zompist bboard

Im confused. Are you saying English is spoken alongside Carinnish? Im just curious. I use endonyms when I can, but most of my conlangs end up changing so much while I work on them that the endonym becomes false and effectively can only be explained as an exonym. e..g Andanese

This reminds me a bit of something I wrote maybe about six years ago on the KneeQuickie: http://www.kneequickie.com/kq/Europe After I realized that languages that have /X/ without /q/ were mostly or entirely European. And that European languages also universally fail to distinguish /x/ from /X/. I t...

I'm sure there are so many incorrect pronunciations I've had to unlearn that it may not even be worth the trouble to try listing them out. Not just in English, either. Yeah, I was wondering if it might be more worthwhile to take a stab at sorting them into categories. As a first approximation, you ...

Next: sugar sugar (m.): qoxdm [qʼoɕtəm] next: conifer Pabappa: wipombi , from Bābākiam kiamabu bemi ŋi , "evergreen with branches". Contrasts with wipambi , a palm tree, which doesn't., Im not actually sure how the sound changes happened here, I think I might have assumed it was "wip pome be" or so...

I have two conworlds. The first is "Dark Skies and Spaceships", which I worked on from age 3 to my early 20s, and is mostly about child superheros bouncing around the galaxy defeating armies and huge building-crushing snakes and other dangerous animals and then coming home to their teachers assignin...

[*]I used to pronounce "Stromboli" with the stress on the second instead of the first syllable. Im not surprised to learn that Ive been saying it wrong, but Ive never heard anyone say it right either, and i think if i started saying "STROM-boli" people'd think it was weird. "Edinburgh", which I ori...

My own idiolect of English has very strongly retroflexed /ʃ/, /ʒ/, and /r/. And of course no palatals. It's just an idiolect but I don't see why it couldn't become widespread. Also, I don't have retroflexes in /tʃ/ or /dʒ/; it's just the bare fricative forms. Also, the retroflex /r/, at least, is fa...

Thanks, I already did "raspberrry" a few pages ago when the challenge word was just "berry" and I wasnt quite satisfied with it. Your etymology gives me another idea: describe the bush instead of the berry. That said, sometimes real life is messy too. Nobody knows where "raspberry" comes from ... et...

QI had some examples of domain names which were easily misdivided. The only one I can recall offhand is penisland . molestationnursery.com Not a daycare center for kids, but a tree nursery in Mole Station, Australia. I believe they went so far as to rename their whole business, not just the domain ...

2 helplessness dreams: I live in the top floor of an apt bldg in Portland Maine. This held true for both dreams. First, a bit of astrochironecromancy: I have dreams about being dangerously close to an approaching tornado. (see page 2) First dream: I was looking out my window at sunset and saw that a...

Oh, thank you so very much. I've been wanting to justify a shift of /d t/ to /t t_>/ unconditionally (with similar shifts for the other stops) for a while now and I just couldn't quite convince myself that it would happen. I'm still not entirely comfortable with it, since ejectives would outnumber t...

I was musing to a few female coworkers that on many bars of soap there is a warning message on the wrapper saying "For external use only" and then trying to work this into an entire impromptu standup comedy routine about soap. I dont remember any of the other jokes I told and there probably werent a...

Did they fight any wars against South Baffin Island, or is it just Santa's happy elf world where everyone loves each other?

Chinese probably has a few meanings at least, but i dont know if any of them would be used as just one word. In Khulls , čênka (IPA [tʃeˤŋ˩kʰa˩]) could mean "with pants on in school". However, /ka/ for "in school" is associated with marginal dialects in the far north of the empire. Most speakers wou...

http://www.frathwiki.com/Moonshine_Ethnographical_Questionnaire#Questions_of_Sex_and_Family In a nutshell: women are taller than men, and dominate men completely in all areas of society. After a hard day's work, the men go to bed with women and get dominated even more. Male homosexuality is common, ...

Thank you, these are some of my favorite foods. Gold : nigau Khulls: nigō Thaoa: nixea Bābākiam: niau Babakiam is the ancestor of Poswa and Pabappa. Hoever, this word didnt survive, being replaced instyead by radže in Poswa and rab in Pabappa. However, it does survive as a suffix, as e.g. in Poswa l...

I never realized ,but apparently Low German is descended from Ingvaeonic, Dutch is descended from Istvaeonic, and High German (i.e. standard German) is descended from Irminonic. (Did they all start with I on purpose?) What that means is that apparently Low German is more closely related to English t...

Hmm?????? I would think any three vowel language would have triphthongs already. But otherwise, I'd say soften all of your intervocalic voiced stops to fricatives, and then to approximants, and then to nothing. Possibly with infection of the preceding vowel if ytou prefer. e.g. /av/ > /u/, /až/ > /i...

I pride myself on having a word for "arm extender tool" in my conlangs where even English doesnt seem to have one. Even "arm extender tool" isnt specific enough to what type of tool youre talking about. Most people seem to call it "the claw" or something. I still struggle with color terms because I ...

English ɡenerally has [ɻ] or [ɹ] while some dialects have [ʁ] Which English dialects have [ʁ]???? [ɔzɛʁ zan fʁɛnʃ pipɔl]??? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northumbrian_Burr It's apparently somewhat out-dated and pretty rare, though... Someone posted on here a long time ago a link that showed that in ...

Manually. Just clicking "Save page as..." every few edits. Its a good emergency measure, but it doesnt actually save the wikitext, so i cant transfer it to another wiki and even the internal links dont work. Nevertheless, Im glad I was paranoid enough to do this because I have spent the last 6 hrs o...

Interestingly FrathWIki has now crashed and thats why Ive always saved my pages to my computer as HTML on both wikis. Nothing is forever,

Thats the problem. Thank you. People seem to assume that Europe was just this one big monolithic "lets all just raise pigs for a living" place with just one or two language families instead of being like the rest of the world that had 862 different tribes each occupying just one hllside and living a...

Dreamed I drank some yel;low Red BUll. I have the most mundane dreams ever.\ Actually a few days ago I had another "big building" dream where I went down into a 5th level basement in a library to look for a book on Franco. I believe the library was essentially based on pieces of real buildings I've ...

In my opinion, *h₂eḱh₃- is simply evidence that *h₃ did not voice a preceeding consonant (or if it did, it's limited to *p, though that's unlikely). Eh. Now that I think of it, if we accept that PIE had no phonemic /b/, a segment that changes /p/ to but does not voice any of the other stops doesnt ...