zompist bboard

And the phonology as promised. Hopefully this is relatively understandable. It is by far the most developed aspect of the language at this point, although I have shortened the explanations and not listed any examples. Phonology Phonology is relatively simple, with only stops and affricates showing a...

Gosh, I didn't expect any answer at all, much less this amount! The egalitarian-to-matriarchal thing I have some amount of conworlding done on this, but probably not as much historical/biological background for it as might be wished, owing in part to it having never been written down. This section i...

Vijay wrote:Ma'a is arguably a mixed language, though, with Bantu morphology in general IIRC, not just noun class markers.

Yeah, that's what I meant when I said "it's difficult to borrow solely the prefix when dealing with such a pervasive feature".

This thread will serve as an attempt for me to jot down my ideas although they might not be as well-defined as I wish at the time. This first post is just a preliminary but of info because I need to start somewhere and I tend to get overwhelmed fast whenever I try to start writing actual sections of...

There is Ma'a (Discussed in ALC, p81), which is (presumably) an originally cushitic language that acquired Bantu grammar (I'd assume it's difficult to borrow solely the prefix when dealing with such a pervasive feature as noun classes). The very fact that a word like "bantuisation" exists and is use...

@Circeus: "You can make something evil/alien and cannibalistic by going the other way: if you don't have that "respect" value, then a dead person is nothing else but a big lump of meat. Why treat it differently from a deer?" Actually in at least one real life culture (I forget which one), it's seen...

way i see it, sociology has one of the same problems as economics: it has FAR more in common with the rules surounding weather than it does the laws of gravity and such. (though economics has the added bonus fun of none the less TRYING to treat it like physics, and then failing to account for the f...

on a tangent, one of morphologists' favourite examples is something like "sensationalisationalisationalise", which is technically permissible under the rules of english morphology, but people lose track of what the meaning's meant to be very quickly. Now see, this I don't get. If no one uses it bec...

Back on topic, many Nahuatl "adjectives" are also nouns with a possessive suffix (e.g. ihteh , "fat", lit. "the one with a belly") or normal nouns (e.g. cualli , "good [thing]"). In the case that interests us, the adjective is indeed a verbal form: cuauhtic (being the perfect of a verb meaning rough...

If everything fails, send me your email address and I'll send it there. Both links are now working just fine and dandy for me, though. You have to click "Pobierz plik" in the second one. Dzięki! And sorry for the late response, I didn't visit the board for some time. (At first, I thought "What the ...

The Cia-Cia even adopted a Hangul Koreanization for reasons I dare not speculate upon: http://thejakartaglobe.com/home/southeast-sulawesi-tribe-using-korean-alphabet-to-preserve-native-tongue/322636 ("reflects our efforts for years to spread Hangul abroad"? wtf) That's turned to be classical unwarr...

I think what Torco means is that two sound changes can start in different closely related dialects at the same time, eventually both applying to all words in the language, but not in the same order for all words. A natlang example can be found in the history of French , where the loss of unstressed...

So for example, the Latin word vespera 'evening' was borrowed by British and comes through in Welsh as gosber , Breton gousper (mainly in connection with the 'vespers' evening service), and was passed on to OI giving e.g. Scots Gaelic feasgar , Manx fastar which are the normal everyday words for 'e...

While many of my concerns have been expressed, I have three primary pieces of criticism to make of the book: Typography Basically, I wish more effort had been put into ensuring that diacriticized character aren't almost systematically put into a different font. Given that the book generally feels fa...

¡Papapishu! wrote:

Circ?us wrote:Introduction à la langue et à la littérature aztèques

I see you copied that from WorldCat. What is with that site and combining diacritics?

Next time I'll retype it separately

For the record, there's a published, more easily accessible version of Launey's thesis in the form of a "Nahuatl as a foreign language" book. It,s a 2-volume books with exercises and texts: Introduction à la langue et à la littérature aztèques . It's also the source of some, if not most grammati...

How about we start by improving the English article itself?

I think it'dbe more useful if you stated which one you're looking for.

I showed the picture to a friend. He told me that the style resembles Herg?'s Tintin drawings. I hadn't realized it before. This picture has always been my favorite. Thank you for improving it! Thanks! I'm not sure I agree about Herg?, but I'll take it as a compliment. Perhaps it's an image from th...

http://www.spinnoff.com/zbb/viewtopic.php?t=12630

Age kruger wrote:Legislature should be no bigger than 2000 words or four sides of double-line-spaced A4 paper. Entries must be handed in before November 15th 2005.

Eddy wrote:English is the Michael Jackson of languages.

Dug this from my blog:

salmoneus wrote:Apparently, the effects of drugs and sleeplack upon philosophical reasoning are somewhat similar.

installer_swan wrote:It's highly addictive to sit for hours doing nothing, once you learn the art. I wonder if there's a blank-wall-starers Anonymous, that I could join.

Meh, I do that every time I open the computer. These things work on usage time, not eckeltricity, i tell you!

I guess Firefox must be having display issues, because all of the retroflexes are showing up as somewhat oversized. They're shaped like lower case letters, but with upper case proportions. I think that's happened to me with Gecko-based browsers before(namely Camino). They never did seem to be as go...

What kind of word would fulfill the definition of 'portmanteauoid', though? A word that looks like a blend, but is etymologically a single morpheme, maybe.. anyone know any of those? Never seen a word like this in French... "porte-manteau" exists but its a composed word, made of the verb "porter" (...

I always that that this french form of the verb "louer" was crazy: loueait. orthographically, yes, but not phonetically. not sure how to pronounce it, though... An impossible form: it'd had to be "louerait" (conditional) or (louait) You can have all 5 vowels with less letters: oiseau (/wazo/, bird)