Zompist Bboard Again

I must say I really like your money!

I'd like to write a series of short vignette, small chunks of conworlding or little stories for Uttes/Yttes (the SF setting I'm toying with). I outlined a few of these and I'm not unhappy with them so far.

money does not smell, but what I would give to breathe yours...

Reached $13 on my Patreon! Finally the website pays for itself!

Pedant wrote: ↑Fri Jul 09, 2021 10:29 pm Reached $13 on my Patreon! Finally the website pays for itself!

kudos!

I've been lexicon-polishing lately, specifically the names of birds -- a few weeks ago I had a loaner cat for a bit, and his mournful yet hope-filled meeps out the window at the park across the street were, frankly, inspirational. I had figured out there were about 120-odd 'etic' glosses of waterfowl and shorebirds, which was more than I planned to bite off. And the ducks, man, the ducks. I say this as a semi-reformed twitcher, the lazy kind that liked to look at birds in the water because they're big and easy to spot.

Way back when, I was into RPGing in Glorantha/Runequest, notorious for including intelligent tool-using ducks as NPCs and potential PCs. IIRC, in Gloranthan mythopoeia, the ducks declined to join in the battle against Chaos and so were cursed by Yelm, the sun/sky god, and banished from his realm (lost the ability to fly, became bitter, vicious little bastards with chips on their wings arms). Let me tell you, after trying to gin up a folk taxonomy for their this-world brethren, those Gloranthan ducks got off lightly. ASSHOLES.

Back to the Pseudo-Misihase verbioids, thank you. How to implant the morphological richness of Tungusic onto the combinatorial perplexities of Japonic (or is it vice versa?) ? -- way better for my mental health.

Jotted down the samples of Ryukuan words and place names that were in the July 2021 issue of Military History in case it helps anyones' work:

Hokuzan (kingdom),
...ruled from Nakijin Castle

Chuzan (kingdom),
...ruled from Shuri Castle

Nanzan (kingdom),
...ruled from Ozato Castle

more castles & place names:
[spoiler]Uraso
Mie
Yarazamori
Zakimi
Katsuren
Nakagusuku

Unten Harbor
Motobu Penninsula
Naha Port
Taihei Bridge
Tairabashi
Ryufuku-ji Temple
Yomitan

Toshima
Oshima
Tokunoshima
Amani Islands
[/spoiler]

the Sanshikan = the Council of Three

gasuku = stone castles (arrayed in a row or line)

I'm thinking of putting out a sample of the dictionary of my 'Pseudo-Misihase' conlang (a posteriori Tungusic) -- I saw that Lexique Pro lets you output a compressed self-installing file that's easy to share. Maybe in a few days I'll post it on the forum and see what people think. It's more of an advertisement of Lexique than my conlang, really -- I like it, and wonder if other people might not enjoy it too. So today I tested that feature a bit and started cleaning up a selection of vocabulary to use.

I now have a signature! Partly because I like to advertise my work, but mostly because it was getting increasingly inconvenient trying to find all my threads as they go further back in board history.

I found a bug in my gloss converter and fixed it. It used to treat contour tone letters as separate instead of composed causing the columns to go out of line.

Just got back from a short vacation (I picked up a grammar of Basque and a few new dictionaries!) -- and I am no longer sleep deprived (no I'm not entirely sure what I was on about in my previous posts either)! And I got some work done on my lexicon and conculture's metaphors. Feeling good.

Finished this:

It's like Esperanto, but naturalistic?

doctor shark wrote: ↑Fri Jul 16, 2021 4:59 pm Finished this:

This looks fantastic!

i got a little bit of work done on a simplified model of my two-moon system, at least figuring out what their phases would be given various sun placements (that is, where is the sun when the two moons are in alignment: are they full moons? new moons? half-moons? etc.; and from this, what are their phases during the rest of the lunar cycle). next steps are:

• deciding which version i like best (which will probably just be "whatever looks the most dramatic")
• figuring out where they appear in the sky in relation to each other during their lunar cycle, and what time of day they each appear in the sky
• deciding how all of this affects the calendar system

i found some site that essentially simulates this for earth and our moon, but if anyone has any resources for figuring it out with custom moons/distances/etc. i'd appreciate it!

doctor shark wrote: ↑Fri Jul 16, 2021 4:59 pm Finished this:

Just wanted to add the the chorus of appreciation -- I really like these! And concurrency in general, i guess. Do I see correctly that different denominations of banknote are of different dimensions? Unusual nowadays, but another nice touch

Rounin Ryuuji wrote: ↑Fri Jul 16, 2021 5:59 pm It's like Esperanto, but naturalistic?

