zompist bboard

Travis B. wrote:(I don't know if there's any other native French-speakers who have been on here other than the now-banned Legion)

(Don't forget long-banned Slereah.)

TONES Basically, if I'm reading this right (and Wikipedia is clear as mud; the tone-correspondence table is a nightmare), tone 1 = Ping, tone 2 = Shang, tone 3 = Qu. Ru basically is a Shang syllable with a stop coda (if this is wrong, someone who is more in the know please correct me). Qu syllables...

Anthologi.ca was down from March to June this year, but it's up again. If you had a language there, you can recover the data now~~

"Sky" and "sea" are words that often have poetic synonyms in languages. For a conlang of mine, I came up with a poetic word for "the sky at night full of stars", and yesterday I was pleasantly surprised to find Mandarin actually has a word for this: 星空 xīngkōng (literally "star-sky"). (Note that 空 k...

Retroactively stripped the /d/ from an instance of <de> that erroneously kept it and moved an accent mark that was in the wrong spot.

Well, there was a pause before it, so it being [d] was fine...

I haven't been following the "Let's Reform English" thread at all, but just looking at the first page it seems all people do is apply phonological changes, even though the opening post said something about changing the grammar too. Ehhh, I added a grammatical change below anyway. I think the text is...

Spanish /uj/ only appears in muy 'very', and, in some dialects, cuy 'guinea pig' (plural: cuis or cuyes ). Some speakers report having /wi/ for these words, but for me muy and fui 'I was' definitely don't rhyme. Some male Latin Americans have [ˈsə] as an alternative pronunciation of the interjection...

I just found a Chinese-language conlanging forum.

http://tieba.baidu.com/f?kw=%C8%CB%D4%EC%D3%EF%D1%D4

Could also be that those people just don't participate in English-speaking fora as much, so we just don't notice their work. There's a Korean conlang-forum at http://cafe.naver.com/stelo Wow! This is great. Does anyone have any other links for non-Western glossopoeia sites? Excluding Esperanto, I h...

Last week I heard "top-tier" pronounced for the first time, and I realized I had been pronouncing it wrong all this time. I had been saying /ˈtɑp ˈtaɪɚ/ when it should be /ˈtɑp ˈtiɚ/. I told the person in front of me, "oh god I've been butchering /ˈbʌtʃəɹɪŋ/ it all this time!". The other person imme...

In English, the normal syntactic pattern is for adjectives to come before the noun they modify: "green dog", "loud motorcycle", etc. occasionally English *does* allow noun-adjective word order, but it is very marked, and mostly restricted to poetic or legal usage: "punishment divine", "the light fa...

Richard W wrote:Are Spanish hermano 'brother/sister' and 'tio' 'uncle/aunt' unisex lexemes with obligatory agreement in form for natural gender? I'm inclined to think that they are.

They are in the singular, but not in the plural. ¿Tienes hermanos? 'Do you have any brothers or sisters?'

Are there languages that exclusively use verb marking with no conjunctions involved, similar to English "Were he to go, I would disown him"? In such cases, is the protasis considered a dependent clause? Are there languages where the protasis is not a dependent clause? English can also do conditions...

Pues vivo en España y mi mejor amiga aquí es alemana y ya ahora estoy pensando (en serio) aprender el alemán, o sea si tengo acceso a una hablante nativa , ¿ po r qué no ? I live in spain and my best friend is german and im now serious thinking about learning german, i mean i got access to a native...

My first sentence in the new iteration of my conlang Alaia: Orthography: IULLA1 -la MREUS1 -us JUNU - JUNU -as LU -ur a- TRILLU -li (<- think of Akkadian) Pronunciation: /julːa mreus eieas lur atrilːi/ Segmentation: julla-0 mreus-0 eje-as lu-r atrilli-0 Gloss: sun- NOM moon- NOM equal-ly 1- ACC obse...

I just made a check for link rot, deleting all links I couldn't access.

If anybody has any conlang they want added to the list, just post in this thread and I'll add it as quickly as I can.

I'd also like to take the opportunity to humbly suggest that this topic be made a sticky.

Chengjiang wrote:I know we've had threads like this for phonology before

I've been here for a number of years, and I don't recall any. Some of the member censuses included the question "most/least favorite phone", and that was it.

I just learnt the word echnos (ɛxnɔs) which is Welsh for the night before yesterday / the night before last . I like it, it's a pretty word. :-D ...Anddd I just learned Spaniards say anteanoche for that. (In Latin America we say antenoche .) Recently I also learned Latin perendiē '(on) the day afte...

Not my project, but since she might not mention it, I'll mention it for her: user Morrígan has developed a nice SCA, run from the command line, that reads script files of sound changes in a notation fairly similar to normal sound change notation. Supports metathesis! https://github.com/samanthamccab...

Rē vērā, nōn bibō saltem... Dīmidium dein difficultātis illīus iam dissolūtum est.
I don't actually drink anyway... So that's half of the problem done.

Interdum vānās habeō imāginēs ubi in familiā nātus sim quae haud commūnī linguā loquātur... Nōnne sīc agimus omnēs? I sometimes have a fantasy in which I'm born to a family that speaks an obscure language... Don't we all. Nūper nōnnūllās hebdomadās cōnsīderō mē fortasse ad Acadēmiam Vīvāriī novī in...

I was wondering if the [tʃwV] and [tɕjV] clusters are possible to exist. They'd have to be one single syllable, V standing for whatever vowel. It seems weird to me that [w, j] would remain (at least as actual approximants), but at the same time I can't come up with an organic rule or anything else ...

Really? Interesting, I'd never heard of this. I don't speak Spanish, but all the material I've read indicated that de-lateralized /ʎ/ merges with /ʝ/, not with [j]. This supposedly happens in the more southerly regions of the Andes, or so I've read. (Regions more towards the north that keep /ʎ/ dis...

Castilian and various other dialects of Spanish distinguish /j/ from /ʝ/; Do they really contrast [j] and [ʝ] in the same environment? I don't speak Spanish so I'm actually curious to know, but reading on Wikipedia, I got the impression that /ʝ/ and /j/ have a different distribution. The only place...

I can hardly think of any mispronunciation in Spanish I've had to unlearn. I guess having a quite shallow orthography really helps weed out reading pronunciations. Uh, I used to pronounce the 2SG and 1PL preterite forms of venir 'to come' as veniste(s) and venimos instead of the correct viniste(s) a...