zompist bboard

It's isolating enough, I think, that that first conlang English speakers make, the one that so often ends up being a native-language-relex n00blang, ends up being isolating, and as a result, we tend to shy away (without realizing it) from isolation because it reminds us of that first conlang. I kno...

TaylorS wrote:English only has 7 regular inflections:

Plural -s
3SG Verb -s
Present Particple/Gerund -ing
Preterite/Past Participle -ed
Auxiliary Negation -n't
Comparative -er
Superlative -est

And a huge lot of derivational morphology.

I've never had an interest in making an isolating conlang, mainly because my own native language, English, is itself most isolating and thus seems boring compared to highly synthetic languages. All my conlangs I have done have been fairly synthetic. English isn't that isolating. And considering tha...

Lyhoko Leaci wrote:(Or one could be given to one team and the other to the second team...)

No, don't. I vote M.

I really like the way 15 looks in Roman numerals here. XV is much better than 15, and much more... something good than XIII and XIV, which look quite ugly. Too bad the next one is XVI, which isn't so good either. And later on we have XX, which isn't so good. And after that it's just too many letter...

Since it's so short, I'll be willing to do: from: Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, French, English, Spanish, German, Old French (of which I don't speak the last three, but could decipher pretty accurately with a dictionary, a grammar and some common sense) to: Swedish, French, English, and if necessary I...

adder, I am pretty sure you're wrong about the form "köpta", as well as about the timing of the changes - in press, the verb inflections did remain for a long while longer, but already by the interwar period they were falling by the wayside. And in speech, they were long gone since centuries before...

Come on Tata, come on Tata!

I think you should translate what is there, no more, no less. I got several sentences with obvious misuses of words and one sentence that lacked a subject, but I just went with it and had it make just as little sense in French.

Serafín wrote:I think we should add a slogan to the polyglottal telephones: if something doesn't seem to make sense, most likely it absolutely makes no sense.

So how's your translation going?

finlay wrote:Try and do it by Friday... I do quite want to have people keep to the deadlines this time round.

Done and sent and sent.

Received. Will try to make sense of it and translate it before Friday. In the unlikely event that I can't find the time to, it will have to wait until Sunday.

It's never used in actual words, only names, and rarely even there.

Great, here we go!

I really should learn some more languages, so I won't have to do Swedish and French all the time.

In French... oh boy. Where do I start? In Quebec, at least, common rules would be : turn "i" into "y", especially when following "o". Add and delete various consonants, and you may replace any "s" with "z" or "x", and you can replace any final "x" with "s". Then, you have all the ancient sounding e...

In Swedish, you'd use plural forms of verbs, like "äro", "kommo" etc. (often incorrectly), randomly replace <v> with <fv> or <hv> (I rarely see fake old Swedish with plain <f> for <v>, although this was common in the old orthography), substitute <e> for many <ä>s, <-arne> for <-arna> and I don't kno...

Shrdlu wrote:In Sweden, you start learning English the day you begin school.

Is that so? Because I didn't start having English classes until second grade, and my sister not until third. That was 1998 and 2001, respectively.

from: Swedish , Norwegian, Danish, French, Old Swedish , any Gallo-Iberian Romance to: Swedish , French And of course English if absolutely necessary, but I'd rather that we get someone who's not very comfortable with it translating into, say, Catalan for me to translate from, rather than using Engl...

I notice we've missed gay . Of course it's semantic shift over time rather than a simultaneous double meaning, but we're at least still familiar with the old meaning in various phrases and lyrics. If your shirt gets called gay, it isn't because you have donned gay apparel. If we're doing diachronic...

Another important rule to learn in Japanese is that some things are the way they are because "It just sounds better". This is the answer to many questions at all levels of learning Japanese. Even native speakers will answer this way. More than likely this is the reason くる and する are irregular. They...

I remember reading in a magazine article about Sweden that the only person with whom you'd use the formal pronoun in Sweden is the king. Is that true or is that one of these "how quaint" stories journalists like to make up? There was an interview recently with the King (he's been a very naughty boy...

It's a shame the English translations are missing for some parts. I'm wondering what this Old Spanish means: "non te treves me mosar las barbas". That ended up as "je ne t'empêche pas de me mouiller le pépin" in my French translation, going through Old Occitan. "Mosar las barbas" has to be some sort...

It's a cool concept. Photo itself needs to be sharper and the lighting could use a readjustment. The band members are too unevenly distributed and the color palette is odd. Heh. The idea was to make the cover art look punky and harsh, contrasting with the music. So we shot it with a disposable came...

More like "creativity of the last three years", but my band releases an album today. Here's the cover art:



It's sooo good to finally have it all done, I hate having unfinished projects lying around.

One question: the matter of using the informal second person du in the continental NG languages, as I have always wondered about this. Can you really use these forms in Sweden or Denmark when approaching a stranger, say an older man or woman, to ask something like "Can you tell me, please, how I ca...