zompist bboard

Nifty. I guess then that if other lesuniae had any acquaintance with high technology, it would have been lost in that final war as well. By the way, is there a name for a/the language the ktuvoks speak? Is it ever tempting to sketch in more details of that area of Almea's history (or the language of...

From the description of the iliu on the Almeopedia, I get the sense that, in terms of general destruction, the iliu-ituvok wars must have been eventful, to say the least, something supported by the advancement of the iliu relative to other thinking kinds; yet I can't help but think that ktuvok civil...

Da:
http://zompist.wordpress.com/2008/10/19 ... ess-almea/

A natural defense like claws or poison or mind-lasers would definitely help against outcompetition (unless it was too much of an advantage, and humans outcompeted *them*; sentient mind-lasered dolphins wouldn't have much of an advantage, being unable to effectively wield and make tools; but give the...

Point taken. And yes, I think the lists of twenty-odd forms for a verb for various persons, tenses, and aspects do spring from the school of prescriptivist grammar that holds that English ought to be modeled after Latin (I had a grammar teacher in junior high that had us make lists like that; it was...

I think there's a certain amount of (happy) suspension of disbelief required to include multiple sentient races of any form in a conworld, if only because we have no evidence on Earth that such an arrangement could work, since homo sapiens outcompeted all its rivals, and if there are any other senti...

Historically, yes, preterite verbs like "should" and "would" (and "could" and "might") evolved out of the past tense of their respective modal verbs (their cognates serve the same functions in German, mostly, that they do in English, for instance), but especially with "should" and "would," they're n...

Surely no-one is Verduria is that bloody-minded.

it can't possibly be harder for you to master than it is for Americans to learn the use of the subjunctive in Romance languages.

But... we use the subjunctive all the time...

"If I were to go down there tomorrow..."
"Thanks be to God..."
"What might you say to that?"

The legend of the "vagina dentata" is, if you accept Freudian psychology (which I don't particularly tend to myself) a common manifestation of the male castration anxiety (though Freud himself never mentioned it).