Search found 195 matches
- Tue Feb 03, 2015 10:13 am
- Forum: Conlangery & Conworlds
- Topic: Unnamed isolating(ish) ergative proto-language
- Replies: 4
- Views: 1690
Re: Unnamed isolating(ish) ergative proto-language
Point of interest: there are, as far as I know, no real-world languages which demonstrate ergativity purely in terms of word order without case or agreement marking. This doesn't necessarily mean you can't do this in your language - I do a similar thing to you in my main conlang - but some conlanger...
- Sat Dec 27, 2014 5:15 pm
- Forum: Conlangery & Conworlds
- Topic: How do you organize a list of sound changes?
- Replies: 4
- Views: 2009
Re: How do you organize a list of sound changes?
Typically "one node to the next". I'll also tend to subdivide the list of changes by period: exactly what lengths of time varies, but 200 year intervals is fairly typical.
- Sat Dec 27, 2014 5:13 pm
- Forum: Conlangery & Conworlds
- Topic: David Salo's Gundabad Neo-Orkish: transcription and analysis
- Replies: 18
- Views: 6216
Re: David Salo's Gundabad Neo-Orkish: transcription and anal
Nice. One little thing: imperatives are finite, not non-finite. They can head independent clauses, whereas infinitives are deranked and thus non-finite. Drat! I should've known that... To be fair I think you could argue it either way - imperatives often do share some properties of non-finite verbs ...
- Tue Nov 18, 2014 6:01 pm
- Forum: Conlangery & Conworlds
- Topic: Extraterrestrial Cultures and Languages
- Replies: 9
- Views: 2887
Re: Extraterrestrial Cultures and Languages
The term "space opera", to me, doesn't exactly scream "realism and believability", so you might want to ask yourself exactly how far you want to go with these things - but I would agree that the cliche of planets with a single culture is a bit boring and questionably realistic. (That said, there are...
- Thu Oct 02, 2014 11:25 am
- Forum: Conlangery & Conworlds
- Topic: How to begin an a priori conlang
- Replies: 12
- Views: 5115
Re: How to begin an a priori conlang
A question that I think deserves asking is "What are the main advantages of creating an ancestor language?". I can think of a few main ones: (1) Being able to produce historical texts in a language before the "modern" period. If you want to do this, you need to be able to trace your language back at...
- Sun Sep 07, 2014 2:48 pm
- Forum: Conlangery & Conworlds
- Topic: vowels make preceding consonants more audible?
- Replies: 4
- Views: 2324
Re: vowels make preceding consonants more audible?
I think so, yes. Final consonants are relatively likely to be lost (or merge with other consonant phonemes), and audibility is likely the most important factor.awer wrote:So, ultimately, do you think that consonants are more audible when followed by vowels?
- Thu Jul 31, 2014 3:18 pm
- Forum: Conlangery & Conworlds
- Topic: The Flag of Vrkhazh
- Replies: 9
- Views: 2263
Re: The Flag of Vrkhazh
These are unusual, but certainly striking. I like them. I shouldn't worry about those "five principles". Like Matrix says, lots of real flags don't follow them - indeed I suspect most flags violate at least one. That's not to say that they're don't constitute sensible advice, but a concountry where ...
- Mon Jul 21, 2014 9:33 am
- Forum: None of the above
- Topic: Nicks past & present
- Replies: 30
- Views: 11623
Re: Nicks past & present
I used to be Curlyjimsam on here, and still am on most of the Internet. I have been calling myself Seven Fifty or a variant on here and one or two other places for just over a year or so, I think.
- Fri Jul 18, 2014 4:38 pm
- Forum: Conlangery & Conworlds
- Topic: Conworld without magic, anyone?
- Replies: 37
- Views: 8258
Re: Conworld without magic, anyone?
My conworld has no magic. It doesn't have a great deal of appeal to me, to be honest. I do have myths and legends and things which have supernatural/magical elements, but even they are only one small part of the whole. What is the technological level of your conworld? It goes up to a "modern" sort ...
- Thu Jul 17, 2014 10:07 am
- Forum: Languages & Linguistics
- Topic: Language Complexity
- Replies: 29
- Views: 6864
Re: Language Complexity
Concerning complexity of morphology - which is easier to quantify that the overall complexity of a language - it has certainly been the case that many languages have grown less complex over time: the Romance languages are an obvious example (and I presume the main influence in the Verdurian case), b...
- Wed Jul 02, 2014 7:48 am
- Forum: Conlangery & Conworlds
- Topic: Conworld without magic, anyone?
- Replies: 37
- Views: 8258
Re: Conworld without magic, anyone?
My conworld has no magic. It doesn't have a great deal of appeal to me, to be honest. I do have myths and legends and things which have supernatural/magical elements, but even they are only one small part of the whole.
- Tue Jul 01, 2014 5:06 pm
- Forum: Languages & Linguistics
- Topic: Rate of sound change
- Replies: 35
- Views: 8534
Re: Rate of sound change
To measure this you'd need a solid definition of what constitutes "one sound change". If you have five voiceless sounds /p t k f s/ and they all become voiced between vowels, is that one sound change or five? If /e/ gradually raises to /i/ in a very large number of very small steps, is that one chan...
- Wed Jun 04, 2014 10:29 am
- Forum: Conlangery & Conworlds
- Topic: Are allophones in big phonological inventories less likely?
