zompist bboard

How about Middle Earth from Lord of the Rings? Technically speaking, Middle Earth is actually Europe in an alternate mythic past. This is found all over JRR Tokien's other writings, as well as in the conceit that he had somehow found the Red Book that Bilbo, Frodo, and Samwise had written (containi...

finlay wrote:Coda ejectives occur in English, George. I guess I don't know how much this varies by accent but it's there.

Oh, yes, I forgot about this. A sort of "emphatic" -- like coda aspirates -- IIRC.

brandrinn wrote:Just expressing my approval of the last couple of podcasts. Great work.

Thanks. Always good to hear.

Happy New Year! (Lol) I agree about the phrases vs. words. I think you see that as a way of consolidating lexicons too like Basic English or toki pona; because I've tried these langauges I can appreciate how productive this can be, especially English light verbs and prepositional idioms (is that wh...

Check out the latest episode, a short featuring William Annis: Conlangery SHORTS #03: Expanding your Lexemes

Apologies for slight tardiness. I did have the family Christmas to attend. Conlangery #79: Cherokee (natlang)

finlay wrote:If i remember correctly, [+atr] refers to lax vowels, not tense. This is indeed confusing.

Nope. At least this chart gives [+atr] to vowels that are generally considered to be [+tense]: https://www.msu.edu/course/asc/232/DF/DF_Tables.html

Valley Yokuts has just four vowel qualities. Also, /i/ in Turkish is apparently [+high][+front][-round][-funny] Hmm, interesting. I'd need to dive deeper into Yokuts, specifically on what evidence they use to justify the underspecified vowels (looking quickly at the Wikipedia, I can think of one li...

I'm not sure now if this was a good idea, but here it is: Conlangery SHORTS #01: Date and Time in Tagalog

George, no in Japanese is "iie", not "ye". It's a long /i:/. (I haven't heard the other one that david mentioned) I didn't catch whether you mentioned the more pertinent fact that 'hai' always means "i agree", unlike english. I didn't actually state it that clearly, but yes, I understand that "hai"...

Conlangery #73: Khangaþyagon ... and you don't even have to figure out how to type thorn.

Hey Ollock, you haven't profiled Neoslavonic-Slovianski yet have you? It's a zonal constructed language like the romance (e.g. Interlingua) or the various german ones but it's not that simple a language. It's a collaboration with a lot of vitality behind it though and the presentations are very goo...

English's voiced dental fricatibe occurs only in function words in initial position. Also you didn't really make much effort there; you missed things like father, mother, brother, smooth, tether, I honestly didn't know where to go with that one. I know it's hard to find minimal pairs for θ/ð (usual...

Has anyone tried just taking their pre-existing conworlds and tweaking them so they fit together? Very few people work out all the parts of a planet in detail, so there should be holes. You could put all this effort into stitching together the details you've already got. Terrible idea? You'd have t...

The site is running really slow for some reason, but here goes: Conlangery #71: Ogami (natlang)