Zompist Bboard Again

Oh, so you steal sentences from elsewhere?! Is that okay? I have some sentences that may have originated from Wikipedia, and I've been worrying it might be bad somehow. Ah, no, I don't. The sentences are, in-universe, from Tarandim scripture. But writing scripture is difficult, you have to fast in ...

Stressed syllables are supposed to have higher pitch, but it's very possible I overdid it. Yeah, this is very common of conlangs getting spoken by their creators. Of course you'll not have a natural flow, because you aren't used to speaking this. People who have been speaking their conlangs out lou...

Ah, yeah, they're a lot of work... A bit of originality helps I think. Sample sentences get a lot harder to make, but you get reusable vocabulary and constructions. They're also less boring to write and they help sustain the reader's attention. Whimsical sentences are really zompist's trick which a...

What the hell is this sound? For the life of me I can't figure it out. At the very least it's voiceless and lateral. I'm fairly confident that it's velar as well, and perhaps the ejective velar lateral fricative? It seems to have a lot of articulatory force behind it. And, most strangely, I can dis...

Kuchigakatai wrote: ↑Sat Aug 29, 2020 2:19 pm

alice wrote: ↑Wed Aug 26, 2020 12:15 pmSigh; I garbled that, yet again. I don't know why the ZBB does this to me.

'Tis for those awful occasions that I figured out these recovery steps~~

This needs to be plastered somewhere.

I've been rewriting my dictionary for about a week now. I'm still at the letter A. :( The only automated thing I've done is using search-and-replace to change the parts of speech, from things like "V., intr" or "N., fem" into "V.intr" and "N.f". Writing exampl...

Sorry if I have asked this before in some thread, but I can't remember the answer. What's the difference between someone and somebody? Are they completely interchangeable? Somebody is more informal than someone. That's about it. Maybe I could add that "somebody" is more common in bilingua...

How would you transcribe labialised palatals? I'm not sure whether to use ʷ or ᶣ, e.g.: ʷ can signify simultaneous labialization and velarization, so ᶣ would be less ambiguous. But almost everyone uses ʷ without caring about its velarization, and ʷ is a more familiar symbol, so... Quick romanizatio...

[*]I should be more coherent when dealing with subentries. For example, in the picture I showed, medordìnarìa (know) is a subentry of ordìnarìa (get used to), because they're really just different forms of the same word. But then what should I write in the part of speech-field of the subentry? Or s...

Sorry if I have asked this before in some thread, but I can't remember the answer. What's the difference between someone and somebody? Are they completely interchangeable?

Ah, I got more replies to this than I had expected. :) The last time I was in this situation, I decided to bite the bullet and just throw it out. I dont want to discourage you though, because you must have put more work into yours than I put into mine, from the looks of it .... I had about the same ...

¿Finalandru di reaghailiz di Liu? ¿Qua ehe qendam a potèntí?
Finishing the grammar? Is such a thing possible?

そうか。じゃ、私はサンスクリット語について質問があったら、ジさんに聞いてみる。（このスレッドは久しぶりだね。） Sō ka. Ja, watashi wa Sansukuritto-go ni tsuite shitsumon ga attara, Ji-san ni kiite miru. (Kono sureddo wa hisashiburi da ne.) Is that so? Well, I'll be sure to try asking you if I have a question about Sanskrit. (Long time since anyone wrote ...

You're welcome!

Things like passive and applicative are commonly used by languages to turn things that can't be relativised into things that can. E.g. if you can only relativise subjects, the passive lets you turn objects into subjects so they can be relativised too. Yeah, I'm already using the passive voice for s...

A list of all ISO 639-3 (2019) languages by code and their corresponding name on Wikipedia. Two mirrors: - https://controlc.com/ca7d884a (ControlC.com, will expire in a month) - https://pastebin.com/B42yGTwp (Pastebin.com, erroneously detected as having "offensive" content, maybe due to t...

I have this one dictionary for a conlang that I started years ago. During its creation I've changed my mind about how to do it several times. Some changes I have carried out through the whole dictionary, and some I've just done partially. So the dictionary is a mess really. Then, some half a year ag...

This is actually tragic, but I saw this headline on TV and thought it could have been phrased slightly differently to avoid a weird interpretation:

BBC World News wrote:At least 7 people killed in Ganja attack tonight

Norms of all kinds were violated here, so it could be confusing. So: the sign tells us that dudes were using their penises to press the buttons. The garden path interpretation is that the buttons have genitalia. Oh, okay. And for some reason, at first I was thinking of female genitalia, so that did...

Are you not getting the pic to load or something? If so, it shows an elevator panel with a sign reading "DO NOT CLICK BUTTONS WITH GENITALIA / Cameras are watching. / University of Alabama". No, I saw the picture, but couldn't understand what it was supposed to mean. And the comments were...