Zompist Bboard Again

Maybe Ryan is just speculating about what the particles of the Standard Model are made of. If so, that sounds a lot more reasonable to me. This particular post was about expanding the particle zoo in such a way that it would be unnoticeable unless you have a particle accelerator. But Tinellb does h...

I couldn't sleep last night because I was thinking about the Tinellbian version of the Standard Model of Particle Physics . Specifically, fleshing out the idea of having one or two fundamental particles that make up everything else. I think I have it. It's based on combinations of particles of ±⅙ an...

I still get a happy birthday email every year from the fiveminute.net forums. I haven’t posted there in decades.

Does anyone else confuse other English-speakers' can and can't ? Often other English speakers' can't sound to me like can because they elide the /t/ and have a longer vowel than my can't , where I pronounce the vowel as markedly short, and, except before a word starting with a vowel, I reduce the /...

Interesting convo today about a special subclass of "spelling pronunciations", specifically the ones you never speak aloud but only subvocalise in order to remember the proper spelling of a word. For instance, saying "Wednesday" in three syllables or pronouncing "parliament...

Rounin Ryuuji wrote: ↑Sun Sep 12, 2021 10:33 pm How are the words stressed?

Just trying to get through their day, I guess, same as the rest of us

Thanks to you all for your kind words.

Moose-tache wrote: ↑Sun Sep 12, 2021 8:50 am ... I think the different stroke widths are slightly distracting in your sample...

Oh, definitely. I wish I had some font designers from my conworld so I didn't have to do it .

My original script for High Lulani was semi-featural. All the nasals had a small straight line somewhere in them, all the alveolar sounds had a wedge shape, all the back vowels had a horizontal line... http://www.tinellb.com/images/Demotic_Lulani_sample.png Click the picture to make it larger [/size...

Supposedly Victoria has a merger of TRAP and DRESS before /l/. Can confirm. Born and raised in Melbourne by Victorian parents. I noticed that "~el" and "~al" were both [æl] when I started conlanging, before I had the linguistic terminology to describe it. And I thought it was un...

Thank-you for a very thorough analysis, Linguoboy.

Does anyone here speak Irish / Gaeilge? Jennifer Fallon's Rift Runners trilogy is set in a number of parallel universes. It uses the idea of doubles of the characters. Since it's set in Ireland, she uses the word eileféin to refer to this concept. I know it's not a real word, but what would be the m...

chris_notts wrote: ↑Sat Mar 28, 2020 7:18 pm Has anyone ever posted a sentence from their conlang into Google translate and see what language it guesses it to be?

The other fun thing to do is have Google's text-to-speech engine read it out in different accents / orthographies.

Next: cêuals /kæːˈɰʌɬ/ [kʰæːˈɰʌɬ] – dwarf (the mythical creature, not short humans) ka’u’ari /ˌkʰaʔʉˈʔaɽɨ/ ghost, fae – anything that can move through gingla , my term for different planes of existence, from ka’u to jump + -’a abstract nominaliser + -ri animate nominaliser . Edit: forgot the "...

Well, mass actually. What are the origins of the various imperial units of mass? The articles I have read are equally likely to say "an ounce is 1/16 of a pound" as "a pound is 16 ounces", so I want to know which one was first. How were they decided? They've been since defined in...

and you'd probably end up with effectively three genders: an indolent but sheltered gender of men (if men are expensive, you don't risk them in the fields!), a matriarchal, 'feminine' gender of women who have access to the men and have the babies, and a 'neuter' gender of female people without acce...

What makes base 5 more ‘universal’ than base 10? Surely if you want a universal base it would be better to go with 2, 3, 6 or 12? it seems that humans (and animals!) are able to distinguish, precisely, without computing, only numbers from 0 to 4... I don't know what they're called in the literature...

What are you having trouble with? It's just like decimal, except you can only count to 7 before needing another digit. I can imagine interesting interference from base 10 or even base 12. The numbers for 30 8 (=24 10 ) and 50 8 (=40 10 ) might be vulnerable to suppletion from base 10 languages, and...

Thanks, bradrn. I really like using other bases, and I tend to rush through explanations of things I'm too familiar with.

This video shows a couple of different ways to convert to other bases from decimal. I prefer the second way, repeatedly dividing by the new base, and reading back the remainders in reverse order.

What are you having trouble with? It's just like decimal, except you can only count to 7 before needing another digit. 1, 2, 3, ..., 6, 7, 10, 11, 12, ..., 16, 17, 20, 21, ..., 75, 76, 77, 100, 101.... 563 = 5*(8^2) + 6*(8^1) + 3*(8^0) => 5*64 + 6*8 + 3*0 = 371 Replace the 8s with whatever number yo...