Zompist Bboard Again

Not lost, just unavailable for now. Other projects are in the way, but parsing the old board data will happen later on...

Sal, I enjoy discussing sf, but please slow down and read . It's tedious to list all the things that I didn't say, such as: "I insist on ultra-hard sf" "there is only one kind of fantasy" "you couldn't even find a few thousand people on Earth" who could do without a boo...

Well sure, but we're talking about science fiction. Magic is essential to science fiction! The reason we call the whole genre speculative fiction is that we speculate some what-if and then see what follows from it. Sure, you can write space fantasy... I'm not going to fact-check Star Wars. (Though ...

On colonization-- introducing FTL isn't so much disagreeing with me as adding a magic element. :) And even with that, we're talking 82 years; you're not going to have much in the way of colonies in that time. Even with 300 years, your math is a little optimistic. Europeans basically had half a plane...

Ah, a chance to trot out some of my pet peeves. These can be divided into "futures that move too fast" and "futures that move too slowly." An example of the first: pretty much any sf involving AI. To sf writers, it seems that fully sentient AI is only a decade away, and always ha...

Hanying is in fact the Incatena langauge that I decided to develop. I have the basic grammar of the creole stage worked out, but not the final (AD 4901) language. If you're asking about real-world models... well, always start with Thomason & Kaufman, Language Contact, Creolization, and Genetic L...

One example is certain dialects of Polish, where unmarried girls are neuter. This apparently was generalized from a diminutive ending which happened to be neuter. This affects not only adjective and pronoun agreement, but verbs, since the past tense in Polish inflects by (number and) gender.

As a reminder, even traditional cultures do not all have the male = default convention. There are languages where default/mixed gender assignment is female, ones where it's neuter, and ones where there are separate genders for younger and older women. (To say nothing of languages which do not gramma...

Nortaneous wrote: ↑Fri Aug 17, 2018 5:40 pmUnusually, there's no voiced equivalent of the lateral affricate - given that the only sibilant is retroflex, the affricate might be from earlier *s > *tθ.

The best part of this is that they become the singan.

As I mentioned, I think Klingon's transliteration is kind of wack. The idea of re-using capitals is a clever way of avoiding special characters, but it makes Klingon look like ToRgO sPeeCh and mostly isn't necessary. So why not redo it? Here's the phonology. stops p b t ɖ q ʔ affric tɬ tʃ dʒ fric v ...

That said, David's conlangs are far better than Klingon - which is actually a good demonstration how not to create a conlang. It's one of the worst conlangs I have ever seen, worse even than Volapük. Wow, I disagree on both counts. Too bad Jay Shorten isn't here anymore to defend Volapük. It's kind...

Really? I'd like to know more about how DJP actually got the job, do you have any articles on this? The LCS was asked to create Dothraki, and had a contest to create it. I'm pretty sure it was advertised on the ZBB, because I submitted an entry. Well Mongol is pretty much out of the window, because...

Not a conscious borrowing— in fact, I don't think I'd heard of the Fasti before. I may well have heard about chronological arrangements elsewhere, though.

Yeah, to be clear, there are plenty of Dothraki names from GRRM and quite a few sentences that had to be accommodated.

(E.g., khaleesi is from the books, so right away you're faced with either challenging his orthography, or giving it a really weird pronunciation.)

I haven't read the book. My impression is that he's a competent conlanger, but hardly of stellar talent. I guess it's easy to feel it rather unfair that he's profited so much from language creation when many others of equal or greater ability have not been able to. I haven't read David's book or lo...

In terms of language, note that the Buddha (c. -500) didn't speak in Sanskrit, but in Magadhi. So classical Sanskrit was already old then... and Vedic Sanskrit is quite a bit more archaic than classical Sanskrit. Isn't the point that he chose to teach in Magadhi (or some pre-Prakrit), rather than i...

As others have said, centaurs are more likely if six legs is the norm for your dominant animals. Six legs also offers the option of having dragons-- i.e. four-legged winged creatures. (The usual dragons shape makes no sense, except perhaps on a planet with minimal gravity. But birds with extra arms ...

Globalisation has sped up the replacement of non-standard varieties. It also has helped minority languages find new methods of preservation and communities who spoke now extinct languages find linguists willing to help revive them. This. Everyone gets so worked up over "global English" or...

The dates I found (researching the ICK) were a little later: -1300 to -1000. Wendy Doniger's The Hindus probably has info on this. Indian historians prefer a date as early as possible. A lot of it is attempting to fit it into what we know of Indian prehistory. The Harappans lasted until the -1700s, ...

I think you missed the joke... the thing with focus is that if your vowel is too high (or even too open) you get "fuck us", and with beach that if you lax the vowel you get "bitch". And Ars Lande is quite right that wrong vowels are liable to produce misunderstandings. As just on...