Zompist Bboard Again

Based specifically on vowel height and quality, no example immediately comes to mind. However, I do know off the top of my head that Cheyenne developed tones based on the length of its vowels while being previously toneless. I briefly discuss this on page 13 of my Fiat Lingua article, where I cite ...

(Not to interrupt the other ongoing conversations...) Among other things, I have just finished reading Children of Time and Elder Race by Adrian Tchaikovsky, which are both works of science fiction (although the latter wears the trappings of fantasy). Children of Time alternates between the perspect...

I apologize in advance for the length of what follows. I posted a (slightly different) version of this this information on the CBB at the end of last year (in this thread ), but I am afraid that I have done little with it since, although I hope to pick it up again. At the time, I intended to post in...

let's be more pragmatic: who among the conlangers has voluntarily studied ancient Greek... (not me...) In addition to the folks who posted above, William Annis is a conlanger (and former co-host of the Conlangery podcast), who has spent a great deal of time studying Ancient Greek, and even created ...

Yes, it is. Thank you! (Nose-to-stomach? Intriguing. I can see the function of a nose-to-lungs tube, but what is the medical purpose of a nose-to-stomach tube?) I had a bowel obstruction: my intestine was blocked about where my small intestine joined my large intestine, causing pressure as everythi...

(Duplicate post; see below.)

Going back to an earlier question: 1) Can you talk with tubes in your nose? 2) If the answer is "yes", how would the voice/accent of someone talking with tubes in their noses sound different? I had a nasogastric tube (running into my nose and down my throat to my stomach) for five days whe...

My parents’ house is in the zone of totality, so my wife and I drove up to spend a few days with them, and several other friends and relatives gathered there as well. We had a excellent view of the eclipse from their front yard, and it was extremely impressive.

Update: The container ship was apparently able to send out a mayday a few minutes before hitting the bridge, which allowed the transportation authorities to block new traffic from entering the bridge prior to the impact (I presume by bringing automated barriers down in the incoming lanes). The only ...

Does anyone here know anyone affected by that bridge collapse? (I assume that you are talking about the collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore.) I live about an hour and half drive away, and my wife and I have driven across the bridge in question in the past, but I do not know anyone...

Well it's been a while, but I wanted to thank everyone who recommended books in this thread. I also wanted to share a resource that I've come across. Tales of Times Forgotten is a blog by a history student, who often touches on how people in ancient cultures viewed the world. A couple of specific e...

I think that may be precisely the fact that ich-Laut can be found as a phone, but not a phoneme, in English, that makes it difficult for English-speakers to distinguish and pronounce, whereas ach-Laut is heard as a distinctively different (and, for most, non-English) sound, and thus one that can be ...

Thank you for the clarification! I thought that this was the case, but I wanted to make sure, in case you had changed your mind since the earlier post.

Does this verb system still include the preverbs that you described earlier? I was rereading your description of them, and found it extremely interesting.

I found a note today that I made at the end of last year, about making the interrogative particle má in Chusole, which was originally conceived as sentence-final only, a mobile one, so I came up with a set of examples: [Kele] Tioluni bigyke má? kele Tiolu-ni bi-gy-ke má 2S.FRML Toilu-ALL go-PST-2S.F...

(I can also mention that in South Africa it’s called ‘varsity’, which is a word I’ve rarely heard elsewhere.) We have the word in the US, but it means the main team representing a college or high school in competition. I had to look it up— I just knew it was associated with sports. Many high school...

I wanted to go back up-thread and take a moment to answer Torco’s question about the difference between “community colleges,” “colleges,” and “universities” in the United States; in my experience, these are fairly distinct categories (albeit somewhat fuzzy at the edges). (I should state up front tha...

@masako: Thank you in return for your kind words; they mean a lot to me.

I should say more generally that I have always been impressed by your conlanging (I re-read the Kala grammar a while back) and especially the depth and breadth of your conscripts (particularly Omyatloko, which is a project I find flabbergasting); my own meager efforts in that direction have been lar...

Thank you for sharing this; I have read the old document on Moya, but it's been a little while. I have always found Moya to be an interesting script; at first glance, many of the characters seem difficult to tell apart, but when looking at the examples, I was able to parse the script without much di...