zompist bboard

I've been thinking recently about an isolating language, spoken in the south-east of the main northern landmass. I'm pretty pleased with the argument structure, so here it is: Person marking and word order in Tǝɣrâ Stated baldly, the underlying morphosyntactic alignment of Tǝɣrâ is deceptively simpl...

I am writing stories for a conworld with absolutely no magic, but rather legends (in an attempt to parallel those that actually happen here on Earth). However, it looks like most (if not all) are designing conworlds full of fantasy, so this post would serve more as a call to those who are designing...

Kebreni would be my number one. But I do retain soft spots for Cuêzi and Verdurian.

I understand it's tradition, but it feels very inconsistent to me. The book doesn't write Latin deivos and datus as <DEIVOS> <DATVS> nor does it put Vedic in Devanagari (and those two are as important to the field as Greek, especially Sanskrit, without which the entire field of Historical Linguisti...

Plains-toi moins?
Complain less?

Thats funny, but be serious.... There's no way of telling. The rate of soundchange is not something which we've been able to find a scientific metric for: a soundchange could hit all the given lexemes in a language in less than a generation, or the shift could be slow, incremental and take several ...

However, if dental consonants are palatalising here, is it not also highly likely that velars would palatalise too? True, that is highly likely. So my suggestion may just not cut it. EDIT: Found a solution in another thread. First you palatalize: /t/ > /ts/, /k/ > /tʃ/. Second, you get /ts/ > /tθ/ ...

However, if dental consonants are palatalising here, is it not also highly likely that velars would palatalise too? True, that is highly likely. So my suggestion may just not cut it. EDIT: Found a solution in another thread. First you palatalize: /t/ > /ts/, /k/ > /tʃ/. Second, you get /ts/ > /tθ/ ...

For what it's worth, there is a sample of the Tjakori syllabary in existence. It is probably contemporaneous with the original reconstruction game, and of debatable canonicity: http://i22.photobucket.com/albums/b335/dewrad/s3010042.jpg I have no idea what it says, although I suspect it's the Tsinaka...

I have eighteen (teaching) days left until I can finally leave my final placement school.

enev rasek means "graceful soul" or "grateful soul": virtuous is ewnhynsek (or ownhenjek for RLC). I dunno if the semantics of brys exactly match those of English "mind", but I can't see much reason why not. Bres yagh, ena ownhenjek is what I'd translate it as. (Why the weird capitalisation in the ...

It's a quirk of how Pages auto-generates a table of contents. There's a way around it, but it's not massively intuitive.

On reflection, it was most likely something like [dz]: final devoicing occured independently in both Occitan and Catalan and must have postdated the [dz] > [w] change in Catalan.

Terra wrote:

Imralu wrote:Relevant. Also, the comments do seem to indicate this is very common.

(Psst. Dewrad already posted that on the first page.)

Yeah, but I was showing off and posted it in Greek.

araceli wrote:I thought it might have been a reflex of the preterite precavit... anyway, thanks for plugging an annoying gap in my knowledge

On account of being fucked up, Catalan changes mediaeval word-final [ts] into [w]. So it's a regular reflex of *precātis.

Second person plural of the present indicative, used as an imperative.

Pretty much anything any Indian nationalist says about Sanskrit counts here.

Bèn, çò n'è rèn com nojaltrei potam rogarlei...
Well, it's not as if we can ask them...

Sèi-tu cu favland del que nomài paocei ZBBariei ne scraive amò? U cu rogand si saja posivlo a morèr en paç?
Are you asking why so few ZBBers are posting at the moment, or whether it's possible to die in peace?

Utsaki utsaki! Ksamur sa idunir tau la!
Run! He knows what we've been doing!

Nate wrote:This is why I much prefer just using <mage>. Means the same thing,.

No, it really doesn't. The gospels don't portray three wizards visiting Jesus in his manger, nor did sorcerers preside over the official religion of pre-Islamic Persia.

Zompist books feedback thread, post 24: "Editing work like this is an interesting past-time for me." past-time -> pastime.

Quant a o jèu, pòs screivro per dravean san defailtat, tró que'm recòrd degl vèrbei corectei. Ansa sovènd jèu'm recòrd o vèrb français u taglan. Peraltro, man recòrd de jate d'o vèrb dravean quand san cu favland taglan o spagnòl: enant nèscei zurnei emplecài el vèrb dravean « calçunei » per el spag...