zompist bboard

Your observation that verbal ablaut is more readily retained (and indeed, modern English has vestigial ablaut in its verbal system) is interesting, and definitely deserving of an answer. Sadly, I don't have it. I thought about this and came up with an educated guess (read: speculation pulled direct...

The Current State of Pazmat This is not, mostly, a post on new things in Pazmat. Instead, it's a reminder by me that this language still exists, and that I am still working on it. I stopped working on Pazmat extensively over half a year ago. There are various reasons for this, such as simply growin...

Sorry if this has been discussed before, but does anyone have any thoughts on how the various athematic noun-classes in PIE formed? It's pretty obvious that ablaut, at least at first, was a process begun by vowel syncope in unstressed syllables, which is most obvious in the athematic nouns where the...

.Also, a caste system endemic to every culture of an entire species sounds implausible, unless if there are actual biological/behavoiral differences like in the animals of Animal Lives (link may be NSFW). ...Did you read the post fully? The Five Castes are split amongst biological and physical diff...

This idea came to me yesterday and I quickly worked on it in an insomnia-induced daze. This is an overview of the unique peculiarities of the Drakania, a race in one of my conworlds named Altacia. This is not a detailed description of any one language, though I have been working on one particular Dr...

Currently suffering from insomnia right now. I've gotten less than an hour of sleep for the past two days. I'm too exhausted to say anything else, I've been in bed for seven hours unable to fall asleep for longer than ten minutes.

Seriously look at this fuckin cake

http://imgur.com/a/zzdtv

(God why do phones take these obnoxiously huge pictures)

Wow I think I'm never holding the door open for anyone again. Today I was at college and walking out of a on-campus restaurant. Some white jocks--they looked like athletes, and the athletic complex/gym was nearby so they probably were coming from there--came up. I'm a nice person who always holds th...

It is my birthday today. Yay. I am now 21 years old. I can drink beer now. Except I don't like alcohol so whatever. My birthday was pretty chill. I knew that I wouldn't be receiving my present today and would have to wait, so I was cool with that. I treated myself to a luxurious breakfast at IHOP be...

Dealing with an extreme narcissist who furiously denies their manipulative bullshit and projects it onto everyone else is absolutely terrible. This weekend has been a terrible litany of my mom's tactics. Yesterday, a boy scout came to our house selling caramel corn. My father bought some, and this p...

Here's a pretty unique vent for me. It's not about depression or school or family life, it's about something entirely different. Something I've never really talked about with people. I hate a particular thing. What this thing is is irrelevant so I will not discuss it in detail. All that matters is t...

I know. I really wanted to just express how much I liked what we did get of it, and that it was an inspiration for Maryusic. I want to give Maryusic one or two loans from Wenetic if he didn't mind but I wont do so without permission.

I think an unstable/"weird" system makes sense to reconstruct for PIE, though. Sihler brings this up as well; I can't remember where, but he points out that reconstructing a "normal" stop system for PIE misses the fact that no IE language perfectly preserves the system. If PIE had a cross-linguistic...

Sorry for the double post, but what do you guys think of Andrew Sihler's theory in The New Comparative Grammar of Greek and Latin that PIE actually had only two series of dorsals (plain and labio-velar), as opposed to the common three-series reconstruction (plain, labio-velar, and palatalized)? To q...

Oh my god, that decliner/conjugator is so cool. Does it support morphophonology? For instance in Pazmat -ar stem nouns in -yarā have reduced forms with ṣ (y becomes ṣ in front of any consonant): uyarā "nothing", ūṣrāva "in nothing" (cf. viśarā "the forge", viśrāva "in the forge")

Wow, this is just great. My dad's car battery died on him yesterday. After jumping it, he went to buy a new one and it turns out that any battery for his car costs at least 180 bucks. This is less than two weeks before my birthday. Of all the times for this to happen, it had to happen right before m...

*oy is supposed to become ī in this language (* negʷnoibʰos > navnības "to the naked people"); it's *ow that becomes ū: ( *drows > drūs "the river"), but only when before a consonant that ISN'T laryngeal; cf. *drowot > dravat "of the river", and the compound *drow-h₁wos > dravīvas "riverside dwellin...

You still alive and working on Wenetic, Dewrad? I really enjoyed this language, and it's inspired me to make my own PIE-descendant, though it's not really anything like Wenetic. I've even used your descriptions of Wenetic as a basis for how I should present my own conlangs! I hope you don't mind if ...

Possibly. I'm thinking of having *g remain /g/ and also turning *gʷʰ into /g/ initially. Unfortunately, I just realized only today that I messed up some noun stuff. I decided that the thematic noun plural ending was going to be *-oy like in Latin and Greek. *oy is supposed to become ī in this langua...

Oh. Huh. I mean, the lack of the most common class of verbs in the other languages is already weird as hell. Hittite is just inexplicable. -nt- participles are passive tense, the -neu suffix forms causatives (though I stole that for my own apost lang), there's no perfect, aorist, -tó- participle, or...

I just came across an amusing statement by Michael Coulson in his Teach Yourself Sanskrit book. It's about Sanskrit itself, but it perfectly applies to PIE, and is from the opening paragraph of Chapter 12, which is about the Athematic verbs: [The athematic verbs] are comparable with the nominal cons...

It's amazing how you feel at peace when you come to accept the collapse of your life. I'm not even venting here. I'm just noticing that I feel at peace now. I am conlanging more, trying to write, reading more, hell I'm fucking trying to get better at drawing! I've accepted that this semester will be...

Phonology Post Part 2 (Errata and Additions) I've realized that I didn't mention a few things or didn't clarify things well in the above Phonology post, and I also have made a few minor adjustments. I could simply edit the post, but then the changes were be opaque due to the lack of a bump (or anyt...

Thanks for the kind comments! I never considered placing this (or any of my other conlangs) on a wiki--I've never really dealt with wikis and I've never really thought my work was good enough for a "serious" place like that. Not to mention this language is a WIP mess of constant alterations and chan...

Kirroŋa Phonology Remodel; Old Kirroŋa Diphthongs, Triphthongs, and Other Phonology Quirks I am sorry as hell this is a complete mess of a post. It has been expanded to thrice the original size and filled with a bunch of extraneous detail for no real reason other than I have nowhere else to put thi...