Day 49 (100 In Base 7) Of Rewriting My Novel

one of the funniest things I see people say about "standard english" btw is californians who are like "yeah basically all american english speakers speak the same way so it makes sense to call that 'standard american english'" because you know they only perceive it that way because californian english has like every single vowel merger simultaneously so they can't tell the difference between other american english varieties. they're fish who don't know they're wet

This idea was too cool not to reblog, especially from my nerdy combinatorics perspective.

Had an idea for a conlang in which instead of pronouns having the standard person/number setup (basically the cartesian product of {1, 2, 3} and {SG, PL}), it uses only the persons of the referents, not caring about how many there are (basically the powerset of {1, 2, 3}).

For example with this you would get a second person pronoun I'll gloss as just 2, but all it means is that the referents are a subset of the audience, independent of whether there are one or many people in that audience. However you'd also get another “second person” pronoun 2.3 which just means the referents include the audience but also people elsewhere (this is definitionally plural).

You'd end up with one third person pronoun (3, can be either plural or singular), two second person pronouns (see above), and four first person pronouns (1 – just singular, 1.3 – exclusive plural, 1.2 – partially inclusive plural, and 1.2.3 – inclusive plural). Additionally you'd also get an empty pronoun ∅, which could be used as an indefinite or impersonal pronoun like “one” or the dummy “it” (perhaps adding an animacy distinction to the system could help here).

It's interesting that the only thing you lose in this system compared to English at least is equivalents to the non-epicene third person singular pronouns “he/she/it”; because both “you” and “they” can refer to singular and plural they map directly to equivalents here. In first and second person you're purely gaining distinctions.

Experience: Learning the right way to connect the dots.

Ok, so, when reconstructing natural proto-languages, those protolanguages are almost never attested. Historical Linguists are basically making educated guesses and throwing darts against a wall when making the Proto-Indo-European hypothesis, it was just that the evidence was so compelling that linguists (and, most humans) believe it. For all intents and purposes, it's a really good guess.

The issue with my conworld? Classical Zispoel and Proto-Ytosi-Itaush are still fully attested languages with exactly 2 and 1 native speakers each, all still technically living.

To make matters worse, Lozerief is kind-of a scientific genius, and Pagjom is the literal Hero of Language. Together, they could reconstruct Proto-Zispoel and see what a god-awful, horrifying shit-show it was.

The idea that my characters could derive my god-awful, good-for-nothing protolanguage is, somehow, deeply disturbing to me. I think they would realize they were in a simulation if they did that.

day 306

pov shes about to say smth really mean to you but you lowkey deserve it

OC Open Tag Questionaire

Open tag from @fantasy-things-and-such

I'll do this with three of my main OCs: Iziser, Hotautebz, and Lozerief.

1) Are you a night owl or a morning lark

Izi: Normally, I hear the phrase as "night owl or morning star." I sleep in too late to be a morning star, though.

Hota: Izi thinks he sleeps in late? 10 AM? Rookie numbers.

Lozerief: I don't sleep. I once went a period of two weeks without sleeping before my body had enough and I slept on the floor. My sleep schedule is so irreconcilably bad that I can't, in good conscience, answer this question.

2) what is/would be your favorite kind of cheese

Izi: I'm lactose intolerant! I hear they make good brie in the highlands, though.

Hota: I feel bad for Izi. He's missing out on the wonders of mozzarella.

Lozerief: I grew up on a dairy farm. I had a brief stint selling cheese. I can't stand the stuff anymore-cheese, milk, butter, you name it! I guess my favorite at the time was well-aged gouda. I put my heart and soul into making gouda, let me tell you.

3) whats your favorite letter?*

Izi: This question is terribly unspecific! What language? Because my favorite "normal" letter is "rr." It looks like this: 工.

Hota: Again, poor Izi doesn't know the horrors of trying to learn to write Ytos. That being said, my favorite letter is the regular "r" in Ipol, which looks like this: 口.

Lozerief: Depends on the language, mostly, and script. Like, I'm old enough to remember the Classical Zispoel abugida that Pagjom invented, like, nine hundred years ago! It's hard to choose a favorite, especially in modern Ipol, which simplified the old abugida tremendously, down into an abjad. But, "f" is my favorite letter: Π.

*Sidenote: these are relative approximations of the actual characters in the Ipol Abjad, which I may later make a post on.

I tag @theothersideofthewoods @oldfashionedidiot and @authorcoledipalo + open tag. Your questions are:

What's your favorite restaurant? If you don't have one, what's your favorite food?

How many languages do you speak? Do you speak English? How many forms of those languages do you speak?

What does magic mean for you?

Hi, I'm back. I'm finally writing consistently again. I'm now finally writing my alternate story: It Will Hurt (And There Will Be No Fire.) More updates to come.

My oil painting of Gatorade Arctic Blitz

Too serious!!!