zompist bboard

I have been mostly active on "the other forum" recently but I have decided to change that. As I have a couple of conworlds and I don't know if there will be any interest in reading my snippets, I will post a few to this thread and see what happens. Feedback and thoughts are welcome. For starters, a ...

If it was my project, I would make the language of magic users develop from the languages of civilizations that did the most magic (ostensibly). Without doing any research, maybe Persian and Egyptian, then Latin tacked onto it, then Arabic, then Hebrew (kabbalah didn't become a thing until later in ...

Atrulfal wrote: The vowels /ɛ ɔ/ only occur on stressed syllables.

Don't know why but I like this little tidbit a lot. Is there a historical justification for this?

Next: A way to express that something is very urgent, or that time is running out Traljo: Kjaró! - lit. “First snow!” Traljo are a subpolar culture, so the first snow means the winter will come soon, and you need to gather resources before then. -- Next: To have a useless hobby. To find fun in some...

Neek wrote:that awful ziggurat logo

KneeQuickie’s logo isn’t exactly pretty, either, you know...

A wonderful thread. Subscribing.

I wish you provided a gloss, as the most interesting thing in your sample is its demonstration of the relative non-configurationality of Polish. What also stood out to me in your sample (Pole, the), is that you pronounce <musiałbym> as [muˈɕawbɨm]. For me, the stress is on the first syllable here: [...

Sorry to only provide more quotes from Wikipedia, which is not a reliable source, but I'll try to find a better source later: Unlike French but rather like Portuguese ão, nasal vowels in Polish are asynchronous, meaning that they are pronounced as an oral vowel + a nasal semivowel [ɔw̃], or a nasal...

Velarization isn't phonemic in my L1 (or any language where I have ever had access to a community of speakers in RL); it should hardly be surprising therefore that I have a problem knowing how to do it, or knowing whether I've done it or not. I had exposure to native speakers of Russian who velariz...

The form of the Archlands, the focus of my conworld Tern, is based on a dream I had about someone wandering an extremely flat, sandy place with a constant flow of a foot or so of water. The Archlands aren't permanently flooding -- another place is in Tern is -- but they have the same constant tempe...

I suspect so too, I don't remember that extra vowel. I was convinced the word was one syllable. I don’t know why but this happens to most foreigners when they listen to Polish. (They don’t hear this vowel.) When learning from written text, they usually pronounce it as /i/ which isn’t very accurate,...

If you can't do consonant clusters don't try to learn Dutch. For example a bus stop in my town is named 'Oegstgeest-Abtspoelweg' [uχstˈχeɪst ˈɑptspulwɛχ] That doesn't seem so hard, if you can separate it wth a syllable. [pts.p] would be the easiest for me. The Polish phrase I was told began with ar...

KathAveara wrote:Oh, right. Probably. I know extending it to "I'm all for" is something I would do, so I'd imagine I'd also say the shorter form.

Cool, thanks. Maybe English is on its first baby step to becoming pro-drop?

KathAveara wrote:Native speakers will understand "I'm for" to mean "I am in favour of this specific thing under consideration".

Well, I understood it. My question is: is it something native speakers say.

opipik wrote:

vec wrote:Now that I'm looking at it, I'm almost thinking I actually want to add some tones and keep to a strict CV syllable structure. Thoughts?

I'm for.

Is it a valid English sentence? Shouldn’t it say „I’m for it.“? Honest question. I am not a native speaker.

I mainly use OpenOffice.org Calc(OpenOffice.org version of Excel), What frustrates me about Calc is, if I want to find all the instances of, for example, the sequence / ti / in my conlang and I select the column where the conlang words are and then go to search, it searches the en ti re document an...

Yes, I do. I curl the tongue backwards with the tip touching the hard palate. Fascinating! I'm wondering whether there is variation amongst Polish speakers, or that my approximation of that sound is actually just dead wrong. Well, I am a Pole (duh) and I don't, so it's more of a variation. However,...

Yes, I do. I curl the tongue backwards with the tip touching the hard palate. Fascinating! I'm wondering whether there is variation amongst Polish speakers, or that my approximation of that sound is actually just dead wrong. Well, I am a Pole (duh) and I don't, so it's more of a variation. However,...

Yes, I do. I curl the tongue backwards with the tip touching the hard palate. Fascinating! I'm wondering whether there is variation amongst Polish speakers, or that my approximation of that sound is actually just dead wrong. How do you pronounce ś? I find ś harder to analyze but I think what happen...

jal wrote:Do you actually curl your tongue backwards when pronouncing it?

Yes, I do. I curl the tongue backwards with the tip touching the hard palate.

That's retracted, sometimes used to differentiate between laminal, non-palatalized postalveolars /s̠/ in Slavic and Chinese from the apical postalveolar /ṣ/ and subapical palatal /ʂ/ found in India, all of which are usually just transcribed /ʂ/. But I've also seen /s̠/ used for a retracted, "retrof...

I have said that different cultures have different values regarding names, and it's appropriate to follow your culture. In Western culture changing the name your parents gave you is a slap in the face of your parents. Yes. Because you alone know everything about the Western culture and we all know ...

Minor side note, I guess, but sirdanilot, I am deeply curious about your views on Peter being called "Peter" and "Cephas" rather than his birth name of "Simon". (and we get a double there, because "Cephas" is a translated form of "Peter") I'm also curious if you think it was appropriate for the apo...

I would be interested to see what more experienced people say. In my mind, the exchange would mainly be in the vocabulary (particularly religious and commercial words). As most islanders would learn the language through religious schools, using constructs based on the lingua franca might be seen as ...

At least my first name is quite easy across languages: Adam. Although some Spaniards think I introduce myself as Alan (typical guiri name?), and at least one person I know does call me Alan, which most times I don't notice anyway. In Spanish, it might be due to the different stress: Ádam might not ...