Zompist Bboard Again

I don't think it's any more natural than the wheel or wrought iron. Societies tend to make use of it once they've got it (though even there it takes a long time for a society to become mostly literate), but plenty have done without it. Conworld idea: culture where writing (a recent invention?) is vo...

zompist wrote: ↑Sat Dec 07, 2019 12:06 am It's not clear if you've read the Language Construction Kit. You're not going to learn as much from a list as from an introduction with explanations--- which that is.

This is a good suggestion.

Are there any natlangs where an auxiliary verb is uninflected while the main verb keeps its usual inflection? Taking the question literally, we have an example in English with the auxiliary 'must'. That auxiliary has no visible inflextion. while the main verb is marked to show whether it is progres...

-en has various restrictions regarding the phonology of the base to which it attaches I think. I'm too tired to try and work out exactly what they are, but to a first approximation *greenen might be ruled out by final /n/, *bluen by a final vowel, *yellowen by having too many syllables etc. So that...

It did originate in 2002, yes. (And you guys are all making me feel extremely old...Also it's occurred to me several times lately that I've been on the ZBB for literally more than half my life, which is rather astonishing...) I joined the ZBB in, I think, late 2004 - and still haven't entirely got ...

I think the point is that "Stephen Langton" would be utterly unremarkable as a name of someone living today, which is not true of most of the names of people from his lifetime we are likely to come across nowadays (compare the names here and here , the great majority of which are not like...

I don't get it. Do you find "Stephen" a modern name? I think the point is that "Stephen Langton" would be utterly unremarkable as a name of someone living today, which is not true of most of the names of people from his lifetime we are likely to come across nowadays (compare the...

I have languages which historically used one base, and then partially shifted to another after language contact, creating weird hybrid systems.

I think I probably wrote my entries around 2005; a lot of what might have been said about those languages - including things like names, setting and fundamental grammatical attributes - may have been outdated even by 2007, though it's difficult to pin down when exactly I made a lot of the changes. W...

As others have said, a lot of these features aren't especially SAE-specific - I doubt anybody would look at a language like this and notice it as particularly SAE-like. Ultimately though I think not looking lazy when presenting a constructed language is often more about the finer details than the re...

It would be interesting to see this sort of reflexive marked on the preposition:

I folded it against-REFL (it) = "I folded it against itself"

I think an early version of my concountry (from around fifteen years ago) had a three-letter code for each county. I haven't thought about the matter since.

No, the problem is not how to insert a possessive pronoun, but is it still realistic if I retain the case of original noun I can't see it being very likely at all if all genitive marking on nouns remains unchanged. Perhaps if the genitive endings for a sizeable number of nouns undergo a lot of phon...

So a phrase like "his excellency" isn't just a noun with a possessive attached; it's a lexical unit in its own right. And it's a lexical unit that's only ever used pronominally. You can't, for example, say "there were seven his excellencies in the room" (or even "there were...

Natural languages tend to minimise the amount of phonologically overt material they use for this sort of thing, so I wouldn't want to use this idea in a realistic conlang (of course, non-realistic conlangs are fine too). Even you got rid of the "numbering", which is redundant if you mark t...

The main resource for this always used to be Geoff's climate cookbook. It's pretty detailed, though: often I think in a fantasy context it's fine to be merely fairly realistic, you don't have to worry about the finer details unless you want to.

Ooh, could make it rather difficult for anyone to reasonably be a carnivore with enough thought about what they were doing...perhaps you should consider investing heavily in designing protein-heavy plants? Or more simply, ignoring what the herbivore is saying and just eat it. Yeah - humans are quit...

If I was doing something similar - and of course you're free to do what you like - I think I'd leave out the pheremones part. But I like the idea of a hierarchy of linguistic ability: where some species can just use single words, others can combine them to only a limited extent, and still others hav...

The "no distinction between name, rank, and title" thing makes me think of the names/titles of a lot of rulers of Persianate monarchies - e.g. the Mughal Emperors Shah Jahan and Bahadur Shah. "Shah" obviously means "king/emperor", and they were kings/emperors, but was ...

I think the list is helpful. I've not seen one so detailed before. Obviously cases combine multiple functions, or every language would end up with exactly the same set, but it's still helpful to have ideas about what sort of attested case functions there are. Even if you don't end up using any of th...