Zompist Bboard Again

And inflammatory and inflammation...

Meanwhile, I have written some notes on the Quendian languages . So here's what bugs me about Quenya and Sindarin. Where's the sound change come from? Sound change in human languages presumably comes from generational shift. My kids hear and say words subtly different from me and generation on gene...

jcb wrote: ↑Tue Oct 07, 2025 2:34 am How do people here pronounce "ask" and "asked"?

I have /{sk/ and /{st/, respectively. The /k/ is totally elided in the latter.

I'm with you. Keeping the "k" in the past tense/participle requires conscious thought

Transitive bodily actions on another person are nominative-accusative; but if they’re done on oneself (i.e. they’re reflexive), they’re ergative. Koi tezaɣu. Tezaño. Koi shave-past.1>3s / shave-past.ø>1s I shaved Koi. I shaved (myself). This looks like it might be described in terms of a middle voic...

By this rule, "I expected him to do it" is Raising, since "I expected him" is either wrong or means something else. Similarly "I caused him" doesn't work, so "I caused him to do it" is Raising. Personally I find "I ordered him" weird but it's hard t...

Trying this here so I can get my head round it (at Bradrn's suggestion). It relates to the distinction between object control and causatives. I take "I ordered him to do it" to be object control rather than raising-to-object, but tell me if that's wrong. Every time I think about the distin...

Would you consider "I made the man fight the soldier" to be object control? The reason I ask is that I have decided (I think) that I've got into a muddle. In Vedreki a sentence like "I ordered him to go" is basically constructed as in English A qhalas ona iraq I-nom order-past-ma...

Just thinking about China where peasants could and did grab ultimate power (but only after ridiculous bloodshed). The pact to keep the people safe and end the chaos is often good enough for legitimacy. Who are you thinking of? That more or less fits the Míng's founder Zhū Yuánzhāng, but peasant-to-...

think it depends on the source of legitimacy; the dynastic principle, the feudal system in the Middle Ages, then the religious legitimacy meant just not everyone to be a claimant. You needed a religious crisis, or a serious claim to the thrones, plus a significant share of the stakeholders on your ...

How do the Xularn emperors protect themselves against sorcerous usurpers? Or is that what they are themselves? I was thinking about this too. It occurs that what people want is money, power, prestige, a sense that they are valued etc. If you have an elite group (and it is an elite group isn't it?) ...

How do the Xularn emperors protect themselves against sorcerous usurpers? Or is that what they are themselves? I was thinking about this too. It occurs that what people want is money, power, prestige, a sense that they are valued etc. If you have an elite group (and it is an elite group isn't it?) ...

I have [θɪ̆ŋk̚ θɐ̆ŋk̚ sɪ̆ŋk θăŋk] for think , thunk (I was trying to get a range of vowels. And it is part of my ideolect (jokingly)), sink , thank . I think your childrens' primary school is just wrong (or more likely, they introduced this because a few people started writing something like ⟨thing...

I think this would depend very heavily on the details of how magic works in your world. Could you explain that further? One limitation is definitely that sorcerers are going to get very tired after a while. Wielding a heavy sword all day is hard work as is shooting a longbow given the draw strength...

What about "nk" The primary school my kids go to teach "nk" as "special friends" by which they just mean two letters one sound - a digraph. I am wholly unconvinced. I think it's two letters two sounds. Even if (like me I think) link becomes ling-k rather than lin-k with...

So coming back to an ancient (in my life anyway) fantasy setting, I started to think about how magic might be used in warfare. Now I surmise that about 5 in 1000 people have some talent for magic in this conworld. Out of a population (in the Kingdom of Melland, one of my main settings) of approx 1m ...

I've got both maglev and vac trains in my sci-fi setting. In the Tarkentian empire it lets you travel north south down the Khardan continent - about 12000 miles - in 3-4 hours

I'm now curious as to what Zompist - and others - think of Dune. We must be 30-40,000 years in the future and have an emperor, dukes, barons and counts, some significant advanced technology (some more hand-wavy than others) but also capitalism, slavery (at least on Giedi Prime) despotism and attempt...

I get the general idea that if the agent is higher than the patient in a person-hierarchy so 2nd person is higher than 1st in Algonquian languages you have a direct marker. On this point, it’s well worth reading Oxford’s Algonquian Grammar Myths (of which this is one). More reading :D Thank you eve...

Can I ask a completely unrelated question - but this is a miscellany thread after all. How do direct-inverse systems handle indirect objects? I get the general idea that if the agent is higher than the patient in a person-hierarchy so 2nd person is higher than 1st in Algonquian languages you have a ...

How does it manifest? As a handy setting for fantasy-like fiction, which also allows plumbing of existential questions of the type more akin to sci-fi. As a bunch of scrawled notes, maps and Google Docs amassed over 20 years, weathered by time and obscured by the billowing shrouds of ADHD. At some ...