zompist bboard

Personal pronouns O Yis has a system of personal pronouns that distinguish between 'self' and 'other'. Pronouns demonstrate number and change according to their grammatical case; there are five cases: nominative, accusative, genitive, dative and reflexive. grammatical case | self | other | singular...

Fun stuff with quantifiers and nominal particles Noun quantifiers can do more than measure counts and quantities. Quantifier words can also be used to indicate noun comparisons, noun tense, intensity, negation and interrogation. It is a peculiarity of O Yis that some of these quantifiers will, if g...

From this point on I'll be using a revised orthography:

/ æ i ɐ ə ɔ u / - [ a i y e o u ]
/ æ: i: ɐ: ə: ɔ: u: / - [á í ý é ó ú ]

/ p b t k g q / - [ p b t k g q ]
/ f ð s ʒ x h / - [ f d c z x h ]
/ ʦ ʧ ʤ / - [ s tz dz ]
/ l m n ŋ ɾ / - [ l m n ŋ r ]
/ w j / - [ v j ]

... If you wanted to say "the chair by the table in the room at the end of the hall in the house on the island in the river"--without asking for an actual translation (because you may not have the words created yet)--but just generally, do you end up with something like the chair the table the room...

Postpositions Postpositions follow the noun they act on. Most O Yis postpositions start with the letter 'i'. The Istran languages use an absolute frame of reference for locative and spatial prepositions, assisted by an intrinsic frame of reference where necessary. The absolute reference system uses...

Way cool. I like the sheer nouniness of it all. That said, I think I speak for the group as a whole when I say: we are ready to see some clause-level syntax! Thank you! It'll be a lot easier (for my poor brain, at least) if I get the NP and VP syntax sorted before heading into the wilds of the clau...

Nouns modifying other nouns O Yis is a head initial language, modifiers always follow their head noun. Thus adjective-like nouns always follow the noun they are modifying, and will use the modifying form of their article to link to the head noun: ni réŋg dos tvel the red ball ni tcul as kanó the la...

Proper nouns Labelling words play an important part in the language. A person's name must always be introduced with an honorific word which is placed immediately before the proper noun: for the most part these are words that have degraded over time to the extent that they have no meaning beyond the...

/w/ <v> is just wrong. Why? It's not that uncommon, at least in Europe. German does it, as well as Dutch, Polish and I think Kurdish does it too, but I'm not sure. But I agree to XinuX, the /ʦ ʧ ʤ/ - <tc c dc> strikes me odd. Is there a reason for this like some historic sound change or something? ...

Anyways ... Onwards and Upwards! Noun number O Yis nouns are indeclinable: by itself ín harf can mean 'a dog' or 'some dogs' . A noun's number is shown by placing a quantifier word (which can be a formal number or an informal measure word) between the article and the noun: in harf - the dog in ýc ha...

Noun 'classes' All nouns have articles and, except for personal names (under certain circumstances), the article must always be present in the noun phrase. Articles change according to the noun's topicality, demonstration state, and whether the noun is modifying another noun - supplying eight artic...

Hi, XinuX. Many thanks for the suggestions. The affricates may work better as you suggest.

I don't think using [v] for /w/ is a problem; partly because the Romans did it, but mainly because the language lacks /v/. Plus I kinda like the look of it.

The phonology, with an orthographic representation in the Latin alphabet (the language will eventually have its own native script): / æ i ɐ ə ɔ u / - [ a i y e o u ] / æ: i: ɐ: ə: ɔ: u: / - [á í ý é ó ú ] / p b t k g q / - [ p b t k g q ] / f ð s ʒ x h / - [ f d s z x h ] / ʦ ʧ ʤ / - [ tc c dc ] / l...

Ve Yiso (edit: name now changed) is a new conlang development for my conworld. Rather than start with the phonology, I thought I'd post some noun phrases to get the ball rolling (I'm sure the phonology will turn up in the next day or so, for those who worry about such things). Hopefully things will ...

Nothing constructive to say about Alpic, except I like it (heck, it might be related to Etruscan!), and I like the way you've presented it here.

Congratulations on your forthcoming book, Mark! Looking forward to the semantics and pragmatics chapters already. Good timing, too, what with the Avatar wave crashing around us. So when are we going to see your Almea novels in print? (Also, if Yonagu Books are using CreateSpace then a Kindle version...

I get a feeling (heh!) that there's a fair amount of Berkley in the current vogue for 'systems thinking' - in particular the need to see the world in terms of mental models. Not that I have any love of systems thinking: I've just failed an OU second level unit on the subject (by deliberately not com...

I'm enjoying these posts. Thank you!

Tarasoriku wrote:Do you want me to remove it? It's a great line.

Nah - it's just the shock talking. Nothing I've ever said here has been sig-worthy before.

In ancient Egyptian, the word for "one million" also meant "eternal" or something like that. I love the Egyption hieroglyph for one million: shocked-man-waving-hands-in-air. Ick! I've been sigged! Just for that, meet my new friends: Puboboing and Coproboing ... http://www.rikweb.co.uk/photos/pubobo...

Gevey family terms - the most widely used are shown in bold italics. Gevey society seems to view families as "moveable feasts" - you don't need to be correctly related to be called moeme or zgatise . In fact younger children routinely call everyone "uncle", "aunt", "cousin" and "kid" (basate) , some...

Legion wrote:Theoricaly yes, but in practice I doubt you ca actually bend a pane of glass >_>

What else do glassblowers do?

I hereby declare Ákat to be (yet another) active-dative language!

Everything you ever wanted to know about Gevey verb transitivity and valency. If anyone would care to explain to me how this should be described in proper linguistic terms I'd be eternally grateful!

John - many thanks for taking the time to write and post these mini-essays. I've found them very thought-provoking, and already have plans for incorporating some of the ideas into Gevey (though I'm not going to rush anything).

Rik