zompist bboard

I realized recently that I have some nice maps of Eretald that I've never posted, and which are better references than anything online. These are really big, about 2 meg each. First, a huge map of Eretald . This was made back in (gulp) 1981— 36 years ago. It was made in four parts— I stitched them t...

Well, two general caveats: * Cuêzi/Caďinor were reworkings and often had to be stretched to more or less fit existing material. * Real life sound changes can be frigging weird . It's fine to stick to the more common changes, but there are some really weird ones out there. A neat one from the numbers...

There's a whole book on this, Penelope Brown and Stephen Levinson's Politeness: Some universals in language usage . I read it years ago, so I can't say I remember much of it, just that politeness strategies are super-common and easily get grammaticalized. And they do follow certain paths: humble for...

Let's see... It's important that the country be safe. It's important that the country have a good supply of bombs. It's important that the grammar cover this construction. The more I look at these, the weirder they look. I guess they're OK, but I would prefer to say "...for the country to be safe", ...

Any news on Brexit? My understanding is six months of the 2-year negotiating period has been eaten up with basically zero progress. Has anything been agreed to at all?

I agree with Kath— the sentence just says that a good supply is important, and doesn't say whether we have one or not.

American English, if you couldn't guess

You're right. I looked this up when writing the post, and looked in the wrong column.

There's also the additional issue of some languages being classified as being f one word-order type when in fact the situation is much more complicated, for instance Japanese is often referred to as an SOV language when in fact the driving factor with regards to word order is its topic-comment stru...

[similarly, some people think there's an /h/ in /S/ and /T/. But this is less common, probably because we don't have any productive, shibbolethical "dropping the H" process]. Not over there, maybe, but we sure do, with /θ ð/. Quite a few nonstandard dialects turn these into [t d]; word-finally, AAV...

Mandarin pronunciation is a minefield, so it's ironic that this particular name is quite easy— they could approximate it quite well as "way-June". (Since we're all pedants here, you probably want to know the Mandarin: [wei tɕyɪn].) People seem to think that Mandarin spellings must be made even more ...

That would be standard practice in France, especially chez Larousse . I have several editions of French plays which have a huge structure of critical apparatus. I think the American/British preference is only enough apparatus so you can read the text. You could put everything in a critical edition, ...

Just as a negative update: I can't supply more info. I can't find any specification of where Buck puts Hellenistic Greek. (He qualifies his Greek as "ancient", which probably means Classical.) FWIW I checked Strong's, which collects New Testament Greek, but unfortunately no one referred to holes. (B...

Buck ( A Dictionary of Selected Synonyms in the Principal Indo-European Languages ) has τρῡπημα for Ancient Greek and τρῦπα for modern-- also (in his text notes) Byzantine. It's still possible he's capturing something simple lookups do not, as he was a Greek scholar and should know what he was talki...

OK, Carl Buck is wrong on that one! Found both words in Liddell.

I'm kind of bothered they used Modern Greek τρῦπα instead of Ancient Greek τρῡπημα.

** do Americans and others use this term commonly? A politician's majority is their margin of victory (usually expressed in total votes, not percentages) over their nearest rival in their own consituency at the most recent election. So they might 'increase their majority', for instance, or have the...

Snowmen are not men (certainly not according to any definition of "man" that I can find). They are not humans; they are not capable of self-identifying as male; they are just figures made of snow in the shape of a human being. Sal was speaking a little loosely, but correctly: N1 + N2 names a type o...

I had to go back to my college D&D folder to get a definitive answer to this one. (I made calendars to keep track of the wilderness campaigns.) And the answer is: kasten is an ordinary week day. So:

28 recoltë 3480 is a néronden
kasten is a cedhnare
1 yag is a scúreden

For why Almea seems Earth-like, and Verduria even more so, see this page . But in brief: it's intentional; Verduria is supposed to be familiar, like most fantasy realms, and areas outside it more exotic. There are a lot of linguistic borrowings. (Some of them I probably wouldn't do if I were startin...

Sal's discussion is good. Basically "adverb" is the trash bin of linguistics: everything that doesn't fit into another ancient Latin word gets thrown there.

We could probably call them particles, which is another trash bin, but allows us to distinguish these from "real" adverbs.

I'm having trouble figuring out what you're talking about, sorry. :( Could you give me an example of a simple verb in Hindi that inflects with gender/number and an auxiliary in Hindi that inflects with person/number? Simple verb: any of them, e.g. ghumnā 'walk'. Past is gender/number: 1m ghumā, 1f ...

First, there's a distinction between simple verbs (e.g. the perfective), and forms with auxiliaries (which are actually more common). Then, there's the paradigms that inflect with person/number, and those which go with gender/number. Wait...aren't these the same thing? Don't the simple verbs inflec...

in my syntax tree below I had to move it to the middle, because in syntax trees lines cannot cross Just as an aside, James McCawley would have disagreed. He played with trees where lines could cross, connecting to somewhere else than their linear order. So you could put your -que in its proper line...

You might be interested in Hindi, whose verbal system is all over the place. First, there's a distinction between simple verbs (e.g. the perfective), and forms with auxiliaries (which are actually more common). Then, there's the paradigms that inflect with person/number, and those which go with gend...

I was thinking along the lines of, for example, "asks" having different morphology in the following examples: (He/She/It) asks a stupid question The wannabe conlanger asks a stupid question Legalis asks a stupid question Colloquial French, if you accept the analysis that the original pronoun has be...