Lady of the Land @Lady@cat.family

@alyssa
• it can be tempting to make words with similar meanings sound similar, but it’s more useful to make them sound very different. it’s fine that beech and beach sound the same, but not beech and ash, maple, oak, pine, fir…

• when developing the initial corpus, one useful approach is to come up not with words but with a number of semantic “roots” which can be combined to form words. that will give you your basic sound inventory and an idea of how words in the language might be derived from each other.

• come up with rules, but don’t adhere too closely to them; language is messy. choose aesthetically appealing choices over more cumbersome “correct” ones; people have a tendency to change the pronunciation of words they don’t like the pronunciation of

• i find it helpful to define some broad categories of words like “body parts”, “people and occupations”, “plants”, “animals”, “food and drink”, “geography”, “substances and materials”, “emotions”, “sensations”, “actions”, “grammatical words”… to make it easier to browse conceptually-similar words

• the most important thing regarding dictionary/lexicon formats is that it be really really easy to read and edit. i’m a big fan of record-jar: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-phillips-record-jar-01 (ignore the CRLF line-ending requirement)

i’ve built conlang dictionary viewers/tools before but i’ll save that conversation until you have enough words to where you start needing to use one :P

• for notes, i’ve always just done markdown or a similar lightweight markup language. you could always stick them on the wiki ;)

@coriander it’s 3AM here (the state of Delaware)

@alyssa let me know if you need Technology

@coriander if there aren’t any riffs, what do you headbang to?

@coriander the thing about games and power fantasies is that games are inanimate objects; power fantasies can only be had by players

@coriander oh lots of people think minecraft is fucked up especially because of how villagers are treated but things are allowed to be fucked up in games

@kepstin @Packbat i disagree that the XML serialization of HTML5 isn't XHTML; it's in the xhtml namespace, has the mime type application/xhtml+xml, and most importantly is what i meant in the post

there are minor differences but generally the xml ones are “correct” and the html ones are “for compatibility reasons” (like uppercasing all tag names, despite nobody doing this in 2024)—with a few exceptions

@Packbat (a lot of web servers just default to this now because almost everyone in 2023 is writing HTML pages as utf-8)

@Packbat these instructions are for firefox but the process is similar for other browsers:

• open the Web Inspector (Tools > Browser Tools > Web Developer Tools)
• navigate to the Network tab
• reload the page
• click on the first request in the results (should be for the page you are on)
• in the panel that opens, look under “Response Headers” for “content-type”

if it says `text/html; charset=utf-8`, then no charset declaration is necessary

@Packbat *unless your server doesn’t specify a charset parameter in the content‐type, lol

@Packbat the charset <meta> tag is the last‐resort option; browsers will look at the Content-Type provided by the server first, so specifying it does nothing UNLESS your server doesn’t specify a content type. also, if you write XHTML, UTF-8 is the default option because all XML defaults to UTF‐8. if you’re the type of person who always closes your tags anyway, you might as well just write XHTML and save yourself some trouble

(XHTML is also distinguished from HTML by its content‐type; be sure to use an extension which your web browser will serve as XML not as HTML if you go this route)