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In 2001 I created an alphabet based on the runes I saw in the Fellowship of the Ring, which had just come out. I have used it ever since. This is the first chapter of Saint John.

Also, Çatal höyük seems to have been thriving before agriculture was the main source of food -- apparently hunting and gathering were still the main way of getting food for at least the early part of Çatal höyük's existence. They had begun to develop agriculture, but it was not yet their "main indu...

So as time went by these city-states began to develop like we've been talking about, mostly along the seashore(freshwater oceans :wink: ) and along the river to the east. The cities in this map did not all exist at the same time, but some were destroyed and rebuilt again under a different name. The ...

Magicians always mutter something in a strange tongue before doing a trick. Abracadabra!

Latin for spells in Harry Potter

I always liked Tolkien's view on magic. In his world magic was based on the power of words. Just as Iluvatar and the valar spoke the world into existence, in middle earth it's the words that have the power. Gandalf cast a spell to rid the company of wolves, and the end of the incantation was the elv...

One such city, probably founded about 115K BP (and thus the oldest discovered city), was located in the west of the Southern Peninsula - and lasted nearly a millennium. Are you distinguishing between cities and towns? If so, isn't the oldest RL city about a tenth that age? I've been using them inte...

http://zbb.spinnwebe.com/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=39307

Magb wrote:I associate AC/DC with waffles because this one time I was eating waffles while listening to AC/DC.

I just finished a slew of library books on the origins of civilization; I have consciously avoided relexing earth history but, as they say, people are people - on any planet, civilization will arise according to a pattern. For example, no conceivable people would invent the cart before the wheel. No...

Much of the grammar is based on Sindarin, if I recall correctly. You could base the order of your description on the Sindarin grammar from Ardalambion.
Or any language really, but that one would probably make more sense to use as a guide because it would deal with more of the same things.

The story in this post is of a form in which none of my other written material is written. My constuff is not written from the point of view of an outsider. This is the exception. In the time I have spent with the plainspeople, I have seen them exhibit a marriage to nature and a closeness to the ear...

The 'featural' description of the script can be most easily explained by referring to our letters p and b , and pretending they follow the rules of the conscript I posted about. They are both bilabial stops; since they have the same place of articulation, they have the same symbol on the line(pretty...

I'm about done with a map showing human settlement of the land over a period of about six thousand years. I rented two books from the library today about the earliest civilizations. I'm using them to base my early civilizations on, though I'm trying to keep from copying anything. There's a lot going...

Earlier I mentioned a glyptodont -like creature earlier, this is what it looks like. It has a furry body, and a shell. Its thick strands of hair are more akin to feathers than to mammalian fur. It is taller than a full grown man, and despite being over-hunted, it is not particularly aggressive. Thes...

I plan on having an urnfield culture as the first one to leave behind artifacts. The name comes from the custom of cremating the dead and placing their ashes in urns which were then buried in fields. Con-artifacts will be forthcoming at that point. How many thousands of years ago have artifacts of e...

Three pages ago, when I first posted this thread I had just finished my world map, which was about seven days in the making. Thus was completed my first week of conworlding. This was a month ago. Thanks to the creative ideas and constructive feedback I got from this thread, I now have a clear idea o...

How true. http://rightbrainart.blogspot.com/2007/ ... tches.html

Just as an example Just like Tolkien's elves, my conpeople will be plagued by dyslexia :) Why? Are there lots of mirror-image pairs, or pairs of characters one of which is a rotation of the other? Or, pairs that differ only in size? Each place of articulation has its own main component; it is the ve...

So pretty much we've come to the conclusion that it is possible for an animal the size and temperament of megatherium , and with the scavenging habits of the hyena , to be found roaming a very large plains area, scaring away other predators for their kills and perhaps supplementing their diet with s...

The article called The Myth-Understood Hyena explains some misunderstandings about these scavengers which are known to scare off lionesses for their kills(though not male lions). However, this page says that the hyena is actually a great hunter and scavenging only makes 5%- 10% of their meals. It al...

Referring to the natlang Otomi, among the interesting features of the language is a four way contrast in basic stops voiced, unvoiced, aspirated and glottalized - it also has a system of consonant mutations and utilizes this four way contrast for grammatical purposes. It also has singular, dual and ...

I have already posted part of the ethnographical questionaire for these people. This is another two sections of it answered. The earliest inhabitants of the plains appeared about 150,000 years ago. The plains were probably the first part of the world called "home" by modern humans. Had sufficient(re...

But women are generally shorter than men so it probably just looks extra long on a woman even if it isn't. I wear dress shirts quite often, and I prefer the ones with very long tails because they stay tucked into my pants even if I bend over or stretch. If the men's dress shirt is too short on a pan...

Itoya brand double headed wide tipped felt marker. Mocha colored ink, using the 1.5mm fine tip

It's ugly in French too. "Ecureuil"

http://www.angelfire.com/fl/scalisti/languages.html < words for squirrel in 300 languages!