zompist bboard

English is a West Germanic language. It shares the traits that define that grouping. It's been influenced by Norse, French, and maybe Brittonic, but it's West Germanic.

English has a subjunctive, it's just morphosyntactically marked, not pure affixal morphology. There's no reason to say that English doesn't have a subjunctive because it's marked by auxilliary verbs or periphrastic constructions. The emphasis on affixal morphology alone is a holdover from Greco-Lati...

There's only one anomaly, and it's not even a separate form: the construction "(if) I were". But this is better explained as an odd quirk of 'to be' (one of several) rather than a different verb form that suddenly appears on the thousands of other verbs in English. Or even as a curious literary ret...

How does the "future" English and Russian differ from ours?

A possible alternative is to simply say that there's some universal language a la English, and simply not talk about the other languages except to mention that they exist. Easier to justify this compared to an actual literal one language.

Dē Graut Bʉr wrote:Wait, Taa has voiced ejectives? I thought those were impossible.

The voiced aspirate and ejectives are said to be mixed-voice, at least phonetically -- they start out as a normal voiced consonant, then devoice in the middle before the release.

Thus: [dtʰ, dtsʼ].

Sew'Kyetuh wrote:All I do is explain how the conlang works.

Yeah, and I can sell directional ethernet cables to audiophiles for ten thousand dollars and say it all works.

Does't actually mean it works that way.

Similar to the /sC/ and /Cr/ examples given above for Spanish and Thai, Sanskrit voiceless aspirates originate in sequences of PIE stops and pharyngeals. This is the reason for PIE's strange stop system.

Salmoneus wrote:So why not have them wear them-shaped clothing?

Assuming a low amount of technology, clothing shaped for a specific person would be pretty expensive.

Which would be realistic, actually.

John Quijada has released the first song from his Ithkuil prog rock album, with vocals from David J. Peterson. and it's actually good music

Additionally, an article from Fiat Lingua on composing the lyrics.

Regardless of the conlang, I praise you for not doing the fucking "a as in father" bullshit and actually learning IPA.

Hmm. Perhaps it would be better to study 20th and 21st century battle for this, where personal armor is virtually useless, rather than ancient battle.

Assuming materials are similar to Earth, though, any stiff armor would reduce flexibility.

Armor and weaponry would be very light. Probably made of plant or leather equivalents rather that metal.

On the other hand, I could imagine warriors who sacrifice flying in favor of armor, thus making themselves immune to comparatively weak fliers.

My (likely wrong) intuition is that diphthongs that go from back → front are more common and stable than front → back. So [au] is more common than [æu]. Is one of these sources simply wrong, or are both changes attested (perhaps in different contexts, such as sequences within a root vs. sequences de...

After ~6000 years and beyond, Future English will be pretty much unconnected to Modern English. It's more complicated when you try adding in societal and technological changes. What if immortality/eternal youth causes language change to accelerate? What if Modern English remains a standard language ...

To be precise, the form of the word is Cuêzi, but it's not analyzable. There are a number of such terms. The ancient explanation is that they were remembered from the previous era of civilization, but this is unlikely. ...and in the Doylist explanation, it's a retained word from proto-Almea where I...

Yiuel Raumbesrairc wrote: (Not that Japanese is anywhere near endangered status, but the number of Japanese people going for an English education is on the rise. That was enough of a warning sign for me to leave.)

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/wo/ exists in foreign loans in Modern Japanese.

Pole, the wrote:

Seirios wrote:In my Mandarin speech (and my family's), /ar/ > [ᴀˤʴ] while /air//anr/ > [ɐɻ].

What is [ᴀ]?

Commonly used in Sinitic linguistics to indicate a low central vowel. [ä] in IPA proper.

diphthongized, and no, I've only heard anecdotally of English dialects that maintain(ed) a difference between eː and eɪ. I doubt they still exist. Generally they are heard as equivalent, although it's a marker of various regional accents. Well, my (Indian) English contrasts /eɪ/ and /eː/ -- but onl...

Latin /gn/ was pronounced [ŋn], even word-initially, but no Romance language has changed it to [ŋ]. Would be a good addition to a romlang.

It sounds interesting, though I'm not sure that the advantages of the ring shape make up for the disadvantages of the structure (i.e., as far as I know it would have to be built from materials stronger than anything known to science). It seems like it would be more practical to build a swarm of sma...

This thread is for sharing clever, elegant, fun, or interesting solutions to problems you've faced while conworlding -- things you wanted to include, but where you did something clever to make it so. If it made you chuffed to have created such a thing, put it here. I'll use my own conculture as an e...

It's out, holy shit!