zompist bboard

Wait, is the ellipsis typed as one character on English keyboards? I always just write 3 dots, both in handwriting and on the computer. There is a Unicode character for the ellipsis, U+2026. It looks like this (brackets added for clarity) […]. On a Mac keyboard it can be entered with the Option-Sem...

*important question:* Do any of you know a reason I couldn't make freshwater the rule rather than the exception? Like, freshwater seas/oceans and saltwater only occurring in Dead Sea-like circumstances? I suspect this would change the climate, which I'm trying to keep pretty close to our own climat...

Astraios wrote:This looks more like physics theories than conworlding to me...

If it's a conworld "from the beginning," it would presumably start from fundamentals, i.e. physical laws.

Why bother with a special form anyway? Why not just "more than one octopus"? If that is still too problematic (it uses the word octopus!), you could just say "more than one animal of order Octopoda".

It might be fun to try and design an inventory that did not match any of these rules. Are there any natlangs that don't?

You can tell if a modifier is actually an affix by trying to insert other modifiers between the root and the affix. If you can't stick arbitrary modifiers between two morphemes, they're probably part of the same word. Or it could be that they're isolated particles in a language with strict ordering...

I will mention here my conlang Tulsimaj that I'm just starting on, and which appears so far to be fully isolating. Incidentally, the isolating-synthetic distinction seems to me rather fake, because it is just, as far as I have seen, a matter of whether there is a space between the root and modifier.