zompist bboard

The following lines are from a longer epic about the folk hero Ιεπριάς during a battle with some sort of mythical reptile. Because Lusitanic does not have phonemic vowel length, it does not have the same poetic forms as Latin or Greek; instead it has lines of anywhere from 16-20 syllables with a bre...

The Uses of the Verb Because I really don't have to care about the finals I have this week, amirite guyz? Person and Number This is pretty straightforward...the finite verb must agree with the subject of the sentence in number and person. Tense In the indicative, this is pretty straightforward: -Th...

SYNTAX http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-vpE6uMJ37dk/UOScrne47aI/AAAAAAAAEL4/Ki-4IWO-SoY/s1600/ron-paul.gif This will (hopefully) be a pretty long post. I'm going to at least try to get through the uses of the major varieties of morphology before the Zeeb Awards voting period. Uses of the Noun So Lusitanic...

I've also just realized that I'm getting too many verbs with identical futures, but that there are other forms from which I can derive the stems, like the desiderative in -sy-. So check the lexicon for verbs with changed future stems.

So I'm trying to get Lusitanic up to a vocabulary of at least 500 words by the end of this month for the Zeeb Awards. The problem is, I don't really have any resources at my disposal for derivational morphology, which I pretty badly need. Could somebody put together a short list of the most common d...

Here's a recording of The Sheep and the Horses. It isn't great- I'm not too smooth- but it should give you an idea.

The Future (in a desperate attempt to have a somewhat finished project in time for the ZBB award voting) Finally, and to round out the verbal system, Lusitanic has a future tense. This was originally derived from a desiderative-like form C₁VC₂- -> C₁íC₁VC₂s-, which has cognate formations in at leas...

There are some ideas I find reasonable, e.g. that plastering *h₁ before all traditional vowel-initial reconstructions is unwarranted Is it really, though? There are a lot of languages that ban vowel-initial onsets, and *h₁ is often reconstructed as a very light sound like [ʔ] or [h]. That's perfect...

Are there any dialects of English which do not affricate /t d/ to [tʃ dʒ] before /r/?

Two of my hallmates, one of whom was inexplicably wearing dental headgear, told me I speak like a character out of an F. Scott Fitzgerald novel and therefore needed a name change.

I have become Jedward Fitzgerald.

Classical Quazian as it is now: 1. Absence of any phonemic POA for stops further back than velar [half mark for only one stop-POA behind velar, or for prominent allophonic stops behind velar] 2. Phonemic voicing 3. Phonemic voicing only on stops and fricatives 4. Voicing distinction on fricatives bu...

I can understand pretty much any English, barring some of the extremely deviant second-language forms from Africa or Asia, but I don't always, if the speech is fluent and I've not practiced hearing it. Glaswegian of course, but I've also been temporarily stumped by strong Geordie, Teesside, LME, an...

P'ăh çem Lusitanik ăn kăk'ur ăk'ar tătîp mă awar qa p'ăh nung ăn k'ar tătîp. K'ar xahî ăqimsang xî ălusitanik'a wik har. 1s REFL to-be-lusitanic REL people 3s.speech PROG.work SENT PERF.cease because 1s to-be-new REL language PROG.work. Language TOP.this 3s.word-order 4s 3s.to-be-lusitanic.speech-o...

Is there any reason not to posit a tʰ-t/d-dʱ distinction of the sort that currently exists in some dialects of Armenian for PIE, other than that Armenian is the absolute worst language in all of IE to base anything on? [even though said dialects perfectly reflect the phonation distinction reconstru...

Nouns Here are the o-stems. Unlike most Indo-European languages, Kazanic has lost gender, presumably under the influence of Uralic. There are some traces, in that a/o-stem adjectives will copy the declension of an a/o-stem head noun, but that's it. Comparatively, all o-stem nouns are masculines, th...

This looks like the start of a good conlang. Your version of the ruki rule is different from the Balto-Slavic and Indo-Iranian one in also affecting the dental stops, while the "regular" ruki rule affects only */s/. But why not? Well, as I said, this is going to need more thought, especially once K...

(How about an IE conlang where *D devoiced but *T did not go out of the way so that both grades merged?) Thy will be done. Where Lusitanic (currently in a lull, but I hope to pick it back up after Thanksgiving, if working on finals isn't too much trouble) is an interesting, but typologically not pa...

though, and the whole thing just plain strikes me as really unlikely. Winter's law (which occured in Balto-Slavic) operated in front of voiced stops, but not voiced aspirated stops. This shows that Balto-Slavic made the distinction at one time before it merged them. I'd forgotten that! Doesn't Celt...

So I'm doing a short bibliography project for my intro linguistics course, and I've chosen Indo-European stuff as my topic. One of the articles I'm reviewing is by a fellow named Beckwith, who has titled his work On the Indo-European Obstruent System. The board won't let me attach the pdf, but the b...

I'm in need of a Russian dictionary, but with a twist: I need a PDF of a dictionary that has the old, pre-1917 orthography. Hopefully Russian/English, but a native Russian/Russian dictionary would be workable in a pinch. Does anybody have one?

(idiotic sound change redacted)

After nearly two years of trying, I finally managed to get a long overdue medical checkup. Unfortunately the results said that I have something wrong with my thyroid and I had to arrange another appointment with an endocrinologist which happens tomorrow. Although I cannot say for sure, there is a v...

I'll get to the future in a bit. Meanwhile, story time: άβις ιήπικε Καμβή, άβις σωκίω σήπα¹ ρώνω βωτ ιήπως ϝεηετά, ήναν σώσεντα σερσάν βρον, ήναν βήηεντα βήρμα θυράν, ήναγκε βήηεντα ιηάν ωκυστί². ¹Lusitanic has no real word for "to have"; instead one says that something is with (καν) or without (σήπ...

Here's the conjugation of ιήθα, ιήσε, βίβοσι, βοστά, --- , "to be". There is no passive voice. Present Indicative h₁ésmi h₁swós h₁smós h₁ési h₁stés h₁sté h₁ésti h₁sth₁és h₁sénti ιήσμα* ϝάς μάς ιής θής θή ιήθα* θής σήν *Epenthetic -α. Present Progressive Indicative This derives from *steh₂ attached t...

K-ish sounds commonly change to labials via velar-labial intermediary stages. An example would be Romanian where latin kw > p so aqua is apă. Proto-Celtic *k^w became *p in the P-Celtic branch. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celtic_languages#P-Celtic_and_Q-Celtic ) Also Osco-Umbrian ("P-Italic" as ...