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In the grammar of Cuêzi, there is the following "no other human nation has been shown greater favor by the ilii than Cuzei". My question is: what made the Cuzeians so special that the ilii favoured them so? The Count of Years and its tale of Lerīmanio's jaunt to discover what a pen is aside, was it ...

Missed this thread the first time round. In terms of years and actual usage, the foreign language I've put most effort into is French. Started learning when I was eight or nine, did it at school, got a degree in it and now I teach it for a living. After that, probably Latin, surprisingly. I started ...

This is awesome. I think probably the most detailed and fascinating belief system sketch yet. I love the nods to the Dharmic religions in there as well.

How come Cadhinor also has a k? I'm assuming that (Old?) Kebreni wouldn't have been written down using the current orthography during the period?

ɔʔ Cǝwiʔ, ndao-cǝtaḥ nduo-car mɛṃ-kɔr a aṃ mǝndar ñjrao?
Travis, are all the different transcription systems really necessary?

I've been looking at the Celtic mutation system, and have been trying to find out more about the Cornish hard mutation / fortition, but there seems to be much less information on Cornish than Welsh out there. Does anyone know how the hard mutation came about? I know that fortition is less common th...

Atzenic /p t k f s θ h l r ɬ m n j w/ /i e ɛ a ɔ u/ /iǝ̯ uǝ̯/ /t ɬ/ become [tʃ ʃ] before a front vowel, stress is largely irregular. /h/ is an extremely common coda consonant before another consonant. [kekeɬˈtʃɛ ˈpɛral ke haˈwol ˈeθ ˈtuǝ̯r ˈtuǝ̯r ˈlɛ ke feˈθɛ ˈmahl ˈruǝ̯hk aloˈhɛn ˈmɛθ. ˈʃinat ˈkɔ ...

I asked Tedur about this. He responds that nobody seems to be too bothered by it, as the migrants want to spend as little time in Dravia as possible. The Austrians and Hungarians are talking of building border fences though, and this is being met with dark mutters about non-specific "treachery".

Can you do the organs of the human body in a foreign language? I took out a few that I thought were a bit tough to identify from this not so great drawing. http://i14.photobucket.com/albums/a311/TheMaskedMan52/Human%20Body_zpsxi5q5kia.jpg Surprised to discover that I can actually do the French for ...

I'm a big fan of those soundchanges.

On the other hand, your initial thoughts on grammar are dull. It's essentially just PIE. Suggestion: don't think about grammar at all until you've run some PIE paradigms through your soundchanges and seen what mergers and analogies suggest themselves.

An interlude: some poetry. The following poem was written by Qêran Irîṣayyi (better known to the Carastans as Cairanos of Zarīssa), a poet, scholar and theologian who flourished some three centuries after the establishment of the Carastan Empire. Qêran was the fifth child of a pious family, and whi...

Io wrote:But no, seriously, didn't you meet Twpsen when he was even younger than that?!

Ouais, mais il était escorté par sa mère.
Yeah, but he was accompanied by his mother.

Du wohnst auch in Rehovot?* You're also living in Rehovot? *I'm aware the normal word order would be "Wohnst du auch ...", but in Dutch one can deviate from this order in case you expect a positive answer, and the question is merely checking whether your assumptions are right. Is that possible in G...

I'll bite. In Gallo-Brittonic, in a fairly literal reading without much concession to poetry: dolyās wo·cecana, dolyās auri, etic dolyās tumīssont, winton wo·cecana, wintos to·axte, in cancābi swittāsset. trās sawūl, trās lousnān, wor mori esāt owinos, oncon traxtāi Nemesolissi tumīsset prennon auri...

‮suoenatroN wrote:Raphal dzgoleri. Khre shlya dzgoleri. Lqorxal taxlera dzbas.
Numbers are shit. Everything is shit. Welcome to hell.

Ozarei soldrà ozar ozar ozar...
Haters gonna hate hate hate...

Most likely, the romance-speaking cattle herders of the Balkans followed seasonal migration routes into the Carpathians, while retaining command of Slavic for ecclesiastical & economic purposes. Once the Ottoman conquests and constant warfare depopulated lower Transylvania and the Wallachian plain,...

Does anyone know where I could find information on Proto-Romanian? Specifically, a lexicon of reconstructed words and a grammar would be ideal, but I'd also take sound changes from Latin in a pinch. I'm trying to do an a posteriori Eastern Romance conlang and finding it surprisingly difficult to ge...

finlay wrote:エアコンというのは、和製英語なの？他人が言うか？
is "aircon" a japanism? anyone else say that?

Non, c'est courant en anglais aussi :/
No, we say it in English as well :/

Io wrote:That's surely the up-upside of it really not the downside

I promise you, being surrounded by thirty or so adolescent boys trained to do whatever I tell them is nowhere as enjoyable as it sounds.

A Dravian joke: C'è n'actastro qui jè meis a càrcer per jèstro tòblo. Apòi qu'è lasçat, la milisa lo cataja ent na cambra de n'otel, e que jal jè cu fotènd o tasat. - Qué se treçta ? - Ah, dòn milisare, jèu hai zòst entrat o pai noav. An actor is sent to jail for being homosexual. After his release,...

Do you think that hyperbaton (syntactic scrambling as in the first sentence of the Odyssey , Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, polytrôpon , sorry for the missing diacritics, where the adjective polytrôpon forms a NP with andra ) was a PIE trait, or is it a Greek innovation which spread to Latin as Roman wri...

Well, we could run with the joke and make the Proto-Western word for grape kyãti . :) This has my seal of approval, although it would have to be kyãči . Man, revisiting the Proto-Western culture page has reminded me just how awful these guys are. Not unrealistically so, sadly, but they do kind of s...

That's what I do whenever I have to actually speak english <as opposed to write it>. I just pronounce it as if it were regular old spanish. so ai saund mor or les laik dis, clír vauels en evrizing. enits ríli a lot mor riláxing dan having to pur in de cógnitiv rísorses to du de jol pronunsiéichon z...

As you may have guessed from the title, this is mainly concerning Mandarin, which gained a rhotic vowel [ɚ] without having any previous liquid coda in the language. The usual theories claim that they came from alveolo-palatal nasal onset /ȵ/ merging with the nucleus vowel, but this sound change see...

Even if they look radically different (my favourite example is still "wheel" and cakra- ) they may well be related, and even if they look very similar, they may have nothing to do with each other. Totally off-topic, but I've always loved tongue - jihvā - язы́к - lingua - kantwo from PIE * dn̥ǵʰwéh₂...