Zompist Bboard Again

We have the Amish in the USA and they haven't dragged us down. Also, some were proposing making Germany a farm-only country after ww2 and although it didn't happen, presumably it wouldn't have made Europe that much poorer.

People in my conworld never get beyond medieval technology because the population of the planet never gets beyond about 4 million and therefore technology develops much more slowly than it has in the past few millenia on Earth. For any of my countries, even the richest, to join the EU would mean a m...

Thanks for your quick reply, ... id forgot id asked ..... i now remember the word I actually wanted was ideophone. Onomatopoeia is just a subset of this.

Looking for a word for sound symbolism that isn't onomatopoeia...like how "moon" has /u/ because the moon is round....I saw it just recently but cant remember....it's not "iconic" or "phonesthetic" either. Something that's used as a noun... "moon is a _____" ....

Haþirysy: Ehiombanicce - whirlwind ( ehiom- to blow -ban- chaotic action suffix -i- result -cce augmentative) Next: mole (could be an animal, a skin feature, or a spy. Have fun) Tapilula: I figured I'd put them in the rodent category for now because they sort of look like rodents and most languages...

Anybody with /ju/ in recuperate? I've only ever heard it with a plain /u/, but it looks like a straightforward Latin loanword, so I'd expect the /ju/ pronunc to be the standard.

It's Beowulf .... I recognize the first line... and I like the way it looks in this language,.... I've always liked macrons in particular.

I use <g> for /ŋ/ in some languages where I don't have any other use for <g>. (Also I always assign priority for <g> to the velar fricative /γ/, since it's much more common in my languages than the stop). Fijian uses <q>, I think. In general I like clean looking orthographies, so I avoid diacritics ...

Haþirysy: Fešabi - soldier, infantryman (lit. spear-carrier ) Next: robbery Poswa: pippepene "to steal, rob" puspepene "to steal something valuable and not easily replaceable" The -pene suffix is common on words indicating violent or criminal actions. But with verb inflections o...

Sorry but I think you may need to modify the criteria yet again, because Russian also has a preposition, https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D0%BA#Russian , which is pronounced as just a /k/, binds to the following syllable, and can occur before plosives such as /p/ and /b/, therefore allowing initial /...

I wrote up some additional characteristics of European languages a few years ago, originally on http://kneequickie.com/kq/Europe . Since that page seems to be not loading properly I copied the source to http://www.frathwiki.com/User:Soap/sandbox for the time being. I think these could be added to th...

Does the word for child indicate both offspring and young people?

I agree exactly with alynnidalar ... if i caught myself saying the 1st sentence, I'd just start over, but the 2nd is at least intelligible.

Which is interesting because etymologically they're the same word even in English. Spelling pronunciation can be subtle. I have them the same, but i think if someone said the word in isolation i would be able to guess which one they meant from intonation. As is the case with wood/would.

Western Nyipa: nyaʔepa ŋkwaʔa , "spirit-mask pheasant". Jalvaan: piryafin , etymologically "chick, little bird". Next: outrage (egregious violation of social norms) Good one, I'll just stick to Poswa for this. befwampa "to make enemies of friends", from historically in...

Wikipedia says Ivan Pnin's name was appreviated from Repnin in accordance with Russian illegitimacy custom. http://enwp.org/Ivan_Pnin Does anyone know more info about this ? Have many more famous people come from families where surnames like this are fixed and get passed down? Or do they all take ne...

next: (musical) chord Amal: kurhuda - (musical) chord Kala: nauamaka - (musical) chord next: placenta; womb Womb is a basic lexical item that I add any time I start a new language, often with a very short word like ā or pap /. Placenta tends to be a historically derived root, though in modern times...

Not mine, but David J. Peterson has remarked that if he's working on a language where, for whatever reason, he has decided the orthographic representation of long vowels will be a doubled vowel letter, then that language can never have long /e/ and long /o/ sad, I like those sounds. I sometimes use...

aural /arəl/ oral /orəl/ moral /morəl/ Florida /florɨdə/ orange /arɨndʒ/~/orɨndʒ/ horrible /harəbəl/ All of those words are /or/ for me, except after /h/, which i think is due to taboo against pronouncing "whore". there's also a few others that arent, but i had to look them up: https://en...

Oh! A complication: if a word is marked both [+long] and as [+creak], then the result is just as if it were marked only [+creak]; that's why you get wḛm rather than a hypothetical wḛ̄m. (The vowel may actually end up phonetically long, I'm not sure about that yet.) I do much the same thing in Khull...