Zompist Bboard Again

Quite a lot (certainly far from all) of recent research is available for free online. The stuff access to a good university library is most helpful for isn't 21st century theory, it's obscure grammars of obscure languages published in about 1960, which can be pretty much impossible to get hold of ot...

It's not a great problem for me personally, but undoubtedly the amount of free time you can afford to have is going to greatly affect the extent to which conlanging is a viable hobby. Access to books is also going to have some effect (though it's possible to do a good deal with just online resources...

A common motivation for me is to try stuff I haven't done before. Admittedly that doesn't narrow things down very much for your very first conlang!

I've never really got anywhere with this sort of thing, though I've often wanted to. The closest I've got to it is in making up languages from scratch as I write the poems in them - those languages have never been used for anything else or had extensive grammars etc. But I've not done much even of t...

I'm currently reading, or perhaps I have already read, Kate Fox's Watching the English , in the 2014 revised edition. That is, I'm reading different parts of the book out of order, I've already read the last part of the book, and I may have read as much as I want to read for now. It's generally pre...

Very interesting! I like the word list and would love to see more of the end results.

Doesn't Haspelmath's paper give some indication of the global frequency of each of the features he discusses, or am I misremembering?

I think several conlangers have tried to collect as many human linguistic universals as possible, and then tried to come up with conlangs that violated as many of those as possible. Has anyone ever tried a con culture version of that? Not by a conlanger, but see here: https://condor.depaul.edu/mfid...

I've noticed something a bit weird about myself: in my mind, the 1970s - a decade when I wasn't born yet - are for some reason strongly associated with hot sunny summer days, as if there had been no other weather or seasons back then. Does anyone else have similar weird mental associations? Old pos...

I like coffee chocolates and coffee ice cream but not actual coffee. The smell is nice though. I also like yerba mate, but ever since I've started taking medication for my ADHD I've been advised not to drink it because we have no idea how it'd interact. Coffee flavoured things are worse than coffee...

I tried to order a "soda" at the soda counter and was baffled that the soda jerk kept asking me, "What kind of ice cream do you want?" I just kept repeating, "No, I want a soda ! Here's some dialect variation: it took me a while to work out that "soda jerk" was no...

I find it's helpful to have sketched out at least the principal details of phonology before trying anything morphosyntactic, so you know what phonologically acceptable words actually are before you start putting them together and putting them into sentences. But yeah, treating "morphology"...

I quite like coffee with a lot of milk and sugar. I mostly have it if I am badly in need of waking up quickly, however: only occasionally do I want to drink it just for the enjoyment of it. I drink tea frequently - although again I enjoy it only with (a smaller amount of) milk.

Cool idea, and interesting results!

elemtilas wrote: ↑Tue Apr 07, 2020 11:18 pm For anyone here into worldbuilding, I'm pleased to announce that I've uploaded a new revision of the great Ethnographical Questionnaire.

Thanks, I've always really appreciated this.

Many of the countries in my world have divisions I call "counties", reflecting the fact that they were originally personal fiefdoms of lords (or "counts"), and often still are. That said, I also have a tendency to use the native names as well, such as Viksen syiyn (if I remember ...

What practical purpose do flying cars serve? How are they not just a more dangerous version of regular cars? Are traffic jams really that bad we need them? One advantage I see would be to free up the streets for pedestrians. In theory they free up space for everything: transportation takes place hi...

The thing to remember when accusing "the other side" of being like small children with no emotional control is that many of them have a similar opinion of you.

Many grammatical traditions for different languages use terminology in ways which are confusing if you're only used to the textbook definitions. "Ergative" is a major offender, as it is frequently used in contexts where something like "agentive" might be a less ambiguous term, i....

(As for (1): I’m always unhappy when terminology is retained for purely historical reasons. I think I’ve proposed several times on this board that words like ‘infinitive’, ‘participle’ and ‘adverb’ are so specific to Latin and English linguistics that they should be scrapped as useless.) "Infi...