zompist bboard

Eddy the Great wrote:Miami doesn't incorporate nouns at all, I heard.

Not sure who told you that, but Miami, like PA and all its daughters, uses the Algonquian medial, which is usually incorporated noun information. Noun incorporation is very much a part of Miami morphology.

I might as well post this here...this is my quick attempt at a polylang: hkoamem?hka:htheahko hk-o-a-me-m?hka-aht-he-a-hk-o Masc.-Anim.-Sing.-3S-to go-(direction)away-1S-Sing.-Masc.-Anim. He is going away from me. (He is leaving.) Is that plausible for a polylang? I suppose, but you wouldn't need t...

If you had a polysynthetic conlang that defined some words as sentences with a specific subject, you could make a language that is much more powerful at forcing people to think in a certain way. So if the word for "marriage" means something like "a man couples with a woman" then it would both exclu...

I think the Polylang thread is a decent start at a Polylang construction kit. Asking other people who've worked with polysynthetic conlangs is good too. But I agree, it would be nice to have a small document explaining what polysynthesis is and how many different ways there are to make it work in a...

Comment on bilabials: Proto Iroquoian, and most of the Iroquois daughters prior to European contact, had no bilabials whatsoever. E.g., classical-traditional Mohawk has none; but it has gained limted /p/s and /m/s from the few French and English loanwords in its lexicon. To this day, /p/ and /m/ are...

Polylangs have their own kinds of irregularity that make them every bit as complicated as Verudurian or any other European-style language. I'm not denying that, it's just that 500 completely different inflections for regular words alone are a huge tax on the memory.[/quote] Verdurian has around 60 ...

Polylangs are mainly agglutinative. No they're not. It depends on the family. Algonquian is agglutinative; Iroqouois is fusional. Verd?rian has the case, gender, and number all in one inflection. Mohawk has person, number and gender of both agent and patient encoded in one inflection. That's a big ...

Eddy the Great wrote:I certainly couldn't learn Verd?rian. I couldn't learn hundreds of inflections.

Then you could never learn a polylang.

I had an odd dream last night (well, this morning, really); and it's esp. odd because I almost never rememeber my dreams.

Napoleon conquered Russia; and the people in Russia were speaking Verdurian. Hmm; is Verdurian what might have resuled had the Russian winter not taken the Little Emperor out?

Ahribar wrote:

jsburke wrote:I don't anyone's mentioned the Jeerio story so far.

Just eight topics below this one (at present).

Hell, I'm blind; don't pay any attention to me.

I don't anyone's mentioned the Jeerio story so far. I have to confess I'm the one who encouraged Mark to publish it; and I'm glad he did. It has an endearing quality to it; and I suppose we can take it as the first Almea story written, or maybe the first work done on it period. Maybe someone would l...

I'm also looking foward to seeing the Western languages; and given my slowness and all the problems that have attended the writing of the grammar, they'll probably be publsihed before Noyahtukah is.

So if we in our IE mindset interpret a lot of our nouns as verbals (language=communicating), are we far closer to understanding the system of e.g. Mohawk? More or less. When trying to accurately capture semantics in translation, -ing words are used by the truckload. Are most poly languages "verby"?...

xelhapwatlashpirāxiwatlarasif?to?axokatar?lwa?o That is one long word. Even my conlang doesn't have them that long. That word has the full forms of some verbs in it. For example, watlashpirāx is 'language' and watlarasif?to?axo is 'world' or 'earth', both of which could be shortened. Trying to inco...

I'll have to take a look. Something that seems odd on a cursory glance is that the language seems not to use object agreement markers (though that may have an explanation deeper in the grammar).

Just how many words are there in Verdurian?

5000+; it's the most well-developed of all the Almean languages (though my personal favorite is Elkaril).