Zompist Bboard Again

I posted the fourth scene/installment of my serialized story on Patreon. Not conlanging but I've basically been worldbuilding on the fly as I write it so it's been fun for that. The hardest part has been not talking about it elsewhere.

With the Adriatic Sea as the head of a baby crocodile riding on the main crocodile's back? (I guess crocodiles probably don't do that in real life.) Alligators do. So do gharials, so I'm pretty sure crocodiles do. Crocodiles are actually very good parents and often act as safe spots for their young...

Curiously, these English speakers online aren't doing that for "dumb" and "idiot", which they happily use all the time, even though these insults also have ableist origins. You say that, but I have seen leftist disability advocates claiming that words like 'dumb', 'lame', 'insan...

Raphael wrote: ↑Fri Jan 22, 2021 8:52 am Why is "mouth breather" used as an insult? It strikes me as rather mean to people who have a cold.

Because many people find the sound of (obvious) mouth breathing either gross or creepy, and also a lot of our insults are ableist in some way.

From the BBC: Oxygen supplies 'under extreme pressure' Funnily enough, I can read that four ways: - Supplies of oxygen are being stretched to the limit - Supplies of oxygen are stored at high PSI - The Oxygen channel can supply programming despite crunches/tight deadlines - Oxygen, the gas, can pro...

Now, if you want to copy the same for /t/, then you could do t > D > 0. But if your conlang is very similar to Japanese, you wouldn't have any [ti], only [ts\i]... :| It's based somewhat on Old Japanese, which might not have had [ts\] or [ts] as allophones of /t/ yet : D so it's not a concern.

I'd like to do a sanity check on a conworld (or should it meta-conworld) idea I had. Here it is: ... How would you feel about such a setting? Does that make sense? Or is it so much like Larry Niven and Ursula Le Guin as to be uninteresting? Or do you think the plot of Attack of the 50 foot woman ma...

... i think this can be a sign of a sound change that got mixed with a grammatical substitution ... e.g. maybe /k/ only lenited in a few environments, but got generalized to others, and at the same time the lack of lenition also got generalized to environments in which it had originally occurred. t...

I know Pickles and Tea was firmly entrenched as The Greeting of the board when I joined, which might have been as early as 2004, but might have been closer to 2005 or -06, my junior or senior years of high school. (Also that it was better than the alternative, tickles and pee.)

Linguistcat: Huh? What exactly were the sound changes for /k/? I am wondering if he meant Ryukyuan. Some of those languages had cool stuff happen with *k. I've had trouble explaining so I'm just going to use examples. This is Standard Japanese and well attested as occurring in the Muromachi period,...

Japanese had a lot of /k/s disappear at one point of its development, especially before /i u/ (tho /k/s were reinserted before /u/s in most dialects, or some verbs and adjectives had forms with a /k/ and forms with it dropped). Question: could there be a similar sound change for /t/ in some language...

Am I the only person in the world who loves to read, but hardly ever re-reads anything? And when I do re-read stuff, it's usually essays, blog posts, or other non-fiction - I'm not sure when was the last time I re-read a work of fiction. But when I read what other people who love reading have to sa...

Japanese has been using particles to mark syntactic function from the oldest attested texts, though which particles are used, and for what purpose, have changed over the centuries. Its ancestrally quadrigrade ( yodan ), modern quintigrade ( godan ), verbs have survived a long time, even when the bi...

the semantic stereotype of "sushi" in Japan is sashimi, rice with the meat on top That's called nigirizushi. Sashimi is the meat itself. (You can also have other things besides meat on top.) In Japanese, I bet. I was using an English meaning there, in which for some or many speakers, &quo...

I know this happens with loans from Japanese. Katana in Japanese just means sword; In English, it means specifically the single bladed, curved sword from Japan. Anime, itself a loan from English, means any animation in Japan, but in English, anime of course means Japanese animation, or maybe animati...

Ah, is yours also Japonic, or simply a similar reconstruction of some other family? It's Japonic but heavily influenced by pronunciations from Middle Chinese if not as many borrowings. And it's supposed to be spoken in a near alternate history of the real world (or irl if you believe youkai exist)....

This is interesting to me. I'm working on a project that has some similar design principles, some very different or even opposite design principles, starting from basically the same reconstructions, but for different reasons. So I'd love to see where this goes and it looks like you're already puttin...

Travis B. wrote: ↑Wed Dec 23, 2020 12:20 pm I would go with "rolling".

I agree. That was the first thing that came to mind.

A comma would have easily saved a lot of confusion.

Not much, but I have been reconsidering the connection between my conlang Nyango, Old Japanese and Middle Chinese. Also, greetings and time words but I always seem to get stuck on those.