Zompist Bboard Again

But it's just simple disfixation on a singular noun. I suppose it is, but disfixation is rather rare, isn't it... In this case, I think the final vowel on the plural will be treated as suffix. The vowel used is analogized by the semantics of the noun. For example I assign the meaning of each noun a...

In the printing era, I think the prototype is arguably a printed character. You may not agree, but think again about China, where characters are drastically and idiosyncratically simplified when written by hand; the prototype is surely something more like the kaishu hand, which underlies the printe...

I doubt there's any languages where there's literally no identifiable patterns to plural formation at all. This is the problem - it is almost completely random. There are some vague, unhelpful patterns - for instance, words ending in geminates add a vowel to form the plural (but which vowel?), and ...

I would say it is a valid definition though - it seems to work for most writing systems other than cuneiform. (Including hanzi - so-called 'Gothic' fonts use monolines.) On the other hand, if you have a better definition of the meaning of a 'letter prototype', I would be happy to use yours. Eh, jus...

Starting from this, I would define the prototype of a letter as being the form it takes when you try to handwrite it most legibly with a monoline pen. According to this definition, serifs never have consistently been part of the prototype; one effect of this is that most people don't write the seri...

For comparison, serifs have been around since the Romans, and yet they still aren't part of the prototype. I can't agree, when before 1800 every printed font had serifs! Sans serif fonts seemed so odd when they were introduced that they were called "grotesque". (I don't mean people said t...

But gestural interfaces don't have to be dominant to influence font design; really they only need to look cool to font designers. Is this how it works? I would have thought that - at least for body text - font designers would stick to generally-established letter forms for legibility, and would onl...

I'm deriving a daughter from a protolanguage, and decided to run a set of word/plural pairs through the sound changes to see what happens - and it is a mess ! There's not even one way of making a plural: depending on the word, you variously have no change, the end consonant being changed, or a rand...

Well, the dominant device was the keyboard; now it's the screen. Already we have near-universal gestures for selection, rejection ("swipe left"), movement, and zooming in/out. VR will likely produce a new vocabulary of gestures. Actually, I would say today that even though we use screens ...

I'm deriving a daughter from a protolanguage, and decided to run a set of word/plural pairs through the sound changes to see what happens - and it is a mess ! There's not even one way of making a plural: depending on the word, you variously have no change, the end consonant being changed, or a rando...

It could be several things... but hey, sometimes you gotta drive the authorial fiat. So... At some point, probably in the late Douane era, some devices took gestural (or hand-drawn) input. For speed and to simplify the input space, letters had to be single strokes. The look caught on, helped by the...

There's a few things in the romanization and orthography which jump out for me immediately. In no particular order: Using <c> for /s/ and <s> for /ʃ/ seems very unusual. I would swap these. Using <q> for /ʒ/ is also fairly odd - I would use <j>. <q> is used for many odd things though - up to and inc...

I use WALS to learn about strategies I might not know about That was basically what I was saying as well. I interpreted your post more as looking at popularity of ideas you already know.... Well, that too. I suppose I use WALS for both in equal measure. (EDIT: Sorry about the duplicated post. I thi...

gestaltist wrote: ↑Tue Jan 15, 2019 9:36 am

bradrn wrote: ↑Tue Jan 15, 2019 3:38 am

gestaltist wrote: ↑Tue Jan 15, 2019 2:41 am I use WALS to learn about strategies I might not know about

That was basically what I was saying as well.

I interpreted your post more as looking at popularity of ideas you already know....

Well, that too. I suppose I use WALS for both of those in equal measure.

gestaltist wrote: ↑Tue Jan 15, 2019 2:41 am I use WALS to learn about strategies I might not know about

That was basically what I was saying as well.

What's CALS? The Conlang Atlas of Language Structures: http://cals.conlang.org/ Thank you! As for what I think about WALS itself, I find it to be more useful for looking at broad trends - I can look at a feature (or a combination of two or more features) and see that x% have this value, y% have ano...

Guitarplayer wrote: ↑Mon Jan 14, 2019 12:10 pm This is amazing. Thanks for investing those hours, Ser!

[...] WALS should have a way to compare languages to each other like IIRC CALS has [...]

What's CALS?

Personally, I haven't gotten to the stage yet in any of my conlangs where I've even needed to organise my lexicon. I imagine that if I did need some organisational tool at some point, I'd use one of SIL's tools, or Excel, or possibly my own tool (like Ryan of Tinellb has done above). Actually, for ...

Did you use Lexique to help you make it? No, there's no fancy linguistics-specific stuff here; it's just html. I use my own version of an html editor, which I've been working on for a couple of years now. I'd be very interested to see this. Is it available anywhere so I can have a look? Personally,...

I didn't know about these. I'm not entirely sure if these will be as useful as the grammars in the Pile, but it's certainly good to know that these are here! (Also, why do I get the message There was a problem previewing this document. when I try to open anything in the Heap?) I just tried opening ...