Hi! Please check out our site about imaginary worlds!
The Wongery
We've been working on this site for fifteen years, but we've never told anyone else about it until today. Why not? Because we're not very bright, I guess. Is a blazed Tumblr post really the best way to get the word out? Probably not! Like I said, we may not be very bright. Still, I've been on Tumblr for more than a decade (not with this account; I just created this account recently; but I have a personal account I've had for a lot longer), so if nobody ends up visiting the site because of this blazed post, well, I guess the worst-case scenario is that we've just given Tumblr a little money to pay them back for all the time we've spent here. (Well, no; maybe the absolutely worst-case scenario is that somebody does visit the site, and hates it so much they devote their lives to hunting me down and eradicating me and everyone I ever loved, and then this somehow results in the destruction of the universe. But I think that's pretty unlikely.)
Anyway, the site is called the Wongery, and it's at https://wongery.com, and it includes a wiki called the Central Wongery where we post about our own imaginary worlds, and another wiki called the Public Wongery where anyone can post about their creations. It's not limited to just writing text content; there are places where you can post RPG stats for creatures and characters of your worlds, and LEGO models, and video game assets, and more. (Admittedly, there is nothing in those places yet, but they're there.) It's still very much a work in progress, and there are a lot of broken links right now and features we haven't implemented yet, but there's enough there that I hope people can get some enjoyment out of it.
Anyway, please visit our site and see what you think! And please refrain from doing anything that might somehow result in the destruction of the universe. Thank you.
Speaking of atoms, I was driving in my car earlier tonight and musing on alternate conceptual metaphors a civilization might use for atomic theory. If your language isn't going to use a term borrowed from a prestige language meaning "uncuttable" for an atom, what other words would make sense?
Japanese uses the word kaku, originally the stone of a fruit, for a variety of concepts involving coreness including the atomic nucleus; so perhaps using "core" or "(fruit) stone" for an atom is not a crazy idea (if this civilization like ours conceived of the existence of atoms before discovering that they have internal structure). Or perhaps extending the sense of "speck (of dust)", to mean an extremely small point-like quantity of a substance.
I was also musing on alternate conceptual metaphors for positive and negative electrical charge, and gender is a choice that a civilization might reasonably have hit upon (much to the chagrin of some types of genderqueer feminism). The terms positive and negative in our own history of science apparently date to Benjamin Franklin's electricity experiments; but I think even someone in his position could have come up with the idea of a male and female element to "electrical fluid". Would it be better if the electron or the proton ended up being the atomic subcomponent associated with femininity?
I'm not sure if there's any better way to conceptualize quarks than three-color human vision. I figure once your society discovers quarks it will almost certainly have discovered additive coloration and might well have discovered the color television; and at that point it's gonna be hard to think of anything other than color adding to describe them.
So a while back I made this world map for a worldbuilding project that never really went anywhere beyond this.
I wanted to find a good projection for this map, so I originally made it in equirectangular, because G.Projector takes it as input and the distortions are relatively easy to work out compared to other projections (Everything is the right height, and just gets wider near the poles, the main hard thing was having to make a polar island basically blind to what it was going to end up like.)
If you want to see the actual continent shapes the easiest way is probably the orthographic projection (What things would look like from space, but if you were technically infinitely far away, i.e. the projection lines are parallel), the south hemisphere is a video to get the entire thing in.:
A new layout of continent shapes gives some really interesting opportunities for which projections work well and which don't because you lose some of the familiarity for distortions with a map of Earth, for example I dislike equatorial aspect cylindrical and pseudocylindrical projections on this map because it feels like it distorts the poles in a way that seems wrong to me. Like we're all used to seeing Antarctica big but I don't really want to see that small island stretched across the north pole line.
This is going to be quite long so I'll put a cut here.
Projections that don't really work
In general I don't think flat-pole pseudocylindrical projections that are common for world maps of Earth really work for this planet. Here's the Robinson (A very common projection) and the Kavrayskiy VII (My personal favourite general-purpose projection):
I think the problem is mainly because there's more coastline outside of 75°N/S here. Antarctica is big so most of it's coastline is relatively far from the pole, and most of the coast of Russia and Canada is further from the pole than the coast of the southern continent here.
For reference here's the Mercator projection cropped to 85°N/S like most of the ones of Earth are:
Like while the Mercator makes Antarctica very big with Earth, it doesn't actually cut off any coastline. In general I just think common map projections for Earth distort the northern continent or the southernmost peninsula on the left of the southern continent.
If you really need a projection centred on the equator, you can sort of get away with the point-pole projections that have "lobes", like the Van der Grinten IV, additionally you can shift the centre to 34.2°W without cutting through any land, which I think reduces angular distortion of the problematic bits somewhat, though results in an asymmetrical graticule.
At the time I originally made it, my favourite way of presenting it was an Equirectangular projection, centred on 45°S. This keeps the land away from the high distortion areas, there's basically no land within 25° of the "poles" of this map, and if you really want to have no land being interrupted you can offset it horizontally like the second image to put the north polar island back together.
Recently I've found a bunch of other projections that look good for it, most of them oblique. Originally I was only using G.Projector which is great but only has a few projections that allow for oblique aspects, but recently I've discovered Map Designer Raster which is much freer in that regard, so I realised that this aspect looks pretty good with the Mercator projection (cropped to the golden ratio):
For comparison here's a Cylindrical Equal-Area version (standard parallels at 30°), they're mostly pretty similar except for the bits closest to the top and bottom:
In general these two are probably both more useful than the Equirectangular what with one being conformal and the other being equal-area, though aesthetically the equirectangular is a good compromise.
