zompist bboard

I have looked for these on the wider internet, but not had much luck. I turned up an old paper arguing that aspirated descended from glottalised stops. That may well be one source, but there seem to be quite a few languages around with both. I suppose a language could develop glottalised stops which...

The more I read all the above the more I think there might be two things going on here: a valence thing, at the formal level and something else, perhaps at the semantic level: point of view/perspective might well capture that side of things. I'm quite a valence adjustment fan, I put a lot into my la...

What kind of thing? I was thinking, pre-theoretically, that the pairs were all to do with the transmission of something to someone/something/ somewhere. Teach-learn A transmits knowledge to B Send-receive A transmits a parcel to B Come-go A "transmits themselves" to location B In each case the thin...

Ye-ah, that sort of thing (unless something else turns up). I note one of their examples is a Proto-Polynesian, sister to Proto-Malay, the ancestor to the language in my example. So this is promising! I shall research their terms some more.

I have a couple of conlangs which are zero marking for inflection, but I'm trying to make them rich in derivational affixes. I working on derivational paradigms like this from Malay-Indonesian: ajar = teach ajaran = teachings belajar = to learn mengajar = to teach diajar = being taught (intransitive...

Sounds like logophoricity to me, as found in a number of West African languages:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logophoricity

I'm only familiar with the second. I've never heard of the first before, so couldn't comment, but I've always understood the second to mean:

He can talk the talk but he can't walk the walk

A more modern expression with similar metaphorical reference.

My Õtari language has 810 words and there's a few more "pending" words as well.

The mean number of words per language amongst the languages submitted to CALSis 1130.

http://cals.conlang.org/statistics/vocabularies/

@hwhatting: Crikey! I see what you mean!

You might be pleasantly surprised by Dolores, his stuff is quite mellifluous.

I like fado too, BTW.

Nothing so profound here, but another conlang related one. A few nights ago I dreamt I lent a phoneme from one of my conlangs to another conlanger and never got it back. It was /p/. I don' t know who it was, but I wrote to them several times to no avail. The loss and sense of powerlessness made me a...

I've not posted for a while in either of the listening-to threads, because the answer has been the same as my last post in the English thread: The Magnetic Fields. I now have a new musical fad though, DJ Dolores. He (yes, he) is Brazilian and mixes typically Brazilian music with modern DJ-ing type s...

I've seen your approach to polar questions at work in Spanish, so that's fine. I'm intrigued by the approach to wh-questions. I gather from WALS this approach is attested, though I've never seen it in action myself. I suspect "u", interrogative/indefinite, needs an affix. How else could you say "som...

OK, I'll look out for them.

hydroeccentricity wrote:Using the super secret math that only I understand, I came up with this:

Thanks for doing this. I've been meaning to get round to counting them for a while, but not done with one thing and another cropping up!

It's looking good so far. How does Proto-Southern handle questions and negation?

Seed 1956171154 offers quite a few un-English features in a small space (23 phonemes):

aeiou mn pb tt'd kk'g ɂ f s h hʷ l L w

hʷ is described as a rounded pharyngeal fricative

The maximum syllable is: CVRC. Where R is any of mn lL w s.

Hi uriell. You're not sure how to represent the aspirated consonants. I'd use digraphs with h: ph, th and so on. It's an approach I take in one of my conlangs. You're not using it for anything else and it is kind of intuitive.

I like this project, too! Coming back to proto-everything-else, how does it form compound words? Which air flow takes precedence in the event of a clash and which vowel? Vowels could be kept as is, though one element would have to adapt its airflow. You could say the stressed element dominates or th...

Gleb seed 2128440978. Has a lot of principles at work within it. There's aspirated and glottalised stops (or are they ejectives? Marked C', etc. which leaves the matter doubtful. Maybe it's up to the user). There's also loads of nasality. These principles interact to produce: Consonants m̥ m n̥ n ɲ̥...

Very nice notes and coins, vampireshark. Gives me a ... yen to learn the language of Telemor. Have you put anything on the 'net about it?

In that case, yes, Middle Vrkhazhian would be better in place names. I also meant to ask, do you have any linguistic minorities? Their place names will be distinctive, of course.

Nice Semitic vibe, for sure. When it comes to the other city names, don't expect them all to make sense in the modern language. Some might be unchanged since the proto-language or come from the language spoken by the previous occupants of your country.

Ah, right! Things are clearer now and in a good way. I had been worried there'd be too much redundancy in this system, but it looks like there's not. The animacy hierarchy handles case and the classes handle number, so they have a division of labour. Does the class system govern anything else, say c...

There's a couple of articles on segmented sleep on Wikipedia. They're here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Segmented_sleep https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyphasic_sleep They mention scientific studies that show humans respond well to segmented sleep and refer to the work of a historian, A. Roger Ekr...