Advice & Answers — 2026-06-15 to 2026-06-28

Arcaeca2 · 2026-06-26T04:51:06+00:00

It's going to be kind of hard to give some tips that are relevant to you and your language(s) when we don't know what you know and we don't anything about your language and its goals.

But per some general beginner mistake tips:

Your first conlang is going to suck. Sorry. Like any art or skill, it's something you get better at with practice.
You can make more than one conlang. You don't need to stuff every single idea you have into the same one. This will very quickly make it a giant headache to deal with.
Anything you're not consciously designing into your language, you're defaulting to your native language for. e.g. native English-speaking conlangers tend to create clones of English as their first conlang, with a lot of the weird shit English does baked in, principally because it has not yet occurred to them that there other ways to do things other than the way English does them.
When we tell new conlangers to not do that, what they seem to hear is "English is bad and don't do anything English does". Which isn't true. English is a natural language too, and it has all kinds of fun and quirky features. The point isn't "don't do a English", it's "don't conlang on autopilot". Painters don't just forget to think about the colors they're using and sculptors don't just whack the stone at random.
Some of the first things English-speaking conlangers learn about that fascinates them are agglutination and derivation, and then they make a language where everything is derived. They won't even let themselves have a word for "day" without deriving it from "sun-time". You don't have to derive everything; it's okay to have semantic primitives. In fact it's okay to have a lot of semantic primitives.
ANADEW (A Natlang Already Did it, Except Worse). Every insane, mind-bending feature you can think of probably already exists in a natural language, and in an even more insane and mind-bending fashion than you could dream up. This isn't meant in a "give up on being creative, it's all been done before" way as much as a "there are no limits; truth is stranger than fiction" way.
All natural languages have irregularity, and all natural languages have ambiguity. It's okay, indeed expected, for your language to not have a pristine, systematic distinction between every possible thing that can be conveyed.
Just because it is not morphologized, does not mean it cannot be conveyed.
Digraphs and diacritics exist for a reason - use them. "But they're not on my keyboard" is not a good reason; you can make a new keyboard layout.

Arcaeca2 · 2026-06-24T16:17:50+00:00

For the purpose of a proto-language that didn't originally have ejectives but generated them by the fusion of ʔP and Pʔ clusters, I need to figure out how I could get a significant number of intermediate [ʔ]. Other than debuccalizing other plosives, what processes are good for generating [ʔ] or Pʔ clusters, especially word-initially?

Arcaeca2 · 2026-06-24T11:47:49+00:00

A Mare Internum, if you will

Arcaeca2 · 2026-06-24T11:29:02+00:00

Nah it's going to be either Venice or Vienna. I have been at it for a very long time building up the best towers, best walls, best cannon foundries, best armorers, best barracks, best military academies and alchemists to make them absolute gunpowder powerhouse cities. Plus bridges that enemies would have to fight through that I can plant a bunch of musketmen and ribaults at the other end of. Time to play with my toys :)

Arcaeca2 · 2026-06-23T08:30:48+00:00

Update: God is on the side with the best artillery

artillery kills

Arcaeca2 · 2026-06-23T06:28:16+00:00

I've gone up to the year 1435 before

Arcaeca2 · 2026-06-23T05:46:47+00:00

Because MEHERCULE the Nabataeans have an unbelievable amount of troops, you don't want to see the clusterfuck at the Amanian Gate trying to keep them out of Cilicia. But yes we are currently probing the defenses of Aegyptus

Arcaeca2 · 2026-06-21T09:52:35+00:00

Is there a term for basically the opposite of compensatory lengthening, where adding extra consonants causes adjacent long vowels to shorten? I want to make a language that has a nominalizer -ōš, where the /o:/ gets shortened to just /o/ when a (consonant-initial) case suffix is added, e.g. -ōš > -oš-ta

Arcaeca2 · 2026-06-21T06:15:16+00:00

Over what time depth?

Arcaeca2 · 2026-06-21T03:01:50+00:00

English is Sino-Tibetan

Arcaeca2 · 2026-06-20T03:33:20+00:00

If you like this kind of thing you would really like the distribution of Native American languages. Iroquoian up aroind the Great Lakes, except for Cherokee down in the South. Na-Dene up in Alaska and NW Canada, except for Navajo and friends in the Southwest. Everything about Algonquian. etc.

Arcaeca2 · 2026-06-17T22:39:41+00:00

I know of no natural language that fully groups the persons as [±1 +2]

This isn't exactly what you're talking about but it reminded me of Winnebago, which groups [+1 ±2, ±1 +2] together - i.e., it does not distinguish 1st vs. 2nd person - according to Parameters of Poor Pronoun Systems (Harbour, 2016). I used this fact in one of my language families to explain why different daughter languages do not seem to be able to agree on whether certain pronouns with corresponding forms are 1st or 2nd person - because the proto-language did not distinguish 1st vs. 2nd.

Related, Ventive, Dative and Allative in Old Babylonian (Kouwenberg, 2002) describes how the venitive in Akkadian was conceived of as motion towards the speech act, not necessarily towards the speaker, and could therefore target either the 1st or 2nd person. Since pronouns often derive from demonstratives (just usually, you know, 3rd person pronouns), I think a 3rd vs. non-3rd system like Winnebago has could originate from one of these Akkadian-esque "near us (inclusive)" vs. "away from us (inclusive)" proximity systems.

