zompist bboard

What about playing the disease scenario from the opposite angle? There could be some disease that is endemic to the New World but unknown in Europe, meaning that the colonists will have no resistance to it. Not only would this kill lots of the initial settlers, but it would give America a reputatio...

Why not do what Japanese does and have adjectives inflect for tense? e.g. /sema-i/ cramped-NONPAST /sema-katta/ cramped-PAST Also remember that copulas don't always need to be verbs, but can be other things such as affixes. So to say "A is B" in your conlang, you might say /A B-ki/, and to say "A wa...

What about playing the disease scenario from the opposite angle? There could be some disease that is endemic to the New World but unknown in Europe, meaning that the colonists will have no resistance to it. Not only would this kill lots of the initial settlers, but it would give America a reputation...

You haven't even said what latitude your island is at. If it is tropical, then the prevailing winds are likely to come from a different direction than if it is temperate. Not to mention we don't know things such as scale, the height of the mountains, ocean currents etc.

You might look up Soqotri. The backstory situation with that island is very similar. Perhaps with the language as well. I could find a lot of information on the history of Soqotra. Yes it seems to have a very close parallel with what I had in mind. But unfortunately I haven't found anything substan...

this really depends on the scenario. I think 'simplification' is maybe not that useful a term, but a language's TAM system (for example) slowly coming to line up with that of a prestige language is possible through several different routes. I think the influence will only be very strong, though, if...

These things happen all over the place in the real world. For example in the Vaupés Area in the Amazon, languages of unrelated genetic origin have been structurally influencing each other for years on end, without really extensive vocabulary borrowing. I dont think anyone knows why in South America...

I would be interested to see what more experienced people say. In my mind, the exchange would mainly be in the vocabulary (particularly religious and commercial words). As most islanders would learn the language through religious schools, using constructs based on the lingua franca might be seen as...

In my conworld, I am creating a language spoken on an island, which is distantly related to another language spoken on the mainland (it is about a one week boat ride between them). The mainlander's language became a lingua franca used by a number of ethnic groups, in addition to having its own nativ...

*The language will be entirely unrelated to any natural language, and will be difficult for an English, Chinese, or Hindi speaker to learn, and vice versa. Wouldn't English, Chinese and Hindi native speakers learning the language bring in influence from their own languages? Grammatically and especi...

Wow Nortaneous, what a thoughtful post. You're totally right about the tradeoff we need to make in terms of overly redundant marking vs. a scheme that requires knowledge of the grammar vs. a scheme that doesn't indicate everything. But the way it is so far, how do you contrast regular unstressed syl...

Like the idea of ergative syntax. My conlang Kämpya does a similar thing (though it also has ergative markers). Are there any natlangs that do this that inspired you? Or did you think of it yourself?

But where did the gender contrast come from? Was it influenced by the nomad language?

Thanks for such a quick response :) Stops /pʰ p b tʰ t d kʰ k g/ <ph p b th t d kh k g> Nasals /m̥ m n̥ n ŋ / <mh m nh n ng> Fricatives /θ ð sʰ s z h/ <c dh sh s z h~x> (/h/ is <h> initially and <x> in the coda) Semivowels /w j/ <w y> Other Sonorants /ⱱ ɾ l/ <v r l> Monophthongs /a e i o u/ <a e i o...

I'm stuck on how to romanise Kämpya. Consonants Stops /pʰ p b tʰ t d kʰ k g/ Nasals /m̥ m n̥ n ŋ / Fricatives /θ ð sʰ s z h/ Semivowels /w j/ Other Sonorants /ⱱ ɾ l/ Vowels Monophthongs /a e i o u/ Diphthongs /ai au ei ou/ Phonotactics The range of permitted syllable shapes is (C) (C) V (C). Initial...

I thought that clusters of mixed voicing were extremely unstable cross-linguistically.

. Unstressed short /e/ and /o/ are raised to /i/ and /u/ respectively. Unstressed short /a/ is lost (probably becoming [ə] before disappearing entirely). No long vs. short vowel minimal pairs remain; long vowels become short. Examples: ˈbeːkʰad > ˈbeːkʰəd > ˈbekʰd doˈkʰapʰ > duˈkʰapʰ > duˈkʰapʰ geˈ...

The texts of the Laikyâr religion are all written in Kämpya (although not all Kämpya speakers follow Laikyâr). It is a gnostic religion which holds that the world was created by "the forces of evil", which, however, are not omnipotent. By purifying one's mind, it is possible to escape the world upon...

Ambrisio wrote:

/áˈlôṵn/ - "that which is alone"

Really?

About 20% of the Kämpya vocabulary consists of English loanwords, such as this one.

. Unstressed short /e/ and /o/ are raised to /i/ and /u/ respectively. Unstressed short /a/ is lost (probably becoming [ə] before disappearing entirely). No long vs. short vowel minimal pairs remain; long vowels become short. Examples: ˈbeːkʰad > ˈbeːkʰəd > ˈbekʰd doˈkʰapʰ > duˈkʰapʰ > duˈkʰapʰ geˈ...

I would like to try out how efficient a language can be, i.e. how much can be expressed with very little text. I know that there have been already other conlangs with this objective, but I would like to test to which degree translations in a conlang made my myself would be shorter than original ver...

That is all well and good but you should look at his first post where it said that this conlang is not intended to be naturalistic . But it also reaffirms what I said about the ZBB not being a good place for this sort of thing. The fact of the matter is, it is basically only good for feedback on th...

Caveat: I know virtually nothing about the Afro-Asiatic language family other than the basics that everyone (with an interest in linguistics) knows about. So much so that I have never even embarrassed myself trying to make a triconsonantal root language. If you don't want to have clusters of mixed v...

Before that I might propose developing a simpler orthography—I'm sure you're wearing out your keyboard with all the IPA in the examples. It's going to have it's own script (that's based off Burmese). But maybe I should devise a romanisation for it. I actually had a go at it, but the hard part is ma...

Yaali Annar wrote:Have you decided how the language will handle compounding and relativization?
For example take the phrase. "The test I had yesterday turned out to be harder than what I expected."

That's a good idea. I'll probably do that next. Thanks for reminding me

Recently I've been putting a lot of work into Kämpya, and I feel like I've it's now at a basic level http://linguifex.com/K%C3%A4mpya . What I'm wondering now is what would be the next step to develop it further. I would be very grateful for anyone's ideas on what to do here. Any thoughts on the con...