I also wanted to make one that showed the northern continent well and realised that despite cutting the southern continent in half an equatorial aspect of the Stereographic projection works pretty well. The centre of that continent would probably be relatively sparsely populated (most of it would probably be pretty dry, so cold or hot desert depending on latitude):
(Of course if you want to only display the northern continent, a polar azimuthal projection would work fine.)
There's another Stereographic aspect that I've found works really well to show the whole globe without interrupting any land (centred on 15°E 30°S):
This is personally my favourite projection for this planet.
There are a couple of other things you can do with this aspect, you can rotate the hemispheres by 45°, or can also use the same aspect for the oblique cylindrical projections, which results in something like this for equirectangular, though personally for the cylindrical projections I think the 45°S aspect from earlier works better:
I actually worked out how to get this aspect working with the Peirce Quincuncial / Adams Hemisphere-in-a-Square projection, and it's probably a personal choice whether you prefer this to the Stereographic. They're both conformal it's just where you want the area distortion, the Stereographic spreads it out around the circle, while the Peirce has higher distortion confined to a smaller area (close to the corners).
I think I'm definitely a big fan of conformal projections for world maps, it seems more worth it to use a conformal projection with low area distortion than a true equal-area projection.
I think if I ever did a real world map with more detail and stuff, I'd probably go with something like the stereographic one that cuts the southern continent in half, it's the one that I could realistically see getting widely used in-universe, at least pre digital.
cair bel /ker bɛl/ [keː bɛw] (of weather) to be fine out, for the conditions outside to be pleasant, warm and sunny; (by extension, of a scene or scenario) to be going well, to turn out well, for people to be getting along or plans to be proceeding apace; (of people) to be content, satisfied or unconcerned, to take no issue; (by extension, pejoratively) to content oneself, to be oblivious to problems and think incorrectly that nothing is lacking or wrong
(An impersonal construction, only taking an optional dative experiencer.)
Etymology: literally "to happen beautiful", formed by analogy to many other uses of impersonal cair: for weather, as in cay ploy/sol "it's raining/sunny"; for events, as in cay je Lun "it's Monday"; and for periods, as in cay set hour "it's been seven hours".
The adjective bel "beautiful" descends uncomplicatedly from Latin bellus "pleasant, charming". The verb cair "to fall, to happen" is a somewhat hybridised descendant from Latin cadĕre "to fall, die, suit, happen" with a Vulgar form cadēre which exhibits a shift in conjugation.
Il amn queldar tras port candon cay bel.
/ɪl ˈa.mn̩ kwɛlˈdar traz pɔrt kanˈdɔn ke bɛl/
[ɪˈla.mɐŋ kwɪwˈdɑː tʀaz ˈpɔːt kɐnˈdɔn ke bɛw]
3p like-3p dine-inf through door whenever fall-s beautiful
They like to dine outside when it's fine out.
---
page taken from the appendices of Jout Boral a Toð Cainç "Borlish Constructions for All Occasions", a popular tourist's phrasebook for the Borlish language published in 1987 by the Ausbagn Outland Edifice.
I’m creating a fantasy world and I have a race of humanoids similar to elephants, with wide flat teeth for crushing leaves and grass. Are there any sounds that require sharp front teeth that they couldn’t make/would this have an impact on their language? Could they speak English?
I'm not especially familiar with elephant anatomy, but quite a few sounds in English depend on the teeth in some way:
The dental fricatives /θ/ & /ð/ (the "th" sounds). Depending on what variety of English you speak these might be made interdentally (with the tongue between the upper and lower teeth), or dentally (with the tongue immediately behind the tips of the upper teeth)
The labiodontal fricatives /f/ & /v/ (the "f" & "v" sounds). These are made with the lower lip against the upper teeth
The sibilants /s/, /z/, /ʃ/, /ʒ/, /tʃ/, & /dʒ/ (the "s", "z", "sh", the extra-soft "g" in beige, "ch" sound, & "j" sound respectively). These are made by shaping the tongue into a groove and channeling air towards the front teeth
All of these sounds would likely be affected by your people having differently shaped teeth. They may well have analogous sounds, but they might sound slightly off, or vaguely lisped
You might also find similar sounds being substituted (i.e. the bilabial fricatives /ɸ/ & /β/, which use both lips together, and not the teeth at all, for the labiodontals, or stops /t/, & /d/ for the dental fricatives, something found in Multicultural London English, and various other varieties)
A very different mouth shape is likely to also give their vowels a very distinct quality and, if they still have trunks, their nasal sounds /m/, /n/, & /ŋ/ (the "m", "n", and "ng" sounds) might also sound significantly different
If they have suitably flexible & nimble tongues, larynxes, etc and their vocal tract has broadly analogous structures in the same order, I don't see why they wouldn't be able to produce something interpretible as English, but it would likely sound strange and might take some practice on the part of the listener to recognise
Star wars may not actually have been far off the mark having aliens with vastly different vocal tracts have cross-linguistic conversations, with each speech partner speaking their own language. Which approach is more reasonable likely depends on how similar the vocal tract (and the manoeuvrability of the speech organs in it) are
