The CBB

Okay, I think we have to distinguish morphological paradigms here from semantic gender assignment. Morphologically there are definitely syncretisms were to noun classes merge, creating a contrast between gender X and gender non-X, where non-X is normally Y and Z. Look for example at German demonstr...

Do noun classes ever "reduce" in natlangs? I'm working on a lang with a gender system between "natural" and arbitrary, natural for animates and arbitrary for inanimates. It contrasts masculine/feminine/neuter (with a fourth unmarked "gender" with no semantic content or ...

Is a voiceless aspirated pharyngeal stop phonetically possible? Google autocompletes it as a search term for me, but no hits for that exact phrase come up, and I can't find mention of aspirated pharyngeal stops anywhere else online either.

Working on a sketch I'm pretty pleased with, and in the middle of figuring out how case/number and person/tense are inflected tonally I came up with a phrase, /na.ɾà na.ɾà/, meaning "some time passes," a frequent transition phrase in narratives. The root ||na.ɾa|| is both a verb, "to ...

A Future English idea: as an extension of the contraction of "I'm gonna" into "I'ma," the immediate future comes to be expressed with "ma" /mə/ in the first person singular and "na" /nə/ for other subjects, as in "I ma do," "you na do," &qu...

A lang where there are third person pronouns, derived from demonstratives, to refer to nameless people or people whose names are unknown, but if you know the person's name you use the name of the first letter as if it were a normal noun and that's the third person pronoun you use to refer to them. I...

There's sort of a myth, or commonly held belief that at some point in their conlanging career a conlanger will make: a triconsonantal root language It's no myth! It's Micamo's Second Law of Conlanging, and it's even more ironclad than the second law of thermodynamics! is this a matter of intent? be...

An addendum to my post about having worked out a distinctive feature system for my consignlang... here's what it looks like. (It's a smartphone photo, so if you've got a slow connection be warned that it's huge.) I don't know what you guys know about feature geometry, but this is the fully-worked ou...

to-day I worked out the phonemic inventory (and underlying distinctive feature system) of my consignlang and plundered the riches of SignWriting to construct a near-totally featural writing system for it. I'm pretty sure it's gonna be nigh-unwritable anyway.

I don't know if this is the right place to ask this, but does anyone know of a program that can check if a string of phonemic symbols is a phonotactically acceptable word in English? Ideally it would take a list of strings and output a list of only the strings that constitute possible words.

Working with a vowel system now that started out relatively orderly- one low vowel, mid and high vowels in each of front, back unrounded, and back rounded, systemic ATR* contrast (with associated ATR harmony), and phonemic nasal versions of all the [-ATR] vowels. So the old system looked something l...

Alomar wrote:

Sangfroidish wrote:<ŋ> rarely looks good in orthography as far as I'm concerned, and the majuscule form is just downright hideous, ergo yay.

Seconded.

There's no accounting for taste, I guess.

A lang in which specifiers are usually appended to the left of the head, but are appended instead to the right of the head in irrealis clauses. Y/N? (Less obtusely, one of the consequences of this is that the lang would ordinarily be SVO, but would be VOS in irrealis clauses.)

Are there any natlangs that indicate, e.g., constituency relations explicitly? I know that English (and probably other langs- if I remember correctly French has yes/no question intonation, but I know surprisingly little about intonation cross-linguistically) indicates some syntactic information with...

trills as the geminate allophones of voiced stops; implosive trills as the geminate allophones of voiced implosive stops. Y/N?

Sketched out enough phonology of a rhythm-and-pitch-only (music) conlang to be satisfied that it feels like a real language and also like improvisational music. I won't know for certain until I solve the word-generation problem (which shouldn't be TOO hard) and start building a lexicon and a syntax ...

Musical languages are not novel, but I still had to make my own. There isn't anything more complex than a phonology right now, but the phonology is a doozy, I hope you enjoy it. The phonological part of the language has the following levels of structure: 'Feet': measures (always 4/4), containing eit...

Roman Jakobson predicted (incorrectly) that no human language could contrast any two of retroflexion, pharyngealization, or rounding with one another, because he didn't know of any languages that did, because they're perceptually similar, and because in at least one language contact situation rounde...

The search tool on this site is not great, but I searched 'handshape' and found no posts whatsoever so I assume no-one's solved my problem here yet: Does anyone here use any sign language and can list all the phonemes of that sign language? That is, all the handshapes, movements, and locations that ...

Recently I tricked my fellow conlanger into beginning work on a magic-language conlang, possibly complete with Classical element noun classes. I don't know if that's an accomplishment or just kind of mean?