zompist bboard

Languages generally have fewer fricative contrasts than plosive ones, I think - perhaps because fricatives (especially non-sibilant ones) tend to be less acoustically distinct from one another (and perhaps pose greater articulatory problems as well). Note how many learners of English struggle to dis...

Dwarves Dwarves are a little more complicated. Tolkein's Khuzdul was largely inspired by Semitic languages, but a lot of fantasy fiction ends up giving its dwarves names which bare a strong resemblance to Old Norse, and even the dwarves in The Hobbit mirror this to some extent, in particular Thorin...

It's been several years since I've had the time to put anything at all on these sorts of wikis, and even when I did use them I never posted anything very extensive. Personally I would prefer to host stuff on my own webspace (not that I'm doing any of that at the moment, either ...). But this is just...

Classical-ish Latin itself of course carried on being used widely up to pretty recently in spite of being "nobody's L1" and "pronounced according to rules based on the L1 of the speakers in question".Could you do something similar with this Latin-based language? That is, it is plausible that this gl...

I'd describe the functions of the desiderative in full in the desiderative section, but include a brief line in the imperative section to the effect of "The desiderative can also be used with imperative function: see section N". A sensible layout would be to have the sections on both moods next to e...

I studied French for seven years at school, plus a History of French module as an undergraduate and a master's thesis on the history of French too (admittedly most of the latter focused on medieval French so didn't necessarily advance my knowledge of modern French all that much!). I also studied Ger...

I was making a logographic script, but I had a couple of people tell me I shouldn't make a logographic script since it's for a "polysynthetic" language and not anything remotely like Chinese. That's rubbish. There's no particular reason why a polysynthetic language shouldn't have a logographic scri...

I was making a logographic script, but I had a couple of people tell me I shouldn't make a logographic script since it's for a "polysynthetic" language and not anything remotely like Chinese. That's rubbish. There's no particular reason why a polysynthetic language shouldn't have a logographic scri...

Remember that word order isn't fixed: a language can shift from (say) postpositional to prepositional. So a postposition might fuse to a noun as a case suffix (not prefix), and then the language shifts to prepositional order. This has happened, or been theorised to anyway, in a number of real world ...

Movement from T to C is supposed to explain verb-second phenomena. The element in Spec,CP in main clauses in V2 languages doesn't have to be the subject (though it often is); it's just whichever element occurs preverbally.

2. Ignore "one sound = one meaning" rule which I always try to abide. And this one doesn't excite me as well :( The unworkability of such a principle is presumably one of the big reasons why real-life languages don't have it. (Of course there's no reason why a made-up language should necessarily be...

It's certainly true that, in the real world, alphabetic writing systems have not arisen independently very many times and many cultures (even very advanced ones) use other types of system. So this is perhaps something to bear in mind, that it may be unrealistic for every (or even most) cultures on a...

I think this could be very useful to me. I have a tendency to avoid morphologically complex languages partly because of the difficulties involved in translating anything into them; this could make things a lot easier.

In my language Greater Atlian the demonstrative pronouns / determiners meaning "this, that" (which inflect for gender and number) are used in place of personal pronouns, and there is no actual person distinction. For example, the pronoun ka can be translated as any of "this female person", "that fem...

So why not have them wear them-shaped clothing? Assuming a low amount of technology, clothing shaped for a specific person would be pretty expensive. In low-technology societies isn't clothing generally home-made? In which case it would generally be made to fit the specific individual it's aimed for.

This looks good. Having a three-way gender contrast between "he/she/it" is rather English-like, but not necessarily a bad thing. I wouldn't worry too much about presenting the IPA. I mean, it probably would be helpful to learn it at some point, and it shouldn't take too long to learn enough for your...

Last night I had a dream that someone from my conworld came to stay! Her name was Abi, short for Wabadi , the modern feminine form of Harobad , the name of the first king of the Viksor. (I'm not sure I'd ever previously thought of the name Wabadi, but it's a perfectly legitimate formation. Abi is a ...

Readers don't give a monkey's about conlangs anyway I completely agree on this point. Indeed, I would go further: too much conlanging risks putting people off. When I'm reading, I might put up with very occasionally coming across two or three words in a made-up language, but anything more than that...

This thread is quite old now, but a couple of hopefully useful comments. (1) For some reason ergative languages with orders other than SOV are pretty rare (I don't think anybody really knows why). This isn't to say a VSO ergative language couldn't happen, and there are purported instances of such, b...

Badly ... At the moment I mostly prefer Excel for my major languages. Some of my smaller languages I just keep lists in .doc(x) or .txt format, though. I used to use Lexique Pro for my biggest languages until I inadvertently failed to transfer the source files when I got a new computer - I kept the ...

I haven't thought much about this. I do have the following brief extract from one modern writer who is also a practitioner of the ancient religion of the Viksor: Why is the Book called “the Truth” when it contains things that cannot be true? I do not merely speak of things that seem scientifically i...

This looks really good. The grammar is extremely impressive. It's rare I see a conlang grammar that I could genuinely mistake for a grammar of a real language if I didn't know better.

Unfortunately, the link to the sound files doesn't seem to be working - it just redirects to the Soundcloud homepage.

I suspect Lloyd is exaggerating somewhat, especially after viewing the videos: reading his example aloud sounds to me like a sort of parody of old RP.

I have a (rather soft) sci-fi setting in which machine translation is able to monitor brain activity and so bases its translations directly on speakers' intended meaning rather than the words themselves. It's not 100% effective though. One big problem that remains is the translation of writing and a...

You know Verdurian was Zomp's first conlang, right? This was before the days of easy, computer-assisted vocab generation. I've no problem with zompist taking words from real languages, but if I did the lack of computer assistance wouldn't be an excuse: coming up with words by yourself really isn't ...