zompist bboard

I seem to be the sort of person who attracts casual violence. It's like because I'm quite short and thin it attracts cowardly thugs who would never dare pick on someone their own size to attack me. I have been assaulted in the streets seven times in three years. This is in what is predominantly a ni...

I had a dream last night where i was with a girl I used to like and I asked her whether she'd like to be made entirely of cheese. Also there was a cat and it killed two dormice by bashing their heads together until nothing was left but a bloody mess. I've spent the day wondering what it would be lik...

The first texts. After a brief period of unrest following the end of the official Roman occupation, Cenemania came to be ruled by a series of men who took the Latin title rex , ‘king’. At this point the local Latin dialect was spoken by at very least the ruling classes, and probably more widely if ...

I'm currently in the process of writing a proper Cenemanian grammar, beginning with a brief history. Most of the stuff from this post I've already published in some form, but there's new stuff to come as well. Comments welcome! :D THE HISTORY OF CENEMANIAN Origins. Cenemanian has its origins in Lati...

I guess you have to be pretty well respected in the first place to get a book published? So if you've produced lots of good quality work before that's stood up to referees/editors' scrutiny then I guess you can expect the stuff in your book to be fairly reliable. But I'm only speculating.

I don't understand what Wednesday has to do with anything. Is it because it's hard to spell?

The question of orthography greatly vexed certain conservative scholars throughout the initial development of Qorbenic II; it was eventually Professor Barabbas who suggested the following respelling of English, based on the pronunciation current in the North of England (the present-day Arric Wastela...

Report on the progress on Qorbenic II, Stage 1 Work on Qorbenic II commenced at 12:20am on 20th June, 2066. The initial goal was the fusing of English noun stems with regularised Finnish case and number endings. The endings in question were selected by the committee as follows: Nominative: -0 Accus...

This is the first time I've read this thread. What a great language and script!

There are a number of programs available to allow amateurs to make their own computer games, not to mention the fact that many people here probably have quite good programming skills. Has anyone here ever made a computer game set in their conworld? Related question: has anyone ever thought about wha...

I saw your tweet about this and thought it was interesting. I think you have considered a lot of the main points. As your post shows, there are so many variables to consider - range, memory, how personal your thoughts are - that it is difficult to give answers that are applicable in every case, or e...

Ceresz - I love your pictures.

What is wrong with "they"? How do you pronounce "xir" anyway?

If I had to make up a gender neutral pronoun it would be "e" /i/. Not sure what the accusative form would be - maybe the same?

I compose some things electronically and a bit by guitar/ukulele. But most of it isn't any good. Also I wish my singing was less awful.

I have read that in Old Latin all adjectives came before nouns. This gradually changed as time went on, but some of the most common adjectives have retained their old position (as more frequent words have a tendency to resist changes).

Verge as well I think. But if you just said "verge2 to me I'd think of a grassy area or bank at the side of the road with no pavement on the other side at all, just a hedge, fence, wall or possibly a field.

Surely I would think it is possible to translate a text with absolutely no indicatino remaining in that text that it has been translated, if it's done well enough? Though of course unless you had genuine evidence (from the text or otherwise) in favour of the argument that it was translated from some...

My medieval Romance language Cenemanian: Stops: /p b d g k g/ Nasals: /m n ŋ/ Fricatives: /f v s z ʃ ʒ/ Affricates: /tʃ dʒ/ Lateral: /l/ Trill: /r/ Vowels: /a e i o u/ Diphthong: /oi/ == My vampire conlang Durecē: Plosives: /p pʰ b bʰ t tʰ d dʰ c cʰ ɟ ɟʰ k kʰ g gʰ/ Nasals: /m n ɲ m̥ n̥ ɲ̥/ Fricative...

This is really interesting. There don't seem to be many conlangs made by people who natively speak non-European languages.

For all we know (some) Latin speakers really did pronoun "R" like that! Not that it's particularly likely.

I also thought this was going to be about /q/ in OE ... which would be odd ... These are the statistics from Hogg and Denison's A History of the English Language (text with year / % -en infinitives / % -0 infinitives): PC 1154 / 100 / 0 Astrolabe 1381 / 44 / 56 Grocers' 1418 / 25 / 75 Caxton Prol 14...