WeepingElf wrote: ↑Wed Feb 15, 2023 11:09 amBut it turned out on the way that the book is also the most important source for that magnificent spreadsheet that Samuel McCabe (formerly known on the ZBB as TheGoatMan, later Goatface and yet later Morrígan) has put together, so when I have a question about a PIE antecedent of a Hesperic word, I can look it up there.
She now goes by as Samantha McCabe.
I agree that spreadsheet is just glorious. Why has no one published a proper dictionary like it anywhere recently?
WeepingElf wrote: ↑Wed Feb 15, 2023 11:09 amBut it turned out on the way that the book is also the most important source for that magnificent spreadsheet that Samuel McCabe (formerly known on the ZBB as TheGoatMan, later Goatface and yet later Morrígan) has put together, so when I have a question about a PIE antecedent of a Hesperic word, I can look it up there.
She now goes by as Samantha McCabe.
Good to know.
I agree that spreadsheet is just glorious. Why has no one published a proper dictionary like it anywhere recently?
I don't know. Pokorny's dictionary is more than sixty years old, based on an obsolete phonology (no laryngeals), and there is a broad consensus that it is in dire need of being replaced by a modern one. Yet, nobody finds the time to edit one. Of course, editing an etymological dictionary that meets the highest scholarly standards is quite a feat, and Sam's spreadsheet, while an excellent source for us conlangers, probably does not really meet such standards. It probably misses a lot of things. As a rule, scholarly work of this kind apparently is much harder than we amateurs imagine.
worked out a new and improved set of adjective declensions
now i'm thinking that, to indicate the newly distinct phoneme /ð/, later gothic speakers might press into service one of the "letters" that had no phonetic value and served only as numerals
reason: because, if I remember my Spanish and Ancient Egyptian, tia=aunt...and mat can easily be turned into ma'at=civilization, order, good manners, law.
I have come up with a draft for a Proto-Hesperic verb aspect system. So far, I had entertained the notion that Proto-Hesperic did not distinguish verb aspect - there was only a present and a preterite, as in Hittite. Now the new idea is that PH distinguished three aspects in the past tense, like "classic" PIE, with the same functions - imperfect, aorist, perfect - expressed with different means.
In PH, thus, there are no separate aorist and perfect stems, rather, everything is based on the same stem. The imperfect has the same form as in "classic" PIE. The aorist has the same form as the imperfect, but with the prefix *h°-. This prefix, consisting of quite evanescent phonemes, was lost in many Hesperic languages which thereby lost the aorist, but it survived as the "augment", a prefixed vowel matching the root vowel in quality, in Old Albic. The perfect is marked by the suffix *-tst-, which developed from a periphrastic formation *-tos steh2- and underwent different developments in the six branches of Hesperic, placed between the verb stem and the personal ending.
The various daughter languages underwent different developments. Classical Old Albic preserves the Proto-Hesperic system intact, but the synthetic perfect is already being replaced by a periphrastic perfect based on the descendant of *steh2- and the genitive of the verbal noun. The five continental branches mostly keep one of the three past tenses as a general past tense. Hercynian and Puranian choose the perfect; Padivian, the aorist; Durian, a form that looks like an imperfect but may have been an aorist since *h°- is lost here by regular sound change; I don't know yet about Alpianic, but it may have kept two or all three of the Proto-Hesperic past tenses. Most continental Hesperic languages also have a periphrastic perfect (and a pluperfect) formed with 'have' (expressed by different roots in the individual branches) and past participle. Some Hercynian and Puranian languages have later lost the preterite, using the perfect instead, and a double perfect ('have had X-ed') for the pluperfect.
All that is still pretty much work in progress and may change, though.
Zju wrote: ↑Tue Mar 07, 2023 2:50 pm
Have you fleshed out any paradigm?
Not yet. I shall do so within the next few days to see how well this works, especially how the interplay with the active-stative morphosyntactic alignment turns out.
my computer crashed so i figured out by hand what the word for "holiday" will be in modern gothic (too much of a pain in the ass to type ipa characters on my phone but it derives from a compound of gothic dauhts "feast" and dags "day")
Emily wrote: ↑Wed Mar 29, 2023 2:34 am
my computer crashed so i figured out by hand what the word for "holiday" will be in modern gothic (too much of a pain in the ass to type ipa characters on my phone but it derives from a compound of gothic dauhts "feast" and dags "day")
Do you retain the original feast or has it been replaced? I would think it would be good to replace since it would make it less transparent to modern speakers.
Emily wrote: ↑Wed Mar 29, 2023 2:34 am
my computer crashed so i figured out by hand what the word for "holiday" will be in modern gothic (too much of a pain in the ass to type ipa characters on my phone but it derives from a compound of gothic dauhts "feast" and dags "day")
Do you retain the original feast or has it been replaced? I would think it would be good to replace since it would make it less transparent to modern speakers.
hadn't thought about it yet but it looks like if i were to retain it it would end up being very similar to the word for "daughter" (including merging in most of the non-singular parts of the paradigm) so i may end up having them either drop it or compound it with something else
I just worked out a neat three-way alignment split: Pronouns and proper nouns use a nominative-accusative alignment, humans and other animates use a realis-irrealis split between nominative-accusative and ergative-absolutive, respectively, and inanimates use ergative-absolutive alignment.
conlangernoob wrote: ↑Wed Mar 29, 2023 3:34 pm
I just worked out a neat three-way alignment split: Pronouns and proper nouns use a nominative-accusative alignment, humans and other animates use a realis-irrealis split between nominative-accusative and ergative-absolutive, respectively, and inanimates use ergative-absolutive alignment.
This feels a little on the complex side, but stranger things have happened. I’d expect the realis–irrealis split to persist across all nominals, with one side having an animacy-based split and the other side having a consistent alignment. (This is the case in various different ways in e.g. Kuikúro and Burushaski, for example, though I’m not at my computer so can’t double-check my usual sources.)
WeepingElf wrote: ↑Sun Apr 16, 2023 6:05 am
It's apparently Porto, Portugal, but mirrored, see this image.
Thanks!
It is, in fact, a mirrored Porto; took the picture when I was there last year, and used it mostly for the fact that most of the border between Telemor and Ilia is a river border with numerous bridges along its length.
aka vampireshark
The other kind of doctor.
Perpetually in search of banknote subjects. Inquire within.
doctor shark wrote: ↑Sat Apr 22, 2023 12:49 pm
Remade some coats of arms for Telemor and its constituent members.
Impressive work. My main first impression is that the one on the top right looks a bit like the odd one out in the collection, as if it was done at a different time and in a different cultural context than the others.
so i figured out by hand what the word for "holiday" will be in modern gothic (too much of a pain in the ass to type ipa characters on my phone but it derives from a compound of gothic dauhts "feast" and dags "day")
