zompist bboard

Iscun wrote:On the language map in the atlas I see Tyellakhi and Demoshi, but no Dheknami.

They're sister languages. Since the Demoshi are the top humans in the empire, 'Dhekhnami' is simply Demoshi.

Just an idle inquiry (I don't know how much work you've done on Sarroc - it would probably depend on how much work you've done on the other languages of the region, if Sarroc was heavily influenced by them), but how did Sarroc manage to loose the genitive case? I assume it has lost final vowels, et...

Actually, I wasn't thinking in the biological sense. It just seemed to me that the Elcari, who Mark says are conservative language-wise, seem to have held some of the features that Mark said might be part of Eteod?ole. Mark, any thoughts? In fact, the Count of Years tells that the ilii taught the e...

Very impressive! The only correction I'd make is in the comparisons:

Mush t?t-phim khila lem?j t?n-pir.
Mush t?t-phim muqha lem?j t?n-nkar.

I'm not understanding these two lines, though... where do the fox and crow come from?

Are you Ihano Es?rho...?

Well. I tried it with some other Almean languages as well. I'm not sure how good a job I did, especially with Elkar?l (I'm convinced Mark Rosenfelder is taking some seriously powerful drugs), but here goes: ISMA?N Lol<U>r</U> izure se amerik[?n/as] <U>s</U>?ne. Assuming the country is Am r ice , th...

Mark, you write that to Verdurians, poetry means "eloquent writing". But don't Verdurians have texts written in some kind of a regular way that are not eloquent? Like, say drinking songs, dirty poems written on toilet doors, rhymes used in children's games, etc? This doesn't seem to fit in with tho...

Mark, in your general introduction to Almean belief systems, you mention a Diary of the Prose Wars wich is said to have been translated into English. Does that mean that you've already written it? Don't get into shock or rage; I don't want to root for more publications, I just want to know to wich ...

I have yet to find Lacatur on a map--what is it? Where is it? And what's so bad about those sad Lacaturians anyway? You can see it in the Atlas, Z.E. 750, when it was briefly a country (the name is Cu?zi for 'Northland'). Later it was a Cadhinorian province, and even later on a Verdurian province. ...

This seems to be to be something well-suited to variability, where X?X would be "fast", XuX "slow" (maybe the other way around) and XiXa "speed". Is this correct? Indeed. OK, here you go: d?p fast ... dup flow. I look forward to the translation! One other thing that popped up. Suppose you have two ...

GreenBowTie wrote:So it would be "Tu f?se soa sazhuna am?ricane"? (And <I>am?ricane</I> keeps the accent, right?)

Just "am?rice" (genitive of Am?rica).

Xil Motqichqebot q?l-t?gu ?Tarkhumqebat b?dot. Phurd mbam ng?l durdat. Moxot b?chiq tbopshdat. Qith b?chiq dutat. Bb?that bb? on b???ng. On [insect] q?l-q?b ?bb qaphdot. Bb?thot bb? bb?th t?t-bokh Motqich rap Tarkhum qhir dda mush mbam gima add ?bb shobdat. Hey, that's pretty good. Though I thought...

For a Xurnese, Haleza, you're doing pretty well with Verdurian. :) Impersonal tu is quite right here, as is the verb. And the genitive of Am?rica is most natural here. As for 'sector', Sazhuna would work; another possibility is keshana 'borough', which doesn't have the military feel to it, but the s...

When you assign a certain vowel to a person with -qeb- , are there any traditional orders? Perhaps u-?-i for far-medium-close referents? Or alphabetical order, whatever that is in Elkar?l? Or anything like that? Or perhaps picking a prominent vowel in the name of the referent? Or is the order (pote...

My only question concerns the phrase shob?t bb?thu elkar?l ; shouldn?t that be bb?thu elkar?l shob?t , since the purpose and the intender (here represented by ? ?t ) come after the experiencer (the thing known)? Shob is a purpose, and I intended it as 'to know that (the action)'... it isn't clear h...

If you have a noun ending in a vowel (like the suffixes -a or -u) and you want to add another suffix beginning in a vowel (and no procedure is specified in the grammar), what do you do? Specifically, I want to add -oj to ??mu. I'll extend the bit about pluralizers and say that you insert -q-. (I kn...

Shobd can mean either ?to learn? or ?to teach?, depending on whether the ?subject? is the experiencer or intender (this is similar to the distinction between an intransitive and transitive verb in English, or ????? (to teach) and the reflexive ??????? (to learn, study) in Russian.) The agentive, ns...

Generally speaking, are the uesti better at learning the languages of the elcari or vice-versa? Do trading pidgins exist which allow communication in a format acceptable to both? The elcari are almost always the ones to learn human languages-- not because they're specially gifted at languages, or b...

Elkar?l is the language of the elcari of the Elkarin Mountains west of Eretald. It is the best-known non-human language of Erel?e. What do you mean by "best known"? What humans would actually take the time to learn this rough, Klingon-sounding language, and who would actually take the time to write...

Or can the speaker identify him/herself without naming (i.e., by a definite form indicating "this person" tagged with an anaphoric reference?) Or is the identification simply skipped? Z seems to imply this in the case of intenders (i.e., "impersonal" judgements are assumed to be the speaker's if no...

1. Z mentioned on the old board that the elcari have been consistently ahead of the uesti technologically; how about the murtani? Given what we know about them, I would expect them to be significantly more "primitive" (although they probably borrow whatever they can grab). True: they're not very in...

I agree with all of the folks above--quite an accomplishment! I particularly like the action/purpose and experiencer/causer/intender separation, and what it means in terms of indicating the purpose or intent of an action, even if grasping the structure means rewiring my brain a bit. Thanks... it to...

Wonderfully bizarre language. The romanisation looks a bit freakish, but I guess that's the point. One nitpick: "no vowels are rounded. E.g., u is the same as the Russian bI or Japanese u, IPA y." I think only the Japanese u is the sound you mean here. Russian bI is a central vowel like the elcari ...

butsuri wrote:Okay, here are a couple of things which look like errors, or maybe I just don't understand.

You're right on both counts. Thanks for reading so carefully!

Whee! It's up! Enjoy.

OK, I think I'm done. I spent the weekend adding words-- there are over 1200-- and though I could easily add another thousand, that's of lower priority. I also read through the whole thing, made various corrections, and added some minor points (e.g. the elcari can name numbers either duodecimally or...