What did you accomplish today? [2011–2019]

[thetha]

Finally managed to mentally conceptualize the Jacobi Elliptic Functions. The linked paper is a very intuitive explanation of their basic properties (much better than that weird rectangle thing on Wikipedia )! I wrote myself a little front and back page of notes on the functions, and being able to understand this stuff is really motivating me to do further learning! (:

Any other junior mathematicians here?

[Omzinesý]

Figured out how to do Ablatives of Specification in Pazmat.

Acj Yedavo gux vonith dl wanuya.
[DEM sword-PL be.3SG.PL powerful-SUPER for slash-INFIN
These swords are the most powerful for slashing.
(Lit. "These swords are hardest for to-slash")

Micavo gux swotith dl Stol artiya, dag Acjos artitham.
chair-PL be.3PL hard-SUPER for 3SGM.ABSOL make-INFIN, therefore DEM-ACC make-3SGF-DEO
Chairs are the hardest to make for him, so she should make them.

I see no ablatives there.

[Click]

Ablative of Specification is a feature of Latin grammar, and Chagen worked out how to form constructions that would require the Ablative of Specification in Latin.

(italic for emphasis, if I were unclear)

[kiwikami]

I taught my Supernatural-obsessed cousin how to pronounce "Lonho lol nen remún shebr a tselúcatra zróchá roshhó," which is ??? (still. haven't. named. this. thing.) for "I'm the one who gripped you tight and raised you from perdition." I had an ulterior motive, as it also meant teaching her to read some IPA, and now she understands what I'm talking about when I ramble about trying to learn German and having difficulties with velar fricatives (I keep uvularizing the things.)

(It's [lɔn.hɔ lɔl nɛn ɾɛ.mun ʃɛ.bɾ a t͡sɛ.lu.ka.tɾa zɾo.χæ ɾɔʃ.ho], in case you care. Stressed in iambs.)

[silvercat]

I have nearly 370 lexicon entries complete. I have about 60 entries to complete in this batch. I'm supposed to picking up my place, but I'm lazy today (actually, this week so far).

[mbrsart]

Bosk'e/Nomadish
Came up with historical evidence for one of the rarely attested suffixes in my prefixing language. It was originally a particular verb form that grammaticalized into a noun that meant "honored thing" or "honorable thing", which was commonly compounded. Then, after a culture's entire world changed and it was no longer acceptable to welcome a stranger, half of that noun vanished from the vocabulary, leaving poor little -zha on its own. So if you wanted to say, "honorable pineapple1", you would have two ways to do it.

Old, which would get you the stinkeye for saying a bad, bad word:
gechâfezhak'erte
gechâfe-zha-k'erte
pineapple-AOR.PTCP-honor.a.stranger

New, safe, complete with new realization
gechâfezha
gechâfe-zha
pineapple-VOC.POLITE

1A gechafe is a fruit native to Hra that is similar in appearance to a pineapple, but the inside of the fruit is purple and very sweet. So when I say "honorable pineapple", I mean, "honorable alien fruit which looks like a pineapple".

[Click]

[...] when I ramble about trying to learn German and having difficulties with velar fricatives (I keep uvularizing the things.)

I thought that velar fricatives in German tended to be uvular away from front vowels, and palatal next to them.

I taught my Supernatural-obsessed cousin how to pronounce "Lonho lol nen remún shebr a tselúcatra zróchá roshhó," which is ??? (still. haven't. named. this. thing.)

Call it vunc until you find a better name for it.

[Chagen]

I finished a small Pazmat fable called "Celca n Yur" ("The Sun and the Moon").

Short synopsis: The sun think it's better because people can see under and work. The moon think it's better because it has the starry skies and people can sleep under it. They can't agree, so they go to a girl named Alif ("reason") to get the answer.

The moon goes to Alif, but she can't work because it's nightime and can't see. The sun goes to see her, but she now can't sleep because it's daytime. She ends up telling them "Look, humans need you both, so stop being whiny assholes and just do your job, fuck. Can I go back to sleep now?"

...Well, she obviously don't say it as crudely, but you get the picture. I guess the moral is "you can't do everything", but I wasn't really thinking of a moral for this.

Also, I wrote the entire thing in Pazmat. I haven't even translated it to English yet.

