Table of Contents
Blog
The blog namespace is for catching stray ideas. These may be less polished than the stuff you see in the Lore namespace.
Rough sketch of puppyhood development
| Human age equivelence | yinrih age (terran years) | Milestone |
|---|---|---|
| 7 | 10 | Pups are expected to know right from wrong. Formal religious and secular education begins. Later bound for end of early childhood amnesia |
| 10 | 14 | the age at which pups may begin serving as acolytes or bonekeepers |
| 13 | 35 | Pups begin rejecting physical affection, such as kisses from parents and tail thumps from siblings and begin showing the adult preference for personal space. At Moonlitter, retail conscription begins |
| 18 | 53 | sexual maturity, legal adulthood |
As for the pups I've featured in stories so far, the three sisters from Everybody Poops Together are around 15 to 18 Terran years. The narrator from one part of First Contact and his sister are around 10 (I'll have to retcon the age at which the sister can become an acolyte though. It should be “four more years” not “six more years”.) The boys from In Which Greg Experiences Indigestion are in their 40s or very early 50s. Crystal from Table Manners is probably around 40.
Rethinking Body Proportions Somewhat
This post from the megathread lists some tentative body proportions. In there I say they're 200 cm from nose tip to tail tip. The tail is a bit longer than the rest of the body, so their body is about 100 cm from the nape of the neck to the base of the tail. The forelegs are about 76 cm from flat palm to shoulder. They may appear a bit taller when knuckle-walking.
Anyway, after measuring the proportions in one of my drawings, the legs should be shorter, about 52 cm. Since (for now) I say the hind legs and forelegs are the same length, that means when standing on the hind feet with their legs and back straight, that gives them a total height of about 152 cm from the floor to the top of the skull (so excluding the ears). With the forelegs raised overhead let's say their claws just about brush two meters.
Indoor spaces should probably accommodate a fully upright posture, so lets say the average ceiling height is about 6 feet. This works out great given my stories. in Everybody Poops Together Greg can just about stand up straight in the waiting room, though he bonks his head against a few protruding ceiling fixtures. But he has to bow his head a bit in the bathroom.
I think to further pin down their proportions I should break out some brads and construction paper to build a scaled articulated silhouette.
update on the database idea
I realized something while walking back from the bathroom in the middle of the night. A surprising number of solutions come to me like that. Anyway, there's a problem with the design as described earlier. If you have multiple Lexeme tables, the senses and derivatives tables have foreign keys from different tables in the same column. That's bad. The easiest way to fix this is to have a single Lexeme table and add a row indicating to which language the lexeme belongs. That way the primary keys for each lexeme are unique across languages.
Multilingual Conlang Database
It's very possible I got the connector types wrong, so I'll try to explain what the ER diagram is supposed to be.
The Lexeme table has just an ID, a lemma, and a pronunciation. It represents a single word in one of your conlangs. You could remove the pronunciation if the Romanization makes it clear how to pronounce the word. You could also add things like usage notes and inflection paradigms.
The Sememe table is a list of semantic units, ideas, or single senses of a word. It has the obligatory ID, the sense itself, and the sense's part of speech. Examples would be the concrete noun “chair”, or the action verb “run”, as well as more abstract fare like a noun meaning “the head of an organization” or the noun “an instance of running” as in “I went for a run today”. You could also add a semantic domain field to put the idea in a broader context. “Chair” could have the domain “furniture” for example.
A lexeme can have multiple senses, a one-to-many relationship, so a Senses junction table links a Lexeme to one or more sememes. The Senses table has the Lexeme ID, the Sememe ID, and a rank indicating how salient that particular sense of the word is, with lower numbers being more salient.
For example, say your language's word for “chair” is “kudi”. As in English, kudi can mean either the physical piece of furniture as well as the metanymous meaning of “head of an organization”. And like English, if a speaker of your conlang hears “kudi” out of context, they're likely to think of the item of furniture. So kudi shows up twice in the senses table, paired with “chair” it has a rank of 1, and with “head of an organization” it has a rank of 2.
To represent etymologies, cognates, and derivatives there is a Derivatives table. It has a source word column and a derived word column, both pointing to a lexeme id. There's also a column for an explanation of the relationship. For example, say your lang's word for mushroom, “kui”, derives from a dialectal variant of the standard “kudi” for chair, with the connection being similar to “toadstool” in English.
If you're only working on one language in isolation, you can stop there, but here's the secret sauce. While there's only one Sememe, Senses, and Derivatives table, you can have multiple Lexeme tables, one for each of your conlangs. Let's call the first language lang A, and the second lang B. Lang A has “kudi” for chair, and lang B, a closely related language, has huti. Both kudi and huti point to “chair” in the senses table, so you can translate kudi to huti when translating from lang A to lang B. Not only that, but kudi and huti are paired in the derivatives table, indicating the two words are cognates.
weird A.I. voice thing
I was playing around with some new TTS voices on Windows. The way it goes from sales pitch to conspiratorial whisper to depressed monotone seemingly at random sounded funny, so here's A day at the market read aloud.