect trolls they were called if my memory is correct.

It was based on the trolls from Homestuck with some interesting vocal track headcanons, but yeah, basically.

- I was thinking that /s/ and /ʃ/ could merge when preceding /i ɨ j/, but I don't want them to both become /ʃ/. Other options? Maybe s ʃ → [ɕ] / _{i ɨ j} and later ʃ → ʂ , [ɕ] being/becoming an allophone of /s/? Or maybe ʃ → [ʃʷ] ; later ʃi ʃɨ ʃj → ʃu ʃu ʃ and si sɨ sj → ʃi ʃɨ ʃj ? I like both of t...

I'm starting on a project for fun, and got my phonemes from there. I ended up with /m n ɲ ŋ p t t͡ʃ k ʔ s ʃ x h l j w i ɨ u a/, with a syllable structure of (C1)V(C2) where C1 is any consonant and C2 is also any consonant, tho I might restrict the second one later. I'm not taking the suggestions for...

Less important, I have plenty of ways to get all of /pt pk tp tk kp kt/ (along with unvoiced fricatives + stops and unvoiced stops + fricatives). But is there any reason /tk/ would not simplify while others would? Or /tk/ and one or two others being kept for a short time while the others simplified...

Two things for an odd language I work on occasionally, especially since these are probably both going to be unstable: Sound changes that produce /T/ and /D/, but are not t > T, s > T, d > D or z > D. I'd be good with an odd sound change that produces one or the other and then voice or devoice it in ...

Also, which Chinese? Mandarin? Cantonese? One of the other dozens of "dialects" that are basically distinct languages if they weren't all spoken in the same country?

Also I'd assume that there might be a language out there where long vowels might only umlaut "partially" (something like *aːCi :> aeCi; it's possible that Samic *oːCa :> :> oaCi went like this but there's no short counterpart to compare with). I don't know why I hadn't thought of this, but it's pre...

Ok, so names are weird and I can probably get away with it as long as I have some reason for it.

Another question: Is umlaut more likely to affect long vowels, short vowels or both in a language with both? I'd suspect short, or that it would be as likely to affect both as one or the other...

Would it be possible for a language that has /tk/ as an allowable internal cluster to simplify it, except in proper names? Or would names that have it have to be borrowed from another language with this cluster?

^Weren't you leaving?

And anyway, there are other ways to handle things without cases. That are interesting. Which is exactly what the podcast is about. Go check t out.

And on a simpler note, whales do not breath water as they are mammals, not fish or amphibians.

finlay wrote:I get the impression it's easier to track male lines than female lines because of the Y chromosome.

Mitochondrial DNA, mentioned in the article, only travels from mother to offspring and so is a female equivalent to the Y chromosome, more or less.

Torco wrote:So the claim that naming little abstract figures promotes good health is true?

most excellent

Eh, something like that.

Torco wrote:Okay, so I made the survey

Not related to the linguistics aspect, but I'm a little cheered up after taking this.

Obviously, the first thing to do with a guitar-language, if it existed in a functional form, would be to translate Through the Fire and the Flames into English. LIKE To add something actually relevant, my Tarn need to have a way of speaking underwater which may or may not be different from their sp...

One thing is that to get iron, you need fire-hardened pottery. The metals you can get before that are copper, tin, gold, silver (soft metals), and by mixing copper and tin you can get bronze. But iron, and steel, need much higher temps to be refined and forged. So, I'm not really sure they could get...

For example, "No, we just slept slept together." We can't use "slept" that way before any other verb: *we slept rested together. Further, even entire VP constituents can be reduplicated: "it came out in the wash came out in the wash" would specify that we're talking about actual laundry rather than...

Isn't carbon dioxide supposed to be dangerous to animals when taken in beyond a certain amount? I know that enough of it will give you hallucinagenic effects and a slight burning sensation in your lungs. As for the toxicity of CO2, it's not a problem until it's many times the current atmospheric co...

I'm from (southern) California, most of the people I grew up with have lived in California most if not all their lives, Mom and Dad both grew up in So Cal, the grandmother I grew up with was originally from Ohio, and the grandfather I grew up with was from New Jersey. Unless you count Ohio as Midwes...

How can you possibly get a negative visual acuity score? Having something higher than 20/1, or perhaps 20/0. AFAIK, having 20/1 vision would mean that what details a normally sighted person would see at 1 foot (meter?) away, you would see and make out at 20 feet (meters?) away. 20/5 means you would...

No conlang for the Tarn yet but their translation would likely be phrased "To swim with a(n ocean) current."

To not understand something as well as one thought one did.