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I did indeed mean the Chinese Pidgin English spoken around the Guangzhou area around the 17th - 19th centuries, although Singlish sounds very interesting and I wouldn't mind resources on that too, or on the Mandarin or other Chinese-English pidgins, especially if good stuff on the original Cantonese...

Can anyone point me toward some resources on CPE? I've been messing around with pidgins and creoles lately and I'd like to know more about this one, but all I can find online is a lot of "did you know the phrase 'long time no see' comes from Chinese Pidgin English?!" with nothing on the grammar or a...

brandrinn wrote:Do their scientific terms all sound like long-winded baby talk? "Now children, who can tell me the atomic number of Big-Boom-Explodium?"

I do hope the reason nobody has linked to Uncleftish Beholding yet is because we've all read it already, yes?

What I was wondering is whether the analysis I have in mind for the data I'm looking at (t pronoun always unmarked, v pronoun always explainable as a politeness feature specific to the context of the particular utterance) is at all cross-linguistically likely. Sounds kind of like the system of cont...

Still reading through, but I'm intrigued to note that the Be have a concept of PMS; there's some evidence that it's a culture-bound syndrome in the real world. I'd be interested to learn more about how the Be see menstruation. I'm guessing it's not much like the famous Gloria Steinem essay?

One (perhaps related) question about Kebri that I have concerns the Kebreni rulers. The Almeopedia article about Kebri notes that the Kebreni consider their monarchs to be “one-third divine”. How does that work exactly? Do the Kebreni believe in a tripartite soul (similar to the Cadhinorian concept...

Well of course I'd be an a ewez - I was a geek and medium-tomboyish from day one. (Honestly, I suspect I'd have been quite a bit happier as a kid if identifying as a giwez really had been an option; being expected to act like a girl was a major source of frustration, enough so that I insisted I'd ra...

Heh. What I really liked was that I started out wondering about the gender of the protagonists - I try to be careful not to assume things like that - and yet by the time "I'm so very grateful to you women" came along I'd still forgotten and managed to fall into the assumption that they were both mal...

Ooh, yeah - that's really, really innovative and cool! One question that I don't think I saw addressed on the page: is it always written vertically as in the example sentence? I like imagining some far-future archaeologists discovering Elkaril inscriptions; I wonder how long it would take for them t...

I have heard more than once over the years that at least one real-world culture employs this same metaphor for time--almost exactly as the flaids do (one of the South American peoples, I believe). In particular, at least one writer explaining the idea compared trying to guess the future to "looking...

The Flaidish metaphor for time is opposite ours. For the flaids, the past is forward; the future is behind. This isn't quite as alien to English as it appears at first - consider the spatial and temporal meanings of "before" and "after" (although I think the underlying metaphor is different). Actua...

Irreanists have no rites, but they do have temples and monasteries. They approve of the individual struggle for Good; but flaids are social creatures, and prefer to do their hermitages in groups. (They celebrate events like marriages; but they find it endlessly amusing that humans don't consider th...

Irreanism is highly dualist: it views Good and Evil in a cosmic war which involves literally every creature and every act. Everything you do is either a blow struck for one side or the other. But they don't believe the world will ever end - so do they not believe that the war will ever be won by ei...

I've read the Gospel of Thomas, though it was some time ago and I don't remember it all that well. It's mostly just a collection of sayings attributed to Jesus, not arranged into any sort of narrative; I certainly don't remember any major dialogues with Mary Magdalen, although various disciples do m...

I was taught poleis in two completely separate history classes, so I suspect it is valid for some dialect...although you can't rule out my professors just having an imperfect grasp of Greek grammar. By the way, Mark, I haven't really had anything substantial to say about the CoY, but I am enjoying it.

Actually, even before I started to get interested in the conlangery I loved the Almean religion pages. Especially the Cuzeian one - fantasy pagan religions are pretty common, but well-thought out fantasy versions of monotheism are more rare. (Which, of course, is one reason I'm glad Mark's doing the...

Whoops, that was me. Oh, and I'd just like to stress - this is entirely supposition on my part, and more than possibly completely wrong. No, that's definitely right about Judaism at least. Not only does Judaism not concern itself much with the afterlife, there are lots of Jewish groups with contrad...

Whoa! The fallen angels can create? They can create other sentient beings?

...Well, that's un-Tolkenian, anyway.

I, too, liked the detail of each successive bad guy being worse than the last. And I also like the Ogres. They're fun.

Argh. That last Guest post was me, forgetting to log in.