Search found 195 matches

by Curlyjimsam
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...
by Curlyjimsam
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...
by Curlyjimsam
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...
by Curlyjimsam
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"...
by Curlyjimsam
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...
by Curlyjimsam
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. (...
by Curlyjimsam
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.
by Curlyjimsam
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...
by Curlyjimsam
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...
by Curlyjimsam
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 ...
by Curlyjimsam
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...
by Curlyjimsam
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 ...
by Curlyjimsam
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.
by Curlyjimsam
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.
by Curlyjimsam
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.
by Curlyjimsam
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 ...
by Curlyjimsam
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...
by Curlyjimsam
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...
by Curlyjimsam
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, ...
by Curlyjimsam
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:...
by Curlyjimsam
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...
by Curlyjimsam
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?
by Curlyjimsam
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...
by Curlyjimsam
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...
by Curlyjimsam
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.