Zompist Bboard Again

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 ...

Roughly 1000 years later, the Notalin Empire has broken up – in fact it lasted not quite 50 years, the three kingdoms have become one, the Kingdom of Melland. The story begins with the birth of a demon lord (Kaarok) in a wood on the tastar plains. In fact, this is the scene I first thought of that s...

6000 years later Teldar-Rantor King of Rakh had united the kingdoms of the Notalin archipelago, a volcanic archipelago situated on an oceanic hotspot in the Rymersea (a bit like Hawaii). He was now turning his attention to the divided peninsula to the west. Instead of three city states surrounded by...

The Destruction of the Preternaturalists: The Tormelike Empire which had been founded some 8000 years previously by the refugees from Tormelil had spread south and west from the cities they had founded – Bizkanotral, Okotril and Tokai-Niril. On the continent of Khetinda the N’Dakwa Dominion had spr...

I haven't read most of it yet, but the idea of the Creator himself having been created in an act of random chaos sounds interesting, and not like something Tolkien would have come up with - it would have been against his religious beliefs, after all. That I suppose he would never have come up with,...

So now I understand a bit of actual linguistics which I didn't when I was much younger... I have toyed around with redoing a language I devised (Notalin) from an old fantasy setting. Now the mythology is a bit silly in places and derivative in others, but I find I am not fussed about revising it now...

lastly, below is the indefinite article ains; the competing indefinite article saums declines exactly the same except with the stem /sɔm-/ instead of /ɛn-/ When do you use ains as opposed to saums or vice versa? dual and plural forms of the indefinite article? Curious how that works. How would you ...

“The money that is given charities” pretty unambiguously means the money … and someone gives charities to that money, somehow. The only reason it doesn’t parse is because it’s semantically nonsense. No. It pretty unambiguously means the exact opposite. Someone gives money to the charities, but I gr...