Zompist Bboard Again

forcing myself to only create a few new roots every day is very hard but i think it's helping with the burnout! i've been slowly but steadily working through my list of semantic concepts i want to create distinct basic roots for in the proto-language, and designing both the root and the proto-logogr...

Two big accomplishments so far in the new year: I've been successfully restraining myself to doing only a little bit a day instead of long exhausting bouts of hyperfocus, and I've realized that fighting my own aesthetic preferences for the sake of avoiding being "too european" was actually...

Maybe this will spark some ideas: typically the state cult in a european polytheistic society is going to revolve around that city-state or tribe's patron god anyway. it's not a bug but a feature that each group of people has their own set of gods. clashes between states/tribes were also seen as cla...

Lexicon ben [bɛːn] n.f. “woman”. pl bin [biːn]. < CBr *ben < PC *benā gour [gʷwɔːh] n.m. “man”. pl gwyr [gʷwɪʂ]. < CBr *gwur < PC *wiros edhyn [ˈɛː.ðən] n.m.“bird”. pl idhyn [ˈi.ðən]. < CBr *edn < PC *ɸetnos ioanc [jɔ.ˈwaŋk] adj. “young”. < CBr *jowank < PC *jowankos glas [glaːs] adj. “blue”. < CBr...

Syntax: Basic sentences are VSO. Determiners come before the noun; adjectives come after. Gweilid bhen ioanc n-edhyn nglas. [gweɪ.ˈliːd βɛːn jɔ.ˈwaŋk ˈnɛː.ðən ŋglas] see.3p.pres.ind woman.nom.fem young bird.acc.masc blue A young woman sees a blue bird. Ni gwel ar edhyn ar mmen. [niː gwɛːl aɾ ˈɛː.ðə...

Noun Paradigms: Old Dersite retains two cases, nominative (subjective) and accusative (objective). There are two noun classes, which follow the typical Indo-European masculine/feminine gender division. The dual has been merged with the plural, which is indicated by ablaut. On a basic level stressed...

Introduction: Old Dersite is a posteriori derived from Common Brittonic, and thus related to Welsh and Breton. (It's "Old" Dersite because my intention is for this iteration of the language to be eventually be a liturgical and literary language contrasted with a more modern spoken form—bu...

! what a cool source, thank you!

in your experience am i accurate in thinking that suppletive be-forms tend to happen most frequently on the third person?

I'm fascinated that the ːʔ seems odd! It feels like the most natural way of simplifying the VhhV cluster to me (in a two step process, where I think the order is probably Vh > Vː, VːhV > VːʔV), but I'm suddenly wondering if that has anything to do with the fact that my dialect of English is one that...

All of this seems reasonable (with the possible exception of hh→ːʔ). The current phonotactics are such that if an /hh/ dropped entirely it would create a vowel hiatus—the sample word I was working with is tih-hik "close to the speaker" + (stative) > tiːʔik "this" —which the stop...

I'm working on mangling some morphological boundaries and currently have the following system for getting rid of /h/: Ph > Pʰ | stops become aspirated Nh > Nː | nasals become geminated (complete assimilation) hh > ːʔ | second h becomes a glottal stop; first h vanishes, vowel before takes compensator...

for naming language, you can avoid any commitment and use a name generator - there are many on the web - or just use your imagination... Yes, perhaps I could use my imagination to come up with a funky li'l vowel inventory and rules for using it, so that the names I come up with have a cohesive aest...

a fixist vision of conlanging that places it firmly under the tutelage of linguistics... it has to be said that using linguistics for conlanging cannot produce another vision of things... a bit like a snake dying its own tail... i'm not certain a naming language for a legend of zelda/homestuck cros...

Which height is dominant? Are vowels other than /ɛ ɔ i u/ neutral? Since it's apparently a height-based harmony, I'd expect /ʉ a/ and maybe /ɪ/ to also be affected by it. [ɛ ɔ] (the low versions) are the default realizations of the E and O phonemes, and become [ i u] when the [+high] feature is add...

Speaking of inspiration from Finnish, I'm playing around with vowel harmony in one project. What I'm currently thinking is a vowel inventory of: <ı, y, i, u, e, o, a> [ɪ, ʉ, i, u, ɛ, ɔ, a~ə] front central back high i <i> ʉ <y> u <u> mid-high ɪ <ı> mid-low ɛ <e> ə <a> ɔ <o> low a <a> where /e/ and /o...

update it has been ten straight hours of hyperfocusing and i have more or less satisfactorily worked out how the consonant mutations interface with the cases. time to mangle some vowels

Sick and miserable today so I'm breaking out my ideas for an a posteriori Brittonic language, meant to be vaguely recognizable as a sister to Welsh. I'm currently considering diverging a little further back than I'd originally planned, before the stress change + apocope in late Common Brittonic, and...

i sat down last night and forced myself to algorithmically generate a small initial lexicon that is, deliberately, phonotactically ugly as hell, no tinkering with sound changes allowed yet. so far i have managed to avoid getting distracted until 3am by fiddling with the phonotactics and instead got ...

usually the process goes phonology > come up with an initial lexicon > ...oh god i forgot i hate doing initial lexicon > tinker with phonotactics for three months > never get around to syntax starting with something randomly generated might do the trick if i'm very strict with myself, thanks for the...