zompist bboard

The general reaction to this map makes me feel like I should re-do it from the start. The thing is, I don't quite know what will happen if I do. I already have ideas for this world based off this map, and I'm a little worried about what I'll have to change. You don't have to redo it if you don't wa...

In any case, I didn't intend for the basic geography - and this IS just the basic geography - to come out this Earth-like; not that I really cared too much, since the main focus of this conworld is the various cultures and their languages. Now I am confused. Did you actually free-hand draw such a n...

Just a reversed and somewhat modified world map? This would be part of my question. Things here look an awful lot like the Earth - more so than we would expect even for an Earth-clone planet with about 4 billion years of divergent history. The rest of my question goes: how like or unlike Earth* do ...

I mean that's not based even partly on fingers. Any base that is not a multiple of 5 would be nice. Binary, then. Unless you're going to count people counting binary on their fingers as binary being "based partly on fingers". The fingers are arbitrary, after all. Taking some historical examples: th...

Clade-Neari Sense Signs I've been playing around with the signs Clade-neari uses to represent the nearis' experience of their environment - particularly the signs for colors. But "color" to a neari means many different things, which we would call temperature, color, and odor. This makes things a bi...

I vaguely remember reading something that mentioned aliens with a base negative three number system. I have no idea how that would work. Like this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_base . First devised by humans in the late 19th century. Does anyone have an example of a counting system that is...

Chibi wrote:It was a thread in ephemera, that's why you couldn't find it

Ah ha. How did people score?

I kept getting confused when I was given a sample of a Polynesian or a Niger-Congo language.

Oops. That's what I get for not being more thorough in searching the archive. Sorry for the necromancy.

In case you all haven't seen it yet, a friend of mine just sent me this link on Facebook: http://greatlanguagegame.com/

I'm afraid I was only able to score a few hundred.

Differences Between Clade-neari and Clade-neari script As with the human sign languages that I am familiar with, Clade-neari allows complex descriptions of objects and their relative arrangements, motion, and spatial relationships by a mapping to the space occupied by the limbs of the neari doing t...

any suggestions for other languages I might use? I'd suggest: Pitjantjatjara/Warlpiri, Lushootseed/Klallam, Ubykh/Archi/Lezgi/Georgian/..., Morse code, and talking drums (though the last isn't exactly a spoken language). For this version, I've got English Morse (as an example of something that a fe...

Nuxalk? Tashlhiyt? Here's about 20 minutes of a guy telling a couple stories in Klallam: http://www.ling.unt.edu/~montler/Klallam/Flood/index.htm So many interesting languages ... unfortunately I can't use them all in this one class. But as with my search for !Kung samples, I'm still noticing that ...

The UCLA phonetics archive is riddled with incomplete work of this kind, unfortunately. Apparently so. There's some good material on !Kung and a few other Khoisan languages on YouTube, but it's a bit involved and a breach of contract to pull the audio out of them. I just found some good samples of ...

Does anyone know of a more diverse collection of !Kung recordings available for download? http://archive.phonetics.ucla.edu/Language/NMN/nmn.html Notice the story and conversation at the bottom, in particular. Thanks! That may work, although !Xóõ isn't in the same family as !Kung (the Khoisan langu...

Lojban! Oh, wait... That comes later, next to Lincos. I also have the Voyager record; the Arecibo and Cosmic Call message; and a couple of original SETI message designs as well. But before I start seeing how well the students do on deciphering those messages, I want to try and make them at least so...

I'm giving a talk about the challenges of SETI to a bunch of junior-high and high-school students next week. I want to make sure that they understand something of the diversity of how humans communicate with one another before I get into the problem of anti-cryptography (making a message that is as ...

Melend wrote:That seems very appropriate. I wonder if mice/rats can make clicking sounds?

I don't know about clicking, but rats grind their teeth to produce audible sounds. Advantages of having continuously growing incisors ...

A note on SIGNAS: This is a particularly powerful sign. Like the IF-series it can apply to a whole block of statements. It can also be nested, and used for questions. This type of question usage is for the signer to SIGNAS the person they are asking the question of, and then sign the implied answer ...

You could in theory have a base- 243 system - actually done as having 5 digits on a hand with 3 states per digit. But that isn't used because it is very hard to move all of the joints on human fingers independently (especially for the middle and ring fingers). For that matter, I find it difficult t...

Since you're basing things on binary counting on one hand, an observation: The 0-to-31-on-one-hand technique can be treated as the basis for a base-32 number system. i.e. I could count 0 to 31 on my right hand, then express 32 as 1-on-left and 0-on-right. This lets you express positive integers up t...

I’ve worked through another Clade-neari sample text. Here it is: http://clementsgame.files.wordpress.com/2013/10/temp.jpg This is a section of a Clade log of messages received from Druk, written a few decades before the humans arrive at Big Bear. I’m not going to give descriptions of all of the glyp...

Since consonants are made by changing the way the oral cavity is shaped, I don't think mice will be able to produce any. What little research I have read about this says that mice can articulate the airflow - at least to some extent. e.g. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjourna...

Ah... Hmmm... Ok, that's a real teaser... I've sketched out some more signs and specified a couple more grammatical structures - I'm working on translating a more interesting sample text. But I can't post those at this point, since I've been uploading the images to Wordpress, which is blocked on th...

If I may pose a second challenge to you: why is the Sun associated with such equipment? Peasy. Cos they use said mirrors to focus the light from the sun to produce the heat necessary for cooking and thermal processing. I should have been clearer. "The Sun" here means Sol , the star that we are all ...

A Few More Glyphs The Clades have developed a convention for denoting most of the stars visible to them. However, they have special names for a few selected stars. The general sign STAR is to hold one set of claws over the center of a facet and open the claws all the way, facing outwards and openin...