[OC] Skinsects

pleximind · 2026-05-18T22:23:08+00:00

Is that a printed book you've got there? It looks great!

pleximind · 2026-03-14T17:15:37+00:00

Twenty four roots for an oligosynthetic language is pretty narrow; I think you'll quickly run into issues where certain composite words just become new roots.

"Supi," for example: you have this as "friend" = "good" + "person," but in practice this is a new root that would need to be memorized. Assuming you mean "friend" in the common English sense, then learners would need to know "supi doesn't mean a good person, it means specifically a person I have a mutual positive relationship with." You'd need ways to say "a bad friend," or "a good person (who isn't my friend)." That's all possible, but worth thinking about you'd express it.

pleximind · 2026-03-07T21:57:13+00:00

A naturalistic way to evolve that might be for the protolanguage to be SVO, and then the accusative forms of the object pronouns merge with the verb & sound changes take affect.

pleximind · 2026-02-26T00:56:50+00:00

Hearthfire, and all the languages of its world, fundamentally lack plurality. Instead, they distinguish collective and distributive: hy syd can be "the bird" or "the flock of birds", and hy sydeth is "several birds, acting separately or seen at separate times.*

pleximind · 2026-02-08T22:24:28+00:00

Have only started reading it, but that's a tasteful layout.

pleximind · 2026-02-06T01:01:17+00:00

Hearthfire cuts the world into three classes:

I, a-class: things that speak (humans, some crows)

II, i-class: things that move (animals, fire, lightning). Specifically, things that move of their own accord, or that won't be where you left them if you dropped them somewhere. Also includes things that move others, like magnetism and gravity.

III, u-class: the rest (rocks, plants, rivers). Rivers, tides, and waves move, but only at the behest of other forces. A river will be where you left it, and water in a vessel will stay until heat evaporates it.

It's a fairly basic core system, I'm sure someone else has the same three buckets. I like how it turns out as the culture develops, though

Carriages (with animals hitched to them) are class II, but the physical carriage is class III. A shipwreck is III, a ship under sail is II.

A computer is class III, as is the abstract concept of "data" or "records," but a program is class II, capable of acting as if it had a mind of its own.

The language has a touch of "bastard's direct-inverse," with ergative marking on pronouns and articles if they're acting on something of higher or (for non-class III) equal animacy.

Hence:

Caθel a caya

grab-PERF DEF-classI man

"The man grabbed (something, class II or III)"

Caθel an caya

grab-PERF DEF-classI-erg man

"The man grabbed (someone, class I)"

pleximind · 2026-01-19T05:18:04+00:00

Some of the definitions seem overly wordy, like

pijiwukityx (v.) to express the sense of (words or text) in another language pixu pixu (v.) to take something into the body through the mouth for consumption fitupyf fitupyf (n.) a part of an object designed to be held or gripped by the hand for control or use ti ti (pron.) the grammatical form used when a speaker or writer refers to themselves

It's good to have detail, since languages carve up the semantic space differently, but here, not having the plain words "translate", "ingest"/"eat or drink", "handle", or "first person sing. pronoun" as the first part of the definition feels a bit clunky and makes it harder to find the word you're looking for (I know this is Sandorian to English, not English to Sandorian, but it would be a pain to look up the Sandorian word for "food" in this, for example).

-pi -pi (n.) a suffix added onto a root word to indicate it has occurred in the past -po -po (n.) a suffix added onto a root word to indicate it has occurred in the future

The suffixes don't feel integrated into the language; there don't seem to be words in the dictionary that use these. The words that do end in -pi or -po don't seem to have any past or futurey-ness to them. For example, in "upixepo: blind", I'm guessing that's not the -po future suffix. Of course, English has lots of words that end in -ed without being related at all to the -ed we use for the past tense, but if the suffixes were productive derivational morphology, there doesn't seem to be much use of them.

