zompist bboard

Here's one I'm particularly proud of:

nwẃwt /nʏːːt/ meaning connection. The pun is rather lame: it's a two way on being similar to English "net," and the fact there there's three w's in a row: thus reminding one of www as in World Wide Web.

An idea I was floating around for Fyrthir is a system of what I call inherent case. I seem to vaguely recall reading about something similarish, here I think, so if you had the idea that I've mistakenly thought of as my own, I apologize. Anyway, let's consider a toy language for illustrative purpose...

How about a conlang called "Zedeti", with noun classes called S, Z, H, N, P, V, and C, and an unproductive formerly iterative suffix /-ir/ which only appears in verbs meaning "move large quantities of something", "search for", "drink", and "vomit"? And that's just the start. I'm intrigued now. What...

Frislander wrote:I'm afraid mine are a bit scholarly/esoteric, not so keen on the pop-culture importations myself.

Those are the best!

Along those lines, a root I'm particularly proud of:

suúdaa /suːdɑː/ "book" from the Byzantine Encyclopedia, the Suda.

snappdragon wrote:None yet...

... but when I saw this topic I immediately began contemplating adding a specific word for "arrow to the knee".

Sounds good. Can I use "snappdragon" as a root for "old meme" ?

I like to use PIE roots as inspiration for roots in my conlangs. And I even borrowed the word for wheel in Dnukta'u directly from PIE: kúkul I do this too a lot. If for no other reason then that it aids with memorization. In particular, I've tried to make my numbers and pronounced IE-ish. Since Fyr...

alice wrote:Loads; far too many to list here in fact, although they're probably too obscure for most ZBBers to appreciate.

Well I suppose if you don't mind, if you can't list them all, then perhaps you can give us a sampling of your favorites, with the origins explicated.

I forgot to list probably the first two ever! ḷaáakun "friend" /l̥ɑːːkun/ named for a close friend of mine's online handle, lacuna veesta "black" /vɛːsta/ named for my cat Vesta, who is black As mentioned, in the orthography, an acute represents pitch accent, which can fall on any vocalic mora in a ...

WeepingElf wrote:You misunderstood. It did not fail to work - I just never added flesh to the idea.

Gotcha. Thanks for the clarification.

Do your conlangs have any words which are interesting or fun references or jokes? " paaṇṇur /paːn̥ːur/ "grammar" is a reference to the Indian Grammarian Pāṇini" --- that one I like! Thank you! It's as much a visual pun as anything. In Fyrthir, the underdot (◌̣) represents voicelessness of sonorants...

WeepingElf wrote:I once had the idea of a logography in which inflectional categories are marked by diacritics. I never really worked that out, though.

Interesting. If you don't mind, would you be willing to expound on what you think caused it to not work?

Do your conlangs have any words which are interesting or fun references or jokes? Verdurian has amrab for "law code," which IIRC is a reference to Hammurabi. Klingon has ghoti /ɣotʰi/ meaning "fish" which is a reference to that (annoying) creative spelling of the English word fish. My conlang Fyrthi...

Shaniija looks very neat and has some relatively underrepresented features (in conlanging I mean) that are nice to see (like reduplication). Cool stuff!

Nouns and verbs would have a top determinative showing the declension or conjugation class, and the rest of the determinatives would be either semantic or phonetic. Prefixes and infixes (Proto-Haethic has no suffixes) would be shown using glyphs to the left (for prefixes) and right (for infixes). T...

This is really awesome! I love it! One thing you might consider: how will this be simplified? Perhaps there will be a more complicated monumental script, and a simplified book hand, like Hieratic and Hieroglyphs proper. You might take a look at some images of Mayan codices to see how their writing w...

Hello! I've made posts about the phonology in the past, but my conlang Fyrthir has an interesting property: almost all consonent phonemes, including sonorants, come in voice and unvoiced pairs. I'd like to make use of this somehow in the morphology, but I'm not quite what to use it for. Specifically...

All sounds affect each other, sometimes to extremely slight degrees, and reproducing the exact same frequencies is improbable. Therefore, there is technically infinite amounts of allophony. Some languages, however, lack significant differences and are sometimes described as "lacking allophony". I k...

Alright guys, so based on some of the points in the thread, I've made a new vowel chart: http://i.imgur.com/GSzhGGM.png However, one thing I'm now concerned about: what kind of vowel allophony is realistic? I have the aforementioned diphthongization on extra-long vowels, and (possibly) a system of n...

I see no problems with it. Thanks! I appreciate that a lot! Me neither: it resembles Finnish with an extra degree of height. I personally wouldn't have added the low front-rounded vowel, but if you want it there then that's your call. I'm also not concerned by the low-back unrounded vowel: aside fr...

Hello! Awhile back I made a post about a tentative phonology for my forthcoming conlang, Fyrthir. For those who didn't see that thread, let me give a brief overview of what I'm trying to accomplish with Fyrthir. Basically, Fyrthir is an engelang with the soul of an artlang: it is a language I am des...

I have one further question though: if all aspiration is, is delayed VOT, then why does aspiration cause the "puff of air" at all? It seems that one could delay VOT without the puff of air. But like, there's no puff after an unaspirated stop. (Or at least, it's marginal). I guess what I'm saying is...

Wow! That is an awesome explanation. Thank you so much!

I have one further question though: if all aspiration is, is delayed VOT, then why does aspiration cause the "puff of air" at all? It seems that one could delay VOT without the puff of air.

A lot of the material on this subject is intensely confusing to me, so I was wondering if we might have a discussion on *what exactly* aspiration even is. Conventional wisdom is that the difference between voiced, unvoiced, and aspirated consonants is something like this: https://upload.wikimedia.or...

I haven't been able to find a clear explanation, the wikipedia page is confusing!

One question I just thought of: How did you make that last map?