Substantial postings about constructed languages and constructed worlds in general. Good place to mention your own or evaluate someone else's. Put quick questions in C&C Quickies instead.
jmcd wrote:E, I'll admit I don't really know much about tone.
Hm, that might be a good reason to eliminate the tonal contrasts. Or do you want to learn by doing a tonal lang?
I'm not too bothered either way. It's more to let you know.
Corumayas wrote:
Maybe we could even have two separate languages coming from it since the 2 sets are so different?
That thought had occurred to me. I don't know if there's room for two languages, though, unless half the Ayasthi-speaking population suddenly migrates somewhere fairly far away.
Maybe we could see in the other Edastean languages if there's a language similar enough that it could've influenced this one?
Corumayas wrote:
I was hoping we'd be able to take some changes from each list and kind of combine them, but that might be difficult since they're so different.
I thought so too.
Corumayas wrote:
/T/ could go to /t/ as well.
It could; on the other hand it comes from Adata /t/ so that wouldn't be very interesting.
True. Having sT>st like in the language name wouldn't be going backwards though. Maybe we could do that along with other fricative-fricative > fricative-plosive changes to increase the plosives?
boy #12 wrote:Climate, and discussion of local flora/fauna hinging on that. I'd like to develop the Lukpanic culture some more, but I don't know anything about what kind of climate they live in and what kinds of things live and grow there.
That happens to be one of the areas I'm sure about-- the climate all around that western gulf is Mediterranean, turning into desert at the south end.
jmcd wrote:Maybe we could see in the other Edastean languages if there's a language similar enough that it could've influenced this one?
That's a good idea. The original scenario for Agaf had the kingdom of Tharas conquered by one of its rivals after the Ayasthi period; there could be people who stayed there under foreign rule, and others who emigrated to somewhere else.
I was thinking Yad looks like a good choice for the language of the conquerors-- it's spoken nearby, and it and the original Agaf already share ergative case marking...
Hüwryaasûr, priestess of the four hegemons, wrote:Ryunshurshuroshan, the floating lizard
Is anybody interested in helping me out with Ndok Aisô? I'd love it to be a really great, detailed grammar, hopefully as detailed as Naidda, but developing syntax is not really my strength. At the rate I'm going I'll never get a Tsinakan text done. I will continue working on the lexicon, etc.
Meanwhile I think I'll do a "North Wind and the Sun" translation for Namɨdu. Inspired by cedh.
boy #12 wrote:Is anybody interested in helping me out with Ndok Aisô? I'd love it to be a really great, detailed grammar, hopefully as detailed as Naidda, but developing syntax is not really my strength. At the rate I'm going I'll never get a Tsinakan text done. I will continue working on the lexicon, etc.
I'm interested. I don't have much time on my hands currently, but that'll probably change soon.
boy #12 wrote:Is anybody interested in helping me out with Ndok Aisô? I'd love it to be a really great, detailed grammar, hopefully as detailed as Naidda, but developing syntax is not really my strength. At the rate I'm going I'll never get a Tsinakan text done. I will continue working on the lexicon, etc.
I'm interested. I don't have much time on my hands currently, but that'll probably change soon.
Cool. I trust your instincts. Roninbodhisattva has also offered to help, though is busy for now. See what he's up to.
I think, we need a timeline of Akana languages or something. I can't keep straight in my head which languages are spoken in which era. This should also help rationalise borrowings...
Our master timeline probably needs updating. The problem is, a lot of the dates and events are still uncertain...
What I feel the need for most is a finalized map-- if not for the whole planet right away, at the very least for Peilash. One with latitude, longitude, and elevation marked. From that we could work out climates and biomes with much more confidence. Practically everything else hangs on those things.
(I've been fiddling with a climate map, but there are a lot of things I'm not sure about. Not knowing exactly where the mountains are is a rather big problem.)
Hüwryaasûr, priestess of the four hegemons, wrote:Ryunshurshuroshan, the floating lizard
I hope this will spark a new era of advancement in the development of Akana, especially since we seem to have quite a number of topics that are better discussed in threads of their own...
I think it would be good to migrate at least the most important discussion on current issues from here to the new board, separated in the appropriate topics. I'd love to get some help with this; paging through the old thread is a lot of work. If you have any specific questions, please let me know.
Go team!
EZE LEWĀPŌBU RO ŪNON!
