zompist bboard

I guess now's a good a time as ever to bring up one of my current (albeit now kinda on hiatus) conlanging projects: I'm making it by taking The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus and translating it line by line, coining new lexemes as I go along; its current working name is Camusian. A friend of mine ...

I don't know if it is really my place to ask this, but could Dumic instead represent an early outgroup from the other Pan-Tuysafan tongues? As in, all the other clades are closer related to each other than any single one is to Dumic? Maybe that's one way to explain away the weird geographic distribu...

Possible complete moron question-what's the singular of Lukpanab, or "person who faces the sea" in Proto-Lukpanic?

I've officially had my first Almea-related nightmare, where my mother turned into a ktuvok. Curse you, Zompist, curse you!

Is a hexadecimal counting system attested in any natural language? I'd figure that they'd use the joints on the fingers to count. How common are octal and duodecimal? Is the former really only attested in Pamean, and is the latter only attested in some languages in central Nigeria and then Chepang i...

Also would the Anheshnalåks' script ever pass through an Adāta stage before going further westwards?

So I'm having an on-and-off debate with my dad about phonemic /pʰ/ in Bengali. This sound is phonemic, but for many, mostly younger speakers, this sound has undergone fricativization, presumably from the influence of English, to become [f]. As all of you who know a thing or two about how language wo...

What do we know about the Xšali otherwise, besides the fact that they had a stable state society going fairly early on in Akana history, that their language had clicks, that they had writing in some form, and that they were just generally weird? There's surprisingly little on them and on the Tjakori...

I think I was under the impression that the Coastal Western tongues, at least, were written in adapted forms of the Lukpanic scripts; the Lukpanab, in turn, got their writing from the Xšali. If so, couldn't Unnamed Historical Figure write languages that don't have written forms by fitting these to w...

To the latter, it isn't nearly to the extent of bringing two entire communities into contact. What I had in mind was to make an as-of-yet unnamed historical individual who grew up in Poalugbum and spoke the Lukpanic dialect there, moved to the mainland at some point and learned Doayâu, somehow ended...

Hi all! I stumbled into the Akana project a couple months ago, and I've been boredly reading AkanaWiki pages ever since. First I have a question, and I'm sorry if this is stupid-is Doayâu contemporaneous with Adāta, Fáralo et al? If so, I want to play around with some con-people historically. Anyway...