Zompist Bboard Again

I've never in my life, for example, heard 'countertenor' without a strong stress on the penult. Really? Even a UK dictionary has /ˈkaʊn tə ˌten ə/. Another one . You really have /kaʊn tə ˈten ə/? (There's a secondary stress on 'tenor', sure, but primary stress should be on 'counter'.) I have primar...

Regarding Quiet Flows the Don : it's ridiculously grimdark. I mean, I thought that when it began with a pregnant woman being trampled to death by xenophobes, it was establishing a tone. Turns out, it was just giving us a bit of light amusement before things got dark. Recently, for example: - one of ...

Roots never surpass the antepenultimate: This is pairs like fántasy/fantástical, anthropólogy/anthropológical, eléctrical/electrólysis, álchemy/alchémical, xénophobe/xenophóbia, vérify/verifíable/verifiabílity, dúrable/durátion/durabílity, phárynx/pharýngeäl(or even pharyngéäl). I also could've swo...

Vardelm wrote: ↑Tue Jan 08, 2019 1:53 pm

missals wrote: ↑Tue Jan 08, 2019 12:12 pmTone and stress are absolutely considered morphology.

Well, I learned something today!

Well, tone and stress are just phonology, same as any other phonology. It's only when they're used to mark grammatical distinctions that they become, like any other phonology, morphological.

1) The languages spoken in my main conculture's core area at the time the part of my conhistory that I've worked out so far starts. For now, I plan to have eight languages in that group. That might sound like a lot, but at the start of the parts of my conhistory that I've worked out so far, this co...

Do you really need that many languages? Even a history of the real world probably wouldn't feature names from more than a dozen or so languages, I should think. [also, don't forget that in a realistic settting, a lot of the languages in your history will be descendents of earlier languages in your h...

I think 'sludgy' might be an example of making it too colloquial, and it certainly has a different sense than (the admittedly ugly) 'troubledly' - troubled flow seems to make more sense, since the leaping fish and rising springs don't seem to equate to sludginess. That's quite remarkable, given tha...

Gosh, I'm flattered. Unfortunately none of these reconstructions would work for any other verbs, but never mind. Well, it works for any EO-I or IU-I verb, and many other verbs can do similar things through analogy. Your verb 'maaron' could be made to work similarly either by giving it an original l...

It may take a while... but my initial reaction is: it's incredibly grimdark. If it weren't so well-written, it would be almost laughable how grimdark it was. I mean, the opening chapter has a pregnant woman being kicked to death by a xenophobic lynch mob, and it just seems to get darker from there. ...

The original form of the verb is teozok . [Words in the distant past had a regular CVCVC form, as in Austronesian, but the stressed open first syllable lengthened, and then the long vowels broke into a variety of diphthongs]. There are originally three persons (-/, -t, -k) and two numbers: singular,...

Hooray, my copy of an improved and disabridged translation of Quiet Flows the Don has arrived! It's a more fluent English, easier to read and more colourful, although it seems it may miss the odd interesting Russian idiom in the process - in places maybe it's a bit TOO idiomatically English. But it'...

Linguoboy wrote: ↑Fri Jan 04, 2019 12:45 pm my excrescent t's

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Though after reading this thread I am afraid to post my IE-based conlang here. :shock: Post away! Many of us have indeed dabbled in the forbidden arts of Indo-European - though fewer than in the past, when board's collective aesthetic was less severely defined. There have even been IE languages tha...

... and you may say to yourself, "My God! What have I done!" I think Sal's saying that it's not possible to have objective standards for judging conlangs. Well, if I may put my head on the chopping-block and let it be kicked around for a bit, as it were: here's what I remember of the verb...

Mi vidis Johanaregon Johanumantajn Johane. "I saw a large group of Johanns Johanning around Johannically." This reminds of my pet idea that the distinction between nouns, verbs, and adjectives seems to be gradually disappearing in 21st Century English. For instance, someone who doesn't li...

Wow, you've just proved that criticism doesn't exist. "There is nobody who has the authority to decree rules for everybody else to follow" in music, in novels, in painting, in poetry, in comics. The artist can always say "fuck 'em all!" And so what? How does that remove people's...

Because there isn't a whole professional academic field that makes it their business as well as a multi-million dollar industry for teaching language creation? Maybe it's just me, but I think that creating a good artificial language is harder than writing a good novel Define 'good'. I have some sen...

It's easy to give examples of things you shouldn't do when creating other forms of Art No it isn't. Indeed, that's almost the definition of art. What your examples are are examples of things you shouldn't do when creating commercial products in the hope of maximising profitability. You shouldn't sw...

The "geographical title rather than name" thing is very striking when looking at that period, yes. Although it's not always fixed - Shakespeare, for instance, sometimes uses one placename in place of another, for variety or poetry. In Richard II , for instance, the future Henry IV is refer...

Me in the past: So I'll need at least naming conlangs. And the conhistory in question involves people and places from several fictional cultures and linguistic communities, so I have to come up with several conlangs, preferably some related and some fairly distinct ones. Fast foward twenty years... ...