[kiwikami]

[...] when I ramble about trying to learn German and having difficulties with velar fricatives (I keep uvularizing the things.)

I thought that velar fricatives in German tended to be uvular away from front vowels, and palatal next to them.

I did not know this. This would explain some things. Thank you!

I taught my Supernatural-obsessed cousin how to pronounce "Lonho lol nen remún shebr a tselúcatra zróchá roshhó," which is ??? (still. haven't. named. this. thing.)

Call it vunc until you find a better name for it.

I'm not particularly fond of that one... I'm considering Váncyoví [væn.kjɔ.vi], Yowhan [jɔʋ.han], Váncyev [væn.kjɛv], Yoshcan [jɔʃ.kan], Táúrórr [tæ.u.ɾoɾ], Tardúr/Tarbúr [tar.duɾ]/[tar.buɾ], and Váncyet/Váncyet-hí [væn.kjɛt]/[væn.kjɛt.hi].

Waiddaminute.
...
Cástían. [cæs.ti.an]

I like it. *smashes virtual champagne bottle against computer screen (not a real one - not doing that again)*
"Thou sure and firm-set conlang, with thy incomprehensible mess of consonants and ridiculously important vowels, I christen thee Cástían, the Language of Faith - because your speakers place great emphasis on faith in themselves, each other, and their religion, and because it sounds pretty - which when I am too lazy to type the diacritics will be called Castian, which actually means a completely different thing something along the lines of 'Language that is caused by an inanimate, nonsentient object relating to faith.'"

Finally.

[Click]

Cástían. [cæs.ti.an]

I like it. *smashes virtual champagne bottle against computer screen (not a real one - not doing that again)*
"Thou sure and firm-set conlang, with thy incomprehensible mess of consonants and ridiculously important vowels, I christen thee Cástían, the Language of Faith - because your speakers place great emphasis on faith in themselves, each other, and their religion, and because it sounds pretty - which when I am too lazy to type the diacritics will be called Castian, which actually means a completely different thing something along the lines of 'Language that is caused by an inanimate, nonsentient object relating to faith.'"

Finally.

ཁཻཔེ་ཏིབཻ༈
Káipoi in Tibetan!

ཀཟེརུ་ཨནི་པི་ལ་སུརྟུ་ཨིམཏོ་ཀཻནུ༔

"ཨིམཏོ་ཀ་ཨུཁིནི་པཻ་ཨིམོ་པ",་བེ་པི་དཻརི་མོཨོ
"ཀ་ནུ་ཨུཁཻ་པ",་མཏོཨོ་ཨམཏུ་པི་དཻརི
"རོ་ཨམཏེར"
"ནུ,་ཀ་ནུ་ཨུཁཻ་པ་པ་སིདྲུ་ཨནི"

[kiwikami]

Finally got around to taking a picture of Castian's writing system... though it's with my fuzzy video camera as I still haven't gotten around to charging my actual camera. Here you go. It looks rather runic. It's not. But it's the kind of thing one could imagine being scratched into some ancient tablet in a history museum.



The bit at the top says:
Metúlat fáteren Yov Yatóhó a’ Csógó.
"In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth."

For the translation challenge. Most of the rest is that repeated. Anything else is mostly me just writing random words and sentences. It's a bit incorrect, as I've made a few changes as of this morning, but for the most part, that's what it says. (Although the word for "the Earth" is miswritten so it actually says "the insect's dead body." With a voicing error. Yep.)
...
Viola.

[Xing]

I've started working on some Wakeu lessons.

One lesson about greetings and introductions, and another lesson on kittens.

I start with the important topics.

[Ossicone]

I drove by a graveyard today and had a cool conculture idea.

Because the Uskra the live in a relatively dense forest clearing land for burials would be difficult. So I thought why not just bury people in the trees themselves. But hollowing out trees would also be labor intensive. Eventually I came to the idea of using fast growing vines or ivy to secure the body to a tree while also covering it from sight.

[Lambuzhao]

Miren de Ossicone ma:

Interesting idea!
You could take a leaf, as it were, from the Farsis and the Choctaw Nation (among Native American Tribes).

