Search found 195 matches
- Thu Aug 08, 2013 8:13 am
- Forum: Conlangery & Conworlds
- Topic: Too many vowels
- Replies: 20
- Views: 4397
Re: Too many vowels
Real languages with lots of vowels have a certain tendency not to distinguish them in writing at all, e.g. Latin didn't distinguish long vowels from short, and it's not always clear in English what vowel is meant from the spelling. Obviously it can be helpful as a conlanger to have a perfectly unamb...
- Thu Aug 01, 2013 9:50 am
- Forum: Conlangery & Conworlds
- Topic: Conlanging Software Wish List
- Replies: 31
- Views: 7915
Re: Conlanging Software Wish List
An inflection engine, which takes into account all rules of inflection and displays various inflected forms. This engine should be capable of handling inflection with affixes, clitics, independent particles, or discontinuous morphology (infixes, stress shifts, apophony, etc.). With the same technol...
- Sat Jul 20, 2013 5:14 pm
- Forum: Conlangery & Conworlds
- Topic: How Do You Stall the Progress of Civilization?
- Replies: 31
- Views: 7772
Re: How Do You Stall the Progress of Civiization?
Could there be some sort of religious or social factor which causes new technologies to be avoided? Maybe something like the Amish, or something more extreme - perhaps those in power see technological developments as a threat to their position, and so try their hardest to prevent them? Another alter...
- Mon Jul 15, 2013 7:31 am
- Forum: Conlangery & Conworlds
- Topic: No Person
- Replies: 44
- Views: 9064
Re: No Person
My language Greater Atlian has a personless or pseudo-personless system employing ideas similar to those described by Sir Gwalchafad above. First and second person are encoded either: (a) by using the same pronouns as for the third person, so that for "I am free" one might say in effect "He is free"...
- Tue Jul 09, 2013 3:16 pm
- Forum: Conlangery & Conworlds
- Topic: CALS vs WALS: Part 2 - Nouns
- Replies: 18
- Views: 4606
Re: CALS vs WALS: A Comparison
I wonder how much of a difference there'd be if you only compared conlangs with European languages: the strongest differences from the worldwide patterns do seem to tend toward common European features. Interesting about stress - most of my conlangs have fixed stress, so it seems odd for me that oth...
- Tue Jul 09, 2013 8:54 am
- Forum: Conlangery & Conworlds
- Topic: Quadripartite morphosyntactic alignment
- Replies: 38
- Views: 9254
Re: Quadripartite morphosyntactic alignment
Are you referring to a system with different cases for (1) "active" intransitive arguments (S a ), (2) "stative" intransitive arguments (S p ), (3) transitive subjects (A), (4) transitive objects (P)? As far as I know this doesn't happen in any real world languages, but notionally it could happen. (...
- Mon Jul 08, 2013 6:36 am
- Forum: Conlangery & Conworlds
- Topic: Kryptonian writing/conscript from Man of Steel movie
- Replies: 12
- Views: 7977
Re: Kryptonian writing/conscript from Man of Steel movie
Aren't Kryptonians possessed of various, you know, superpowers? Meaning that what may be impractical to us is not necessarily impractical to them.
- Sat Jul 06, 2013 1:37 pm
- Forum: Conlangery & Conworlds
- Topic: Spelling in your conlang
- Replies: 30
- Views: 8059
Re: Spelling in your conlang
Viksen spelling hasn't been updated for a few centuries and so some sound changes aren't reflected, e.g. <æ>, <r>, <l> and <h> aren't pronounced in final position. Some sounds can be written in more than one way reflecting different historical origins. There are also various more sporadic sources of...
- Mon Jun 10, 2013 2:06 pm
- Forum: Conlangery & Conworlds
- Topic: Open Marriages
- Replies: 64
- Views: 13366
Re: Open Marriages
I don't think this sort of thing would go down well in any of my concultures for which I've considered this sort of thing. Some have concepts of marriage which differ from our own - e.g. in Atlia group marriages are common, whereas in the ancient Viksorian culture men could take "concubines" as well...
- Fri Jun 07, 2013 7:11 am
- Forum: Conlangery & Conworlds
- Topic: What if William the Conqueror had been defeated in Hastings?
- Replies: 52
- Views: 12619
Re: What if William the Conquerer had been defeated in Hasti
The effects on <c> and <cw> seem to be the only significant orthographic effects of the Norman Conquest that I can think of. I'm not sure how frequent /kw/ was in Old English but it was definitely respelled <qu> in cwene/queen and maybe some other words as well. I'm also not sure to what extent the ...
- Thu Jun 06, 2013 1:00 pm
- Forum: Conlangery & Conworlds
- Topic: The rarity of modern-day conworlds confuses me.
- Replies: 34
- Views: 9657
Re: The rarity of modern-day conworlds confuses me.
I have a "modern-day" world, which allows me to do interesting things I wouldn't be able to in an "historical" conworld like write the TV schedules. Of course, there's nothing to stop a conworlder from working on their world at any point in its history, and I must admit that a huge amount of the wor...
- Thu May 30, 2013 12:35 pm
- Forum: Conlangery & Conworlds
- Topic: Suhengga
- Replies: 10
- Views: 4492
Re: Suhengga
This language has a nice sound. I think "irrealis" or "subjunctive" would be a reasonable name for the mood you discuss: any other label probably wouldn't cover a sufficient range of meanings. Arabic would appear to have a "subjunctive" mood with a similar set of functions . It would be interesting ...
