Zompist Bboard Again

This old junk laptop survived me replacing the RAM and doing some internal spill clean-up on my own. I was not confident that would be the case. I'm making progress on this fiction draft, and raising my weekly word quota again. I've gotten bogged down a few times but I'm finding tricks to keep the m...

I was falling asleep a few nights ago thinking vaguely about a language register indicated mostly through phonetic shifts. Social dynamics indicated by more voiced consonants, rounded vowels, rising tones, palatalization, etc., not noticeable within a social grouping but adopted to demonstrate relat...

I really think it is: I find it helps me to come up with more minor cultural details, to come up with better ideas for character and place names, and to add more unique flavour to dialogue (transferring expressions, calquing for things that either aren't in our world, or for which they certainly wo...

I did some soul-searching on whether it's worth developing some conlangs beyond what would appear in the narrative fiction they are created for, and whether my desire to do so is sometimes an excuse to procrastinate on the more important work of continuing the drafts. My actual accomplishment today ...

Or anywhere else that suits your fancy, thus terrorizing neighborhood pets for days to come? Not just pets. In addition to the usual signs about fines and starting fires, I saw a few saying "Veterans live in this neighborhood. Please be considerate." Spoiler: The family behind me isn't.

A search for something unrelated brought me to a relic of childhood: my first attempt at making up non-English vocabulary. It was just a naming language for some story I had in mind back then, a list of words clustered around a few specific topics. By now it's largely free of context, which for me m...

Contradictory Feelings: I keep coming back to this forum and writing replies to threads, but then changing my mind and erasing the drafts. I am very happy to know a community exists for this hobby, and I hope it will encourage me to learn from you and improve my own projects. Self-doubt and perfecti...

Linguoboy wrote: ↑Sun Feb 07, 2021 5:43 am Which sounds longer to you: “half an hour” or “thirty minutes”?

"Half an hour", for prompting me to think in longer time periods.
Although I could see someone saying the opposite, for thirty is more units of anything than one-half.

Last night's accomplishment was working out the new alignment and the cases I would need for this renovation project, and most of those specific particles. I remember that I was very excited at having a new direction. Unfortunately I was writing my notes at the time my sleeping medications took effe...

Very small things, but I dug up a short reference grammar for a language I started and shelved two years ago. I had some fragments preserved in the story outline, but now I have some record of what I wanted to do with it. Therefore it is time to stay up far too late on a work night reorganizing and ...

Welcome! I believe the custom is to offer you pickles and tea. No, I don't have any idea why. That is far more understandable than being offered squirrel cookies by a Mead Moose, as is the custom in another part of the internet I frequent. I suppose the other happy thing is that tomorrow is my firs...

I discovered this forum! I've been making conlangs of varying sizes for years, but mainly as an amateur hobby, for use in fictional settings. It did not occur to me to look for a community of people that did the same, and developed them to the degree I see here. I look forward to learning and meetin...