zompist bboard

I'm not arguing against your alternative scenarios at the moment, I just want to clarify something about the "conservative" one: (1) The "conservative" hypothesis is that PNT originates from the NE corner of Siixtaguna and had "always" been there (within the timeframe that is conceivable at this poi...

My personal opinion is that rather than spreading the language families we have over ever larger areas, we should be building more families. On the other hand, not only is that a lot of work, but the desire to give an interesting proto-language lots of interesting daughters is also perfectly underst...

To me too. I've always assumed that the Núalís-Takuña languages originated on the Siixtaguna subcontinent, specifically in the region directly opposite Tymytỳs. That was my assumption too. A few months ago I wrote up a thing about population movements in Siixtaguna as I understood them then; it's n...

Yeah! That was really fun to watch. It's kind of neat to hear the voices of people I've only communicated with in text; and I realized while watching that this was the first time I'd heard all those Akanaran names spoken out loud! It changes my perception of them slightly-- e.g. for some reason I wa...

On thinking about it a little more, I believe that my /ɪŋ/ is tenser when it's followed by /k/ or /g/: so I have something closer to [iŋ] in think, drink, England, but closer to [ɪŋ] in king, ring, wing. It also occurs to me that I (of course) have for word-final -y (including in -ly); surely that's...

I have this! Actually I probably have some variation between [in] and [iŋ]~[ɪŋ] for -ing; but the velar nasal feels slightly foreign to me, like it belongs to another dialect (or maybe a spelling pronunciation). The primary difference between running and runnin' isn't the nasal for me, it's the vowe...

I think it's #3: the point is that the affix says what roles (subject, direct object, indirect object) each noun argument plays in the clause; or equivalently what order the roles appear in among the nouns. I don't think that's what your examples are doing though. The only difference in order is wh...

Sounds really fun, cedh! I hope we'll get to see a video of your talk or something. :) Also great to hear from you again, TzirTzi! If you'd like any input from me about what you're planning to talk about let me know. I really ought to stop by IRC again soon, anyway; maybe we should schedule a chat? ...

Even though /ŋ/ is definitely more common than /ɲ/ (roughly 50% vs. 30% of langs)?

But do what you like of course! (I'm slightly tempted to try doing my own avralang now... I don't know if I'd have the patience to get very far with it, but it seems like an interesting exercise.)

I'm kind of interested in this too, so I looked at the UPSID site a little more closely. It seems to me that the biggest problem with the site (or rather, with trying to use it for this kind of purpose) is that it makes fairly fine distinctions (for example, between alveolar, dental, and "dental/alv...

One thing that strikes me as a little odd in this story is that the Fáralo seem to give up on their empire so quickly/easily. Why doesn't the new king of Ussor declare himself emperor? Why don't any of the successor kingdoms really try to reunite the empire? Some more explanations seem needed here. ...

I remember that too; but if you still want an abugida, I think we could probably figure out a way to make it work. For example, I'm now wondering if the EI family's pervasive ablaut patterns might make it sensible for Ngauro to develop consonantal signs like Egyptian, rather than (or maybe in additi...

I think I'd prefer the Doroh to acquire writing as late as possible; though maybe it's not really plausible to continue thinking of them as unlettered barbarians in the classical period, I don't know. (A while ago cedh and I were thinking of analogies from RL history for their relationship to the Af...

After this we will have a look at what's been said about PEI morphology, systematize it and decide on the most important features, and write a short sketch of the morphosyntax that we can then all work forward from. If you want to join in now, you could start evaluating the morphology proposals (mo...

That seems all good. Here's a more precise question: among the things I'm supposed to be working on, what should I give the priority to? Whatever seems the most fun to you, of course. (But it does seem like Sumarušuxi is a particularly important region, connected to several other projects. If you w...

It's good to see you again, Legion. I also missed you... In addition to what Basilius pointed out, there've been some other new languages. Cedh made a new daughter of Fáralo , and Radius is working on a very interesting new language that's unrelated to any of our other langs. Also, there are now thr...

Cool. :) I had a good chat with cedh on IRC today... among other things, we talked about the map of northern Peilaš, and he had an idea for an alternative tectonic scenario. So there may be a new map proposal in the works. In any case, we agreed that our next major goal is a truly finalized physical...

Well, I think that's mostly what I wanted to know-- are they ok with how we're using their conlangs? Though maybe we should also ask what things they'd be ok with us doing in the future-- something like the list of questions I wrote a few days ago, but it probably doesn't have to be that formal. The...

Thanks for putting the label on there, Cedh. One usage nitpick: the word "respective" (to my ears anyway) doesn't make sense with the singular "content"; it indicates a kind of distributive relationship (in this case, that each author claims the copyright for their own contribution), which only work...

That notice sounds fine to me. (It should probably include the © though, just to be thorough-- see below.) The US copyright office has a bunch of information at http://www.copyright.gov/ . Here's some things I found there: The copyright owner of a work has exclusive rights to: -Make copies of the wo...

As I understand it, under US law all work you create is automatically protected by copyright as soon as you write it down. I believe our lack of a licensing statement simply means that the content of the wiki is still owned by its authors with all rights reserved. (Other wikis have licensing stateme...

Thanks, Salmoneus: I was hoping you'd weigh in. And I agree with you; I really don't want to unexpectedly find my work reposted somewhere else on the internet, for example. (And I know I'm not alone: Dewrad has already made his feelings about this clear, which is why we're not putting copies of his ...

Sorry I've been absent lately-- I've been very busy the past couple of weeks, and will probably continue to be fairly busy over the next few months (at least); but I do have some blocks of free time, e.g. today and the first half of next week. 1 About Radius' idea: I think I somewhat agree with Salm...

The Takuña and Proto-Nualis-Takuña materials are offline - does anyone have a copy? They're actually still online-- the links on the wiki just haven't been updated since TzirTzi changed hosts a while back. Until someone gets around to fixing that, you can access them from http://tzirtzi.ipage.com/ ...

I had a prescribed list of sound changes ... Oh wow, I don't think I've seen that page before! It looks like Lotoka in a few ways (open syllables, no consonant clusters), but I suspect it won't really be close enough to be related. To be honest, though, I don't see how it could realistically not be...