Zompist Bboard Again

eshwa kita urhim shúmunum house-ACC be.old-3sg.INAM spirit-PL haunt-REPO-3pl They say that ghosts haunt the old house. Actually, in Commonwealth countries, it's pronounced shúmun i um . Sorry, this is meant to be a joke on the pronunciation of aluminium / aluminum in different English dialects.

I heard someone say "I shook my head yes" to mean "I nodded my head." Is this a new thing? A regional thing? It reads strangely to me, but I have seen it a few times over the years. A quick google search of "I shook my head yes" reveals a few other people bothered by i...

masako wrote: ↑Fri May 03, 2019 12:17 pm next: facial contour; facial shape

High Lulani ’arasikahi facial shape.

Next: lightning.

When I started con-scripting, the only way I could find to get a right-to-left script was to use the codepoints for Thaana . Arabic would have worked, except for the automatic substitutions word processors make when creating the cursive. Nowadays, I can use the Unicode Right-to-Left markers and CSS ...

http://www.tinellb.com/images/BadArabic.PNG This is from a Cadbury ad for orthodox Easter. To my I've-been-kinda-learning-the-Arabic-script eye, this looks reversed and unjoined. Can someone tell me what it says, and if it is indeed in Arabic itself, or one of its derivative writing systems? Thank-...

I hit my "random word" link for the next word, and the first thing it came up with was ramaha /ɽəˈmahə/ subtriadic number Is this word morphologically complex or do the Lulani have a basic root word for "subtriadic number"? It's a basic word. The language is a conlang in-univers...

next word kàilá f /'kai.la:/ Good omen, lucky sign High Lulani kala /ˈkʰalə/ saltwater carp : a type of fish, lives in tidal pools on Mala Ptokonoi, considered to be lucky. I don't know enough about the culture of my proto-language speakers to actually know what they find lucky, but since this soun...

As a kid, I once made scrambled eggs with the idea that salt and pepper were opposites. It did not end well.

Salmoneus wrote: ↑Sat Mar 23, 2019 9:58 am Sorry, transcribing errors by the field researchers...

Or typos (writeos? paintos?) by the original author. Which is probably a realistic obstacle to things like this anyway .

I don't have postcodes, but I do have codes for separate universes within the multiverse. They comprise one Latin letter, a digit string, and a Greek letter. The Crackled Egg, for example, takes place in universe A³⁷⁶γ.

ablative: stress on the first or second syllable?

karaluuebru wrote: ↑Tue Feb 05, 2019 10:38 pm next word: obsidian, volcanic glass

High Lulani: rukaga - ruka glass + ga black

If I were making the language for Game of Thrones / A Song of Ice and Fire, I would have course have rukajuffila, dragonglass.

Next word: coelacanth, or any kind of similar fish.

I've not heard of the Welsh one, but german in this sense has nothing to do with the German people. It's cognate with (wheat-)germ and germinate.

See also “Dakota(h)”. Madison is a mostly female first name that slightly surprising in it's use as I would have expected it to have been given to boys due to the president James Maddison. I think it may be the resemblance to "Maddie" (from "Madeleine") that was decisive in this...

I prefer post-nasalised stops to pre-. /bmaɪ/, /dnai/, /gŋaɪ/. Even before I knew what they were called.

Dumb question that I'm sure I know the answer to, but it's just not coming to me. What is this construction called? Something like "his majesty, the king" where two nouns sharing a referent are juxtaposed. Additional question: are these constructions universal/widespread, or is it a peculi...

Hey, Zompist. Sometimes I like browsing your grammar guides when I'm on the move, but I find the font too small to read on my smartphone. Would you be able to slot in a <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0"> ? Or something similar? I noticed the Al...

Did you use Lexique to help you make it? No, there's no fancy linguistics-specific stuff here; it's just html. I use my own version of an html editor, which I've been working on for a couple of years now. I'd be very interested to see this. Is it available anywhere so I can have a look? It's on Git...

What about an additional row for clicks? I realize we can change the row names, but 1 of my conlangs would take all of the currently available rows + 1 for clicks as well. I learned javascript when I needed to adapt the sca to my own needs. You could do the same with this. Alternatively, follow zom...

High Lulani has modal adverbs. Placed at the end of an utterance, they convey things like emotional reaction, evidentiality or likelihood. They will most likely evolve into full-blown evidentiality clitics or suffixes by the time this language becomes Koine Fezhlê.