The CBB

Excellent work! I pronounced your example sentence, and the language has a very pleasant sound to it. One extremely minor bit of advice: Spelling final /ʃ/ with a double final sigma (ςς) looks nicer than "σς." I've intended/wanted to make a diachronic PIE lang for a while, but the grammar ...

Oooh, nice! I really love this so far. Very well researched and thought out.

Here are my first impressions. I'm a historical linguistics geek, so my inner historical linguist is probably going to show big time here: You give us lots of interesting historical context and phonological details, but what you didn't do was show us examples of the language or give us any other det...

Y'know, IE notwithstanding, whenever I've seen verb-stem reduplications in natlangs (and in conlangs too), they've always either expressed plural agreement, had some sort of imperfective aspectual meaning (general imperfective, progressive, continuous, habitual, iterative...), or were a pluractional...

@spikedee West Slavic seems reasonable to me: xk → xkʲ → xʲkʲ → çc → ʃtʃ I also worked it out in my head*, but that's actually why it struck me as bizarre. A few of the steps involved were kind of "weird," but still nothing I hadn't seen before. It was just the sheer number of steps consi...

Since xroot already did Spanish, I reckon I'll give this a shot using the other natlang in which I have delusions of proficiency. :fra: français Il est pêcheur. 3SM COP.3SG.PRES.IND fisherman.M. " He is a fisherman. " Il est fort. 3SM COP.3SG.PRES.IND strong.M " He is strong. " I...

Are there any natural languages that have coda clusters like /xk ɣg Xq/? All three of those clusters pop up a few times in the Index Diachronica , and you can find several instances searching through WOLD too, but /xk/ is easily more common than the other two. That said, if Index Diachronica is any...

And /aʊ/ = /æ:/ is also being repeated in cockney. Not just Cockney, I have that same pronunciation sometimes way over here in Georgia. I've come to the conslusion that the goal of Southern American English is to turn all diphthongs into /æ:/. Anyone wanna place bets on who's next after /aɪ/ and /a...

What about combining tone and stress into a pitch accent system where unstressed syllables don't carry tone, but stressed syllables have either a high or low tone? Various derivational and inflectional affixes can muck around with the system, changing the placement of stress and which tone it carrie...

So, I admit it. I'm a filler- I have created a conworld and put many languages and language families on it. This gives me little time to make full grammars for the languages and they will probably stay in highly-developed sketches. Thus, I've been thinking- instead of writing a grammar for each con...

I can also vouch for MyScriptFont.com . It's about as easy to use as you can get. I've only used it for its intended purpose of making a font out of your own handwriting, but it's not like it actually checks to make sure you wrote "real" letters on the template. If you want something that ...

Southern Florida more or less has an accent of its own, so it's largely immune to this change, though I've noticed that some of us SoFlos have something kind of like [ae], as though the change is in progress but not quite there yet. (But I think originally this particular change operated by dropping...

That's some very interesting stuff, Lam, unfortunately, I haven't seen Star Wars in quite a bit, and just caught myself misremembering some things after a cursory google search. So, I don't trust myself to answer either question really. I don't mean to detract from your question, but I do have a re...

Similar question: Is there a language known to phonemically distinguish this, e.g. [aj aw] contrasting with [ai̯ au̯]? (Edit: Partially answering my own question, French apparently has this contrast marginally, but it seems debatable. I perceive the small difference between minimal pairs like pays /...

I really like the verb morphology—looks like the historical details are very well thought out—but I'm really in love with the script.

Sanskrit technically has one regular "declension" (or two, if you consider the differences between masculine/feminine and neuter to make them separate declensions). Thing is, Sanskrit has so many effing sandhi rules that if you tried to divide their outcomes into declensions, you'd probabl...

In addition to what's already been said, I've also seen the devoicing diacritic used in narrow phonetic transcriptions to represent phonemically voiced plosives and fricatives that are phonetically devoiced in certain environments (e.g., a language devoices all word-final consonants, but underlying ...

OSV and SOV languages generally pattern similarly in regard to syntax. The order of Object and Verb relative to each other tends to have a much greater influence on syntax. Check out the various WALS chapters on "Relationship between Order of Object and Verb and X." 1. Where is a possesive...

roninbodhisattva wrote:Athabaskan-esque phonology with an isolating/mildly inflecting morphology and V2 syntax?

Yay! Don't think I've seen this done.

@loglorn: Sort of. Spanish uses <b d g> to represent /b d g/, but those become something like [β ð ɣ] after a vowel (e.g., in positions like V_V, V_r, V_#, etc.).[/color] IME N_V also; "invited" becomes "imbited". In those instances, are conditioned allophones. I picked up Spani...