zompist bboard

I've used Word and Excel in parallel for years - the latter solely to sort the entries by English translation. However, I've begun migrating to FieldWorks Language Explorer (which is sort of Lexique Pro's big brother), with the eventual goal of exporting to WordPress.

Well, long time, no see, folks. This may be my first update in over three years, but I've been working on Gomain plenty in that time. In fact, I made a couple of significant changes recently, which prompted me to prepare a new edition of the reference grammar: Predicate nominals and adjectives work ...

Next: to imagine something as more pleasant, auspicious, or desirable than it really is; to romanticize Gomain: amchaddhi okarímüs st uwangkrau [ˈɑmt͡ʃɑðði okʰɑˈrimʊs st uˈwɑŋkʰrɑ͡ʊ] paint-INF ACC-bowl-AUG in DAT-0-garden to paint the toilet in the garden A modern Anhrüshite painter once painted a ...

I don't know of any cursive style letter that connects by looping from the last letter when the last letter doesn't have a loop. I do: the lam-alif ligature in Arabic. Neither of its component letters is written with a loop in any other context. While I didn't have lam-alif specifically in mind whe...

I've got five sets of traditional Anhrüshite units, one each for weight, length, liquid capacity, dry capacity and time. I imagine that the Anhrüshites have since moved on to a more SI-like system (they're presently at a near-future tech level), keeping only the traditional units for time, but I hav...

The Pégrif looks really sexy :o Thanks! After a lengthy period away from here, I'm back with new Gomain goodies! First off, I've completely overhauled the prepositions. One of the critiques I received at the CBB (and which was voiced in the Conlangery podcast's review of Gomain) was that Gomain had...

It does in Civ III though! Sort of. Anyone else here play Civ III? I used to, before I got Civ IV. I used to be more of a gamer, but then I took a university to the schedule. Now the only game I play is SimCity 4 (and I just recently picked it back up after a six-month burnout), and based on the re...

Fuck it, I'm done arguing. It's no use trying to reason with an unreasonable person. Helios is worse than Darkgamma.

Asking a conlang to be more like natlangs is like demanding every fiction story to be realistic fiction. No, it isn't. You're saying that we should accept a lion with only its left legs and a wing on the right side as a perfectly reasonable animal. It's a pathetically weak animal but it's still a f...

Helios wrote:This doesn't explain the rest.

That wasn't my goal. I was just making a correction.

Wattmann wrote:Hersself is 3SG.FEM-POSS-self

No. "Her" is both accusative and possessive (when modifying an overt NP). "Hers" can only be used by itself (oh look, another one!).

Age: 26 Gender: Male Nationality: American State/Province/Other Subdivision: California Occupation: None at the moment Sexual Orientation: Heterosexual Status: Single Native Language: English Secondary Languages: Italian Languages I Want to Learn but Don't Have the Time: Too many to list Religion: C...

EDIT: also, wow, you had the patience to translate 27 verses of Romans? :o I translated all 16 chapters of the book, for that matter. Unless you're referring to a particular verse? I definitely prefer the new version. (If the historical reasons are that important a motivator for the acutes, you cou...

/kɛɹəˈbiən/ when referring to the movies or the ride, /kəˈɹɪbiən/ otherwise.

I just finished recording new sound samples of Gomain; you can listen to (and read) them here . I've also decided to see whether you all think the new Gomain romanization (mentioned in the edit to the preceding post) looks better than the old one. To compare, you can look at my text of Romans with a...

Darkgamma wrote:Viktor has explicitly stated the last is not a <K>.

And as we all know, Viktor is infallible.

...Er, it's generally good practice to use the diacritic on the series that's less common. So I've been told, yes. I've chosen otherwise for historical reasons (tense vowels coming from earlier long vowels) as well as matching the native script (although I adjusted the script to match the romanizat...

Those are the tense vowels (and syllabic r). Check out the grammar to see what they actually represent.

Double-post to announce the completion of my first longish text in both the Pékrif and romainzation, the biblical Letter to the Romans, available in PDF form here. Enjoy!

Weed farm?



Does that look like a weed farm to you?

EDIT: On-topic, I'm a Californian with a rhotic accent. So are most of the people I talk to every day. None of them grow weed AFAIK.

Beautiful PDF and beautiful script. It's hard for people to get me hooked, but I'm reading this PDF with excitement! I have to ask, though, why is /dZ/ ‹jh›? It feels odd to use a digraph with ‹j› when you don't even use ‹j›. It's a fairly common letter alone to use for /dZ/ (I'm currently writing ...

I know of hj > ç (I think I do this in some English words), but as Jádyndár seemed very thorough in his changes, I wanted to know about hj > ʃ directly (i.e. no intermediate ç). Also, isn't ç more likely to turn into ɕ? hj > ʃ happens in Slavic languages AFAIK And, yes, ç does appear more likely to...

Hmm. Still no comments on those sound changes. Either they're fine as is, or I need to post more sample words/sentences...

Anyway, the dictionary now has 3000 entries! Check it out here.

Astraios wrote:

Mr. Z wrote:It's a voiced uvular approximant.

He means ח.

This may be a bit of a non sequitur, but: ח-ers gonna ח.

Bump, because I'd really appreciate feedback on my sound changes above. What changes are good? Which ones are too weird to work (if there's anything not covered by ANADEW)? Should I have more changes, or do I have enough now?