zompist bboard

I certainly wouldn't like to be a Greek under Turkish rule, nor would I want to be an Aztec (Tens of thousands of people sacrificed each year. During some festivals, thousands would die per day !). Seriously, Europe was nice compared to a lot of the rest of the world. Better to be a Greek under Tur...

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!) [...] The question is, could there have been something with their geography that has caused this? Guns, Germs and Steel talks of how un...

I have a co-worker, a native English speaker, who very frequently avoids the third-person pronouns in favor of saying "this one" and "that one", with appropriate gestures to the person she's talking about. I haven't read any particular theory on the development of pronouns in the IE group; all I kn...

What about the /y/ though? is that a front rounded vowel? (probably not, given as you say that all vowels are unrounded) Ah, sorry, forgot to explicate that one. The phoneme there is /ly/, actually-- a palatalized l, as in 'million'. (I could use a single transcription scheme for all Almean languag...

So how do you pronounce the sentence? Just like it looks. The vowels are pretty much as in Barakhinei (except that none of them are rounded). Ch and j are as in English; ph is just [f]; q is the same uvular q as in Arabic or Verdurian. This sentence doesn't happen to have any implosives in it. And ...

ranskaldan wrote:Another sentence that seems to defy every single Terran convention!

Nice work!

Heh, thanks.

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

Not a glitch. Bob tried to worm his way in here, but I sent him packing.

Well then, by the same logic, neither "you" nor "I" are pronouns. They certainly do not refer to arbituary objects. Instead, they are just very short nouns. Nah. In English, their morphology and syntax is clearly different from nouns. (They have a different case structure than nouns; they don't tak...

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...

So, you think you could give us maybe a three-sentence description of that universe? Is it more like a Star Trek type or a Star Wars type or neither? In Earth's future or in a totally different setting? ...? It's a future history for Earth. Compared to other s.f. universes, the biggest difference i...

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.

Here's another bit, just because I kind of like it. This is in contrast with a typical human sentence like "Put this in the other one over there." An elcar would prefer to say: Chun t?lpiph q?l-tulpiphoj tuly-qdunk rapat. put (sphere-hollow-half) in-(sphere-hollow-large-half-other) (on-far-right)-(s...

I was actually thinking of eliminating horses from the Athanire scene, for the sole reason that I can't see a race that would need them. Why have them, if no race is going to take advantage of them? Hey, planets aren't just for the Thinking Kinds. There's always a niche for large grass-eating herbi...

S.F. Universe? Do you have a whole other fantasy creation like Almea, except in a science fiction genre instead of a fantasy genre? What are you hiding? :) A whole 'nother s.f. universe. I have a couple of novels set in it, and one of them is even readable. Not as much background material, though. ...

Testing. Tho' I'd might as well say that I was working on Elkaril last night. Now you can ask questions or deny things. And there's only one true pronoun so far!

Thats a lot of stuff. So... are you going to do some sort of future history? Like, Erelae for the next 400 years? :D There's enough to do without that! But who knows... I've always assumed there'd be a big war between Verduria and Dhekhnam in the 3500s. After that, I don't know. It'd be fun to take...

Well, there was at least one such war, though it wasn't just a human-elcar war; it was one of the iliu-ktuvok wars, in which other Thinking Kinds participated on both sides. Almean uest? are not as suited as terrestrial humans to live in very dry climates, so they rarely contest land occupied by the...

What kind of phonemic inventory are we dealing with? Do the elcari have different speech production capabilities to our own? Not really, unless you count it as a bit inhuman to not only pronounce words like p-t??ch?ngmsh 'and full of iron ore' but to retain such clusters in the language for thousan...

That's a novel idea. Is there a single Terran language that works like this? I hope not, since it's intended to violate a human universal. :) Human languages do use continuous variables-- notably length, pitch, and stress-- but the same phonological factor isn't similarly discrete and analog, as in...

Here's a bit of Elkar?l morphology. One oddity of the language is that it uses continuous variation, not just separated phonemes. For instance, take these words: <b>khul</b> dark red <b>kh?l</b> darkish red <b>khil</b> red There are only these three vowels at this tongue height (u, ?, i), but there ...

A third and very important solution needs mentioning, which is light cavalry armed with bows -- a method that constituted the bulk of the uses of cavalry up until the invention of the stirrup and that retained much popularity even afterwards (the Muslim horsemen of the Crusades, frex, like the Maml...

Rhofasil crivan vouim il eshele, ac il rho e fasil crivan im soan Sfahan! You're doing very well... you don't need either il here though. You can just write Rho e fasil... Rho tenao sul an cues ci-piyula: esce soa Cir?ma sfahe eta soi elcari? Se rhedcao dy ila e pleshchura Cuze?. Aa, er <<Cir?ma>> ...