zompist bboard

Voyageur ("Traveller")is fortunately gender-neutral, and that's how the protagonists are referred to in the first paragraph Not for me: I say voyageuse very often. Of course, if there are one hundred voyageuses and one voyageur among them, it is grammatically correct to refer to the whole lot as le...

A nice, clever and entertainingly creepy story, definitely my favourite story of yours. And it's nice to hear from Arcél :) I pity the eventual translator of this story into French since it would be extremely hard to maintain the main surprise. It could be done, I think. Voyageur ("Traveller")is for...

I'm rather inclined to think that there's some level of overlap between ideology, tribalism, and material necessity.


How big is Skouras by the way? My guess is around the size of Britain...
And who's the throat-cutting barbarian?

Hard to pick one... I really like Elkar?l and Old Skourene for the grammar.
But Xurnash just sounds great, and is pretty promising.

Give me a week and I could try something for Verdurian and Elkar?l.
I'll try Yingzi as well but I don't know if the script is complete enough...

before adequate sanitation comes about, clean bathwater is pretty unrealistic unless it's boiled first. the more people bathe, the more they are exposed to diseases. On the other hand, the need for xclean waters to bathe creates an incentive to build adequate sewer systems; which would have spared ...

I was thinking recently about diseases (and I'm currently reading a lot of things about Italy in the 13th and 14th centuries) , and how they affected our history. Did epidemics have any effect on Almean history? None of the scale of the Black Death seems to have occured; what's the reason? The compa...

With some imagination, I guess it would be possible to fit the three parties into a left wing-right wing dichotomy, the Cadhin party being right-wing, and the two others exemplifying various aspects of the left wing: progressism for the Navy, anti-establishment rhetoric for the other. Okay, the anal...

I'm just posting here to say, that, well I had been waiting for it for 2 years, and I'm honestly, not disappointed at all. More than half the grammar is devoted to syntax; this is partly to serve as a good example. Glancing at people's conlangs, I get the impression that you all are mastering phonol...

Hey, it looks like I'll be the first to post about it! I must say I like it - I didn't find it that inattractive; it might be grossly ethnocentric and sort of brutal, but it's not worse than Medieval Europe :p. The cosmogony was fun and believable at the same time - it looks like the Meshaic mind, f...

Yeah, I'm really looking forward to seeing grammars of Axunašin and Xurnaš, and more cultural pages about these countries... Just to see if they're like I imagine them. I tend to imagine something like the Netherlands, and some parts of Belgium and northern France. I'm originally from Dunkirk, and I...

Hey, congratulations, Neek!

I might continue the trend by getting some Axunashin tattooed eventually. (Perhaps Mesha or something like that).

This is probably the most random Almean question ever, but well, it has bugged me for a while. In a few placenames in the Historical Atlas, a few names in the Xurnese sphere appear with a 'q', Diqun Bormai for instance. Since it wasn't mentioned in the Xurnásh phonology on the old board, I'd like to...

I'm reviving this thread to post a link to this: http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~cwconrad/docs/CompPhon.pdf

Which is a study of the historical phonology of Ancient Greek, and has a list of changes from PIE to Ancient Greek.

Thanks a lot ! Btw, I think I 've noticed a few Spanish influences. Am I right ?

Something which had been bugging me for a while : I had always supposed that x represented a voiceless velar fricative in Axunashin and Xurnash. But in the sample of the "Sounds of Almea" page, it seems to be pronouced [z]. So how is it pronouced ? And why did it change to "h" in Verdurian loanwords...

For some reason I felt like translating the first sentence of "Jeerio" into Flaidish. Don't believe anyone who tells you Flaidish is easy. It's really, really, really tricky. And I guess I still got wrong a couple of things - and probably more. I borrowed "algebra" and "chronometer" from Verdurian, ...