A While (I'm Talking Coming Up On A Decade Or So) Ago, I Wanted To Write A Space Western Inspired By

This but it’s about a series you’re writing that’s not even published yet

Find the Words Tag Game

Thanks to @authorcoledipalo for the tag!

My words: ache, slash, bounce, wink

Your words:

Ache

Tears blurred my vision. My head raged with a headache like no other while I choked on my sobs. Mucus stained my tongue with salt while I struggled to keep my head up. He loved me. He loved me unconditionally, up until his dying breath. No, he still loved me. Even in death, his immortal love remained deep inside of me. My head finally fell.

Slash

"No," I decided. "It's-" A foul stench slashed at my nose, popping my eyes open. "What the hell?"

Bounce

I laughed, flying along the ceiling so that I could see the inside of the crystal chandelier. The crystals bounced light from electric bulbs around the center of the chandelier. I stuck my hand through it, seeing if my hand would glisten.

Wink

"The Emperor's request," chef Siz added, sending me a grin with a wink.

Paging @foxgloves-garden, @ominous-feychild, and @oldfashionedidiot, +open tag. Feel free to ignore as wanted.

Side note: Does anyone else use "bounce" as a transitive verb? I.e. "I bounce the ball" where "bounce" takes an object. (An intransitive verb is a verb which doesn't take an object: "I bounce." Is perfectly grammatical.) I feel like the transitive form feels... old? Archaic?

Y'all, I just got curious at one point, and I hope this isn't a repeat of a previous post. So, if you don't mind:

Wiktionary

orange - Wiktionary, the free dictionary

Wiktionary has a couple of recordings if you're curious about the difference/don't know linguistics and can't read IPA.

Follow-up question:

What words/phrases (if any) rhyme with orange?

This is a hotly-debated topic in the English language. I sincerely believe that in my dialect, no single word is a true-rhyme with orange that isn't also either a portmanteau or explicitly related to the word "orange." (E.g. blornge does not count for me, even though it does rhyme, because it is a portmanteau of blonde and orange.)

Reblogs are appreciated!

Hey, I wanted to share some conlang news with you all. A friend of mine named Jake Penny just released a video describing their creation of a new conlang—Pankashku—for the movie Madame Web.

Now if you've actually seen Madame Web (unlikely, I know), you may recall not hearing a conlang in it at all. This is because the actual Pankashku dialogue that Jake translated for the film was cut in its entirety, and Jake was not credited.

As a professional conlanger, I can tell you this does happen, and it always sucks, but it especially sucks when it happens with your first and only job. Jake isn't alone this. Bill Welden created a conlang for the movie Noah, and it, too, was cut and Bill wasn't credited. Both were paid, and, of course, the contract states that your work will be used at the company's discretion (which includes not at all), so it wasn't like they were taken advantage of, but when your work isn't used and you're not credited it means no one hears about you, and industry word of mouth doesn't spread to get you future work. It really, really sucks, given that there are so few opportunities for conlang artists to be compensated for their work.

That is why I'm sharing this here! If you're interested, please give it a watch, but if not, please reblog it around, if you would. A lot of work goes into creating a language, and the least we can hope is that our work will be heard/seen and appreciated.

Also, if you'd like to support Jake, they and Miles Wronkovich have a YouTube series/podcast which you can support on Patreon here.

Thanks for your time! <3

Kshafa Morphosyntax

For Kshafa I want to have a more complicated morphosyntactic alignment than what I had for Ngįout, which was marked nominative, but otherwise just plain vanilla nominative accusative. What I had come up with was inspired mainy by what I'd read about alignment in Majang, which is a complicated variant of tripartite fluid-S, in which the subject is nominative if it's "topical/expected", and ergative if not.

This whole split based on pragmatics is a bit too complicated for me, so I decided that for Kshafa the split is going to be based on the definiteness of the subject. If the subject is definite it is nominative, and if it is indefinite it is ergative in transitive clauses and absolutive in indefinite clauses.

The diachronic explenation I have for this to make it make sense in my mind is that originally it was an ergative fluid S language that is based on definiteness - transitive clauses are ergative, intransitive clauses are fluid. Then, a kind of focal definite demonstrative article thing stuck to a definite ergative argument and the nominative case was made.

In addition, another part of the system (that was also inspired form Majang) is that the verb agrees with the definiteness of the subject, and because Kshafa has can be pro-drop, it can distinguish between intransitive clauses and transitive clauses with a dropped agent. Some examples:

A dog runs - run.3SG dog.ABS

The dog runs - run.3SG.DEF dog.NOM

A boy is being bitten - bite.3SG boy.ABS

The (known thing) bites the boy - bite.3SG.DEF boy.ABS

smth bites the dog - bite.3SG.DEF dog.ABS

A dog bites a boy - bite.3SG boy.ABS dog.ERG

The dog bites a boy - bite.3SG.DEF boy.ABS dog. NOM

Final thing is that nominative arguments can be freely fronted, so:

The dog bites a boy - bite.3SG.DEF boy.ABS dog. NOM => dog.NOM bite.3SG.DEF boy.ABS

I'm pretty happy with that, it makes sense to me. The only thing is that I need to figure out what to do when non-subject arguments are definite, because I don't want to have a morphological definiteness destinction in the other cases, and having a definite article just for non-subject cases feels weird. Maybe I can just say that just like how turkish only marks definiteness on accusative arguments, Kshafa only marks definiteness on subjects.

midnight mspaint drawings

*gong sfx*

tried doing comic accurate virska from memory

roxyy

sprites from memory

ok well this is just getting stupid

and minecraft ones

The findings are in! Thanks to the 105 people who voted.

The results are pretty expected, I think. The prestige American and British pronunciations are in roughly equal distributions. I figured mine ([ˈɑɹnd͡ʒ]) would be pretty low down, and it was, lol.

Shoutout to:

That one British person in the replies, for whom "orange" rhymes with "Stonehenge." I assume it's a true rhyme, which is cool!

Also, shoutout the the one person in the tags from Singapore who gave the pronunciation [o.ɹeɪntʃ] (something akin to "oh-wrench"). I'm in a languages of Southeast Asia course right now, and we glanced at Singapore English and Singlish, so this was another cool glimpse.

Y'all, I just got curious at one point, and I hope this isn't a repeat of a previous post. So, if you don't mind:

Wiktionary

orange - Wiktionary, the free dictionary

Wiktionary has a couple of recordings if you're curious about the difference/don't know linguistics and can't read IPA.

Follow-up question:

What words/phrases (if any) rhyme with orange?

This is a hotly-debated topic in the English language. I sincerely believe that in my dialect, no single word is a true-rhyme with orange that isn't also either a portmanteau or explicitly related to the word "orange." (E.g. blornge does not count for me, even though it does rhyme, because it is a portmanteau of blonde and orange.)

Reblogs are appreciated!

Experience: Learning the right way to connect the dots.

Help my family to get out and search for what is left of life. The war is devastating. Death is approaching every person and destruction is everywhere. We hope that there is hope before it is too late.

Go support!

Dear Conlangers making A Priori, Naturalistic Languages...

Specifically those that use a protolanguage... please write down your sound changes before you copy-paste them! I've been struggling for several months to remember which sound changes happened from Old Ipol -> Modern Ipol and I cannot, for the life of me, find the file where I saved them. Please write them down I'm begging you.