Zompist Bboard Again

I have two days to myself (if all goes well) in 10 days' time and I hope to spend most of one of them to get things in order, make a to-do list, and see where I am with it all. Well that didn't happen! I got called into work one day and spent the other doing the sort of things one must when in a re...

Today I've accomplished... nothing . I haven't had much time recently to do any conlanging. I don't know about you, but I, for one, cannot just do a little bit for half an hour here and there. I need a morning or an afternoon where I can concentrate on it. Anyway, I had a spare hour-or-so and though...

Professor Brian Cox, around 2013, did a special lecture to a celebrity audience explaining (among other things) why time travel into the past will never be possible. It was a Doctor Who themed lecture and was a part of the BBC's 50th Anniversary celebration for DW. From what I remember it requires f...

With the new series of Doctor Who just a few weeks away, I had a thought - has anyone ever tried to make a Time Lord/Gallifreyan conlang? I don't think there's ever even been a nonsense Gallifreyan used in the programme, never mind a conlang. From memory, Gallifreyan names seem to be either nonsense...

Before I begin, I don't know if there's a correct term for the phenomenon I'm going to describe here, so I went with migration . Is it me, or is there currently a on-going change in the position of "not" in English sentences? In standard English grammar we all know that "I would not l...

I've been through two total solar eclipses (but naturally only remember one): Hawai'i in 1991 and Southern Germany in 1999. That said, with this one, a professor who came to visit from where I did my Master's mentioned that it was quite chaotic in Kent in terms of people coming in from out of town,...

Does anyone else struggle with coming up with a word for something which sounds right? I know we can simply come up with roots and derivations and apply them arbitrarily and build a lexicon fairly quickly; but for me, I too often think "but that doesn't sound like 'grass' to me"; or "...

Does anyone else struggle with coming up with a word for something which sounds right? I know we can simply come up with roots and derivations and apply them arbitrarily and build a lexicon fairly quickly; but for me, I too often think "but that doesn't sound like 'grass' to me"; or "...

That Welsh-language entry is unexpected. I wonder if maybe it was used in a video game or something, in addition to the movie? Equating "song" with a manifestation of a work (to use FRBR terminology ) also skews the numbers in a particular way, away from traditional tunes and old standard...

I've been chewing over the possibility of creating a conlang with Greek-ish-style consonants (but lacking /v/, /ð/, and /ɣ/ and including /j/) and having a Biblical Hebrew style vowel system of a–i–u, ā–ī–ū–ō–ē where ō and ē come from older diphthongs au/aw, ai/aj. Mostly because it's different to w...

I once read a claim somewhere that, because human beings originally came from the East African savannah, we are supposedly genetically programmed to find landscapes that are mostly grass, with some trees here and there, prettier than any other kind of landscape. That sounds like a pretty silly and ...

CON structed LANG uage mak ER The differences between -ist and -er are subtle, but distinct. Surely by those definitions it should be -ist? If it were langconing we should get langconer because con - is the verb and so - er the agent while - lang is the noun and so a "related hobby" or &q...

Why are we conlangers and not conlangists? In my mind -ists seem to be more high-brow than -ers; I'd like to be an -ist.

we also see no Gothic-inspired languages in Middle-earth as far as I'm aware. To the contrary! Taliska was modelled on Gothic. Based on what I had read, I had assumed that it was Gothic, in much the same way that Old Norse was borrowed to furnish names for Dwarves and Northern Men, and the language...

I think the answer lies in the quote: "Most English-speaking people ... will admit that cellar door is 'beautiful', especially if dissociated from its sense (and from its spelling). More beautiful than, say, sky, and far more beautiful than beautiful. Well then, in Welsh for me cellar doors are...

How does my "translation" of Schleicher's Fable look? I've given an English version of the Fable (from Wikipedia), then a linguistic gloss version of how it will translate into my conlang, followed by an English approximation of the conlang (for reference); this is due to my conlang curren...

I've had an idea for evolving a feature in one of my conlangs, which usually means I come here to ask if it's logical or naturalistic, I get told "no" and I cry; but here goes: If I have understood the use of the Latin gerundive correctly, it is an adjective which pretty much corresponds t...

But having a shilling as the largest denomination is odd, no? IIRC the term shilling refers to the shaving off of metal from more valuable coins - in the UK that would be the pound - of which a shilling was one-twentieth. The shilling ought to be the smaller, or middle, denomination if it is a 'shav...

So... I've spent a lot of time recently rebuilding the verbal system of my L conlang, and I'm happy (for now) with what I have. I have, however, overlooked passive voice constructions and I'm too lazy to try to go back and make entirely new passive forms. Also, from the start I've known I wanted to ...

I was looking up the Latin -que and -ve suffixes today – the ones which mean 'and' and 'or' because I'm basically stealing it for a conlang. I'm not all that familiar with Romance languages though and I was wondering if these actually persisted into any modern languages?