zompist bboard

A Race of Obligate Tories is my new favorite band name.

Hey Ollock, out of curiosity, what are your listener statistics like? Is your audience still growing, or has it plateaued? Have you thought about promoting the podcast in any way?

Isn't this similar to -jevo < jego in Russian?

OK, it's official.
UK, and by diffusion some parts of the commonwealth: verge
USA: no agreed upon term
I'd be most interested to know what Canadians call it.

I'll try to have it ready by mid-August. Early September at the latest. It's good having a goal; that will keep me focused.

My current project will probably be ready for view in a month, if I keep working on it at a good pace. I almost never publish conlangs (I'm a doodler, so I'm never feel like showing my stuff), but I am determined to make something showable this time. If you'd be willing to keep a slot open for me be...

OK, is verge only in common use in the UK? I think everyone who's said it so far was a Brit, and the yanks are going for collosal phrasal nouns.

I think this is a general issue with the podcast. Many conlangers, even if their languages are publicly visible, are very sensitive to public scrutiny and criticism by people who are not very familiar with their work. I know it's extra work, but I think every podcast that features a language should ...

Wow. Good question.
I don't. It's never come up.
I would probably call it the median first, then shake my head and run through a number of alternatives, in this order:
buffer?
greenspace?
I give up. It's just grass.

Have you done:

Gevey
Rawang ata
Dritok
Ithkuil
?

Also, I am still waiting on that episode on pragmatics. I will gladly help you or even write a whole show if you like, but sadly it would have to wait until after my job stops working me 60-70 hours a week, in about a month.

I don't think you need to be physically isolated from someone to think their vowels are stupid.

FWIW, what I (now) do for garlic is, in October, buy 5 or 6 heads of it and separate out only the fattest cloves and plant those. It's best if they aren't already sprouting because they need to be dormant during a winter and preferably get frozen a few times - this is the signal to the plant that n...

Eandil wrote:Awww. I wonder what the onomatopoeia for kissing is in labialless languages.

glarlorlalloglalorgl.

Can I just say, this thread has made me feel better about my love life than anything in a while. Here's brandrinn's two step guide to not sucking at life: 1) go on OKcupid 2) pick a girl 2a) date her Meeting people in real life is great, but if that doesn't work, go online. I've gotten more tail tha...

Maybe this was mentioned already, but I would be immensely grateful if English spelling would just pick one of the set <-ible, -able> and stick with it, instead of making me take a complete stab in the dark every time.

You said this: You have to look at the whole system. English has morphological forms for past and present. Then it has an array of modal auxiliaries-- may, might, can, could, would, will. "Will" behaves morphologically and syntactically like these, and this is inherently a modal system, not a tense ...

So English doesn't have a future tense because the future tense is historically derived from a modal? That seems kind of... wrong.

Serious question: How many languages would have a future tense if we insisted that the future tense convey absolutely zero modal or aspectual information?

OK, if people want to talk about the borrowability of morphology, I guess that's a worthwhile topic. But keep in mind the SAE test we devised was supposed to be about phonology. That was the point from the beginning. It's not something Wattmann made up. Is anyone still interested in the thread's ori...

Have we decided yet which European language would score the lowest by this test? By my count Finnish only gets 58% Euroclone, mostly because there are so many questions about voicing, vowel harmony, complex syllables, and having lots of fricatives/affricates.

You have inspired me! I am going to go learn Mandarin, Wu, Hakka, Cantonese, and Navajo.

Glancing through the archives, I don't see an episode about pragmatics. Did I miss it, or have you seriously gone this long without addressing that topic? Also, you should ask Salmoneus on, because I've always wondered what he sounds like.

The Conlangery Podcast did an episode on postural verbs, in which they mention those Mayan classifiers, and link to a couple of very useful articles on the subject. Unfortunately, it doesn't say whether or not the Mayans had fundamentally different categories for simple shapes like squares and circ...

I am enjoying these podcasts, just to let you know.

The password didn't work when I tried to extract the files.