zompist bboard

Thought people might get a kick out of this, considering that blue is a much more widespread shade in Almea:

https://owlcation.com/humanities/Blue-P ... -Blue-Skin

In the first example text, demadôf penath dhnala roromat bigo is inconsistent with the gloss. I think it should be demathôf penath dhnala Gelat wiwigo. I'm not sure if it's an inclusive or exclusive “we” however, or if just “me” can stand in for “we” in that context. I changed it to 'the gods' to m...

Now, Cantonese vs. Sino-Korean, using the same song from earlier in this thread (well, two-thirds of it): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ScLiTW6WFc0 Sino-Korean ((X) represents unknown hanja): 양개저시왕자 시타유저본사 성중가도가부양급타 희(X)청방변부수하대가 호내청주전다일망타적풍채 간바타주근고라타타고 가회애상저개타 시왕자다메종위시심융영웅 궤하장이표존경원주부하 개개야망도입신 금천장갱...

Chinese question: In the Arthur Waley translation of "Monkey", the protagonists have adventures in kingdoms called "Crow-Cock" and "Cart-Slow". It occurred to me that because of their oddness, perhaps those are actually Chinese transcriptions of non-East-Asian names transcribed using the given Chine...

Back to the OP: from examining Wikipedia pages in different languages, it would thus appear that Chinese names are "translated" into Sino-Japanese, Sino-Korean, or Sino-Vietnamese when the respective language mentions it. Likewise, Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese names are "translated" into Chinese...

A theory I'm aware of is that Vietnamese converts Early Middle Chinese labial consonants followed by a non-chongniu medial (i.e. those which have a chongniu counterpart) to alveolar, due to strong palatalization. So, that would mean the EMC sequence Pj- with /i/ or /e/ as the main vowel is palatali...

Actually there's a standard correspondence between Cantonese/Chinese b and Sino-Vietnamese t . I'm not sure the exact conditions of the correspondence but there's enough examples that it's definitely not a screwy transcription. It might just be a sporadic change but I've seen it before. Okay... it ...

Using "why" focuses more on the reason you know it than the circumstances that allowed you to learn it, so it is a little more confrontational. "How" has a better feeling than "why". Changing "know" to "learn" also has a better impression. "Why do you know Hungarian?" feels like you're saying "Tell...

Another one I was curious about is Sino-Vietnamese versus Cantonese. I found a Cantonese version of Prince Ali from Disney's Aladdin (catchy tune) on Youtube and it had the characters. Ran them through a tool at hanviet.org. The Vietnamese transcription of the Cantonese I got is actually not terribl...

I don't know what happened with 5, but it's going to be Exhibit A for the Verdurian equivalent of Greenberg & Ruhlen. Yeah, there's a far stronger case for the numerals of Georgian and Chinese being related than anything here. (Except for Georgian six, which looks like it could be a Greek borrowing.)

I imagine that the Skourenes would use additional special triutittar to represent these extra prefixes and suffixes that aren't shown in the description (like the one they had for Aksun which indicated it was a toponym).

As for the Portuguese pronouns, my understanding is that tu is intimate, not despective, so it's not just a matter of rank. I suppose... IIRC "thou" was lost in English exactly because it tilted more toward despective than intimate, so much so that it came to be seen as an insult, and then close fa...

Thomas Winwood wrote:So it's akin to English spelling - representative of the speech of a few centuries ago, but somewhat inconsistently regularised?

I'm thinking more along the lines of Japanese writing.

I like most of the Erelaean languages -- Eastern, Eynleyni, Old Skourene, Flaidish. I seem to prefer inflecting languages over isolating (too boring) or agglutinating (too mechanical), so I'm sort of the opposite of the OP.

Nice. What strikes me is how conservative Dhekhnami is; it does have a slew of new sounds, but it still looks much closer to Munkhashi than, say, Verdurian does to Cadhinor. I do have one correction in that area for you Zompist: where you say "Besides the mostly-allophones mentioned, it’s innovated ...

Has Zompist put any thought into future events that might occur in Almea, and whether we'll get, say, an updated version of the historical atlas displaying these events? All I know is that I read somewhere that Verduria and Dhekhnam are likely to have a major war in the current century. Also, what ...

Choosing Xurnese seems a bit odd. After all, it's an Eastern language (the Almean Indo-European), and I've always thought Xurnese had a strong hint of Polish in it. I understand how Xurno going through a population boom and deciding to colonize Tellinor could proceed by the year 4000, but getting fr...

They had to be moved for their climate to be anything like what zomp wanted them to have. He redid a few things (this is probably the most drastic major thing; the most drastic was the change from the Rau Jungle to the Rau Savanna) while he was doing research for the Planet Construction Kit. I gues...

zompist wrote:Thanks! I forgot the starting point for Lúriei. Fixed now.

Would it by any chance be defined by +10 for the freezing point of a supersaturated salt solution (like 0°F), and 0 for room temperature?

I'm curious as to what the music would sound like.

For example, for the "sad songs of Lácatur", a Portuguese fado like this one seems to bring that to mind (especially since Portuguese is relatively close to Verdurian phonologically, amplifying the effect):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QoEZB0XvEZQ

I've noticed that on this obviously new map: http://zompist.com/langs-3480.jpg ...the Gurdagor seem to have been moved over to the western side of the Luduyn peninsula? I'm curious as to the reasons for this? I like the shading that shows relative concentrations (majority/minority languages), such a...

What is a "radioactive ring"? Saturn's rings are made of ice. A ring made out of some highly radioactive material. Uranium and thorium would not do; it would have to be something like plutonium, polonium, radium, cobalt-60, etc. that leaked out of orbit and deposited itself on the surface of Almea....

Nice.

In fact, while recently reading the Wikipedia article on Thai, I've switched completely to IPA and consider the Romanization they use now to be garbage.

Back to topic... Doesn't work. Cause? MAGIC! Zompist himself says a plane would probably be the best way to get across, and a fast ship the next best. Doing it over land on foot is obviously ill-advised and as far as I can tell, the worst way. Personally, I've never liked "magic" and try to figure o...

Large quantities of methane in the atmosphere is my guess. Well that would be cyan, judging from our own Ouranos Hírumor is described on the Almeopedia as "bright green", certainly not cyan. Due to light scattering, celestial objects from Earth appear shifted toward the red. Just as white stars (su...