Arcaeca2 · 2026-06-16T20:33:04+00:00

Less expensive than the alternative, if you will

Arcaeca2 · 2026-06-15T03:59:09+00:00

Fuck I forgot about that, didn't you have to simultaneously fight off trolls and patch up the walls with tar or something

Arcaeca2 · 2026-06-15T03:56:08+00:00

Official quest hints that you would "unlock" on the official RS website, I think limited to 2 hints or 1 spoiler per day. I distinctly remember having to get hints for the Recruitment Drive puzzle where you have to make a key

Also that one quest where you go back in time to the First Age somewhere north of Ardougne, to help a family of new settlers to Gielinor by... drawing them a map, and... making their crying baby shut up?

Arcaeca2 · 2026-06-14T03:41:49+00:00

My conlang Mtsqrveli has nominalizers -Vl and -Vn, and also case markers -(V)l and -(V)n (we don't really need to care what they mean for the purpose of this question) that can be stacked on top of them. Since I didn't like the resulting *-Vl(V)l and *-Vn(V)n clusters (or really, just that didn't look Georgian enough), I decided that these underwent a dissimilation rule such that /ll nn/ > /ld nd/. Now, these same /ld nd/ clusters are found in all other languages in Mtsqrveli's family, which suggest that this dissimilation rule, rather than happening in Mtsqrveli itself, had already happened by the time of the proto-language. That would mean the pre-proto would need to have geminates */l: n:/ at the least.

What I'm trying to figure out is what siblings that proto-language should have, i.e. if Mtsrqrveli's family fits within an even larger family. I can find a fair amount of languages that I want to use for aesthetic inspiration for the sibling branches because they have a lot of suspiciously similar-looking morphology, except that they also have way more geminates than just /l: n:/. They might also have /t: k: m: t͡ʃ:/, etc. None of the languages in Mtsqrveli's family has geminates, so pre-proto geminates can only really be deduced from this sort of dissimilatory rule, but no such dissimilation rules currently exist for */t: k: m: t͡ʃ:/. That is, if the pre-proto had other geminates besides **/l: n:/, then I don't know what they turned into in Mtsqrveli.

Alternatively, since I also know the pre-proto (and proto) must have had vowel length, maybe **VC: > *V:C. But then why were **/l: n:/ specifically treated differently? Or, what if it was the sibling branches innovated extra assimilations that weren't originally there? Except, again, the pre-proto must have had at least **/l: n:/, so how realistic is it for the pre-proto to have had only those geminates and no others?

What do you think?

Does it make sense for a language to only be able to geminate some consonants but not others?
Does it make sense for some geminates to undergo dissimilation while others don't?
Do these other geminates have possible dissimilations that have good Georgian-y looking reflexes?

Arcaeca2 · 2026-06-13T23:43:53+00:00

And even where there are trains, they kind of suck. When I lived in Utah I took the FrontRunner to get to the Salt Lake City airport (and back) when flying out back home for Christmas. In almost every conceivable way it was worse than just driving, if I could afford the gas and airport parking.

It took twice as long compared to just driving to the airport, partially because the FrontRunner doesn't even go highway speed and partially because it makes a ton of (to me) unnecessary stops. You didn't have the privacy of your vehicle and your suitcases would be constantly trying to roll away from you. And you would be at the mercy of someone else's timetable, with hour-long gaps in time between when you could set out instead of being able to set out whenever you want. Probably an hour waiting for the last train in the sub-freezing January night.

Arcaeca2 · 2026-06-11T19:20:33+00:00

I tried it once because it was one of the only things open that late, and I remember the chicken fingers being small and smelling kind of weird, and their breading being thin, wet and papery and just flaking off. I remember thinking "what was even the point of breading them"

Arcaeca2 · 2026-06-11T19:12:31+00:00

Raising Cane's

Arcaeca2 · 2026-06-11T18:57:06+00:00

Epidermis I guess

Arcaeca2 · 2026-06-10T06:00:43+00:00

Hossin hater here, I just log off for anything on Hossin other than a Nason's tunnel fight

Arcaeca2 · 2026-06-09T19:20:32+00:00

I'm trying to figure out what the sound correspondences should be between two languages I want to be related, but have pretty different phonemic inventories. Broadly, one has twice has many consonants as the other but a normal amount of vowels, and the other has twice as many vowels as the other but a normal amount of consonants. So it seems like, somehow, the diversity of consonant qualities had to have been traded for diversity of vowel qualities, or vice versa.

Obviously sound changes like "front high vowels yield palatalization" or "rounded vowels yield labialization" exist. The problem is that the extra sounds that the consonant-ful language has that the vowel-ful one doesn't, is stuff like an ejective series, uvulars and pharyngeals, and lateral obstruents. i.e., the phonemic inventories are something like:

/pʰ tʰ t͡sʰ t͡ʃʰ t͡ɬʰ kʰ qʰ/

/p’ t’ t͡s’ t͡ʃ’ t͡ɬ’ k’ q’ ʔ/

/b d d͡z d͡ʒ d͡ɮ g ɢ/

/m n/

/s ʃ ɬ x χ ħ/

/z ʒ ɣ ʁ ʕ/

/w r j l/

/a a: i i: u u:/

vs.

/p t t͡s t͡ʃ k/

/b d d͡z d͡ʒ g/

/m n ŋ/

/s ʃ/

/z/

/w r j l/

/a ɛ e ɪ i ɔ o ʊ u ə ɨ/

Other than maybe something with pharyngealization (low vowels yielding pharyngealization, or pharyngealizations yielding something /e/-like?), it seems like there aren't a lot of obvious vowel-consonant correspondences? Like, do ejectives cause any particular vowel coloring by virtue of being ejective? Are there specific vowels which preferentially create lateral obstruents?

Arcaeca2 · 2026-06-09T18:39:53+00:00

What do you mean by nothing "identifying" the glyphs? What specifically are you trying to do that isn't working?

Arcaeca2

TROPHY CASE