zompist bboard

I am trying to come to terms with the realization that I have dedicated the better part of my life, from adolescence to middle-age, to a lost cause. Everything I care about has been rendered worthless. I might as well have taken up phlogiston theory for all the good it would do me.

I am not even sure what I'm doing with my life anymore. I am a charlatan pretending to support a moribund political movement. I keep making mistakes at work, ruining my chances of getting a better job.

Salmoneus wrote:There are so many words that can be easily misheard, and mutations help distinguish them.

On the other hand, mutations also distort and merge words, so eliminating them would eliminate the ambiguities and confusion that comes with that.

I take it, then, that youre not fond of zero morphemes or grammatical fusion? Well, the language already has several zero morphemes and instances of fusion. The marker for indicative verbs (as opposed to imperatives, attributives, and so forth) and the inanimate object pronominal suffix are both ze...

Would it make sense to put the suffixes only on one of the words in each phrase, since they can be assumed to agree with each other? "Quickbrownfox" etc Not really. The equivalents of "quick" and "brown" are themselves nominals and must agree with the head noun, rather like adjectives in Romance la...

What other alternatives are you considering? One where everyone speaks the same variety instead of one standard and various vernaculars? One without a shared standard, only multiple vernaculars? Regarding the former alternative, I suppose the benefit is saving political authorities the trouble of ex...

Having witnessed the wave of political reaction sweeping the world over the past year, I have become increasingly pessimistic about the future. It seems difficult for me to imagine what could dislodge the GOP from all three branches of government or stop the rising tide of xenophobic nationalism in ...

To illustrate my dilemma, imagine you wanted to translate the sentence "the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" into a language based on the principles I am describing. Notice the nagging repetition and long-winded quality that comes from every word ending in the same few grammatically signific...

Also the Iroquoian language Oneida (see page 99 of this PDF), closely related to Mohawk, which malloc named as an influence. It's likely that Mohawk itself also has kinship verbs, but I don't have a source at hand right now. The Iroquoian languages are very verby in general, but they clearly don't ...

(More interesting is the case where both inflections apply... e.g. a form has both aspect and plural morphemes. Again, it's not strange if a form is part-verb, part-noun. But there might still be useful rules that tell us which predominates in a particular instance.) Well, the words marked as attri...

I'd like to expand on this, because I think conlangers probably still underestimate syntax. If you find yourself writing "A verb in the indicative or subjunctive appears with several arguments, all verbs in the attributive"... well, it's just kind of a weirdly jargonized way of saying "verbs have n...

First, that assumes that they are "verbal stems" to begin with. And secondly: English has plenty of affixes that apply productively and (barring irregularities) transparently to any verbal (or nominal) stem. But we don't say that "duckise" ('cause to be or be infested with a duck') is a inflection....

I'm not sure how this is eliminating the noun-verb distinction. If the 'attributive suffix' is, say, -t, then that's just a roundabout way of saying that all nouns end in -t and verbs don't. Which is hardly eliminating the distinction - if anything, it's just making it more concrete. You could also...

So, I have been working on eliminating or minimizing the noun-verb distinction in my conlang. My main approach thus far has involved treating all roots, even those describing objects, as verbs and putting those verbs into an attributive form used for relative clauses to form arguments of verbs. Thus...

Once again, I gave into my tendency toward procrastination and waited until today to register to vote. Unfortunately, I cannot remember whether I filled out the form correctly and I will have to wait at least a week before I get confirmation either way. By then it will be too late to attempt to regi...

I have always liked agglutinative and especially polysynthetic morphology with considerable head-marking and derivational affixes and such. I find that I really tend to favor a head-final syntax and suffixes over prefixes as well.

I have been trying to teach myself programming on and off over the years as a hobby (hence the username being a reference to C dynamic memory allocation). My main project thus far has been a small calculator program that uses the shunting yard algorithm to evaluate arithmetic expressions.

Nortaneous wrote:i to used to be a republican before i grew up and learned better. restore the stuarts

Why? Even putting aside the relative merits of republics and monarchies, what makes the Stuarts so much better than the current royal family of the UK?

Oh, thank you so very much. I've been wanting to justify a shift of /d t/ to /t t_>/ unconditionally (with similar shifts for the other stops) for a while now and I just couldn't quite convince myself that it would happen. I'm still not entirely comfortable with it, since ejectives would outnumber ...

Yes, I believe that would be termed a pitch accent system.