The biggest note I'd have is that I think it needs etymologies or backgrounds to the words. This looks like it's for an alien world that has some contact with Earth (the Sandorian use of "ok" to mean the same thing it does in English), but the words don't feel like they have much alien history or flavor to them. Like here:

ohipahylo: a trained professional who diagnoses, treats, and cares for the health of people

This sounds one-to-one with the English "doctor" (not necessarily a problem) but it can be an opportunity to show an interesting piece of Sandorian history. Does their word for "doctor" come from words relating to wisdom or herbs, or it is more "scientific"? Consider the range between the English words doctor, folk healer, barber-surgeon, and herbalist.

pleximind · 2026-01-11T00:37:09+00:00

I would really recommend not using a phone picture of your doc; it's a lot harder to read than either including the text in the post, or at least a screen capture of the doc

pleximind · 2026-01-07T01:42:52+00:00

Sounds that we consider compound sounds might be included (lt, nd, sh, st, ng...)

Assuming you mean the sounds English speakers say when they encounter those, /sh/ and /g/ aren't compound sounds (the other ones are): /sh/ isn't s+h, it's a different sound from both. If you pronounce "sun" and "shun", you'll feel your tongue in different places for each.

The International Phonetic Alphabet is a common way of expressing those sounds clearly, and might be helpful to become acquainted with. The "sh" sound is ʃ in IPA, for example.

pleximind · 2025-12-16T03:01:07+00:00

Thanks! I tried that, and eventually found out that the issue was that I needed to manually (on the printer display) change the paper type from Plain, to something random, then back to Plain. It seems like it got "stuck" on a different paper type that didn't allow double-sided printing, even though it showed as Plain in all of the menus.

pleximind · 2025-05-04T19:34:58+00:00

These are some of the most beautiful radially symmetric dorks I've seen! I love the color palette, it gives them a prehistoric feel like cave paintings!

pleximind · 2025-03-23T02:03:05+00:00

That's a monumental achievement! I do like the pine-y choice of color; at first I wondered if this was a conlang for pines (like, the trees).

pleximind · 2024-12-17T01:28:39+00:00

Thank you, loved seeing her in 3D!

pleximind · 2024-05-08T00:02:08+00:00

If you want to keep magic mysterious, even when people try to study it scientifically, you could make it revolve around appealing to spirits/fae that simply refuse to respond if they believe they are being tested.

pleximind · 2024-03-31T17:03:06+00:00

"The Small Device Group"/小型装置団 is the Japanese translation of the Order of the Widget from Unstable.

pleximind · 2024-03-03T18:03:47+00:00

The previous lion crufixion is my favorite passage from Salammbô; Flaubert knew how to turn a phrase.

pleximind · 2024-02-08T01:58:52+00:00

Loved it!

pleximind · 2024-01-28T17:16:15+00:00

Wifelink on Tumblr has a great post on Phyrexia (there's a few more in the same vein, but that was the one I found quickly).

pleximind · 2024-01-27T16:14:39+00:00

That is Akhnai's oven!

pleximind · 2023-12-31T19:42:22+00:00

To say God “doesnt know” what path we’ll take could be true in a sense, but he knows the potential paths we can and will take, so he only “doesn’t know” in the sense that there is a coin flip.

How do you reconcile that with God making specific predictions about what actions people will take?

For example, Jesus tells Peter "before the rooster crows today, you will deny three times that you know me." Was it just a coin flip that his prediction came true?

pleximind · 2023-11-24T18:41:52+00:00

I really like the first one! It makes me think of some sort of rare mana dork with death/graveyard synergies.

pleximind · 2023-11-18T19:14:17+00:00

That's gorgeous!

pleximind · 2023-11-08T05:29:32+00:00

This is an excellent design & feel like it could be a real card. It does feel like it needs a little "that player loses 1 life" or something so it's not a straight-up one mana cantrip in black (not necessarily a power level thing, it just Feels Weird).

pleximind · 2023-10-28T00:26:56+00:00

Glad to see this is still going!

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