It's more a personal Romance-flavored artlang I've been working on for the past... uh, 11-12 years? (Actually longer, though the first version's notes got destroyed when a computer when splut... so I restarted largely from scratch in 2010.)

Emily wrote: ↑Fri Jul 16, 2021 6:02 pm This looks fantastic!

Merți!

fusijui wrote: ↑Fri Jul 16, 2021 10:58 pm Just wanted to add the the chorus of appreciation -- I really like these! And concurrency in general, i guess. Do I see correctly that different denominations of banknote are of different dimensions? Unusual nowadays, but another nice touch

Thanks! I would joke that some of my conlang design is for the purpose of making pretty money... which actually is somewhat true, but more on that later. But, indeed, the denominations do increase in size with increasing value: each higher denomination is 3 mm wider and 7 mm longer. Many of the currencies I've used do have increasing sizes (eg. the euro and the pound sterling), though some currencies also do a different approach of only increasing the length with increasing value.

I also like seeing other people's concurrencies, so I'd love to see more! (Perhaps unsurprisingly, I'm very much a coin and banknote collector...)

The main currencies I can think of where sizes are invariant with denomination are the Canadian and US dollars, the Hungarian forint, and some older varieties of Mexican peso. Russian rubles are unusual in that they have a "slab" system: 10-500 ruble notes are of one size, and 1000+ ruble notes are of a different (but larger) size.

I did some soul-searching on whether it's worth developing some conlangs beyond what would appear in the narrative fiction they are created for, and whether my desire to do so is sometimes an excuse to procrastinate on the more important work of continuing the drafts.

My actual accomplishment today was giving the orcs of this setting five ranks of animacy in their language, which I can easily justify because those convey something important about their beliefs. I started with broad categories and now I'm picking out specific exceptions based on semantic criteria.
I just deleted something about classifying activities, because I hope there is a more appealing option that what I was just considering.

Gryphonic wrote: ↑Sun Jul 18, 2021 11:10 pm I did some soul-searching on whether it's worth developing some conlangs beyond what would appear in the narrative fiction they are created for,

I really think it is: I find it helps me to come up with more minor cultural details, to come up with better ideas for character and place names, and to add more unique flavour to dialogue (transferring expressions, calquing for things that either aren't in our world, or for which they certainly wouldn't use the same names — I often replace genericised proper names in English with terms calqued from an internal language, like changing a toasted sandwich into stacktoast, or a normal one to a breadstack).

...and whether my desire to do so is sometimes an excuse to procrastinate on the more important work of continuing the drafts.

In my mind, it's a part of the creative process.

My actual accomplishment today was giving the orcs of this setting five ranks of animacy in their language, which I can easily justify because those convey something important about their beliefs. I started with broad categories and now I'm picking out specific exceptions based on semantic criteria.
I just deleted something about classifying activities, because I hope there is a more appealing option that what I was just considering.

This is very nice. Going on the above, you could also give the "orcs" a different name, and further differentiate them from Tolkien and Dungeons and Dragons, and everything else with orcs, by building the language more (if you want to, of course).

I also have a sort-of accomplishment — I finished a redraught of an old work of fiction, that I think both improved it enormously, and brought it to better match how I now conceive the world. It's also quite surreal, and I wonder how well it really fits in overall, but I always doubt my own fiction. It's about 20,000 words, so I suppose it's a long short story or novelette, or a rather short novella. It also, incidentally, resulted in my creating a word for "hell" in the internal language (下死原 Shita Insis, literally "Lower Death Meadow"), though it isn't a fire-and-brimstone hell, or a place of tournament, the overall realm of the dead simply being 死原 Insis, which doesn't have any sort of negative connotation internally, and it's at least strongly implied that the inhabitants of the main part of the fictitious world (or at least most of them) aren't aware of its existence.

