Zompist Bboard Again

Grammar (Part 1) Low Riparian has no inflectional morphology, and, in traditional analyses, is not considered to have derivational morphology. Categories such as case, tense, and number are expressed via word order and particles; derivations that are expressed with suffixes such as <-ness> and <re-...

But split ergativity only evolved recently in Indo-Aryan, in the early to mid second millennium, not even reaching unrecognized languages that are considered dialects of Hindi, like Bhojpuri.

I just noticed this on Twitter: https://twitter.com/alon_levy/status/1085505735465881601 My translation of the Hebrew tweet is almost perfectly word for word, but I just noticed something important about the original Hebrew syntax: the original tweet says הרבנות יפסיקו, ha-Rabbanut yafsiku, the-Rabb...

alice wrote: ↑Mon Jan 14, 2019 4:30 amBack to Bad Conlangs: I get the impression from people's replies that it's probably impossible to create a conlang which everyone will consider to be Bad. Although it might be an interesting exercise (but not for me!)

Volapük!

Raholeun wrote: ↑Sun Jan 13, 2019 8:42 am Why is it called Low Riparian? Do these aliens live on the plains or in coastal areas?

They live all over their planet, much like humans on Earth; Low Riparian is just the language of one particular country that's coastal, in contrast to the farther upland area speaking High Riparian.

I created this language for a LARP about an alien society that's much like a whitewashed Victorian England, with one key difference: there are four genders. Mostly I was trying to test-run different pronoun systems, and the one we ended up using in the LARP was not the one I created for this languag...

In Hebrew, names get the gender of the corresponding Hebrew class name. The Hebrew words for state and country are both feminine, so every country is feminine; the Hebrew word for river is masculine, so every river is masculine; etc. Common nouns are gendered by morphology. If they're not shoehorned...

Yeah, the "imposition of one language on another group" has a big problem: it describes nearly the entire world, on one side or another. The languages of China and Southeast Asia are analytic, and you could argue that it's somehow because Chinese, Burmese, Vietnamese, etc. are imperial lan...

Curlyjimsam wrote: ↑Wed Jan 09, 2019 2:07 pm Nonconcatenative morphology isn't exactly vastly common in natlangs, don't forget. And loads of people at least attempt triconsonantal root conlangs.

Neither are initial consonant clusters...

E.g. nominal roots might be disyllabic, inflecting for number: /ˈliko/ 'dog' vs /liˈko/ 'dogs' and verbal roots might be trisyllabic, inflecting for different categories: /ˈkabato/ 'kill.nonpast' /kaˈbato/ 'kill.past' /kabaˈto/ '(a) killing/(a) kill' I don't think such a system is impossible for a ...

You can do a lot of interesting things with analytic syntax, though, like having coverbs and relational nouns rather than adpositions, or playing with word order, or not really using pronouns. What is probably my second most advanced conlang, with maybe 300 lexical items, has a lot of syntax element...

My biggest suggestion for conlangers is "know what you're intending to use the language for." I imagine the vast majority of conlang usage is for SF/F media, especially stories we write and RPGs we run. If it's ever planned to be written, aim for a phonology that's reasonable to Romanize. ...

Nearly all the conlangs I'm aware of have complex affixational morphology. This includes standard average European ones like Esperanto, Quenya, and Verdurian, but I think it's also generally true of ones meant to not be Europeanish, like Klington or a lot of the typologies I've seen here from time t...