Zompist Bboard Again

The creator of Láadan said that most of the people interested enough to buy her book were men ... And I'm one of them. Láadan interests me and I'm interested to see more languages in the same mold. It influenced my own conlangs too, but most of what I borrowed from Láadan has been slowly wrung out....

You should publish it on your own scratchpad. Also, sorry if it seems too harsh, but what is the uniqueness of your conlang? Okay, that’s fair. The purpose of this conlang is to create something like Láadan, to focus the grammar and lexical stock on women and femaleness as Láadan does, while simult...

I have most of my verb structure for my first polysynthetic language, Venusian, but almost no roots to speak of at this stage. Also, I’m not sure how I should go about deriving participles or verbal nouns, or even if I should. Here’s the extent of the morphological and phonological sketch I have: P...

It is out already, found in Alexander Lubotsky's Festschrift — though the publisher homepage unhelpfully currently has a broken link for the TOC. I'm looking forwards to this arriving online at some point in the future (I think Beech Stave Press allows authors to distribute articles online about a ...

This looks pretty damn convincing, particularly when we don’t have any super archaic forms of Tai-Kadai or Austronesian attested as we do with IE. Imagine having to reconstruct PIE with no Ancient Greek, Avestan, or Vedic Sanskrit evidence, let alone Anatolian evidence.

*h₂ is, per recent results from Kümmel (though I'm still waiting to see the full paper), retained in SW Iranian as /h/~ /x/. Given also the Anatolian evidence, I think this nails this down as a voiceless back fricative pretty conclusively. Let us know when the paper comes out and where to find it. ...

非常好！雖然你用簡體字寫中文，但是找到會說普通話的人讓我很高興。我認為繁體字比較好看和優雅。
Awesome! Finding someone who can speak Mandarin makes me happy even though you use simplified characters. I’m of the opinion that traditional characters are prettier and more elegant.

I consider Austro-Tai pretty solid. I haven't looked at the details of the reconstructions enough to say at what exact point Tai broke off from the others ..... archaeology might be as helpful here as linguistics is. The author of that paper seems to have written newer ones in which he assumes Aust...

Gahhhhh I love this shit. My “Venusian” language: p t̪ ʈ k q ʔ pʰ t̪ʰ ʈʰ kʰ qʰ f θ s ɕ x X h ts tɕ tsʰ tɕʰ m n̪ ɳ ŋ l̪ ɭ r̪ ʀ w j i ɛ ɑ u ĩ ɛ̃ ɑ̃ ũ Syllable: (C)(C)V(ʔ/h) Assimilation of sibiliants/dentals to following retroflex consonants’ PoA Assimilation of velars & uvulars to the PoA of the ...

I remember reading a paper years ago by Laurent Sagart that argued pretty convincingly for Austro-Tai, specifically Tai-Kadai as a primary branch of Austronesian, on par with the other Formosan language groups, though the location of this paper is now lost to time and the ravages of a shitty memory....

As for two - they come from PIE sigmatic perfective and a blending of -ē deverbal nouns with the non-suppletive aorist of the copula respectively. Okay I obviously wasn’t thinking straight when I wrote that last night, as I’d neglected to think about the sigmatic aorist. Are there any papers or oth...

這𥚃有些可以幫我練習寫普通話的人嗎？我很希望我寫的事情的語法是能明白的。
Does this place have any people who can help me practise Mandarin? I really hope the grammar of the stuff I write is comprehensible.

Hi, I’m a newbie. Two questions: 1. Why do the different verbal aspects have different sets of person/number endings when they usually already have differentiation in the stems, reduplication, or augment - and where did these different sets of endings come from (particularly the 1sg)? 2. Where did t...