Zompist Bboard Again

Makes sense. Depending on how exactly the phonology ends up, most of the roots wouldn't be affected anyway.

Thanks, that table was a mess. That's a good point about analogy, you're saying the speakers would think of the system as "root + suffix", and not apply the sound changes to the root? That's even more likely to work if there's plenty of roots that wouldn't change anyway, like "me".

I have a few fairly reasonable sound changes in my conlang: u > y _C[front vowel] [stop] > nasal _...[nasal] (nasal harmony) The problem is that I don't want any of these changes to affect the root, only the suffixes. For example: root pu plural suffix ku case suffixes ti n The case-number pattern I...

Fair enough.

Right, the original text should be kept secret from the translators. Without actually revealing the secret, can you talk about the text generally? Like, how long is it, are there any words that don't have an equivalent in your language's culture?

I've just seen a conlang relay on Youtube, where each conlanger is given a text in a conlang and a short grammar and lexicon. They translate the text into English, then into their own conlang, and pass it along to the next person, all within 48 hours. There were some complaints that the original tex...

I keep wanting to throw out three-quarters of the Monster Manual to make a more coherent setting, but I can never decide on which three-quarters. For this project I'd just accept the kitchen-sink supernatural elements and concentrate on the natural world being more consistent.

I get the idea about the genetics of the races but I probably wouldn't be that specific myself. The real science would only go down to the level of mundane plants and animals, with the origin of the sapient races including humans and monsters left ambiguous. As for gods and magic, I'd keep all the m...

I've been thinking about the modern kind of physical, planetary worldbuilding, and wondering how you would apply it to making a campaign setting for Dungeons and Dragons. None of the major settings seem to have been created this way, so it might be a new, interesting approach. A couple of assumption...

I haven't seen Knives Out , but a reviewer said that an Australian actress had some difficulty saying "alt-right troll" while playing an American character - the American vowels in that phrase are hard for Australians to copy. That reminded me of a Doctor Who writer deliberately including ...

Reading over the answers, either this is simpler than I thought, or the pronunciation of "skull" varies more than I thought. New Zealanders tend to vocalise dark "l"s - people joke about spilling mook on the beach taos - but I don't think I do it.

Thanks for the answers. I might not be transcribing the American speaker well, here's the video with the first "Skrull" at 1:54.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O4GR2NV7Isk

The Skrulls are alien invaders from Marvel comics, and I've been amused at the variety of ways people pronounce their name. A Scottish podcaster consistently calls them "scrolls", whereas an American on Youtube calls them [skrlz], with a syllabic r and a syllabic l, almost like "squir...

I'm not sure how this is a failure; I was in a meeting today where this very thing happened. Fair enough. The worst social prediction I've seen wasn't actually from an SF story, but by the futurists who wrote about American generations and invented the word "Millenial". They predicted the...

I suspect that the world of the future will not be "21st century America but more liberal," but rather something much stranger and more unpredictable, whose issues are things we wouldn't even think about, and whose people don't think about our issues, or think it's ridiculous that people ...

I've heard there's a quote by Gene Roddenberry that "real" 23rd-century people would be disturbingly alien to present-day audiences, so he deliberately made Star Trek as present-day characters in space. Does anyone know where he said this?

What would a sincere prediction of the future that falls flat on its face in social issues look like if written today? Anything we write now is inherently doomed to fall flat on its face - social issues are much harder to predict than economics or technology. You can identify trends, higher birthra...

Just "principles we understand today" doesn't specify much about the technology of 2100. So I'll introduce a couple of other limits. These are not based on any kind of extrapolation, but are arbitrary choices to keep the setting recognizable from our perspective. Call one the Human Brain L...

It's not really prediction I'm talking about, you can always have unexpected applications of known principles. I wouldn't really expect Archimedes to predict the internal combustion engine, much less monster truck rallies or exurbs. It's more about understanding the principles behind it.

"Past performance is not indicative of future results", maybe. Sure, but there's nothing else to base the setting on.