P.S. As long as the new forum is not yet known to spambots, I'll leave user registration open. After that I'll probably switch to a stricter registration process.
Last edited by Cedh on Mon Aug 10, 2009 11:06 am, edited 1 time in total.
I'll gladly help with moving things over to the new board... but how should we go about that? Copy-paste posts from this thread into new threads over there?
Hüwryaasûr, priestess of the four hegemons, wrote:Ryunshurshuroshan, the floating lizard
Wonderful!
(although you'll have noticed that my own interest in the project is in the down-phase of the cycle at the moment)
I'll broaden Corumayas' question to the general issue: how should that forum and this forum interact with one another?
Regarding that forum itself: I must admit, it's not the structure I would go with. Personally, I think it makes more sense to divide by region and time-period than by subject-matter. After all, if I'm doing something set in the classical period of the Aiwa region, I'm likely to want to look at what else is going on around it, in terms of history, culture (can those two be divided, anyway?) and language, all at once. I know the official data source is the wiki, but I think that it's useful to have the work-in-process easily accessible as well, and I think zonal divisions work best there.
My preference, at least.
As for the history of this thread: perhaps the best thing to do is to export it somewhere, and then break it down into subject matter as a resource? I think that works better than importing into lots of different threads, since most of the stuff here is for reference purposes only anyway.
[I would break it down first by time period (out-world, not in-world!) and then by subject matter]
Then there's the question of what we continue to do with this thread. The obvious answer is "nothing", but I think that's dangerous - we all rememer Kutjaraworld! This thread has been useful in recruiting interest. It's also been good at maintaining it - I go through cycles in my interest, and when I'm not interested I don't check the wiki, and probably won't check the forum. I do still (usually) check here, however, so having this thread periodically enthuses me again when there's an interesting update.
So, I think we need to keep this running. How do we do this without it feeling artificial (and hence prone to abandonment)?
Personally, I suggest we keep this thread in a dual role:
- advertising major new things, either completed on the wiki or in progress on the forum
- strategic discussion, leaving the forum for the details.
Whether this second use is feasible I'm not sure - we'll be tempted to discuss strategy on the forum itself, but I really think it would anneal the vitality of the project.
EDIT: this, for instance, is why I'm posting these suggestions here, rather than on the forum.
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!
Salmoneus wrote:Regarding that forum itself: I must admit, it's not the structure I would go with. Personally, I think it makes more sense to divide by region and time-period than by subject-matter.
Hmm. I'm not sure we actually need subforums at all-- unless we're going to have tons of threads, that level of structure seems unnecessary. Even then, I imagine we'll have a better idea of what divisions might be most helpful once we've been using the board for a while (e.g., maybe "quick comments & questions" vs. "discussions we want to keep around" would be more useful than dividing things by subject matter). So why not just have one forum, at least for now?
As for the history of this thread: perhaps the best thing to do is to export it somewhere, and then break it down into subject matter as a resource? I think that works better than importing into lots of different threads, since most of the stuff here is for reference purposes only anyway.
[I would break it down first by time period (out-world, not in-world!) and then by subject matter]
That sounds pretty good (although I'm not sure what you mean by "out-world time period"). Where do we put this resource, then? Some stuff can probably be entered into the wiki... maybe the rest goes in a set of archive threads on the new board?
Personally, I suggest we keep this thread in a dual role:
- advertising major new things, either completed on the wiki or in progress on the forum
- strategic discussion, leaving the forum for the details.
That sounds right to me. Details are what we need the new forum for; organizational stuff could continue to happen here.
Hüwryaasûr, priestess of the four hegemons, wrote:Ryunshurshuroshan, the floating lizard
Salmoneus wrote:Regarding that forum itself: I must admit, it's not the structure I would go with. Personally, I think it makes more sense to divide by region and time-period than by subject-matter.
Hmm. I'm not sure we actually need subforums at all-- unless we're going to have tons of threads, that level of structure seems unnecessary. Even then, I imagine we'll have a better idea of what divisions might be most helpful once we've been using the board for a while (e.g., maybe "quick comments & questions" vs. "discussions we want to keep around" would be more useful than dividing things by subject matter). So why not just have one forum, at least for now?
I think I'll merge the History & Culture boards; these can definitely be a single forum into which most of the stuff we'll be discussing will go. However, I think it'd be good to keep a separate Languages board for stuff such as the recent discussion on revising A'gaf, or Dunomapuka's request for help with Ndok Aisô. Probably, most of the stuff on that board should be conlanging details, whereas cultural aspects of the languages may really fit better in History & Culture. Similar for the World board; I'm intending this for macro-level discussions about e.g. the map, climates, or biology.
