zompist bboard

All of my conworlding efforts (so far just the one, Qevelia) have been set in a contemporary period. Usually the technology is at a slightly-more-advanced level, so they have high-temperature superconductive materials and can mess around with the weak and strong nuclear forces, but no FTL travel, so...

Cross post from C&C Quickies Don't know if anyone will find this useful, but I figured I'd share it anyway. For those of you who use TeX or LaTeX to write your conlang grammars or linguistic papers, I've written a basic index of linguistic abbreviations (based on the Leipzig set IIRC) that's format...

Alright, just an update to confirm that I have in fact been working on this. I was a little too busy to do much in the two weeks or so after I originally agreed to work on this (dealing with moving into a new apartment), but since then I've been able to put a bit of work into it most days. I've now...

A great addition would be some means of manipulating Semitic-style roots. I was working on a dictionary in PostgreSQL but it didn't quite work out the way I'd hoped.

Also, a collaborative project sounds like a pretty good idea: maybe host the code on Github or something?

Reading Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next series last week, and this week it's been Jennifer Fallon's Tide Lords series. Both are very good although completely different genres; I quite like the depth and detail of Fallon's fantasy world. Listening Arcade Fire. "The Suburbs" is brilliant, but so are bo...

So, try out http://benung.nfshost.com/test/?page_id=5, available there for a limited time for now, because it's not yet finished. I've been obsessing about the dictionary search stuff instead of learning for my exams for the past week. Just give it a try. The database has ~2200 entries, so simple w...

So I asked a couple of questions on Stack Overflow and it turns out that this will be a lot easier than I'd thought. After reading the document much more thoroughly I figured out how I can link my tables to one another as required, e.g. tbl_patterns_triliteral depends on tbl_patterns for the pattern...

Argh. Three hours of playing around with postgreSQL and I have no idea what I'm doing. I just can't plan it right, every time I write something I change my mind because I come up with a "better way". Still no luck. How can I have "sub-tables"? patterns_biliteral and patterns_triliteral inherit patte...

Zoqaeski: Nice train diagram! What program are you using? Also, epic Communist ownage? I draw most things in Inkscape and then fine-tune the exported PNGs with GIMP (cropping mainly, because the originals are drawn on approximately A4 sized paper). Heh. Not quite Communist: if you look closely the ...

I've posted this fairly recently already, but I've made a few changes since then. Still haven't worked out stress or prosody, I'll come to that once I've written enough of the morphology, syntax and lexicon to see how different combinations would work. Perhaps a pitch-accent rather than stress, or s...

That's cool. I wonder if SQLite has something similar to this as well? I'm still stuck on the planning/implementation stage. I had to work out the vowel patterns and root forms before I could even begin to code something, and I've almost got that worked out but trying to work out the tables I'll nee...

The other day I went out photographing the local freight train in the rain , much to the bemusement of the crew... There's nothing particularly imaginative about the angle or the subject matter, but I quite like the results. Despite appearances, the weather was not a misty winter's day but a hot wet...

I use Apache, made a folder /var/www/myusername, chmodded that to 777 and made a shortcut there in ~/ so that I can access stuff from http://localhost/myusername now. Mine is the inverse: ~/srv is my www-directory, and I've symlinked it to /srv/http/‹myusername› so Nginx will find it. My main site ...

Perl = Pathalogically Eclectic Rubbish Lister 8) In all seriousness though, I might be able to make a start on this dictionary database soon. All I need to do is work out the basic set of patterns I need (I should be able to extend it later though), and fix up my Nginx configuration so my localhost ...

It was casual conversation. She mentioned that the title of the book was unusual, so I told her why I found it interesting. I've also got a reputation in the town for being into unusual subjects. Thanks a lot, small-town-small-mindedness and school bullies who still annoy me sometimes (thankfully on...

I wish I knew any programming beyond html and css. I'm not far beyond that; I studied a bit of programming in university but other than that don't get it nearly as well as I might appear. The hardest part of this (or indeed, any project) is trying to work out exactly what the requirements are; I've...

Semitic Languages: Outline of a Comparative Grammar , by Edward Lipiński. In general, any questions regarding Semitic languages can be redirected to that book. Thanks. I just had a browse with Google books and it seems to be very comprehensive; no idea where I'd get a copy of it though. I can just ...

"Type" describes whether the pattern is nominal, adjectival, etc, but in more specific detail. So, for example, k-s-t is the root for words representing writing, and -a-oi- is the pattern for a person that performs the verb; putting them together yields kasoit "writer/author/...". The type field wou...

I've never done any database administration before, but SQLite seemed like a good place to start (that way I don't need to worry as much about the complex O/H of mySQL or something like that). Come to think of it, my programming skills have kind of gone out the window since I quit university; LaTeX ...

I'm at a loss for deriving nominal patterns for Qevesa, and I thought I'd seek some inspiration from the Semitic languages, which also have a triliteral root schema. Does anyone know of any English-language resources on Semitic languages that list patterns for nominal derivations?

Phew, I feel like I've forgot all about SQL. Let's see... what tables might we have? tbl_root (root_id, root) tbl_pattern (pattern_id, pattern) tbl_translation (translation_id, translation, root_id, pattern_id) Then you should be able to do SELECT root, pattern, translation FROM tbl_root NATURAL JO...

I'm not sure why you would need a rank 3 array. I would have guessed roots on one axis, patterns on one axis, and for each entry the English word (and the conlang word, if that's not completely obvious from root+pattern). Then you could search for either an English word, a conlang word, or a root+p...

All I wanted to do was modify my ~/.XCompose ... Don't need UIM for ~/.XCompose . You may have to activate the compose key in your keyboard settings for that file to work, though. If you want to use UIM on top of that , here is a guide about how to make it the default input method so that non-GTK a...

I'm pretty sure a number of threads on this topic have sprung up recently, but searching couldn't find them so my apologies for creating a duplicate thread if I have done so. How do you store your conlang's lexicon? I'm up to the stage with my Qevesa grammar that I need to start building up a lexico...

Although it seems a little buggy, I'm content with using UIM right now; also I'm on Ubuntu, and Ekaya seems to be a Windows program. I think I've also figured out now why UIM didn't recognize the modification of the uim-ipa-x-sampa package I made when I stored the modifications in a new file: I pro...