The CBB

Languages across time tend to be pulled toward basically two directions at the same time ... Okay, thank you for the information. I'll work on unpacking it to better understand it. At the moment, I'm still struggling to figure out how this works though, so please bear with me. This language makes u...

Another newbie question: How do affixes in a language evolve with sound changes? For example, let's a say a language uses affixes for declension, so that (making up something on the fly): -lem is added to a root to mark a noun as allative -kit is added to a root to mark a noun as locative Again, jus...

Thank you for the reply and information. Sorry it has taken so long to respond. Life got crazy. Let me work out what you've suggested and get back with you. Thank you again.

This is a very strange consonantal inventory. I'm aiming for strange for the prime language, and then shifting toward less strange as it evolves. Part of it is out of sheer curiosity regarding what will come out on the other side of the process. What jumps out as weird: ejectives with no correspond...

Verbs suck. A lot. And I apparently suck at making a system for them. Verbs Given that this society's people exist solely to perform functions for their deity overlords, there is no perception of linear time, thus no tense use for verbs other than inference from the context of the speaker/listener. ...

Morphology Nominal Inflection The language uses a complex system of marking nominal inflections. Nouns are marked as collective or singular via articles that decline based on whether the relevant noun is nominative, accusative, or dative, or whether the noun has no case. The underlying logic to the...

I'm still new at designing conlangs and hope I can get some help from those with much more experience and knowledge on the subject. I'm designing a prime language that I can use as a starting point for developing a language family. The idea is that the language begins deliberately designed by the de...

I intend to include numerology, but haven't gotten there yet. In research I'm doing on the Anglo-Saxon culture to inform development of conculture, I saw that they focused on multiples of 3.

Others have touched upon it, but I think the primary reason is simplicity. Rather than diverging from the story one wants to tell in order to fill in enormous knowledge holes on the reader's end, focusing on humans allows the author to focus on storytelling while maintaining momentum. Also, while a ...

Thank you everyone for your responses. I apologize for not posting before now; I'm just now able to get back to the boards. The information provided presents a lot to consider. I appreciate the different perspectives that present interesting story telling directions. I think given the strong religio...

Assuming a group of people who live significantly longer than the average human (say, several hundred years at least), would the language spoken by that group evolve comparatively slower or at the same rate?

As for "foreign" sounds, they would replace it with similarly-sounding native sounds, as all other languages. Would any "new" sounds develop relative to the two parent languages? I don't think so, I heard that the phonemes are often roughly the intersection of the substrata, e.g...

So in determining the superstrate and substrate parent languages, I want to explain my thought process to get feedback from the community. The creole is a result of two disparate groups (racially and ethnically) being more or less forced to join into a common society. The first group is not human, b...

From the article, it appears that the sonority hierarchy influences consonant clusters, to the point of deleting some sounds that violate the hierarchy (e.g. speak > piki). So, perhaps the new creole phonotactics would take on the following form: Parent Language 1 (C)(C)V(C)(n)/(r)/(s) Parent Langua...

So I found this article regarding creole syllabic structure. I'm reading it over and seeing what I can glean from it that may help determine the new phonotactics for this creole.

https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/14ff/5 ... 62734d.pdf

Thank you for the information, Vlürch. I'm going to change Parent Language 2 so that instead of /ɵ/ it has an /e/. That will help resolve the issue of /ɵ/ and /ə/; besides, I think it would be nice for the creole to have /e/ as a phoneme. So the new phonology removes /kx/, /ʍ/, /x/, /ɵ/, /ə/. It ret...

Creoles often have a simplified phonology which is the intersection of the mother tongues of the speakers, and a reduced amount of roots(but that does not mean they have a smaller lexicon. Hmmm. Well, I'll need to go back to the phonology I determined earlier and pair down the number of phonemes (a...

Parent Language 1 Plosives p, b, t, d, k, g Nasal m, n, (ŋ) flaps r, (r̥) Fricatives v, s, (z), h, ɦ Approximants j, l, w, ʍ aspirations p, t, k Vowels i, u, o, ɛ, a Diphthongs yi, ei, eu, oi, ai, au Parent Language 2 Plosives p, b, ʈ, ɖ, k Nasal n Fricatives s, z, ʒ, x, ɣ Approximants ɹ, l Affrica...

Thank you for the reply. I appreciate the information. I'll post up the phonologies for all three soon and see the community can check my work.

I've limited knowledge of linguistics, but am trying to learn more. Hopefully this is one way to do so. I'm trying to develop a creole derived from two rather different languages. The concept is that political exiles flee to a land and through intermarriage with locals and an armed uprising, their d...