- Tue May 21, 2013 6:43 am
- Forum: Conlangery & Conworlds
- Topic: Two tools for conlangers
- Replies: 23
- Views: 7384
Re: Two tools for conlangers
These look amazing. Thankyou.
- Sun May 19, 2013 8:11 am
- Forum: Conlangery & Conworlds
- Topic: An Essay towards a Real Character & a Philosophical Language
- Replies: 6
- Views: 4992
Re: An Essay towards a Real Character & a Philosophical Lang
I've always thought this was a pretty poor conlang - it's hard to read, and too easy to confuse concepts. The taxonomy side of things is probably the most interesting aspect, though it's also somewhat arbitrary.
- Thu May 09, 2013 1:35 pm
- Forum: Conlangery & Conworlds
- Topic: What if William the Conqueror had been defeated in Hastings?
- Replies: 52
- Views: 12619
Re: What if William the Conquerer had been defeated in Hasti
I'd predict maybe about as much non-Germanic vocabulary as Dutch or German? Or maybe a bit less, given the extra factor of the English Channel.
- Tue Mar 19, 2013 12:18 pm
- Forum: Conlangery & Conworlds
- Topic: How much to develop a conlang before posting it here?
- Replies: 11
- Views: 3399
Re: How much to develop a conlang before posting it here?
I wouldn't say there's necessarily a minimum amount you have to present, although a post along the lines of "my conlang will contain the phoneme /t/" is probably not enough. A lot of threads here literally are little more than the phoneme inventory and as far as I can tell even these often get some ...
- Tue Jan 29, 2013 8:05 am
- Forum: Conlangery & Conworlds
- Topic: Human homeworld called Earth but with fictional geography
- Replies: 13
- Views: 3340
Re: Human homeworld called Earth but with fictional geograph
Not sci-fi, but the setting of A Series of Unfortunate Events has both similarities to our world (e.g. Brazil is a real place, there's a religion called Buddhism, William Shakespeare existed) and strong differences (e.g. there's a Duchess of Winnipeg and a King of Arizona, and none of the places the...
- Sat Jan 12, 2013 1:15 pm
- Forum: Conlangery & Conworlds
- Topic: Origin of Nations
- Replies: 6
- Views: 3032
Re: Origin of Nations
The Viksor began as a group of kingdoms with largely very similar culture and closely related languages (in a dialect continuum), probably formed by tribes migrating across the northern desert. (Several neighbouring tribes representing an older although probably not entirely unrelated culture were a...
- Thu Jul 12, 2012 11:31 am
- Forum: Conlangery & Conworlds
- Topic: Aesthetics of a Proto-Language
- Replies: 58
- Views: 13712
Re: Aesthetics of a Proto-Language
If "aesthetics" are your main problem, then I would say that the aesthetics of a proto-language have fairly minimal bearing on the aesthetics of its daughters, provided the time period involved is long enough. English does not look much like Proto-Indo-European in any of its reconstructed variants, ...
- Fri Jul 06, 2012 1:03 pm
- Forum: None of the above
- Topic: The Complete Tourist
- Replies: 30
- Views: 8310
Re: The Complete Tourist
Italy: Historic Centre of Rome, the Properties of the Holy See in that City Enjoying Extraterritorial Rights and San Paolo Fuori le Mura Malta: City of Valletta Hal Saflieni Hypogeum Megalithic Temples of Malta Netherlands: Seventeenth-century canal ring area of Amsterdam inside the Singelgracht UK:...
- Thu May 24, 2012 2:26 pm
- Forum: Languages & Linguistics
- Topic: Question - Languages with inconsistent spelling systems?
- Replies: 101
- Views: 15736
Re: Question - Languages with inconsistent spelling systems?
It's non-contemporary but I'm surprised it hasn't been mentioned - English, of course, did not have any standard orthography from the end of the Old English period up until a few hundred years ago. I suspect other European languages are similar - there was certainly a lot of debate about spelling re...
- Sun Mar 04, 2012 9:08 am
- Forum: Languages & Linguistics
- Topic: Adapting Traditions in Naming Custom
- Replies: 8
- Views: 2082
Re: Adapting Traditions in Naming Custom
He could probably just say "my previous surname", couldn't he?
- Mon Feb 27, 2012 6:23 pm
- Forum: Languages & Linguistics
- Topic: Ukrainian dying out among young Ukrainians?
- Replies: 57
- Views: 9467
Re: Ukrainian dying out among young Ukrainians?
Partly what DG said, and the fact that the extinction of languages is something I consider at least half as horrifying as the events that are transpiring in Subsaharan tropical Africa - you are irreversably wiping away thousands of years of evolution - it's like species and culture extinction... Gi...
- Thu Jan 26, 2012 5:57 pm
- Forum: Conlangery & Conworlds
- Topic: How to design a non-European phonology
- Replies: 622
- Views: 166779
Re: How to design a non-European phonology
Viksen. Predicting before I start that it will come out quite Europeanish (which wasn't really the intention when the phonology was designed five years ago, but I've decided I don't really care any more). 1. Absence of any phonemic POA for stops further back than velar [half mark for only one stop-P...
- Thu Jan 26, 2012 9:07 am
- Forum: Languages & Linguistics
- Topic: Possible sound changes for [ɲ]
- Replies: 22
- Views: 4093
Re: Possible sound changes for [ɲ]
Sound changes I tend to apply to this sound include [ɲ] > [j] and [ɲ] > [ŋ]. The latter hasn't been mentioned in this thread yet but seems quite plausible to me; if anything, I'd predict it to be more likely than [ɲ] > [n] as there is a greater similarity in the articulation.