Zompist Bboard Again

I'm terribly sorry to ask for this, dewrad, but I've been in the hospital for a bit and was wondering if I might get an extension of 24 hours on the challenge? To be honest, you don't really need to ask me! It's not a deadline I've set for you, but a suggestion that you might like to set a deadline...

Clearly, I have an issue with mathematics (this is the major reason why the whole "designing a whole astrological system from scratch" thing is genuinely killing me): by "Friday 11th", I obviously mean "Friday 10th".

I’m going to be honest: my current project is kinda boring me. I’ve been working on religion, calendars and astronomy (on the one hand, it is amazingly satisfying to know which of your invented planets is the most luminous in the sky; but on the other hand it is a pain in the proverbial to determine...

(An irritant with TreeForm is that it doesn't really do the drawing lines for transformations at all well.) (This is more or less exactly why I asked, I was hoping for something that shows movement a bit better and with a bit more flexibility) I will admit that it's the only thing that really bugs ...

Verbal morphology Telpahké verbal morphology, as should be apparent by now, is largely periphrastic in nature: a conjugated verb is made up of a lexical verb which encodes voice and aspect (hereafter the "main verb"), and an auxiliary which provides information about tense, other aspects,...

OK, so you raise an interesting point. I will confess entirely that I haven't really done any syntactic work since graduating: that was nine years ago. And, furthermore, my area of speciality (as it were) has always been historical linguistics rather than syntactic analysis. As such, I am potentiall...

First, quickly---are you using TreeForm for the diagrams? And what's CP in this context? Yes! TreeForm is awesome, literally helped me get a first in my syntax modules at Uni. "CP" in this case is probably inaccurate (maybe?) - essentially "complementiser" is what the particles ...

Topic and comment - part 2 Before looking at how Telpahké marks non-core arguments of a verb as the topic, it is worth looking at how Telpahké marks non-core arguments when they aren't the topic, as it were. As in many languages, non-core arguments in Telpahké are marked by adpositions. Telpahké be...

mèþru wrote: ↑Sat Feb 23, 2019 12:04 pm Ah that makes sense
I was just trying to turn it into a Star Wars reference.

Don't worry, the Sun will be all over it.

[For those who don't remember: it's widely thought Umunna must have some sort of Issue, personally or in his family. He ran for the 2015 labour leadership, and was considered a frontrunner, but withdrew after only three days declaring himself "uncomfortable" with the "scrutiny" ...

To what degree are Sarroc and (say) Erenati Verdurian mutually intelligible?

An update n the Dr Bateman vs. JRM situation; she has appeared on Good Morning Britain, again naked, but this time with blur because morning TV, and has once again challenged JRM to a debate, but this time has dropped her demand for JRM to be nude like her, much to everyone's relief. Am I the only ...

What does i and in mean? They're auxiliaries. There are eight of them in total: so far we've just been seeing i / in because I'm deliberately trying not to make things too weird. They essentially express tense, aspect and mood, while the lexical verb just expresses voice. I think I have this - just...

For what it's worth, my own Tagorese is heavily analytic: morphology is largely limited to suppletion and some compounding. Another of my conlangs, Qôni, is nonconcatenative, but very "Semitic-like". I think non-concatenative morphology like triconsonantal roots is probably one of the hard...

Quick excursus on transitivity and voice assignment Before explaining how Telpahké marks non-core arguments of a clause as the topic, I need to briefly run through some details on voice assignment. All of our example sentences so far have featured transitive verbs - primarily because the only argum...

I’ll be honest, evidentiality has never really interested me from a conlanging point of view. The only language I’ve ever made that marks evidentiality morphologically is Proto-Western . As I recall, I pulled this system from a reading of Mithun’s The Languages of Native North America , but I have t...

Topic and comment I haven't been looking forward to writing this post as, frankly, the concept of topic and comment seems to be one of those things that is intuitively easy to grasp, but a bit of a bitch to reduce to dry prose. I would suggest these two Wikipedia articles as a fair starting point. ...

Verbs The Telpahké verb is, undoubtedly, the most complex part of the language's grammar. And, consequently, the most challenging to describe in a concise, lucid manner. I have almost certainly failed on at least one of those counts in what follows, so I can only apologise in advance. Rather than t...

What does that mean? Well, if the Prime Minister and/or the Attorney General is found in contempt, they could be suspended from Parliament (not unheard of) Or, under a little-known law, suspended from a high place in Parliament... The committee also contains Sir Christopher Chope, who may be even w...

evmdbm wrote: ↑Thu Nov 22, 2018 6:06 am

dewrad wrote: ↑Sun Nov 18, 2018 4:52 pm Out of interest, have you worked out which natlang inspired this system?)

I hate it when people do that. I over-think it completely and end up with something ridiculous like English

Bingo! You win the prize! It is indeed (to a degree) inspired by colloquial English.