Read on, MacDuff -

Farsi Dakhma -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dakhma

The Choctaw Funerary Biers -
http://www.ehow.com/info_8622332_chocta ... ition.html

The special trees that the Uskra choose for such could be named "Silent Trees" or "Trees of Silence", perhaps?

It would be interesting if these sorts of trees had "built in" vines, i.e. withies, like the Willow.
Who knows, maybe the Uksra pleach or weave a kind of suspended bier (think papoose or weaver-bird nest ) for the corpse with such hanging branches

They could also hang dangling wind chimes that rang special notes to signify the presence of the dead (Woops! Then they wouldn't be "silent" anymore. Chanting Trees, perhaps?)

[Lambuzhao]

I wrote to some fontographers (Dunno if that's their correct title in ) about the existence (or not) of a calligraphic variant/descendant of (Old Persian) cuneiform. That is, a pen & ink version of the writing system, with all the curvy swashes of a Hieratic Egyptian or Arabic, or with the logographic strokes of Chinese. My Rozwi uses such a writing system (more abjad or alphabet than abugida), and I wondered if anyone else did such a thing (Calling Masako - Come in Masako!).

On another note, I backhoed some Rozwi versions of Persian cuneiform symbols I never bothered to create, like "ka" and "u" and a few others. They are not additions to the existing Rozwi writing system, just some additions to help me transcribe some Persian cuneiform words and names.

[Lambuzhao]

I wrote to some typographers about the existence (or not) of a calligraphic variant/descendant of (Old Persian) cuneiform (we're talking a script, basically). That is, a pen & ink version of the writing system, with all the curvy swashes of a Hieratic Egyptian or Arabic, or with the logographic strokes of Chinese. My Rozwi uses such a writing system (more abjad or alphabet than abugida), and I wondered if anyone else did such a thing (Calling Masako - Come in Masako!).

On another note, I backhoed some Rozwi versions of Persian cuneiform symbols I never bothered to create, like "ka" and "u" and a few others. They are not additions to the existing Rozwi writing system, just some additions to help me transcribe some Persian cuneiform words and names.

[CrazyEttin]

Finished the phonology of my current conlang project.

[decem]

Finished the phonology of my current conlang project.

/A i N k/?

In other news, I decided to change how the object is marked on verbs. Before, the object pronoun was added to the start of the verb as a prefix, and the subject declension as a suffix. I've decided to change it so that, the object pronoun is separate from the verb but you still must mark the object by adding another suffix after the subject agreement.

For example:
Before - Se fabadhata
Se faba|dhat|a - 1SG.NOM 2SG.DAT|wait|1SG.PRES
After - Se feba dhataf
Se feba dhat|a|f - 1SG.NOM 2SG.DAT wait|1SG.PRES|2SG

[Click]

Finished the phonology of my current conlang project.

/A i N k/?

I don't understand.

[Chagen]

A few days ago, I thought of what Thooselqat's equivalent to 4chan was. An odd thing, I know, but I like that I have a conworld with modern tech--let's me think of things like how their internet is, or what kind of TV programs they have.

In any case, this site--no name yet--basically is an imageboard like 4chan, except you can choose to display which country you're from in your post with a small flag next to the whole "Anonymous" part. This is mainly because it was formed during a period of bunch of civil wars and was mainly a war for people in the nations warring to communicate with each other covertly, but now basically people from everywhere use it.

One of the more unique traits of its userbase is how they refer to each other--like how 4chan uses the word "fag" for shits and giggles, it's customary on this imageboard to refer to someone by a racial slur for their race. Really, they basically call each other the equivalent of "nigger/chink/kike/etc." all the time just to fuck with those coming to the site for the first time. Indeed, calling someone by the normal name for their ethnicity usually results in them humorously acting like you just called them the most offensive slur possible.

One popular thread on its /z/ board (named as such after the Pazmat word for "random", "zwastel") is "what's the temperature right now where you live", mainly because it draws Cry (where the average temperature is negative 100 degrees F at BEST), and Foxro (where the average temperature is above 150 degrees F usually) into hilarious flame wars about who has it worst.

I even came up with a meme for this board, formed when a Cry, annoyed with a thread of people bitching about having nothing to do, came in with a hilarious post about how running from bears was a children's game in Cryset (it isn't). He then went on a screed about how games in Cryset are way more dangerous.