zompist bboard

Hm... Let's see. I have Super Smash Bros. Brawl is in my Wii right now. Other than Minesweeper and company, I'm not that much of a PC gamer. I'm also interested in retro Nintendo emulation and ROM hacking (NES, SNES, 8-bit Game Boys). I've actually been playing around with programming for the NES re...

Rule exceptions don't work right unless there's a positive condition. Just using a plain underscore for the condition will completely ignore the exception part, applying the rule unconditionally. Yeah, this is not a surprise. I realized that it might be a problem this morning; also, you can't use O...

American foreign language education is B.R.O.K.E.N. I mean, I took three years of Spanish in high school, and just two years later I can barely remember any of it. I can still read Spanish (somewhat), but I couldn't hold a conversation to save my life. That's what you get from compulsory education l...

Broadly speaking, my /r/ is realized as a retroflex [ɻ]. Word-initially it's pretty much just that. In postvocalic positions it tends to be velarized to something like [ɻˠ]~[ɹˠ]; it's also pharyngealized after back vowels only. It's occasionally labialized in word-initial clusters, but there's obvio...

Okay, it's pretty much done now. It wasn't that hard, really. I'm just finalizing everything.

And I certainly didn't see any fish...

/ˈwɪ.kɪˈpi.di.ə/ [ˈwɪkɪ̈ˈpʰiˑɾɨˌəˑ],
/ˈwɪ.ki/ [ˈwɪkɨ]

I'll be expecting a PM or something when it's my turn.

All this time I was still looking for a thread called "Conlang Relay"...

I've read somewhere about "grammaticalization cycles" - changes leading from isolationg to agglutinating structures, from agglutinating to fusional ones, and from fusional back again to isolating. These cycles can be classified to groups, by time of duration of each of them: "short-timed" - like Je...

Bengedian was strongly influenced by Old English in terms of phonology and syntax. Lexical sources include various Germanic and Romance sources mixed in with a priori bits. It wasn't consciously based on anything though. As far as changes, here's what I can recall right now: Originally, Bengedian ha...

A guy at might work thinks there are "300 German dialects". Srs. It depends on what level of detail you go to. There's as many German idiolects as there are German speakers, and a dialect is basically a group of idiolects which have certain features in common. Depending on which features you group ...

Well, it isn't so much gibberish as an actual word-formation phenomenon. But some examples of Japanese-English (aka "Japlish" or Wasei-eigo ) would be: Compound innovations: リストアップ risutoappu v. "To make a list" n. "Listing" (< list up) セクハラ sekuhara n. " Sex ual hara ssment" トレパン torepan n. " Trai...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLZhclvLbfI :o WUT ???? That sounded nothing like English. More realistically, however, they have knack for borrowing actual English words and morphemes and fusing them together to form things that would otherwise seem nonsensical to us. In other words, they're perfec...

Words that are important to me in some way? Hmm. Well, the Bengedian word dons "thing" was the very first Bengedian noun I ever came up with. It's always held some sort of special importance to me because of that. As far as unusual words like some examples above, I can't really say that Bengedian ha...

I don't really care which.

Okay, so I'll be expecting a PM when it's my turn

I don't really care what language my input's in.

I'd like to do one of these. It's the first time I've joined one, so yeah. Bengedian's pretty much the only lang I have, so I guess that's what I'll be doing :) I've been looking for a reason to use my conlang for days now. I have some advice: Make sure the initial text isn't well-known, so people d...

Next word: tyre ( tire for the Americans, as in the rubber things on a car's or bike's wheels, not to become tired) Hmm... Thí fidum... (Bengedian: "I'll try..." :D) Bengedian: icla "wheel" íclašamu "tire", lit. 'wheel-covering' Old Bengedian: rai jéklā "wheel" (f.) *Macrons indicate long vowels, a...

I like conlanging because it's both mentally challenging and a creative outlet. It's an art and a science at the same time. What I don't like is how when I tell people that "I'm making my own language", they always show one of these reactions: One, they'll overestimate and think I'm out to create th...

But Bedelato, why are you so ambiguous about where you are from here? NAE varieties are not nearly as homogeneous as you may think they are; saying you are from the US is not saying much here at all. Because, clearly, we are all stalkers who only want to find and CENSOREDCENSOREDCENSOREDCENSOREDCEN...

Some of you mentioned California dialects. I'll look into that, but what with air travel and all that, you can't exactly pinpoint a regional accent anymore. Yes, yes you can. Most people really don't move all that far from where they grew up, generally. Agreed. In coastal northern California (and I...

Please do. Right now it's like: A: Help 911! I'm being stabbed! B: Ok, caller where are you located? A: Oh you know, one of those streets with a stop sign by it. Except in that case it's justified. You can trust the emergency services with your address. Some stranger you meet in an online forum, no...

Yeah, I have [e] or [eI] (not sure) in Genghis Kahn and penguin (although I'd understand some one who used for the last one). I have [ɛ] in both of those. Protip: A state would be specific enough for determining accent and non-specific enough not to attract stalking. Even a rough area (Midwest, Nor...

But Bedelato, why are you so ambiguous about where you are from here? NAE varieties are not nearly as homogeneous as you may think they are; saying you are from the US is not saying much here at all. Because, clearly, we are all stalkers who only want to find and CENSOREDCENSOREDCENSOREDCENSOREDCEN...