Zompist Bboard Again

Travis B. wrote: ↑Fri Oct 10, 2025 9:16 pm I have bolded the section that looks like it is in a different language from the rest.

You are right.

Did the languages look different enough, or did the repeating words help?

rotting bones wrote: ↑Fri Oct 10, 2025 9:19 pm

Travis B. wrote: ↑Fri Oct 10, 2025 9:16 pm I have bolded the section that looks like it is in a different language from the rest.

You are right.

Did the languages look different enough, or did the repeating words help?

The languages looked distinctly different to me.

Travis B. wrote: ↑Fri Oct 10, 2025 9:20 pm The languages looked distinctly different to me.

Good to know.

evidentials question: for languages with evidentials that incude one for e.g. "i didn't witness it but it was reported to me/i heard about it/i read an article about it" etc., is it attested for there to be an option to pair the evidential itself with more detail about the source? e.g. if the evidential is "skalta" then "skalta newspaper" or "skalta my-buddy". or is that not really how they work

Emily wrote: ↑Sat Oct 11, 2025 5:29 pm evidentials question: for languages with evidentials that incude one for e.g. "i didn't witness it but it was reported to me/i heard about it/i read an article about it" etc., is it attested for there to be an option to pair the evidential itself with more detail about the source? e.g. if the evidential is "skalta" then "skalta newspaper" or "skalta my-buddy". or is that not really how they work

I strongly doubt it, but remind me to consult my sources tomorrow. (In any case you can always add an extra clause saying ‘my buddy told me’ or whatnot.)

Anybody come across base-48 number systems? I’m thinking mixed radix (12,4)

sasasha wrote: ↑Sat Oct 11, 2025 7:15 pmAnybody come across base-48 number systems? I’m thinking mixed radix (12,4)

Never heard of base-48 myself but sounds interesting. I have been experimenting a lot with base-12 and derivatives and it has certainly grown on me. What does the second column represent, ordinals perhaps? Also does the letter <ȹ> represent a labiodental stop or something else?

malloc wrote: ↑Sat Oct 11, 2025 10:02 pm

sasasha wrote: ↑Sat Oct 11, 2025 7:15 pmAnybody come across base-48 number systems? I’m thinking mixed radix (12,4)

Never heard of base-48 myself but sounds interesting. I have been experimenting a lot with base-12 and derivatives and it has certainly grown on me. What does the second column represent, ordinals perhaps? Also does the letter <ȹ> represent a labiodental stop or something else?

Yeah, it is interesting me in that it is kinda like an octal system combined with a duodecimal system (the way that base-60 is decimal combined with duodecimal), and also it has a kind of ternary form, too. With my music head on, I like that it can be divided into 16s, but there are three of them, and into 12s, but each one is composed of ‘triplets’.

The third column are numerals. They represent the strategies used in speech rather than place value logic. <ı> ʔe, <u> nu, <ɯ> di, <q> ga, <p> po, <ȹ> chu, <n> le, <o> represents a long vowel. <·> is a bit like a place value marker, but more accurately represents a word boundary. (Though one can write ‘chuu’ <ȹo·oo> if one wishes.)

I have a thought about the people that use this: whenever they make something in large quantites (say, bricks), they make two spares for every lee. Thus, if five people are to divide the quantity, they use them all and get ‘poʔe’ each. If it’s seven people, they discard one and get ‘gaʔe’ each. If eleven, they discard six, and get ‘diʔe’ each. The other fractions below 12 lead to two (the spares) being discarded; if a larger non-factor number of people want to divide it they have no special strategy, but they always have two bricks to play with to help, at least. The discarded commodities are supposed to go to the state, where they build up spare lee to be used in times of scarcity. (Or they go back to the manufacturer. Or ‘disappear’...)

Thus, while lee generally doesn’t combine, i.e. 51 is ‘lee dii’, which goes right up to 2,303 ‘dichu ponu lee dichu ponu’, there are two exceptions:

49	leʔe	nı
50	lenu	nu

Also, ‘always coming as five’ is an idiom meaning ‘miserly, efficient to the point of meanness’, while ‘coming as eleven’ means ‘inefficient, disorded, profligate; generous’

Emily wrote: ↑Sat Oct 11, 2025 5:29 pmevidentials question: for languages with evidentials that incude one for e.g. "i didn't witness it but it was reported to me/i heard about it/i read an article about it" etc., is it attested for there to be an option to pair the evidential itself with more detail about the source? e.g. if the evidential is "skalta" then "skalta newspaper" or "skalta my-buddy". or is that not really how they work

Not grammatically, but of course it may be part of the discours. As for how evidentiality works, the Wikipedia page is a nice primer.

Note that with regards to conlanging, "how it works" refers to known human languages, and you can do whatever you want.


