zompist bboard

What general areas do y'all base your conlangs on? Seems like North America is the most popular one. There aren't any Mesoamerican conlangs either AFAIK, and that would be interesting. Only a few SE Asian, and that's all like Khmer and shit -- no one rips off Yi. (My usual method is to combine two ...

To the guy who made Austronesian: it's great that you made such a huge number of languages spread over such a huge distance, but for fuck's sake why did you not back up your Proto-Austronesian file?! Why would you keep the only copy on a flash drive?! And how can you not even remember the phonology ...

There seems to be a problem with the rule "0/something/conditions". The specific example is: /˧˥/V(ː)_(C)[pts] [pts]//T_ (T being "tone") When this is applied to "ukta" it results in "u˧˥ta", but when applied to "ut" results in "u" when it should produce "u˧˥". I managed to work around this problem ...

I noticed recently that in my idiolect, the /u/ in "doing" is slightly fronted, especially in rapid speech. If I had to take a stab at notating it, I might say that it's [ʉ]. Upon realising this, I looked at my pronunciation of "going"- it turns out that the /o/ is slightly fronted as well, maybe to...

Proto-Pseudo-Sino-Austronesian Bastard I kept Wikipedia's page on Proto-Tibeto-Burman open in another tab while I was working on this. I hope to work a language vaguely resembling Tibetan and Hawai'an out of this, with a dash of Qiang's insane bullshit. The noun morphology is bare-bones, while the ...

Also, it may be that */a/ actually was the only monophthong in Pre-PIE and my */i/ and */u/ actually were */ai/ and */au/, respectively; but such a system would be so typologically odd that I prefer a reconstruction with monophthongs. Could the diphthongs have been /a/ plus an offglide? This reduce...

I have very, very little experience working with this kind of software. Could you write an idiot/newb-proof guide/user manual for this SCA? Thanks.

Perhaps tC > ʔC > hC > ʕC > Cˤ ?

But my main question still stands: how to generate (and then dispose of, preferably interestingly) pharyngealised consonants.

What can be done to create (and later dispose of) pharyngealisation of consonants? I have a couple of ideas, but are they any good, and how many alternatives are there? I have one idea for pharyngealising consonants: tC > ʕC or ʔC > Cˤ I could use other voiceless stops in addition to /t/. As for get...

The Salishan languages. Whose idea was it to have syllabic fricatives?

My current project (Proto-Tovlisic) has relativisation marked on the verb, with two different suffixes for relativising the object and the subject (à la Welsh relative clauses). Common nouns that are the subjects/objects/indirect objects of verbs cannot appear without an accompanying pronoun. Infixe...

Gives me an idea for a future English conlang… but something triggers it, initial mutation style a la Gaelic, or something else… Not sure if that's likely or not. I've noticed initial mutations in my own speech, actually; I deaspirate consonants between words. For example, "Did you find the car?" b...

Dewrad wrote:The weird thing is that Proto-Albanian can be reconstructed as a fairly sane, unexceptional IE language. It just got batshit crazy after contact with the Romans.

I'm not familiar with Albanian. Just what makes it so crazy?

. Unstressed short /e/ and /o/ are raised to /i/ and /u/ respectively. Unstressed short /a/ is lost (probably becoming [ə] before disappearing entirely). No long vs. short vowel minimal pairs remain; long vowels become short. Examples: ˈbeːkʰad > ˈbeːkʰəd > ˈbekʰd doˈkʰapʰ > duˈkʰapʰ > duˈkʰapʰ geˈ...

Do these sound changes seem reasonable to you, and what do you think of them aesthetically? Proto-language phonology: /m n/ <m n> /pʰ b p' tʰ d t' kʰ g k'/ <p b p' t d t' k g k'> /s h/ <s h> /l j w r/ <l y w r> /e e: o o: a a:/ <e ee o oo a aa> Phonotactics: (O)(C)V(C)(E), where C = consonant, O = o...

The sound quality in a lot of the samples is crap, which adds a fake level of difficulty to this. That aside, why would they list Bosnian, Serbian, and Croatian as separate languages? The Slavic languages are already hard enough to tell apart with only 20 seconds of fuzzy audio.

@pdusen. I agree with My core vocabulary in my conlang has been with me for years, through different conlangs. Words that I don't like have been gotten rid of. I've been tweaking it for years and I'm getting to really like it. Don't get stuck in this phonology thing. My experience is that figuring ...

I second WeepingElf and Pazmivaniye. That said, I like your word structure; it feels quite smooth. If you're going for a sound similar to Tolkien's Elvish, I would advise looking at Welsh and Finnish, two of the languages that inspired Tolkien most (if I remember correctly, Sindarin phonology was pa...

When I asked about Dravian media, I was thinking about movies, TV shows, games... I would think it's difficult to get the latest Star Trek movie in Dravian.

How hard is it to get media in Dravian? Is there a Dravian internet community out there?

In my dialect, unvoiced stops are in the process of being converted into voiced stops between sonorants and word-finally (except /t/ after /s/, where it's being lost entirely). So for me, it varies between [p h ] in careful speech to [p] or even in rapid speech. The other day, I said "bugged" for "b...

What was it like living through so many political and economic changes (Yugoslavia, independence, joining the European Union)? How did it affect Dravians in particular?

When you say it's going to be an alternate history, what specifically do you have in mind? What would Europe look like in 2013 CE with the Wenetic people thrown into the mix (and also presumably some other stuff that's happened, since The Dragon Waiting has vampires and stuff...)? I honestly haven'...

When you say it's going to be an alternate history, what specifically do you have in mind? What would Europe look like in 2013 CE with the Wenetic people thrown into the mix (and also presumably some other stuff that's happened, since The Dragon Waiting has vampires and stuff...)?

Bristel wrote:Unnamed Conlang: śećüka [ɕet͡ɕykɒ]

Unnamed Conlang śećüka [ɕet͡ɕykɒ] > Slönjaacu shechygo [ʂetʂyko]