zompist bboard

I'm currently reading Journey to the West , a classic Chinese mythological/historical/martial arts/adventure story. I'm not sure if I'll ever finish, since it's in four large volumes, and after a point it seems to get rather repetitive... Probably a reason why I never managed to read it from beginn...

My favorite little quirk between eastern and western thought (or at least between idaho and half the anime I've seen) is that a lot of the time in eastern fiction, sci-fi stories, and whatever, they have extremely different levels of technological advancement: A traditional farmer inheriting his fa...

One of the best routes still open to us is to explore unfamiliar cultures. I haven't yet got tired of learning things about China, for instance. And as for me, I like to compare Western and Eastern cultures. There are differences in areas that you wouldn't expect, for instance... and yet, all the a...

In a way, human history works just like weather. There are certain patterns, but in general, anything and everything can happen. Nevermind that Europe is a bunch of semi-barbarian kingdoms clinging to the Eurasian littoral - boom! 1000 years later, they rule the world. Human genius, climate, geograp...

All those identifications are pretty good, though as the author I'm aware of other borrowings: Kebri borrows some bits from Japan; Cuzei also borrows from Israel, and its epics from China; the Skourene language is intended to sound Indic; the Tzhuro matrilinearity is borrowed from the Amerindians; ...

Interesting! BTW, I dunno why, but I always alligned Cadhinor with the Mongols and Verduria with the British 0_o I myself aligned Ismahi with France, Kebri with Britain, Verduria with - nowhere in particular, Cadhinor with Rome, Cuzei with Greece. Similarly, Axunai with China, Gelyet with Mongolia,...

Despite all of the comparisons between China and Uytai, I've always felt that Axunai was a better match (or perhaps it's because I don't know a thing about Uytai!) Both China and Axunai began as disorganized warring states, until an empire managed to unite the areas (Qin in 221BC, Axuna in 890ZE). T...

Chinese third-person pronouns have a convoluted history themselves, and are also linked to demonstrative adjectives. In modern Chinese, the third-person pronoun, ta1 (he/she), is still avoided when referring to inanimate objects/ideas (where English uses "it"). It's more preferrable to either skip t...

So how do you pronounce the sentence?

Another sentence that seems to defy every single Terran convention!

Nice work!

p.s. there's a glitch. The author of this thread is displayed as "Bob", not "zompist".

A sufficiently vague noun. Some linguists argue that Japanese doesn't really have pronouns, only nouns conventionally used to refer to oneself or the listener. But if you have a noun that refers to the speaker - isn't that, well, a PROnoun? No... the "pro" part refers to a pronoun replacing any arb...

zompist wrote:

JonathanaTegire wrote:"True" pronoun? what's a false pronoun?

A sufficiently vague noun. Some linguists argue that Japanese doesn't really have pronouns, only nouns conventionally used to refer to oneself or the listener.

But if you have a noun that refers to the speaker - isn't that, well, a PROnoun?

Thats a lot of stuff.

So... are you going to do some sort of future history? Like, Erelae for the next 400 years?

It seems that Elkar?l can be spoken by non-Elkari, though, with difficulty. This aspect doesn't seem that hard to grasp, but I'm sure there are other, more difficult oddities (difficult to humans at least). As for the Iliu and Ktuvok tongues, I can't wait to see how they will turn out. :D They migh...

Mmm... then we'll have a language that totally violates all Terran rules.

Which is exactly what Mark is looking for, right?

but I've never seen a single language that varies vowels along a continuum, not even Semitic languages.

This is really a very novel idea.

But now that I think about it, why aren't all human languages like this? It's so logical!

Whoa, that's an amazing amount of work!

That's a novel idea.
Is there a single Terran language that works like this?