zompist bboard

Upon looking through the Almean languages that are on the web, I note a bunch of different methods of morphology. Just wondering if there's a Semitic triconsonontal-root system in the works, perhaps on a different continent; I happen to be quite fond of that one, and it's nicely alien to what the Verdurians speak.

--Neon Fox

Neon Fox wrote:Upon looking through the Almean languages that are on the web, I note a bunch of different methods of morphology. Just wondering if there's a Semitic triconsonontal-root system in the works, perhaps on a different continent; I happen to be quite fond of that one, and it's nicely alien to what the Verdurians speak.

There's hints of it in Kebreni and Elkaril, but I'd like to do a full-fledged vowel-changing system. I've thought about doing so for Tzhuro, or perhaps Dhekhnami.

zompist wrote: There's hints of it in Kebreni and Elkaril, but I'd like to do a full-fledged vowel-changing system. I've thought about doing so for Tzhuro, or perhaps Dhekhnami.

Nifty. I don't know what state you live in, but in many license plates are a fine method of randomizing your roots. :)

--Neon Fox

Neon Fox wrote:

zompist wrote: There's hints of it in Kebreni and Elkaril, but I'd like to do a full-fledged vowel-changing system. I've thought about doing so for Tzhuro, or perhaps Dhekhnami.

Nifty. I don't know what state you live in, but in many license plates are a fine method of randomizing your roots.

--Neon Fox

That's an interesting idea. I might do that for mine.

zompist wrote:There's hints of it in Kebreni and Elkaril, but I'd like to do a full-fledged vowel-changing system. I've thought about doing so for Tzhuro, or perhaps Dhekhnami.

I hope that the former is not going to require two tongues .

But this makes me want to ask yet another question about your processes in creating Almea - do you prefer working forwards or backwards (I know you've done both). Given that you have wordlists for Old Tzhuro and Old Skourene, are you more likely to create their common ancestor first, then devise a set of sound changes, or flesh out a Tzhuro grammar in full and then work backwards to arrive at proto Lenani-Littoral?

And the same question goes for Dhekhnami - would you complete Munkhashi first, or the modern version?

And secondly - do you complete a full phonology before starting a wordlist, or do you have only a rough idea of what the phonology will be?

I much prefer to work forwards (unless I'm doing an isolate, of course). Not only is it easier, but the child language ends up much more consistent.

If I'm working on an isolate or a protolanguage, I work on the phonology and the word list together for some time, till the phonology seems to gel. (If I'm deriving a child language, the phonology can be taken from the sound changes, though if desired it can be tweaked, e.g. by borrowing from elsewhere so that a conditioned change becomes phonemic.)

Neon Fox wrote:

zompist wrote: There's hints of it in Kebreni and Elkaril, but I'd like to do a full-fledged vowel-changing system. I've thought about doing so for Tzhuro, or perhaps Dhekhnami.

Nifty. I don't know what state you live in, but in many license plates are a fine method of randomizing your roots.

--Neon Fox

Here where the wavin' wheat smells sweet when the wind comes right behind the rain, all the plates are in the form AAA-000 or 000-AAA, when they're not tribal plates, and those are rather common.

I've come up with a system for rendering them into words, and sometimes play a game with a friend of mine where we read plates. He's not a conlanger or amateur linguist of any kind, though, so I have a decided advantage in pronouncing some of them.

When I'm on my own, I sometimes read them as SAMPA, with a few changes: a letter can be read in its lowercase or uppercase SAMPA value, thus "AZK" could be /AZK/, or it could be /azk/, or /aZk/, etc. etc. Numbers can be rendered as numbers, or as letters with a certain correspondance thing going on (like with calculator words). Those are also subject to uppercase/lowercase.

I once saw a plate that said ZMP, one that said ZBB, and one that said JHX, all in the same day.

No SDC, or SPD or anything, though.

I've seen a few ZBB's too. I've begun reading license plates as SAMPA as well, at least the ones that have letters and numbers mixed. I used to have a syllable-to-character mapping for Xap, so that any combination of letters and numbers at all would map to something in Xap that was at least pronouncible. I have forgotten it now, though, because I don't use it anymore.

I never read license plates as SAMPA (mainly because I don't really know it), but I do like inserting vowels between the consonants, or sometimes leaving it as it is, and seeing what the word sounds like.