- Replies: 8
- Views: 3192
Re: Are allophones in big phonological inventories less like
You are aware that you'll never perfectly recreate your mouth's setup when uttering the same phoneme twice? That falls under allophony, even though it may be so fine-graded that it's barely measurable. This is the most important thing to state in response to this thread, I think. Though in fairness...
- Thu May 29, 2014 5:13 pm
- Forum: Conlangery & Conworlds
- Topic: What tools do you use for conlanging?
- Replies: 46
- Views: 12804
Re: What tools do you use for conlanging?
MS Word, mostly. Notepad quite a bit for stuff I don't want to go into detail for. I used to use the SIL dictionary program (I forget its name ...) for my main languages, until I accidentally deleted the source files when I got a new computer. (They were in a different place from all my other files....
- Tue Mar 04, 2014 8:49 am
- Forum: Conlangery & Conworlds
- Topic: Naming language for nonhuman civilization in RPG
- Replies: 23
- Views: 6499
Re: Naming language for nonhuman civilization in RPG
Etching clay was one of the earliest methods humans used for writing, and used a lot - according to Wikipedia "between half a million and two million cuneiform tablets are estimated to have been excavated in modern times". Clay, unlike other materials, is very durable as well. The same writing syste...
- Thu Jan 30, 2014 4:34 pm
- Forum: Languages & Linguistics
- Topic: The plurals of deer-like animals in English
- Replies: 25
- Views: 8418
Re: The plurals of deer-like animals in English
For me, "I'm going out hunting pheasant" would be OK, but not *"there are five pheasant in that field". And similarly for "elk" etc.
- Tue Jan 21, 2014 5:57 pm
- Forum: None of the above
- Topic: Non-Tolkienian fantasy
- Replies: 61
- Views: 18789
Re: Non-Tolkienian fantasy
I've for a long time been fascinated by the fact that in the Gormenghast books, although they seem to fall fairly naturally in the category of "fantasy", there is an absence of magic or the magical. Specifically, it's interesting to me that more authors haven't done similar - the Tolkienian style ha...
- Thu Jan 16, 2014 6:10 pm
- Forum: Conlangery & Conworlds
- Topic: Conlang words that happen to resemble real words
- Replies: 80
- Views: 51405
Re: Conlang words that happen to resemble real words
Viksen has a whole load; here are some from the start of the alphabet: - Somewhat boringly, a "and" - ad , "centre", pronounced similarly to English add - as , "only", pronounced similarly to English ass or arse - bág , "new", pronounced similarly to English bag - bog , "to make" - dad , "perfect" -...
- Fri Jan 03, 2014 5:04 pm
- Forum: Conlangery & Conworlds
- Topic: Baranxe'i Script
- Replies: 14
- Views: 4458
Re: Baranxe'i Script
Very nice. One of the more distinctive scripts I've seen. I would ask how easy it is to write by hand, though? I can imagine that getting all those vowel and consonant signs lined up neatly like you've done might be quite difficult. I imagine it could be turned into an easier-to-write version quite ...
- Sat Dec 21, 2013 7:51 pm
- Forum: Conlangery & Conworlds
- Topic: Examples of truly unique conlang features?
- Replies: 57
- Views: 15282
Re: Examples of truly unique conlang features?
My conlang Viksen has an ergative alignment that, due to the absence of case or agreement morphology, is expressed entirely through word order, and furthermore is only apparent in the subjunctive which has an SVO order (i.e. AVP for transitives and VS for intransitives), non-subjunctive sentences be...
- Sat Dec 07, 2013 8:24 am
- Forum: Languages & Linguistics
- Topic: Learning to Gloss
- Replies: 26
- Views: 6646
Re: Learning to Gloss
I would advise that there is no single "correct" way to do glosses, and you ought to a large extent to be sensitive to the context. Generally, I at least would rather read English words than abbreviations of grammatical categories unless there's some specific reason to use the latter. So sometimes i...
- Fri Oct 18, 2013 1:29 pm
- Forum: Languages & Linguistics
- Topic: Syntax Question
- Replies: 29
- Views: 7211
Re: Syntax Question
The vast majority of languages have subjects before objects as the most basic order anyway - over 90% based on http://wals.info/feature/81A. And as others have said - object/verb order is the most useful for predicting other orders, although the tendencies (though fairly strong in many cases) are by...
- Thu Oct 10, 2013 4:59 pm
- Forum: Conlangery & Conworlds
- Topic: Creating dialects and language families
- Replies: 16
- Views: 6430
Re: Creating dialects and language families
My History of the Viksen Language contains a lot of information on morphosyntactic change (though I can't guarantee it's all necessary realistic). Obviously this is just one language rather than a whole family, but it might still be instructive.
- Thu Aug 22, 2013 2:37 pm
- Forum: Conlangery & Conworlds
- Topic: Conlanging and the novel - essay
- Replies: 4
- Views: 2321
Conlanging and the novel - essay
This is an essay I wrote a couple of years ago and have recently dug up (and revised slightly in places). Not totally sure if I still agree with all its points, but some people might still find it interesting. === Conlanging and the novel 1. Introduction The hobby of “conlanging”, or creating “const...
- Tue Aug 20, 2013 1:53 pm
- Forum: Languages & Linguistics
- Topic: Isolating CV languages?
- Replies: 19
- Views: 4694
Re: Isolating CV languages?
http://wals.info/feature/combined/12A/22A doesn't suggest any particular correlation between syllable structure type and morphological type.