Zompist Bboard Again

Miscellaneous Additions Grammaticalized Roots So, I should clarify that just because Katapharteo only has one type of syntactic relation , that doesn't mean it only has one grammatical rule . Just as English uses words which are syntactically prepositions, or Japanese uses words which are syntactic...

Would kata xthóamske cheanteoo t'urpo language.00 difficult(y).10 strange.10 very.20 mean "a very difficult and very strange language"? And how is xthóamske parsed? I count two preinitials in front of the second syllable... kata xthóamske cheanteoo t'urpo would mean "a difficult and ...

Are there third person pronouns, or some other way of referring back to a word/phrase earlier in the discourse other than by the adjunct relation? At present, no, but that's just because I haven't gotten around to them yet. I'm hoping to find some other, slightly more interesting solution to the pr...

I've had this idea for a non-naturalistic, engineered language floating around in my head for a while, and I recently thought it was time to finally hammer out some details. I've never really attempted an engelang before, and I don't see too many of them posted around here, so this should be a fun e...

The argument for Afroasiatic is that while it is sorely lacking on reconstructable cognates, the morphological similarities amongst the languages within it are too striking to be mere coincidence. Do you know of any good reference on these similarities? I'm assuming you're referring to the trilater...

Afroasiatic is obviously widely accepted as a family, and I want to be clear that I'm not trying to peddle any crackpottery here. I'm a completely novice when it comes to the AA family, so I have no desire to butt against established scholarship. However, as a novice , there are a lot of things abou...

I keep hearing that head-initial languages are have a preference for prefixes, while head-final languages have a preference for suffixes, and while this makes some sense to me from a synchronic perspective, I just don't get how it works out diachronically. Like, suppose you have a strictly head-fina...

I'm beginning to feel that all my conlangs are ripoffs of Burushaski. Well, not really, but Burushaski does contain a really implausibly high number of my favorite features. Honestly I'm surprised it doesn't get more discussion here, it's exactly the sort of language (isolate, typologically unusual,...

I've seen exactly one thing from the gamestop thing that gives me hope, and it's the strengthening of the 'fuck wall street' thing. who knows, maybe in a couple more millenia people will come to see "the economy" is bullshit. Many people (mostly leftists) already see "the economy&quo...

Ok so I had this half-baked idea for a conworld recently. In this world, reincarnation exists, and its behavior is governed by an enormous cosmic cycle. This cycle has two phases, each lasting millions, or possibly billions, of years. The first phase is called the waning soul phase . At the beginnin...

Has anyone else been under the impression that what is written in Rōmaji as ⟨ei⟩, e.g. in sensei , corresponded to /ei/ rather than to /eː/? I have no idea what vowel "/eː/" is supposed to be. ? Japanese has a five vowel system /i u e o a/ plus vowel length. So /eː/ is the long counterpar...

Anyone here have any thoughts on this whole GameStop stock business? I'm finding the whole thing quite entertaining

Man in Space wrote: ↑Mon Jan 25, 2021 7:18 pm My OCD seems to be coming back in grand fashion. Days like these will happen. I just hope it’s the OCD and not something with more gravitas.

As someone with OCD myself, I feel for you and hope you're alright.

I am thinking about trying to (re)learn how to program. In highschool I took programing classes for a couple years, where I learned C++, and I studied python on my own a bit around the same time. I've forgotten absolutely all of it though. If I did want to pick it back up again, does anyone have any...

Just heard this very strange sentence in a youtube video. For context, this was a scripted video, not natural speech. The narrator was discussing this "iceberg" meme format , and said the following: "It's this image full of different hoaxes, theories, secrets, trivia, anything of the ...

Well this week has been truly awful. It started off with me failing to submit one of my grad school applications (for the program I was the most enthusiastic about), through a mixture of poor time management and a technical error (which I would have had plenty of time to resolve if I had managed my ...

Couple of confusing things here… the sample text has /j a/, but the phonemic inventory doesn’t. Also, I’d like to know, is stress predictable? (In both the protolanguage and its child.) Fixed, in addition to a few other typos. I wrote this at about 1:30 AM. Stress is not predictable in the proto-la...

unnamed phonology: /p t t(s)ʲ tˤ k/ /b d d(z)ʲ dˤ g/ /f s sʲ sˤ/ /m n~l nʲ~ʎ nˤ~ɫ/ /i o a/ /iː uː eː oː aː eu/ /ɛ̃ː ɔ̃ː ãː/ V́ V̅ V̀ V̰̅ V̰̀ Only stressed syllables contrast tone and length. Stress always falls on the first or second syllable; stressed initial syllables are always heavy. /n/ > [l] w...

Ares Land wrote: ↑Tue Dec 08, 2020 10:15 am

I like the look of this phonology a lot, impressionistically it strikes me as somewhere between Nahuatl and an Australian language.

What are the sound changes? Highly unfinished, such that I ended up filling in a lot of the details of the latter paradigm with "yeah, this seems about right". Which is why I didn't post them. But: stressed vowels round when /u/ (and maybe /o/?) follows in next syllable, front when /i/ fo...