JAL

jal wrote: ↑Mon Oct 13, 2025 4:23 am

Emily wrote: ↑Sat Oct 11, 2025 5:29 pmevidentials question: for languages with evidentials that incude one for e.g. "i didn't witness it but it was reported to me/i heard about it/i read an article about it" etc., is it attested for there to be an option to pair the evidential itself with more detail about the source? e.g. if the evidential is "skalta" then "skalta newspaper" or "skalta my-buddy". or is that not really how they work

Not grammatically

thank you!

jal wrote: ↑Mon Oct 13, 2025 4:23 am Note that with regards to conlanging, "how it works" refers to known human languages, and you can do whatever you want.

yes i know, i have been a conlanger for decades and i've done all kinds of crazy shit in various languages. but like many people in the hobby i do value realism and believability, which is why i asked about irl attestation

Emily wrote: ↑Tue Oct 14, 2025 2:08 amyes i know, i have been a conlanger for decades and i've done all kinds of crazy shit in various languages. but like many people in the hobby i do value realism and believability, which is why i asked about irl attestation

Fair enough. I didn't recognize your handle, but my memory is getting worse these days.


JAL

Rate how much this language doesn't feel like ubykh/any caucasian lang.


Maximal syllable structure is CwV with vowel sequences being common. The only exception to this is the reduction of the accusative case plural marker *-na to *-n and the first copula.
Palatisation is near universal before *i, more common than not before *e and less common before other consonants. It seems to derive from the loss of *j although it also occurs before the glide *w although it is very rare.

*o was often unrounded except in contact with another labial in which case it is always rounded. In addition *e and *o lower before voiceless consonants and creaky sonorants. This lowering is especially obvious before the aspirated consonants and creaky nasals in which case they become low vowels. *a is fully central and in unstressed (even) syllables it often laxes slightly.

Just a couple quibbles -- a [c] is inherently palatalized and need not be marked as such, and a phonemic contrast between [c] (or "[cʲ]") and [kʲ] is very implausible because they are essentially the same thing. Same goes for their aspirated counterparts.

This is huge, but doesn't feel very Caucasian to me, especially since I see no ejectives, which are essential to Caucasian phonological typology.

I assembled a massive outline of Toukanta from pieces like a jigsaw puzzle: viewtopic.php?p=101156#p101156

Now I don't know if I like the result. I had pieces that I couldn't figure out how to fit into the outline. For example, nowhere does my outline mention my long notes on vowel harmony. I guess in hindsight, this is a stage of the language that no longer has vowel harmony? Traces of it might still be visible in the vocabulary.

I seem to have developed a bit of a block while trying to write up a description of Eŋes TAM markers. I know what the markers are and how they’re used, but I’m struggling to explain them in words and to come up with sufficiently helpful example sentences. It’s a particularly acute problem for the modals, which in places differ substantially from those of English.

Here's a puzzle for you all.

You're making a movie or TV show that takes place in the present day. Some people arrive who natively speak an imaginary dialect of English. I don't know what country they're from, but let's assume it is a fictional Anglophonic country with whatever history or geography you care to fill in. This dialect is immediately recognizable by the viewer as not any existing dialect they know. This means it needs to satisfy two criteria:

1. It is recognizable as not the dialect of the viewer or other characters in the movie or TV show (e.g. if the story takes place in London, it can't be so similar to SE British English that the viewer won't notice the difference).
2. It is not slotted into any existing dialects (e.g. the viewer won't think "Huh. I guess they're from Scotland?").

So far, I have found this task to be incredibly difficult. Any plausible alternate dialects get subconsciously slotted into existing dialects, while more radical sound changes make it hard to present as native English.

Glass Half Baked wrote: ↑Thu Nov 13, 2025 7:00 pm Here's a puzzle for you all.

You're making a movie or TV show that takes place in the present day. Some people arrive who natively speak an imaginary dialect of English. I don't know what country they're from, but let's assume it is a fictional Anglophonic country with whatever history or geography you care to fill in. This dialect is immediately recognizable by the viewer as not any existing dialect they know. This means it needs to satisfy two criteria:

1. It is recognizable as not the dialect of the viewer or other characters in the movie or TV show (e.g. if the story takes place in London, it can't be so similar to SE British English that the viewer won't notice the difference).
2. It is not slotted into any existing dialects (e.g. the viewer won't think "Huh. I guess they're from Scotland?").

So far, I have found this task to be incredibly difficult. Any plausible alternate dialects get subconsciously slotted into existing dialects, while more radical sound changes make it hard to present as native English.

may I present to you: slurring your words like you're drunk. sure, its a cheap get-around, but it fits all the bills. you can (mostly) understand someone who's slurring their words, it's not too similar or dissimilar to any dialect of english (at least that i'm aware of), and you can fairly easily label it as a dialect as there's nothing against over-lenition aside from it sounding foreign and strange, which is the goal.

in England, my French daughter, who speaks very quickly, in a high-pitched voice, and often with an accent that flattens diphthongs with a predilection for words of Latin origin, was generally not localized with her variant of English...
the use of a foreign, or even gendered, standard might allow for this kind of effect...

Glass Half Baked wrote: ↑Thu Nov 13, 2025 7:00 pmSo far, I have found this task to be incredibly difficult. Any plausible alternate dialects get subconsciously slotted into existing dialects, while more radical sound changes make it hard to present as native English.

Obviously. Americans are famously accent-deaf (or so I've read more than once), and the British are famously good at guessing where someone's from based on their accent. And given the huge variety of native accents there are, it'll be quite difficult to come up with anything that doesn't vaguely sound "Scottish" or "American" or "West Country" or "Indian English" or "Jamaican English" and so on.


JAL