Zompist Bboard Again

I wonder what effects developments in machine translation might have on language vitality. If (hypothetically) somebody developed an AI that was capable of working out how to accurately translate from English to Icelandic with minimal human input, then might Icelanders start engaging with the automa...

The European have perfect (and indeed possibly the be perfect) certainly looks like a prime candidate for borrowing, though as far as I know nobody has any firm evidence-based proposals for what the pathways of borrowing might have been, and it is possible (if not very appealing) to explain it as a ...

Those words exist as transitivity pairs in standard English as well, so aren't that interesting. Although "cook" is an unusual one now you mention it, because it's the only one where both words in the pair are frequently univalent (you can say "I cooked", to mean you cooked some...

Nonconcatenative morphology isn't exactly vastly common in natlangs, don't forget. And loads of people at least attempt triconsonantal root conlangs. Wrong, there is loads of it. If the language is tonal (which is very common), there is a good chance that they have nonconcatenative morphology. In f...

Great work. How many "weird" English features do people's conlangs have? (Perhaps this should be a separate thread in C&C, similar to the SAE thread.)

Nonconcatenative morphology isn't exactly vastly common in natlangs, don't forget. And loads of people at least attempt triconsonantal root conlangs.

My main conlang Viksen is basically analytic. While most of my other languages have some inflection, I do tend towards less complex morpholog, in part because with more complicated systems I have a tendency to end up confusing myself. Analytic conlangs are perhaps harder to do if you don't know much...

I handle this by running everything through an intermediary language that doesnt have tones or exotic consonants, and which occasionally mishears the words being transliterated. So for example the hideous-looking Gʷidiʕìləs can become "Vidīlas" and ʕʷĕle becomes "Wele". This is ...

I disagree about it having to conform to the audience's phonology - for the most part, the audience is not going to care to even try pronouncing it correctly, so you may as well ignore the audience. That might be reasonable. I think it's probably helpful if the audience at least feel they can make ...

I think what we see of the conlang in the book (or whatever) should be held up to more-or-less the same standards as any other conlang. Although I also think that in general what we see of the conlang probably shouldn't be a great deal, so there might not be all that much to judge. For example, in m...

I'm not sure Viksen fits very neatly into the causativising/anti-causativising typology, because it doesn't really have many "unaccusative" verbs - states and changes of state are usually expresse with a modifier + wu "to be" or wi "to become".* So "to cool" ...

The Sint stuff looks really good; this is an important but often neglected area. (If I were to write some kind of LCK-esque guide, I think valency alternations would be something I'd definitely mention, because it's all too easy just to replicate the English system without realising how other langua...

Evidentiality in my languages tends to come across as a bit of an afterthought that I don't pay a huge amount of attention to. Though to be honest I've realised recently that even with things like tense and aspect I tend not to go into the details of how they are used. Viksen has some evidential mod...

After experimenting with various possibilites, I have found the best way for me is generally Excel spreadsheets. Sample of a typical entry: igak | mod. | beautiful | COV igaks "sunny, bright" (headword | part of speech | translation | etymology) Other information (e.g. usage, irregular mor...

Looks good.

Very interesting.

Your occasional comments on the history of the board made me think that it would be nice if someone could put together a full history sometime, possibly (if they were feeling particularly ambitious) in the context of a history of the internet conlanging community as a whole.

They don't occur for a good reason - they are really hard to distinguish acoustically from the bilabial stops. Give it a go yourself and you'll see what I mean.

However, the geography of Ereláe doesn't really facilitate a Europe-sized state. The steppeland in the middle would make any north-south union difficult. The natural groupings are east-west, either Eretald + Dhekhnam, or Xurno + Šura. Yes, I think geography would be a consideration for the Viksor t...

I was pondering the question today of how the people in my made-up countries might react to an organisation like the European Union. To be fair, it is unlikely they would ever considering joining the EU, given that they are (a) not in Europe, and (b) on another planet, but plausibly you could imagin...

From what I understand, it was originally /twɑː/, then raised to /twoː/ during the Great Vowel Shift, then further raised to /twuː/. w > ∅ / C_V[+round], see "who", "whore", "sword", but contrast "swoon", "swollen". swollen presumably sees reinstate...