Zompist Bboard Again

My new job, barely started, has already turned sour. The archive I have been asked to took after has turned out to be a terrible mess which requires years of work that goes far beyond my qualification. I am simply the wrong man for it.

doctor shark wrote: ↑Sat Feb 17, 2024 4:21 am Indeed. I was more inspired by Hungarian than anything when I first came up with Ilian... uh, almost fourteen years ago? (I feel old.)

Yes. This language has always reminded me of Hungarian, and its Romance neighbour Telemor of Rumanian.

I would like to share a project of mine: palasimi . It's a website with graphs of colexified concepts, similar to those in CLICS and A Conlanger's Thesaurus. It doesn't quite have as much linguistic information as CLICS, but every concept in palasimi is annotated with a short description, which I h...

My condolences, too.

But we do-- we can see the Indo-European, Sino-Tibetan, and other families taking over huge territories over recorded history, and what we know of those areas from say 5000 years ago is that there were more families there. Where Europe is now almost entirely IE, and the Middle East is almost entire...

Raphael wrote: ↑Tue Feb 13, 2024 7:25 am

hwhatting wrote: ↑Tue Feb 13, 2024 6:46 am
Well, that bunch is still xenophobic and pro-Putin, only with left-wing social and economic policies. Not really more appetizing than the AfD.

It's as if someone had set out to prove horseshoe theory right.

Yes.

The bottom line is Verdurian, right?

Raphael wrote: ↑Sat Feb 10, 2024 1:07 am

keenir wrote: ↑Sat Feb 10, 2024 12:27 am

bradrn wrote: ↑Fri Feb 09, 2024 10:32 pm but further on my explorations of writing systems, I made myself a bamboo pen:
— I highly recommend giving it a go if you have any bamboo near you. (Or reeds, which are the more traditional choice.)

That is super cool! Kudos on accomplishing it.

Seconded!

Thirded.

[ɑ] and [ɒ] - two vowels that were dangerously close to each other Didn't they have their cannonical values then? Because if so, it's just a rounding distinction? (And since in NAE [ɒ] > [ɑ], I would guess neither of them is unstable in and of itself?) Well, it's anyone's guess. There are reasons t...

And also PIE */e/. I'd say that *e was [æ], *a was [ɑ] and *o was [ɒ] at least in Early PIE, though they may have drifted towards more "canonical" qualities later. But that would make a vowel system with all low vowels, which is ridiculous. Only if you insist on there being a system with ...

Splitting /ə/ info [ə] and [a] sounds like a good idea to me; a system without any low vowels seems unstable IMO (despite the reconstructions of PIE with /e/ and /o/). PIE /o/ was probably low. And also PIE */e/. I'd say that *e was [æ], *a was [ɑ] and *o was [ɒ] at least in Early PIE, though they ...

Raphael wrote: ↑Thu Feb 08, 2024 7:00 am I like the Wheel of Music.

So do I. But it would be cooler if the note-letters were arranged according to the circle of fifths.

bradrn wrote: ↑Wed Feb 07, 2024 9:08 am

WeepingElf wrote: ↑Wed Feb 07, 2024 9:00 am Is there any reason why this thread is here rather than in the Akana section?

I thought it would be best suited to here, since it’s really about studying the comparative method itself. The Akana aspect is incidental. But presumably it can be moved if it would work better there.

I understand.

Is there any reason why this thread is here rather than in the Akana section?

It's hard to enjoy the mild weather in Chicago in February without thinking of how much we've fucked the climate. Yep. On one hand, I hate cold weather, and therefore am glad that winters are mild now, but on the other hand, I of course know that this is not how it ought to be , and am worried abou...

Man in Space wrote: ↑Sat Feb 03, 2024 8:21 pm

WeepingElf wrote: ↑Sat Feb 03, 2024 6:52 am I am no longer unemployed!

Band practice went well today.

Good! I am planning to form a band myself later this year.

Wasn't Proto-Semitic spoken in the south of the Arabian peninsula? It's a stretch to posit some parasemitic substrate in the EE steppe. Although the lexical similarities are suspicious indeed. According to Wikipedia , it is now mostly placed in the Levant (Israel/Syria/etc.), and the south Arabian ...

There's been a lot of stuff happening in German politics since this year started, and I really should have written about it, but, frankly, I found most of it too depressing. So, apologies for that. Yes, it is pretty unpleasant right now. But at least, people protest against the far right, and the m...

I'm reviving this thread in order to discuss a new thought that came to my mind last night. It has long been theorized that PIE was a language related to Proto-Uralic altered by the influence of a "Caucasian" substratum, and this is borne out by the fact that the Yamnaya people, who probab...

I've read a reddit guide on tonogenesis but it doesn't tell you how to manifest tones from closed syllables or syllables with dipthongs or syllables with onset clusters or all three. I was trying to write up something, but in the process I discovered this paper which looks quite comprehensive: http...