As is to be expected, it's flowery, and full of rather long and convoluted sentences.

Rounin Ryuuji wrote: ↑Sun Jul 18, 2021 11:54 pm I really think it is: I find it helps me to come up with more minor cultural details, to come up with better ideas for character and place names, and to add more unique flavour to dialogue (transferring expressions, calquing for things that either aren't in our world, or for which they certainly wouldn't use the same names — I often replace genericised proper names in English with terms calqued from an internal language, like changing a toasted sandwich into stacktoast, or a normal one to a breadstack).

I agree. I've enjoyed developing cultural information in the lexicon, but this is my decision to branch out into grammaticizing some of it as well. Thinking about how they define animacy did help to add detail and logical consistency to certain events and interactions.

This is very nice. Going on the above, you could also give the "orcs" a different name, and further differentiate them from Tolkien and Dungeons and Dragons, and everything else with orcs, by building the language more (if you want to, of course).

In the current version of the setting, the human term "orcs" has a faux derivation from initially mishearing torukshan, "forest person(s)", which is how they refer to themselves. -Shan is an unusual case of being equally applicable to individuals as well as people groups, at least when used as a form of address, implying that they do not see individual persons as possible to separate from their familial background.
I do have two less conventional fantasy settings, and even neighboring cultures within this one, but this is what happens to be on my mind lately.

I also have a sort-of accomplishment — I finished a redraught of an old work of fiction, that I think both improved it enormously, and brought it to better match how I now conceive the world. It's also quite surreal, and I wonder how well it really fits in overall, but I always doubt my own fiction. It's about 20,000 words, so I suppose it's a long short story or novelette, or a rather short novella. It also, incidentally, resulted in my creating a word for "hell" in the internal language (下死原 Shita Insis, literally "Lower Death Meadow"), though it isn't a fire-and-brimstone hell, or a place of tournament, the overall realm of the dead simply being 死原 Insis, which doesn't have any sort of negative connotation internally, and it's at least strongly implied that the inhabitants of the main part of the fictitious world (or at least most of them) aren't aware of its existence.

As is to be expected, it's flowery, and full of rather long and convoluted sentences.

I love seeing examples of colorful and poetic names! Is this conlang on this board at the moment? I apologize that I'm sometimes confused by which ones are part of connected settings for various members. I try to lurk and learn.

So far today I've added some food-related words while thinking about what food sources would be most available in different regions, and whether some may be more or less esteemed than others based on ease of access.

Gryphonic wrote: ↑Tue Jul 20, 2021 3:42 pm

I also have a sort-of accomplishment — I finished a redraught of an old work of fiction, that I think both improved it enormously, and brought it to better match how I now conceive the world. It's also quite surreal, and I wonder how well it really fits in overall, but I always doubt my own fiction. It's about 20,000 words, so I suppose it's a long short story or novelette, or a rather short novella. It also, incidentally, resulted in my creating a word for "hell" in the internal language (下死原 Shita Insis, literally "Lower Death Meadow"), though it isn't a fire-and-brimstone hell, or a place of tournament, the overall realm of the dead simply being 死原 Insis, which doesn't have any sort of negative connotation internally, and it's at least strongly implied that the inhabitants of the main part of the fictitious world (or at least most of them) aren't aware of its existence.

As is to be expected, it's flowery, and full of rather long and convoluted sentences.

I love seeing examples of colorful and poetic names! Is this conlang on this board at the moment? I apologize that I'm sometimes confused by which ones are part of connected settings for various members. I try to lurk and learn.

It sort-of is. I had a thread, but the development of the language has evolved kind-of beyond it, and the document in which I'm working on articulating everything is very incomplete. I haven't updated the thread in a while, or said much of anything about the world, so I shouldn't think people would know much about it.