Hullo, long time no see! The other day I was musing on how I might translate a random sentence in English into Beldreni, when I realized I didn’t know how to translate “damn” (in this case “so damn difficult”) or indeed any other swearword. Which got me to thinking. First, should Beldreni have swearwords in the same way that English or Swedish does? I’ve heard that Japanese doesn’t quite have them, that the rudeness expressed by swearing is conveyed in…
I have now decided that the Nahul word for ‘crow’ is surakh, which also meant deciding that this world has crows in the first place. This makes me wonder – what bird words have you come up with in your languages? Whether it’s the word for ‘bird’, for specific species or types of birds, or other bird-related words. Are the species invented, too? Anything else you feel like sharing about birds in your languages, or in your worldbuilding? (I…
Calendar reminder fail resulted in yesterday’s post not going up.
Today, I’ll describe the inner workings of the English sentence generator I talked about a while ago. (I’m a bit overdue, but I figure better late than never.) (I’m a lot overdue, actually, and left this as a draft for like a month and a half or so, so the other editors may have seen it (I don’t know how WordPress handles permissions on these)) This project leverages most of the features of my word generator, so I would recommend…
I have a verb stem in Akachenti that gets used by itself for a variation on present indicative which indicates that this situation/action will continue in the future, e.g. I love you now and expect to keep on doing so. With a non-present marker, the stem is used to indicate simple future tense, e.g. I will come to love you. The normal present is the unmarked stem and indicates the action began previously and also occurs now. You could call…
The Conlanging documentary by Britton Watkins has just been released (or on Monday if you crowdfunded it). It features interviews with hobbyists as well as conlangers from various media franchises. I haven’t seen the bonus feature yet, but lots of good stuff here!
I am getting to the point where I don’t want my dictionary and my grammar in the same file anymore, so I’m setting up a separate dictionary file soon. I downloaded Lexique Pro to try it out but honestly, I think I’d rather just do a text file for mine. It just seems easier? I don’t know. How do you organize and format your dictionary? What sorta info do you include? What do you think characterizes a good dictionary? If…
In August my D&D group are starting a new campaign and I’ll be playing a Dragonborn for the first time. For those unfamiliar, dragonborn is a D&D fantasy race that’s basically a reptiloid race with dragon blood. When you watch rpg streams and stuff, there’s a tendency for people to give dragonborn chars this deep, big, broad-chested kind of voice. I don’t really wanna do that: partially I don’t think I’d be good at it and partially I don’t think…
I have been posting dissertations for the past two days and nothing has saved or posted. What do I do? I cannot even ping a mod!