Zompist Bboard Again

My other problem is that it's a millennia-old language used as a lingua franca and I want to keep it reasonably "updated" despite it being native to a culture in antiquity—they need to talk about spaceships and petrochemicals, after all—but I don't want to just kludge it badly. Has anyone...

The phrase is "zav tumat" The difference with chip and zav is that a native speaker of Hebrew would not understand the word zav to refer to the longer phrase. How would a native speaker of English understand 'shed' as a weaving term outside of a weaving context? Context is important for a...

Linguoboy wrote: ↑Thu Apr 09, 2020 12:02 pm One of my Facebook friends is ranting about the use of "social distance" as a verb (e.g. "Young people didn't social distance because the government kept telling them not to worry.").

Any compound noun can be compound verbed...

KathTheDragon wrote: Liekwise

Me niether.

Interesting, I thought a Juliet balcony was a balcony not wide enough to stand on. Like the one pictured. A balcony wide enough to stand on is, well, a balcony, for me. I'm in the UK. Never heard of a French balcony, and not really accustomed to hearing people say 'fake balcony' or 'false balcony', ...

A piece by my favorite composer, Philip Glass, has recently been rediscovered and is being released next Friday! It was recorded in isolation, but they still pulled it off! Oh, exciting, what is the piece? I tried searching for it but didn't find anything (probably because I use Ecosia: ecofriendly...

Has anyone done any serious poetry-writing in their conlangs, and if so, would you care to share? I haven't (tried to do that since I was 12*), but it's something I would definitely like to work towards. By 'serious' poetry, I suppose I mean con-poetry that is written at least in part for its poetic...

This is a slight tangent, but I absolutely love the tone of your website, with the 'Let's make something together' vibe. It's a lovely idea very well delivered, so far. And what I've checked out of the content is great too. How did you calculate your insolation patterns? Or is it more conceptual and...

But wouldn't it be nice to help something, anything grow there! Any advice for a barren north-facing bush-drained slug-pelleted metre-wide strip of potential planty paradise? In addition to the geranium macrorrhizum I suggest above, you could try some of the following, especially if you're willing ...

Did my first big shopping in a week, at the Middle Eastern bakery and grocery near me. Two miles each way, so it's a bit of a hike, but it was a lovely day and I managed not to destroy my arms coming back. Normally, I try to practice restraint when I'm there, but between COVID-related stress and no...

Globalisation has sped up the replacement of non-standard varieties. It also has helped minority languages find new methods of preservation and communities who spoke now extinct languages find linguists willing to help revive them. All true, but I'm wondering if non-standard varieties are also bein...

Also think about how you can overemphasise extreme forms of articulation to help distinguish phonemes like filling cheeks entirely with air before [b], or having [d] always be implosive (or coarticulated in some way). Like how in English [s] and [S] are aided in their distinguishing by the coarticul...

Is this for a conworld? If so, what is it like? (Extremely windy, for instance? Or with a dense atmosphere? Lower gravity, with higher peaks and deeper valleys, potentially lending better acoustic opportunities for communicating this way?) And you're talking with human physiology? Assuming that thos...

Not an expert, but in addition to history-/archaeology-based guesstimation, isn't it related to certain parts of the text having older-looking features than others - so estimates of age of the older parts can be inferred partly by establishing a rough chronology of the level of difference between th...

Does anyone have any interesting reading to point me to or thoughts about how globalisation affects language change? A thought that occurred to me just now, whilst realising I have watched so much of Kim's Convenience that I am quite often thinking in a potentially fairly fictional Korean-based L2 f...