Zompist Bboard Again

My parents’ house is in the zone of totality, so my wife and I drove up to spend a few days with them, and several other friends and relatives gathered there as well. We had a excellent view of the eclipse from their front yard, and it was extremely impressive.

Update: The container ship was apparently able to send out a mayday a few minutes before hitting the bridge, which allowed the transportation authorities to block new traffic from entering the bridge prior to the impact (I presume by bringing automated barriers down in the incoming lanes). The only ...

Does anyone here know anyone affected by that bridge collapse? (I assume that you are talking about the collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore.) I live about an hour and half drive away, and my wife and I have driven across the bridge in question in the past, but I do not know anyone...

Well it's been a while, but I wanted to thank everyone who recommended books in this thread. I also wanted to share a resource that I've come across. Tales of Times Forgotten is a blog by a history student, who often touches on how people in ancient cultures viewed the world. A couple of specific e...

I think that may be precisely the fact that ich-Laut can be found as a phone, but not a phoneme, in English, that makes it difficult for English-speakers to distinguish and pronounce, whereas ach-Laut is heard as a distinctively different (and, for most, non-English) sound, and thus one that can be ...

Thank you for the clarification! I thought that this was the case, but I wanted to make sure, in case you had changed your mind since the earlier post.

Does this verb system still include the preverbs that you described earlier? I was rereading your description of them, and found it extremely interesting.

I found a note today that I made at the end of last year, about making the interrogative particle má in Chusole, which was originally conceived as sentence-final only, a mobile one, so I came up with a set of examples: [Kele] Tioluni bigyke má? kele Tiolu-ni bi-gy-ke má 2S.FRML Toilu-ALL go-PST-2S.F...

(I can also mention that in South Africa it’s called ‘varsity’, which is a word I’ve rarely heard elsewhere.) We have the word in the US, but it means the main team representing a college or high school in competition. I had to look it up— I just knew it was associated with sports. Many high school...

I wanted to go back up-thread and take a moment to answer Torco’s question about the difference between “community colleges,” “colleges,” and “universities” in the United States; in my experience, these are fairly distinct categories (albeit somewhat fuzzy at the edges). (I should state up front tha...

@masako: Thank you in return for your kind words; they mean a lot to me.

I should say more generally that I have always been impressed by your conlanging (I re-read the Kala grammar a while back) and especially the depth and breadth of your conscripts (particularly Omyatloko, which is a project I find flabbergasting); my own meager efforts in that direction have been lar...

Thank you for sharing this; I have read the old document on Moya, but it's been a little while. I have always found Moya to be an interesting script; at first glance, many of the characters seem difficult to tell apart, but when looking at the examples, I was able to parse the script without much di...

Might I suggest something midway between these two? (Plus a small adjustment.) https://bradrn.com/images/band-logo-adjustments.png I agree with these changes, particularly changing the descender on the "g", which makes it much clearer that it is "g" and not "q". (Like ...

This is not a typo per se, but I wanted to ask about it. In the page on Bé belief systems, in the section on the Brɛ́drɔŋje Dàe (Story of Brɛ́drɔŋ) , the following passage appears: Fortunately, as she dies Rèr herself appears (this is before her birth, but don't ask questions) to explain her key rol...

I have no useful suggestions, unfortunately; I just wanted to say that I am flabbergasted by the scope of your work, and want to wish you the best of luck with future developments!

2. I think zompist wrote in one of his books about how…I want to say it was some faction of the Iroquois?…had this conceit where a man's sister's children inherit, basically because of the principle of "mama's baby, papa's maybe" and how it keeps things in the bloodline. I am trying to fi...

(Note: I wrote this before seeing and replying to the posts above.) Some time ago, I read the fantasy novel The Interpreter’s Tale: A Word With Too Many Meanings by E.M. Epps. The main character in the novel is a military interpreter who is recruited to serve as a negotiator for a diplomatic marriag...

Jumping up-thread a bit: Spent much of this week reading John Scalzi’s novels Starter Villain and The Kaiju Preservation Society (in reverse order compared to their publication). Both great, quick, fun reads. And both of them left me wishing they were longer. I always get that feeling when reading s...

A language for fairies with modals/verbal markers that indicate whether the speaker was flying and/or how they're flying; quickly, hovering, fluttering, downward, etc. I like this! I have seen people create conlangs for flying creatures that paid close attention to representing three-dimensional mo...