zompist bboard

zompist wrote:So Haleza's comments are good. The sentence should be (according to my grammatical sketch):

Sahiz kuran ariz Ubingkayi?.
is language my Obenzayet-gen.

(L?vani does mean 'tongue', but the word for 'language' is kuran, where k is velarized.)

I thought velarised k was impossible...

Only 10? You must be our youngest member... is there any special award we can give this guy?

Zomp? How about posting a set of rules for Knights and Kings? Please....

I had always pronounced "Aidan" as /aid{n/, until I learned it was a real name and turned off my linguistic receptors when reading it. And it seems obvious to me that Mark used "plaid" as the example word because the transcription of the /{/ sound is the same as in "Flaid." You don't say. :D Not re...

I'm pretty sure there are none. Not many words begin with X, and the only plausible short ones, xal and xel, both fail with other letters.

(ai) is always /?/ and (au) is always /o/. ... ... Flaid /fl?d/ rhymes with 'plaid', not 'played'. Well, in that case, it's Mark's fault for choosing such a silly example word. I'd never heard it used once in my life. Why couldn't he have said Flaid rhymes with "mad" or "dad" or any of the dozens o...

Vlaran, welcome to the board! Um... are you really from Verduria? If so...

Donireu dorot, ontenei miura!

Like the other vowels but longer, I'm guessing. On the vowel diagrams, each long vowel is in the same place in the vowel space as its short vowel.

jsburke wrote:I don't anyone's mentioned the Jeerio story so far.

Just eight topics below this one (at present).

John Ramirez wrote:9. Sorry, but I still don't understand what sound does dh and :dh represent.

You can hear the sound on the speaking IPA site: http://www.ling.hf.ntnu.no/ipa/full/ipa ... _pulm.html. It's the one that looks like a curved d.

No.

But, it is instructive to look at Mars and Venus. Both once had favorable condidtions. Then something went terribly, terribly wrong on each planet. Positive feedback loops, runaway effect crashed each planet; something littel gets started, but its self reinforcing and eventually the you've got CO2 ...

It works fine for me too.

I think it might be interesting and useful to gather together several types of vowel harmony, with examples. E.g. tense/lax, as in Igbo; front/back, as in Finnish; high/low, as in I don't know what; and any others I may have missed. The other one mentioned so far that's not in your list is rounded/...

Usually it's front vs back, round vs unround, or high vs low. But average people are not linguists, and they dont often follow the rules. For example, notice that /i/ is in both groups. But that was a natlang example, so it looks like real languages don't follow the rules either. In which case, why...

Interesting. Is there any pattern in the way the vowels are split into the groups?

I would reply if I didn't have an essay due tomorrow that I must get back to. I'll reply in detail when I have time, though.

Wow, I guess I just wasn't prepared for such a radical metphysics as yours. :) So you really believe nothing without sufficient evidence? And I say "sufficient" because there is certainly some evidence for the non-existence of dragons: the lack of reliably attested dragon sightings. What I meant whe...

"The dragon ate the knight" may not contradict any evidence that you've seen regarding dragons or knights, but it contradicts your belief that dragons don't exist. If we read fiction, we usually know that we are reading fiction, so we have a belief that all information regarding the particulars of t...

When we read fantasy (or any fiction, for that matter) we have to "suspend disbelief". The word you're looking for must be one that means "impossible to suspend disbelief about". Anyone have sufficient Latin to construct the word?

Nice, but not very original of Kafka. "Truth is often stranger than fiction" - Shakespeare.

Well said, Salmoneus. I agree with everything you've just posted. Although I think I remember something that said the Zone of Fire might be of artificial origin, which would make it not so much unrealistic as strange?

Catching flu over the internet? I'm sure no Zompister (to use Mark's lovely new word) would be nasty enough to post a virus...

Not at all, I love Culture Club, but only really know one of their songs at all well. You can guess which, probably.

Nearly 10 years for me.