zompist bboard

The next post will be a while coming. It took nearly two days to put this first post together for you. It's still sloppy and incomplete, and needs a lot of editing and improvement still. I have some regrets, since I expected the total project to be a one-day project when I began, and now I either have to fulfill it to completion or abandon something I spent a lot of time in.

So, I probably won't even begin writing the next post until I see that this is actually helpful for people. I'm almost afraid it's not simple enough.

Please do let me know of any issues in the post, which was composed in BBCode in a word processor, as well as any suggestions or comments or questions.

I have plans for a vowel-root language and this will definitely help me with that (I'm working on other stuff currently).

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ìtsanso, God In The Mountain, may our names inspire the deepest feelings of fear in urkos and all his ilk, for we have saved another man from his lies! I welcome back to the feast hall kal, who will never gamble again! May the eleven gods bless him!

I'm not sure that it is unrealistic to just throw in random vowels.

If your only knowledge of IE languages were English, would you really immediately see our vowel alternations as the result of regular processes, or would they just look random?

I have to take issue with the claim that metathesis "is where infixes come from". Many, many infixes in world languages have not been demonstrated to have derived from any source. And even if we assume that all infixation must derive from a non-infixing source, it needn't be through metathesis. We might also imagine, for example, a process similar to English tmetic expletives, which derive from stress-based analogy; or, we might imagine the fusion of a previously prefixed (or suffixed) element, such as an old gender marker or the like, trapping another affix as an infix.

You might also want to explain why you're using so much circumfixion, which isn't exactly a common default way of deriving such basic things as "patient". And certainly in the case of "profession", which isn't a basic grammatical operation, it might be worth explaining where that came from, diachronically?

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Blog:

But the river tripped on her by and by, lapping
as though her heart was brook: Why, why, why! Weh, O weh
I'se so silly to be flowing but I no canna stay!

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ìtsanso, God In The Mountain, may our names inspire the deepest feelings of fear in urkos and all his ilk, for we have saved another man from his lies! I welcome back to the feast hall kal, who will never gamble again! May the eleven gods bless him!

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Blog:

But the river tripped on her by and by, lapping
as though her heart was brook: Why, why, why! Weh, O weh
I'se so silly to be flowing but I no canna stay!

Thanks for your input.

Glad, also, that your response to my draft of something this community has been lacking for a long time is "Don't bother. I'll create a better example for people to follow one day, maybe" instead of "I would have taken a different approach, but here's some constructive feedback on your approach." As I've already said a couple of times, there is not just one way to go about it, but people certainly are looking for (and needing) guidance on how to go about it. Certainly you are not one of these people looking for direction -- you not only already have an idea of how you would go about it, but also you are more well-read, and more knowledgeable than most people on this forum, who tend to be much younger and less studied than you. Hopefully the fact that I did it differently than you would have preferred does not mean the time I put forth in putting this together was in vain or that what I did do was poorly crafted, meriting the abandonment you so freely and perhaps unthinkingly suggested.

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Blog:

But the river tripped on her by and by, lapping
as though her heart was brook: Why, why, why! Weh, O weh
I'se so silly to be flowing but I no canna stay!

Well I added almost of the music links to my playlist, and it gave me ideas for one of projects. So thanks! A lot of the time after reading I great post I just don't think of saying thanks or I can't think of anything to write that doesn't sound lame. But I reaally liked your posts, and I really liked tiramisu's (even the ones where we argued politics, because even if it ruined my mood, it made me think critically about my own views and practice debating)

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ìtsanso, God In The Mountain, may our names inspire the deepest feelings of fear in urkos and all his ilk, for we have saved another man from his lies! I welcome back to the feast hall kal, who will never gamble again! May the eleven gods bless him!

Wait, that's what you didn't like? I said that was tongue-in-cheek! And it's obviously, I thought, not denigrating your guide at all, because your guide doesn't address not making a language like the one you're making. My comment was thus intended as an addendum, not a correction. As I said, I think that guides like this can be valuable. I just think that people should read them bearing in mind that they're not just narrow guides to construct a specific language, they also can be applied more broadly. In the same way that if you were writing a guide on composing canons, I'd point out that one didn't have to just use that to compose strict canons, one could also apply those techniques to enrich compositions in other, less rigid genres. Non-concatenative morphology and counterpoint more broadly are more interesting, in my view, than a priori pseudo-semitic languages and strict canon - but of course that shouldn't be taken to abnegate the value of guides to the latter as a way of understanding the former - indeed, they should expand their interest (because you don't have to want to make a semitic language to be able to gain something from understanding semitic languages). Even Mozart read Gradus ad Parnassum (I think?). But if you found the comment rude, of course I'm sorry about that.


[methru: thanks. And don't worry - we none of us are good enough at being supportive of one another, so no blame attaches to anyone in particular. But feel free to share, over in that thread, what you liked and didn't like...]

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Blog:

But the river tripped on her by and by, lapping
as though her heart was brook: Why, why, why! Weh, O weh
I'se so silly to be flowing but I no canna stay!

This idea came to me when I was trying to sleep, so it probably isn't the greatest ever, but: how about showing an example of a triconsonantal conlang derived from (a necessarily tweaked version of) PIE, or something like Latin?

That sounds like a great idea!

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ìtsanso, God In The Mountain, may our names inspire the deepest feelings of fear in urkos and all his ilk, for we have saved another man from his lies! I welcome back to the feast hall kal, who will never gamble again! May the eleven gods bless him!

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"But if of ships I now should sing, what ship would come to me,
What ship would bear me ever back across so wide a Sea?”

I should try to develop a triconsonantal root language from PIE some day. Well, some day. I have enough other things to wrap my mind around already.

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...brought to you by the Weeping Elf
Tha cvastam émi cvastam santham amal phelsa. -- Friedrich Schiller
ESTAR-3SG:P human-OBJ only human-OBJ true-OBJ REL-LOC play-3SG:A

I found this incredibly interesting, and will be sure to use the ideas here if I ever plan a language such as this. I'll definitely bear this in mind. Thank you for taking the time to do this.

Élerhe

If by "failed attempt" you mean "developed ablaut but didn't happen to undergo the developments that generalise it" then sure. But "failed attempt" is loaded af for that.

Also, fricatives haven't affected Semitic's triconsonantal system: begadkefet hasn't made Hebrew or Aramaic lose their tricon system, wholesale p > f hasn't caused Arabic or late Neo-Punic to lose their tricon system, even losing all the laryngeal consonants didn't cause Akkadian to lose its tricon system (with the obvious exception that words with laryngeals became biconsonantal...). Also NB that Ancient Greek had a very minimal fricative inventory of /s h/ and was no closer to being tricon than Germanic.

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"But if of ships I now should sing, what ship would come to me,
What ship would bear me ever back across so wide a Sea?”