zompist bboard

I have a question about triconsonantal root systems that's been bugging me for some time. Let's say that there are two roots, K-R-S and R-S-T. Now let's posit the word karasata , and assume that ka- and -ta are valid affixes. Reminds me of what happened when Swahili borrowed the word kitab "book" f...

Rory wrote:I wonder if I can work some of this stuff into a IE-style language family...

That's exactly what I was thinking of.

I've suddenly realised that part of the history of my conworld rests on a bunch of evil wizards. I suppose there should now be fifteen of them? Is this leading somewhere?

chris_notts wrote:

geoff wrote:Especially since my current project is my first ergative language!

Cool. Have you made a thread about it?

Not yet. It should appear "soon", though...

When Laura Nyro died, a bunch of artists recorded some of her songs to make a tribute album; the results were described by one reviewer as something like "several dwarves partying at the feet of a giant with they were not fit to share the same air". This is how I feel everytime Mark puts up somethin...

Mark already knows about this, but I did notice that the climate of Verduria is more likely to be Cfa (Maritime east coast) than Cfb (Mediterranean).

Please contribute! By "weird" I mean things which look particularly strange, silly, or peculiar.

To start off with, "she will eat" in Manx is written "eeee ee".

It's pronounced the same in Scottish Gaelic, but is written differently, so this doesn't qualify as weird enough.

While browsing through the list of guilds and associations (at
http://www.zompist.com/drill4.htm), I noticed this entry:

Lapiskuskuomi? - Bunny-suit makers

which makes me wonder: Do human-sized rabbits have a ceremonial or other important purpose in Verduria? Could zomp enlighten us?

At the risk of being told to RTFM: is there a website or something with all of these lists of changes?

I often get German and Dutch grammar and vocabulary mixed up (I once said "der Badkammer" in German class). And there's the time, under the influence of a certain auxlang which shall remain nameless, when I was asked "Como estas" by a Spanish speaker, and replied "Estas muy bien"...

Another kind of vowel harmony is found in Igbo, IIRC; there are two groups called "tense" and "lax", each of four vowels. I think the tense set contains /i u e a/ and the lax set /I U E o/. A word can only contain vowels from one set, not both. Vowel harmony must not affect all the vowel phonemes. V...

hwhatting wrote: ei, e:i > i
ai, oi > ? (i after /j/)
a:i, o:i > ?, sometimes a

You missed out the other diphthongs:

au, a:u, ou, o:u > u
eu, e:u > ju (not jy!)

I'm pretty sure about the last one, but I can't find an actual example. Does anyone know of any?

In earlier stages of the Slavonic languages, long vowels could develop from Proto-Indo-European long vowels or diphthongs. I unwittingly used something similar in one of my conlangs. In this conlang a vowel could be preceded or followed by a glide; the glides had a low pitch and the vowels a high p...

Slavonic langs are tonal? Modern Slavic languages aren't. Except for Serbo-Croat and Slovene. Older forms of Slavonic were, too; the tonal distinctions are reflected today in vowel length (Czech, Slovak, and partly in Polish, Polabian, Sorbian and Cassubian) or place of stress (Russian, Ukranian, B...

What are some ways in which tone can develop? In earlier stages of the Slavonic languages, long vowels could develop from Proto-Indo-European long vowels or diphthongs. Those from long vowels had a rising tone (normally known as "acute"), those from diphthongs had a falling tone ("circumflex"). Thu...

there are causative and inceptive forms of each verb What is causative and inceptive? Ghost :roll: The causative is the form used to express "to make X do Y", as in "I made the dog sit down". It's also used to make verbs from nouns and adjectives, for example in Gothic hweitjan "to whiten, make som...

zompist wrote:You guys get a preview!

http://www.zompist.com/elkwrite.htm

I don't know what you were on when you invented that, but I'd sure like some. It's utterly brilliant.