Zompist Bboard Again

As a side project, Im planning to start up a secret history of Romania in World War II. By this I mean that it begins and ends the war in the same state it did in our timeline, but what happened in between is replaced by metaphorical echoes of the events of the Mallard Wars fought between 4179 and 4...

Im more of an experimental conlanger myself .... if I ever find a place to put this idea into practice, it will be packed to the brim with propaganda. e.g. for a society of nudists (who are more vulnerable and thus easier to control), all their words for articles of clothing would be derived from ro...

the -x thing honestly surprised me because i remember seeing @ used as the gender-neutral noun marker back in the early 2000s, maybe 2004 or so if i had to pick a year. -e makes more sense intuitively than either of the others, since it doesnt disrupt the visual order of the words.

I've considered this a few times for my writing but I haven't really found a good place to work it into the timeline. I don't even know yet whether I'd be doing a Newspeak-style language where just a few aspects have changed (and people could presumably still understand the source language) or an en...

https://mobile.twitter.com/vgr/status/1448711782554488836 sometimes you dont have to add anything useful though. i go to chatrooms where nearly everyone is smarter than me, because i like intellectual conversation, and I am nearly impossible to embarrass. i'd rather be wrong and have someone show m...

pollard .... it's a verb, so I assumed it would have final stress. But in fact it's initial, as it contains the suffix -ard.

Very good idea. Dystopias are far more common in writing than utopias are. I found out just recently that Brave New World had a sequel called Island in which all the bad things were replaced with good things. Of course, the novel still has conflict in it .... it's not written for toddlers .... but s...

well if it's for a conworld, especially one that's just starting down the untrodden path towards a healthy democracy .... i'd say it's a great idea. Societies with a lot of problems are more interesting than Marysuetopias. And societies can be perfectly stable even if they are dysfunctional, particu...

i misread that as Zompist at first. oh my eyes. anyway ... I sympathize with that person, and its one reason why I mostly keep my writing private, and when I do share, its with people i trust. that said, i dont do maps of Earth, and even when I used to, they werent really alt-histories but wholly di...

-tion is parsed as a unit ... it's a pan-European thing, I think, or at least occurs in a nucleus of languages that includes Swedish and French alongside German and arguably English. I definitely remember learning the c = /ts/ rule when I was reading about German when I was very young, and maybe ov...

well, the pedal on a bicycle is pronounced that way, so I'd have assumed that words like bipedal would be too. Even if it happens to not be listed in the dictionary that way, I wouldnt call it wrong, since, again, it's literally the same word as the pedal of a bicycle and just has an extra prefix on...

only one i have is "Philip pines" (like the tree) for Philippines .... which is very often misspelled as Phillipines or as Phillippines.

are we sure about that? .... i dont mean to make things difficult for the sake of it but ... this is presumably for a conlang, so .... it seems to me the suffix -jan could have been present because the Goths analogized it to their native sequence, and thus would have done so even if the acoustic imp...

I havent read the posts upthread but i would say that one of my greatest achievements was linking Andanese and Pabappa together historically, despite their having been part of two separate projects originally and sharing nothing in common whatsoever as they were first drawn up (since it wouldve been...

To me the main difference seems to be whether Tapilula /tʷ/ turns into /tʰw/→/w/→/∅/ or /tʷ/→/kw/→/p/. Unless that somehow depends on the presence of /ɡ/? yes, and whether /pʰ/ > /f/ or not. the /g/ (which is IPA [ɣ]) controls whether the /ə̀i/ diphthong becomes a monophthongal /e/ or just remains ...

Tapilula tʷòho pə̀gi > twoʔho pəʔgi > twokopokki > tʰwokopʰokki > hwokofokki > hwokofoki > hwokohoki > wokōki > wokōči > wokōsi > okōsi but Tapilula tʷòho pə̀i > tʷòho pè > tʷohoʔpe > tʷohoʔpo > twōppo > twōpo > kwōpo > kʷōpa > pōpa so okōsi turns into pōpa because of the deletion of /g/ in the orig...

Thanks for your replies. Very nice data! Are there any temperate areas anywhere? :) yes this planet has a lot of water, .... the charts i used are for areas far away from the sea and represent extreme points. on islands and even the west coasts of the continents, temperatures are not as extreme beca...

arguably, paradigm should be the term for the individual entries, and we could use something like paradixis for the whole thing, but we're stuck now because the word paradigm is well established in its current use. also it seems that the proper form of the word i want would in fact be paradeixis , w...

i mean you could write an academic paper making your case for why ablaut & umlaut should be considered infixes, but it isn't the term we traditionally use, because the root vowel is being replaced rather than being supplemented. you could argue that /i:/ is underlyingly /u:i/ or something and, l...

Im confused .... does this script not allow backwards-facing glyphs? I wouldve thought the old system would make more sense since you could just spell the vowels explicitly ... e.g. ta-it = /tet/, ta-at = /tat/, and so on.are they all read as CV regardless of direction?