zompist bboard

The distinction between <a> and <æ> is a bit weird to me - it implies four degrees of vowel height in both front and back vowels. In North Germanic languages, such a system is unstable, which is why Swedish and Norwegian have had a chain shift /o: u:/ > /u: ʉ:/. In French, this is the system in oral...

In English, several verbal nouns referring to a process can also be used to refer to its outcome. Examples: Creation Building Painting Drawing Sculpture Invention Innovation Computation Calculation Entrance This does not seem to be regular or productive. Of note, manufacturing is only the process, a...

No, it wasn't online - it was a LARP. The language only ever crops up in the names: <Zhun> rather than <June>, <Naed> (/næd/) rather than <Nat>, etc. But it's a full language, not just a naming language. And it's not a future that regressed technologically. It's a future in which economic growth fro...

Not sure whether it counts, but in American English, prestige Eastern accents dropped non-prevocalic r's under British influence, but later restored them under inland US influence. In Middle Chinese, there was a palatal series, /tɕ tɕʰ dʑ ɕ ʑ/. It merged into the retroflex series, but then modern Ma...

When you design conlangs over long periods of time, do you find that as you tweak them, the tweaks create out-of-universe sound shifts? Concrete example: I've been working on a conlang that represents 4th-millennium English since about 2002. In 2003-4, I came up with a list of sound shifts, initiall...

Lizard people use a lot of coronal consonants. An avian race would have no lips and long mouths, like the dragons in Zompist's conlang , so no labials but a lot of places of articulation. In a phonemic chart I drew for fun a few weeks ago I settled on six places, which to human ears sound linguolabi...

Why would the recommended pronunciation preserve fossil features? If the reason it's so popular is that it's viewed as a transitional language between German and English, it would make more sense to drop the case endings entirely. Germans wouldn't make the unstressed vowel distinctions - they'd neut...

Good question! There's a concountry I created for a LARP. That was in 2013, before the refugee crisis, but the issue of rising anti-immigrant nationalism was already there; it's based on a mixture of the Netherlands, France, Switzerland, Belgium and Germany, and of those, the first three had huge fa...

Grammar: 1. No grammatical gender. Zompist said something about it in one of his intros to Verdurian - conlangers dislike it, but it's a common feature in several unrelated language families. In my languages, there's never a gender distinction in pronouns, either. 2. No Latin- or Greek-style fusiona...