zompist bboard

FWIW, I've updated the Luke page to remove the Latin 'B' 'L' '!' characters (I've replaced them with the proper Verdurian characters now).

I've turned i-breve into plain (Verdurian) i -- I believe this is common practice in Verdurian texts anyway.

I've kept the hyphen as ASCII for now

IIRC German works the same way; a glottal stop precedes an orthographic initial vowel. That's my understanding, too. Even word-internal vowel-initial morphemes tend to start with a glottal stop, though this is not universal -- for example, I say erinnern (from er- + innern?) as something like [E@?I...

zompist wrote:Chapter 8 is up.

Heh... my favourite quote is

Count of Years wrote:The Lale?sigō said nothing, but took the messenger and sacrificed him to Amnās.

it's going into an Almeopedia , which will have articles on just about anything that isn't covered in more detail elsewhere. But those things which are "covered in more detail elsewhere" will have entries in the Almeopedia with pointers to the other section, won't they? So that it can be a kind of ...

zompist wrote:

Jaaaaaa wrote:WHats the Cuezi word for Ktuvok, by the way?

Amnigo (literally 'child of Amna:s').

Amnigo: with long o, no?

Yes, but not everyone knows that, alas...at least in the past, too many textbooks presented Pangaea as if it were Step One. (I thought so myself as a child, before I grew older and deepened the scope of my reading.) Um, I thought so myself as a child, and still did until I read this thread. It neve...

Thanks for asking, mariko; I've wondered the same thing before

Sort of like those people who believe the whole "man on the moon" thing is a myth?

So, it turns out in Turkish double plurals aren't allowed. Saying "the two books are on the table" is incorrect because it marks the plurality three times: with "two", "-s", and "are". (Sorry, I don't know the actual words at the moment, I just remember the concept.) That's interesting. I know of l...

Nikolai wrote:Y'know, I wanted to ask about that p@. I always thought it meant 'peace.'

That's what I always thought, too. (One "obvious" connection is Verdurian p? "peace", which is pretty close -- and its accusative p? even closer.)

Yes. Is that a problem? :D The thing is, those couple of lines of text come from a static file and are inserted by analog. It was easier to keep the text static rather than specify a new inclusion file for each language. So it says "Verdurian" even if you're viewing the stats in Viminian, English, o...

And I wonder whether the pre-Great Relexification Verdurian (e.g. the sample in Soa Et?levi i Ihano) might be reinterpreted/retconned as some dialect, perhaps early Av?lan? It is, after all, internally consistent, just different from Modern Standard Mažtana.

I don't know if the phonology differs between the sexes as in Barakhinei, but it does in Argentine Spanish: <ll> is pronounced as :sh but women pronounce it in a longer and more emphatic way. That reminds me of this nugget from Katzner's The Languages of the World : A curious feature of the languag...

zompist wrote:Ii niwa da naa?

Reminds me of the tonguetwister "Niwa ni wa niwa niwatori ga iru", which I also heard expanded as "Uraniwa ni wa niwa, niwa ni wa niwa niwatori ga iru" = "(In the back garden there are two, ) in the garden there are two chickens".

Without bothering to decipher the Barakhinei -- I assume the question was where the separate male/female phatic particles came from? I remember when I was told that my Japanese sounded a bit feminine... because I sometimes hung around the Japanese girls at school while I was learning Japanese and pi...

Glenn wrote:Say...anyone know a language where "weird" is a verb?

Lojban, perhaps... but then, it doesn't really distinguish between verbs and nouns. "selbri" are kind of like verbs but they can also be used like nouns if you put an article to them. So that's basically cheating.

OK, I don't remember who asked for this, but the default for my web server's statistics switched from Viminian back to Verdurian. (Viminian is still available by calling the appropriate URL explicitly.) The encoding is Latin-2 (Eastern Europe); Latin-1 is available with an explicit URL -- follow the...

GreenBowTie wrote:CADHINOR
Let scannaa americae feus.

Cadhinor, like Verdurian, is pro-drop; since the inflection determines the person, you can leave off the "Let". And I think the ablative makes more sense in Cadhinor if you're leaving "away from" somewhere: Scannad Americae feus. BICBW about the case usage.

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 (poten...

Drydic_guy wrote:could the Ilii have sowed the seeds of language in the rest of the thinking kinds?

And the Cuzeians believe that the Iliu gave them their writing.

Here's a little challenge for y'all, to keep me from wrapping my brains around the grammar & vocabulary that closely: Can you please translate for me into Elkar?l the sentence "If you can understand this, you can speak Elkar?l"? I'm considering swapping it for the Cadhinor in my current Slashdot .si...

zompist wrote:The variable idea is indeed similar to Sign, and also Lojban, though neither of these took the idea to its logical extreme and got rid of the personal pronouns!

Lojban's ko'a and friends (or, more generally, goi as an assigner) was what I first thought of when I read about the "assigning" bit.

So Haleza Grise wrote:Also, baruq is a derived word, where char is an unanalysable root; this suggests to me that the original word for "axe" may have become taboo. Cf. Russian medved'.

What's the story behind Russian "medved'"? Was there also a taboo leading to a substitution there?

you3 is also the only irregular verb in Chinese (so to speak). All verbs, every single one, takes bu4 for negative. Only you3 changes itself to mei2 , or mei2you3 . And in Cantonese, it has a special negative verb "mou5" to go with "yau5"/"yau6" . All other verbs are negated with "m" (not sure how ...

Chinese you3 does double duty as both 'have' and 'there is', depending on whether you precede it with a subject or not. And of course, the literal meaning of French il y a "there is/there are" is "it there has". Apparently not an uncommon way for humans to think about possession. In this context, i...