Zompist Bboard Again

The intersection of Yokai noun classes, pronouns, verb conjugations, and other related matters are melting my brain, which is to say progress is being made.

I'm still plugging away on my homonym-cleaning job, nothing new to report there except the ticker at the bottom of the window says I'm 6182/7120ths of the way through. But what struck me is how much attention I've paid to developing the 'conethnozoology' and 'conethnobotany'; I seem to get some disproportionate satisfaction from working out the taxonomies of bird names, fish names, etc. in this and, I think, previous conlang projects I've done. Anyone else experience this kind of thing?

I've started a massive writeup on the Japonic language I wanted to be the result of my project. I got bored with working with the archaic stages, and decided to dive into working on the thing I wanted to have emerge, in order to keep the motivation up. I expect the project will need a great many edits before it's "done" (if it ever is; I have a tendency to never let things be); either way, I like how it's shaping up so far.

I breached a thousand words on the 5,700-word vocabulary project I set for myself this year. Which is…not too bad, really, given the date.

That's impressive, congrats!

Ares Land wrote: ↑Thu Jan 07, 2021 11:13 am That's impressive, congrats!

Many thanks! Approaching 1,100!

I mentioned a little earlier that I was learning how to use Inkscape, and now I've mostly gotten the hang of it. My city map is going well (though I've been a little distracted by other projects), and I've decided to label every street using my conlang Keševan, which you might have seen me dabble with in the lexicon-building thread. I'm allowing myself English labels for buildings under the rationale that only Keševan street names are important insofar as they would be used by visitors for finding an address. So far I've created ~700 street names (I'm keeping track in another doc so I can know not to repeat them) by really plumbing my conlang's vocab, existing proper nouns, and the combinatorics of good naming roots. And oh my god I'm realizing I'll need probably something like 300-500 more names to fill the map. Gonna start using in-jokes.

Pedant wrote: ↑Wed Jan 06, 2021 10:21 pm I breached a thousand words on the 5,700-word vocabulary project I set for myself this year. Which is…not too bad, really, given the date.

Nice, do you have etymologies for them?

Every. Single. One. The Malehinese ones I have to replicate about a dozen times across the different languages, too. It takes forever but they are cemented.

I love a good etymology.

Pedant wrote: ↑Sat Jan 09, 2021 6:17 am Every. Single. One. The Malehinese ones I have to replicate about a dozen times across the different languages, too. It takes forever but they are cemented.

Nice work!

303 words in Irthironian!

surprisingly quickly, I've gotten my newest lang Bau Danyi to a point of significant maturity: 1,5 k lexicon, a decently unified feel to it, and when i pick some random conlang syntax test case, for example, I can translate it just with adding lexicon to it, i.e. I don't need any new grammar: apparently my productivity in front of a computer has been increased by a decade working in front of a computer?. anyway it feels somewhat like a popping of the cherry moment: granted, the language was thought of initially as minimalistic: totally isolating, relatively straightforward phonology (I'm not crazy about phonology, tbh). so now I want to use it as like a protolang to make an adari language family.

problem is, I really don't know how to go about it. I mean, sure, sound change appliers are fun and easy to use, but I really feel like I need to sort of grok language change as a thing rather than blindly going through the motions. ¿anyone know of like a guide? ¿a daughterlang creation kit or something?

Torco wrote: ↑Wed Jan 20, 2021 4:23 pm problem is, I really don't know how to go about it. I mean, sure, sound change appliers are fun and easy to use, but I really feel like I need to sort of grok language change as a thing rather than blindly going through the motions. ¿anyone know of like a guide? ¿a daughterlang creation kit or something?

I struggled with this for a very long time; at one point I asked for suggestions, and people recommended some resources about which sound changes are most likely. But I suggest just reading as much about sound change as possible: I only started doing that in the last couple of months, and it’s already helped me feel significantly more confident about diachronics. (I recommend Blust’s The Austronesian Languages as starting point, which has a lovely section on historical phonology.)

(Zompist’s LCK also has a good introductory section on sound changes, but I assume you’ve read that already.)

Torco wrote: ↑Wed Jan 20, 2021 4:23 pm surprisingly quickly, I've gotten my newest lang Bau Danyi to a point of significant maturity: 1,5 k lexicon, a decently unified feel to it, and when i pick some random conlang syntax test case, for example, I can translate it just with adding lexicon to it, i.e. I don't need any new grammar

WTF?! Is this the same language as in the accidental ergativity thread?

Torco wrote: ↑Wed Jan 20, 2021 4:23 pm surprisingly quickly, I've gotten my newest lang Bau Danyi to a point of significant maturity: 1,5 k lexicon, a decently unified feel to it, and when i pick some random conlang syntax test case, for example, I can translate it just with adding lexicon to it, i.e. I don't need any new grammar: apparently my productivity in front of a computer has been increased by a decade working in front of a computer?. anyway it feels somewhat like a popping of the cherry moment: granted, the language was thought of initially as minimalistic: totally isolating, relatively straightforward phonology (I'm not crazy about phonology, tbh). so now I want to use it as like a protolang to make an adari language family.

problem is, I really don't know how to go about it. I mean, sure, sound change appliers are fun and easy to use, but I really feel like I need to sort of grok language change as a thing rather than blindly going through the motions. ¿anyone know of like a guide? ¿a daughterlang creation kit or something?

Hey, congrats!

What really helped in my case was reading up a lot on historical lingustics. Romance historical linguistics worked very well for me: mostly because we have data on pretty much all stages of the process, also because I speak a Romance language

One resource I heartily recommend is A linguistic history of Italian, which gives a very detailed view, including sound changes, the reason behind some of the sound changes, and how these relates to Italian dialects, how the grammar was transformed, including a very in-depth case study of some specific problems (such as the 1st and 3rd person plural).

Old French is a fascinating case, and resources are very easy to find... but are in French.

I know very little about Spanish historical linguistics, but I assume resources on it (especially in Spanish) are of similar excellent quality.

All of this is of course very theoretical. I would suggest as well to just go ahead, come up with a bunch of changes and just generally have fun with these.

I've also used my speech and other people's speech for inspiration. Bonus point: you can make boring meetings more liveable by listening to that weird quirk the guy who won't stop talking has, and wondering: what if this was generalized?

Ares Land wrote: ↑Thu Jan 21, 2021 3:00 am One resource I heartily recommend is A linguistic history of Italian, which gives a very detailed view, including sound changes, the reason behind some of the sound changes, and how these relates to Italian dialects, how the grammar was transformed, including a very in-depth case study of some specific problems (such as the 1st and 3rd person plural).

Is this Maiden’s book or Kinder’s? I assume the former, as the latter contains little to no detailed linguistic information.

Maiden's!

Ares Land wrote: ↑Thu Jan 21, 2021 4:52 amMaiden's!

Thank you! I have added that to my Big List of Things to Read. (182 linguistics articles and counting! And I still have >900 tabs open…)

I've made quite a lot of headway in the development of verbal morphology for my current project, now that I have a better grip on how the sound changes ought to have worked out.