zompist bboard

Interesting that he says that New Orleans has the most unusual dialects. I live there, and it really is remarkable how different we all sound. I come from the uptown area and I doubt that anybody would be able to tell I was raised in the South without knowing, but I have a few friends that really do...

Who is "we"? French carries certain connotations, but it doesn't really evoke "sophisticated upper class" where I live (except perhaps in a literary sense, where French seems to be the go-to for the educated man; that being said, any language works just as well in that slot, making me think that mu...

The Norman Conquest of England was 950 years ago, and we still think of French as a language of the sophisticated upper class today. Then again, the Roman Conquest was almost 2000 years ago and we still think of Latin that way. I guess it's never gonna change. Who is "we"? French carries certain co...

cromulant wrote:roborative
salubrious
propaedeutic
munificent
comprehend (meaning 'to encompass or include')
praxis

Ashamed to say I only recognize "munificent". Is that where "comprehensive" comes from (as opposed to "comprehensible", which I suppose is more in line with the common definition of "comprehend")?

As my very first conlang shakes out slowly, it's clear that I'm accidentally making a crappy cypher of Latin with double the case endings, more periphrastic constructions and a LOT more syllables. Gotta start somewhere, I guess.

Wow, all of that is just fascinating. It's interesting in itself to see how they think of English, but the best part is that video; I feel like I can really hear the little tinges of English that comprise his internal picture of the whole language, even though it still sound distinctly Japanese. As ...

For a English-speaker to make "generic" Japanese, all he has to do is put together a bunch of CV syllables (e.g. "hodamashu"; it is likely gibberish, but it would instantly be identified as Japanese-sounding). This is a simple matter thanks to Japanese's relatively strict phonotactic constraints. Ho...

Taking these out of order because it worked out that way when I threw this together. 3) Aspiration. This is what continues to confound me. I've done the "hand up to the mouth thing", and I can feel the difference between "spin" and "pin," but I can't seem to hear it. I also am not sure how to overc...

2) Palatalization. What does [tʲ] sound like relative to [tj]? Are they pretty similar? Similar, but not the same. In [tʲ] the two sounds are simultaneous (co-articulated). Pronounce the [t] while also raising the tongue as if to pronoune . [tj] by contrast is an ordinary sequence— [t] then [j]. Th...

One of the most discouraging elements in my conlanging is my near-complete lack of understanding of these topics. When working on my first conlang, I tried to ignore them, but I'm incredibly frustrated by being unable to use them. So at the risk of utter noobishness, I'm going to ask about them. 1) ...

For me, monotransitive "give" in almost any situation is ungrammatical, and I don't think anybody I know uses it. That being said, there are some exceptions that were brought up above, such as "giving blood", but those are universally accepted. The only one I use that might be ungrammatical to some ...

The album Ezekiel by the Baque prog group Itoiz.

I'm confused as to the sounds of the long vowels in Latin. I get the concept of long vowels, but as far as I can tell, the long and short vowels have completely different sounds for some of the letters. For example, I've been told that <i> corresponds to /ɪ/ whereas <ī> corresponds to /i/. These are...