Zompist Bboard Again

Cherokee has some three-syllable agreement markers, and plenty of one- and two-syllable verb roots.

Nice! -- this is really vivid.

With XeLaTeX (which texmaker appears to support ) you don't need to do anything special for font support, you can just use any font installed on your system. Which in particular means you can use the SIL fonts, Charis or Gentium, with basically no hassle, and those both have very nice IPA characters...

It's interesting that on Earth we've got precedent for bony creatures losing limbs, but not gaining them. If that's not a coincidence -- maybe it really is harder to make your body plan more complicated once you've got a skeleton? -- then centaurs would need to be a very archaic branch of the family...

New chapter! Talks about some general points of morphosyntax, including the agreement markers, which are the same on both nouns and verbs.

Yup! LaTeX with Stone Sans Phonetic as the IPA font. I'm actually really proud of that last part -- it's a GORGEOUS font, best IPA font ever designed in my opinion, but it's in a weird-ass pre-Unicode encoding, and I had to write a bunch of code to get the right characters at the right codepoints.

You could add conditioned variation to this if you wanted. But unconditional reduction-with-mergers in unstressed syllables is totally a thing that happens in natural languages, and merging "adjacent" vowels like you have is the way it usually works. (Check out Catalan for another example ...

Originally I'd wanted the mixed vowels to come from assimilation, but as I put the morphology together I've ended up with few or no places where it feels right to put two vowels together -- and so basically no assimilation. So in fact mostly now they occur in roots. I'm not 100% thrilled with this.

More writeup soon, but skipping ahead a bit, one feature I'm still working out is verb chaining. I want it to be quite common for a single clause to have more than one finite verb in it, and I have in mind at least these three ways of doing that: Verb serialization: This should be pretty productive ...

Username: Name: Leah Other nicknames (including good stories, if you have any): Birthplace: Princeton, NJ Place of residence: Medford, MA Any particular reason you live there now? The genderqueer folk dancing cabal Occupation: Editor Pets (+5 extra credit if you provide photographic evidence): Two c...

I'm not super attached to the name, though. The grammar's an idea I've been iterating on for a LONG time, but without a ton of worldbuilding behind it. The name I pulled out of a hat when I started this writeup.

Definite article's not a bad idea — that would make it Kalee

Welp. Guess I'll be changing that?

The way I look at it, there are two kinds of reference grammar. There are reference grammars designed for language learners, and there are reference grammars that are written by linguists for other linguists as the end result of a bunch of years of fieldwork. I associate long lists of declension tab...

Kala (edit: now Kalathi) is my One True Conlang that I've had on the back burner for years. I'm working on a PDF grammar sketch -- I'll post here as I update it. (Currently: just a short chapter on phonology.)