zompist bboard

I think an authentic native perspective is missing from this debate; here, a Cheyenne talks about preserving his language. Thanks for the article, Jeff. I think it is a good presentation of an important perspective. It's also very interesting, the note about the elders' over-correcting speeding the...

What does the wealth of Europe have to do with anything? If I'm a Catalan, it doesn't cost me anything to speak Catalan. I can still get a job with a Spanish company - the local office may be staffed with Catalan-speakers anyway, and even it it isn't, I speak Spanish as well, so where's the problem...

Preserving rare languages and cultures does not spare them from history, and is hence an act both misguided and pointless, as long as your motivation is sentimentality for the languages and cultures themselves. (That motivation is what I can see from your entire passionate paragraph above, of cours...

IReally, my ultimate goal is to have the world speaking a constructed language designed to make people think more clearly, rather than a natural human language like English, which has a lot of problems. Heh... we humans will never think "clearly" (in the sense of being entirely logical or not mixin...

Imagine if I or someone else asked "Are all Almeans (and people on this board who question religion) going to burn in hell like the infidels they are?" That would be an expression of opinion (not mine btw), but I don't think that'd be likely not to offend people. Especially those Almeans... :wink:

Since I don't really like inventing roots (and yet did that aplenty for Elkar?l), I usually borrow vocabulary from all over. For Flaidish I decided to steal most of the vocabulary from a single source. See who can find what it is... O.k., some of it seems to be from Hungarian - neev "name", tood "k...

One thing about proto-Eastern has been bugging me for a while: the three different infinitives. Any thoughts on why the language ended up with three different classes of infinites? It seems unlikely that a set of endings as diverse as -k , -m , and -r (which have no phonetic features at all in comm...

zompist wrote:There are a few million flaids and ic?lani.

On the map, Flora seem to be quite small - is it very densely poulated? Or is there a substantial Flaid diaspora in other places?
Best regards,
Hans-Werner

I wouldn't agree. Most classical music is very hummable. Of course, you can argue that classical music has other layers of accompaniment too - but then, so does popular music. Classical music hummed is very pale and shallow compared to the real deal - and the same applies for popular music. Well, m...

There's not yet the great divide between popular and serious music that we have. An orchestra accompanying a nobleman's entertainment might well play some of the same dances from the dance halls (though perhaps quieter and more consistently on key...). As I see it, the basic difference between "ser...

Emai, while re-reading the Travelers' guide (BTW, that's one of the parts of VV I like most), I came across this: To the east is the Nochii 'Night' district, known for its theaters, nightclubs, restaurants, discos, and stores. What's a disco in Verduria like? I'd assume they did not yet invent elect...

I recall reading that in some alternative manuscripts, Mary Magdalene has a lot more to do -- more conversations with Jesus about the role of women in society. Does anyone know if there's anything to this? I certainly did not encounter such things when I was looking up text variants to fit to the O...

It hasn't really come up... if I translate NT texts, I have to use an English version anyway, though Philip Newton has translated some texts from the Greek. Would any interesting heresies appear in the alternate manuscripts? :) Now, AFAIK there is certainly nothing really spicey (like "Jesus was no...

Thanks for the explanation. Would this apply to late Classical times, however? The Elenicoi left around 325. IIRC, the composition of the Aprakos gospels ( lectionarium in the Latin tradition) began in the 3rd/4th century, in connection with a standardisation of the liturgy, to ensure that the offi...

Hans-Werner, I'm afraid I don't know what an Aprakos manuscript is. I tried a Google search, but nothing offered definitions. It seems that "aprakos" means "weekly - arranged for lecture and service". Below is a text I culled from the Internet. Ecritures: Evangiles de deux types - tetras: Quatres A...

BTW, did the Ellenicoi bring some books with them? Especially a gospel? Or did they reconstruct the bible text they have according to the Verdurian grammr from memeory? Basically, I would not expect many books on a 4th century ship - in the end, manuscripts were expensive things. But if they had, wa...

Emai Mark,

Chapter ten is great, just could have been longer...

One quibble - the conquest of Nayas and the sharing of wheat are both said to have happened in Eleisa 78, although the latter one happened 5 years later. Should it be Eleisa 73 and 78 respetively?
Ad onlelan,
Hans-Werner

There's no long i in Koine, only o: and e:, thus giving seven vowels: a e i o y* e: o:. So I assume the change was made during the reign of Alexander the Great. But I don't really know much about Greek diachronics, so I'm probably wrong. *or u, depending on preferred transliteration. So, before the...

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. Both your professors and Drydic_guy are right, depending on what you want to convey. A transliterate...

Shm Jay wrote:They’d also be thinner than most Americans

Except when they're nobles...

Seems the right place to put this question... When re-reading the Verdurian drill-down, I came across this: Alric's succession was not contested, but his heirlessness was a problem, and his advisors hurried to find him a suitable-- and healthy-- bride, as soon as was decently possible after Vlaran's...

R.M.W. Dixon thinks this last bit is very significant in generating the variety of Australian languages. It puts a premium on borrowing, since the easiest way to replace a word that sounds like the dead person's name is to grab the equivalent from another language. Amusing instance: the process app...

The same has happened in Dutch, where "jij", originally being the pronoun for 2nd person plural, has become the pronoun for 1P singular, and a new pronoun for the 2P plural has been developed,"jullie". What does "jullie" literally mean? Honestly, I don't know, and I don't have an etymological dicti...

I find it facinating that in English there used to be the sing/plur distinction in the 2nd person pronoun: thou/you. But then the singular was lost; this is where we officially stand now, but really many (if not most) dialects have solved the problem. And here's the part I find interesting, they've...

Well, Old French had nominative and accusative only, while Romanian retains three cases-- though I'm not sure which Latin cases correspond to the Romanian ones. AFAIK, the Romanian genitive - dative is based on the Latin dative. Late Old Persian is another example for a language which replaced the ...