Corumayas wrote:I'll gladly help with moving things over to the new board... but how should we go about that? Copy-paste posts from this thread into new threads over there?
Salmoneus wrote:As for the history of this thread: perhaps the best thing to do is to export it somewhere, and then break it down into subject matter as a resource? I think that works better than importing into lots of different threads, since most of the stuff here is for reference purposes only anyway.
I think we only need to port those discussions that adress relevant issues with Akana and are currently unresolved because conversation skipped away from them. The old agriculture discussion which I've ported myself is an example for this; other important ones I can think of would be map stuff, the Ttiruku migrations, Isles etymology issues, and some of the talk about Proto-Eigə-Isthmus.
Corumayas, I'll give you mod status on the new board so you can structure stuff as you see fit.
Corumayas wrote:
Salmoneus wrote:Personally, I suggest we keep this thread in a dual role:
- advertising major new things, either completed on the wiki or in progress on the forum
- strategic discussion, leaving the forum for the details.
That sounds right to me. Details are what we need the new forum for; organizational stuff could continue to happen here.
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!
Comments on how this sounds would be appreciated. Everything else is still being worked on, of course, but it would be nice to finalise the phonology and have a rough idea of what the sound laws are going to be...
I got an error earlier today as well. Seems like freeforums.org doesn't always have enough server capacities. But that needn't concern us, because:
On the weekend, a good friend of mine offered to host the forum at his webspace. Which is definitely preferable since we won't have to rely on an anonymous freehosting provider. So I gladly accepted. And as we don't have much content at the new forum yet, it was rather quick to set up everything and to move the existing posts. The only disadvantage is that those of you who had already registered will have to do so again, but well.
Zhen Lin wrote:Comments on how this sounds would be appreciated. Everything else is still being worked on, of course, but it would be nice to finalise the phonology and have a rough idea of what the sound laws are going to be...
Very Greeky phonology.
I like it, and it's rather easy to pronounce. The only things I'd really consider worth rethinking are the phonetic value of <f>, for which I'd personally prefer [f] rather than [ʍ], and the orthography <c ch x> for [k kʰ ks] - maybe <k kh ks> would look better. But then, a language that's phonologically this similar to Ancient Greek should use the Greek alphabet
cedh audmanh wrote:I like it, and it's rather easy to pronounce. The only things I'd really consider worth rethinking are the phonetic value of <f>, for which I'd personally prefer [f] rather than [ʍ], and the orthography <c> for [k kʰ ks] - maybe <k> would look better. But then, a language that's phonologically this similar to Ancient Greek should use the Greek alphabet
Indeed. Too bad there isn't a digamma-with-dasia though.
Ἄρρυ φίνι θύρερα λάρυθθυ ὕνανι φίος ὕμῃ τυθυρισκάχυ νδα τιτίσκρι μη ϝ̔ιξῆν μη θυριθλέσκυ.
Ndok Aisô is shaping up really nicely. Seriously, you both have done a great job with it - we wanted to keep the same strong flavor ghur came up with, but provide it a firmer basis and some grammar - and that's exactly what we now have! It's good to see.
----
Meanwhile.... r0ry.co.uk appears to have passed on to the realm of defunct domain names. Google has cached the Mûtsipsa' grammar for the time being, I just saved a copy of it, but it might be wise for others to grab it too: http://74.125.155.132/search?q=cache:ql ... clnk&gl=us
Radius Solis wrote:Meanwhile.... r0ry.co.uk appears to have passed on to the realm of defunct domain names. Google has cached the Mûtsipsa' grammar for the time being, I just saved a copy of it, but it might be wise for others to grab it too: http://74.125.155.132/search?q=cache:ql ... clnk&gl=us
Grrr. Pharazon's site has gone defunct too, and so we don't have access to the Naidda dictionary. And, not everything has been ported over from the Ndak Ta lexicon either, we're missing a few words.
Oyyy, yeah, I've let that stay offline too long. I do still have all the Akana material that used to be on the old webspace, I should just upload the whole folder. Phar's got new space these days, so I'll ask how to use it when he gets home.
Google has cached the Mûtsipsa' grammar for the time being, I just saved a copy of it, but it might be wise for others to grab it too: