Zompist Bboard Again

Thanks everyone who replied! While people have been good at explaining what a (past) imperfect ive is, the specific term ‘imperfect’¹ is a lot more confusing. It was originally used for a specific Latin tense that happened to mostly match a past imperfective, and then got borrowed across Europe for ...

I've begun working on a conlang again that I started long ago and never got very far with. The old grammar sketch is mostly a list of features without much explanations. When it comes to tense and aspect, the language apparently only has this: present, perfect, imperfect. They are all marked, so I a...

Sorry about the very belated reply, Qwynegold. When I saw your post, I decided that I really should get off my butt and get some rewriting done. And to motivate myself a bit more, I decided that I didn't want to respond to your post before I had gotten some more rewriting done. And now, after runni...

Are there languages where a complement clause always precedes its main clause? I'm thinking of examples like eating fish likes Rachel or that the weather is warm knows Jeff . For the first I was thinking of Japanese also (I studied it in middle and high school, actually), but many other SOV languag...

I really hope this thread could help people! :D Perhaps if I have to regularly post a cryptic line like "another piece done" here, I can push myself to write more. How about coming up with some kind of rewards that you get to give yourself for every piece finished? I've been looking at the...

In Swedish there is a word svennebanan . My understanding is that it refers to a typical conformist Swede. The word banana comes from the observation that when Swedes go on field trip or something, they will typically have a banana as part of their snacks, because fruit is healthy and bananas are co...

Raphael wrote: ↑Wed Dec 31, 2025 4:23 pm Nine billion diseases?

That's how I thought too at first. Apparently they had first written "AI finds more diseases than people do", but then removed the last word.

Dagens Nyheter wrote:AI hittar fler sjukdomar än människor

This one works in exactly the same way when translated to English:
AI finds more diseases than people.

I've been watching the anime Made in Abyss. Both the story and the animation is really well done. But it's really dark and the body horror is really gross.

Thank you! I'm making a quiz about language families, and I'm unsure what to do with myriad languages of New Guinea. Maybe I should exclude the really tiny families, because no one's gonna get those anyway. But it looks like I can include TNG at least. Of course, when making a quiz, you should avoi...

Some of you seem to be knowledgeable about the languages of New Guinea, or at least have read a lot about them. I hope someone can answer this question. I thought that Trans-New Guinea was just a catch-all term, but the Wikipedia article says this: The core of the family is considered to be establi...

Some of you seem to be knowledgeable about the languages of New Guinea, or at least have read a lot about them. I hope someone can answer this question. I thought that Trans-New Guinea was just a catch-all term, but the Wikipedia article says this: The core of the family is considered to be establis...

I somehow got on this topic with my parents, and they think I am insulting my non-natively English-speaking coworkers by modifying my speech for them by implying that they don't know English, that I should speak with them the same way I speak at home. Based on what you've written earlier on the for...

Hi! I'm terrible at syntax. Can someone please tell me if the underlined parts here are olique phrases or content clauses or what? 1SG.F want.PRS COMP 1PL COP like DEM.DIST couple I want us to be like that couple. but 1SG.M know.PRS NEG COMP use these.ACC how But I don't know how to use them. 1SG.M ...

Does Standard Swedish kyrka reflect direct influence from Byzantine Greek, since ON had kirkja (note the unrounded vowel), itself a loan from OE cirice (Late PWGmc * kirikā ), but Byzantine Greek had κυριακόν ( δόμα )? I doubt that; it rather looks like a tendency to darken front vowels near retrof...

Well observed! But I’m sorry to say that the actual graphic forms got a bit messed up there. If I had done that image a bit more carefully, it should have been clearer that ‘hook left’ was meant to be ‘turn slightly to the bottom’, and that ‘hook right’ is just a variant of ‘turn slightly to the ri...

10 000!!! That's a lot of work. Few people get that far with their projects. How many characters would an average person know, in a hypothetical world where this was used instead of the Latin alphabet?

Here's an idea I had about this very topic: Use the phonemes in your name! this includes all consonants and vowels, any diphthongs (not necessarily required but optional), if you want added challlenge: stick to your name's syllable structure and phonemic stress, Maybe a max of two "freebie&quo...

First very rough ideas for a script for Eŋes: IMG_3183.jpeg On the left I have the original Wēchizaŋkəŋ form, followed by its form as used in Eŋes and the word and/or syllable it denotes. At the bottom I wrote a simple example sentence in it. (For which I just noticed the last character is misalign...

Since last time I wrote in this thread I have done no conlanging until last last Sunday when I did a tiny bit and then last Sunday again. I have finished reformatting the dictionary of Liu and I've written a great deal about when the progressive aspect is and isn't used. Maybe I'll post that on the ...