Zompist Bboard Again

After reading this highly interesting book , I found the Old Albic word for 'bird': phintá (< Proto-Hesperic *p'etnah < PIE *petnos (root *pet- 'to fly'). The idea came from chapter 5, which discusses a suffix -annos found in several Celtic bird names, for which it gives PIE *petnos (the loss of *p...

Since the new year began I have not been as keenly attentive to Msérsca, but I have been mulling over its comparative constructions for several days, and that slower, more undulating pattern of attention has been to some clear benefit. I'd already established that Msérsca had a comparative construct...

Lexember 29 & 30 & 31 - City Life (borrowing the final week's theme from the CBB's Lexember, which I only half-finished): tammos [ˈtamːɔs] bridge; from the old locative plural of tám wall, originally "space or thing between" direct singular: tammos direct plural: tammora [ˈtamːɔɾa]...

Lexember 22 & 23 & 24 & 25 & 26 & 27 & 28 - Economy and Exchange: covea [ˈkɔvja] wares, goods for sale; price; from *kopau , result noun formed from *kopii "to sell, assign value to, declare," which diverged in meaning early, giving Msérsca covi to adore and mediopa...

Lexember 15 & 16 & 17 & 18 & 19 & 20 & 21 - Biology and Taxonomy: zutto [ˈzʏtθu] mushroom, especially an edible one; bulge, protuberance; alteration from earlier thutto (itself likely from thýl tree, trunk + -(t)to diminutive, singulative, or "daughter of"; variant ...

Lexember 11 & 12 & 13 & 14 - Movement and Exercise: máire [ˈmoːiɾɛ] to push, shove; to (deliberately) give off; possibly related to mói to grind, pound, knead and thus to mót granule, speck zaele [ˈzaːlɛ] to pull, draw; to attract, catch; (with dative or ablative) to take influence from ...

Lexember 8 & 9 & 10 - Movement and Exercise: tóima [ˈtwɔima~tøːima] to lift, hoist, raise; from *toorima to carry, hold up, related to tórea floor, ground faxea [ˈfaksja~ ˈfakʃa] pose, position, posture, arrangement; either: 1. metathesis of expected *fascea from *fasu stop, pause, rest (whe...

Lexember 6 & 7: coavi [ˈkwavɪ] to squeeze, pump, (esp. with reduplication as coavioavi ) wheeze, squeak, huff and puff; onomatopoeic or perhaps from *koi two (Msérsca coa ) + *pih puff, blow essoc [ˈesːɔk] quietly rebellious attitude; niche appeal; essa low, quiet + oc spark, noise (cf. occea no...

qu’âkgį́sât qo’a- kgį́sât ’lapis lazuli’ qo’anósto’ qo’a- nósto’ ‘mica’ The etymology on this one is super interesting (well, at least to me)—it appears to be an atomic root nósto’ specifically for the referent at first. Etymologically, though, this is ultimately related to, and kind of a doublet o...

I've decided to participate in the CBB Lexember as well, but I'll just post words for our ZBB one on here. Lexember 2 & 3 & 4 & 5: záat [ˈzoːat] "what one goes through"; a personal season, a specific period or movement in one's life or that of a group; passive participle of záa...

In unrelated news, I was made aware of this apparently annual conlanging community census , which I completed in a bored 15 minutes. I was going to ignore its pleas for sharing, but it's conlang media question did not accept bulletin boards as an option, so I now highly recommend anyone with a spar...

Looks good to me! I guess in the long run, such a system might be eroded or interpreted in a different manner, if the Nom-Acc distinction isn't supported by other parts of the grammar. Yeah, it could be unstable. But it does have some further support: 1. Relative clauses are formed with attributive...

Msérsca has a double function as both a personal language and that of a conculture, so I may further a bit of both with this week's theme. Let's start with the latter, since I haven't done much for it in a long time. The speakers of Msérsca have a god, Drasonis or perhaps Zassonis in later speech, w...

Thank you guys for the replies. So I'm imagining something like this: *prus apple.NOM and *prusso apple-ACC became *prus and *pruss, then final geminates were eliminated, making them identical as prus . But following the topic marker - (V) n(a) , the geminate and final vowel (or perhaps what could b...

Is it plausible that a language might have nominative and accusative collapse into a direct case, but then have a not-always-obligatory demonstrative or topic marker that preserves the distinction?

Huh. In Brave it continues to give me the same error and the browser says the site isn't secure, but Chrome has no trouble with it. Thanks!

Forgive me if this has been addressed elsewhere, but is there any hope for getting the preserved incatena.org board to show up again? It still throws a Dreamhost error page.

As far as errors on this site are concerned, I thankfully haven't noticed any. Everything loads pretty fast for me.

Just had a great example of this. At this stage of Msérsca's development, I have some grasp of what its ancestor c. 1000-2000 years prior would have sounded like, and I've gotten pretty good at "justifying" whatever new coinage or discovery I have by thinking through the diachronics at the...

I'm tinkering once again with how Msérsca handles attributive verbs, of which adjectives are a subtype. Adjectives can be thought of as acting like verbs predicatively and nouns attributively. When modifying a noun, adjectives show case concord with the noun. There is an additional quirk to this, th...

OK, here's a way we can put this all together: December 1st-7th: Culture and the Unusual Words for highly specific things that may not lend themselves to 1:1 translation. Does your conculture worship a pantheon? Do the people wear a hat shaped like a sacred plant on the 23rd day of the 8th month? At...