The CBB

I once recall someone remarking that interdentals aren't all that uncommon in Europe, they just seem to be distributed rather oddly around the periphery of the continent—Greek, Albanian, Spanish, Welsh, English, Icelandic, Sami, some Finnish dialects, and presumably some other Uralic languages in Ru...

Not a remotely original inventory, but I was thinking of doing something with one of Hyman's (2008) hypothetically possible minimal phoneme inventories, by combining it with a (C)V - or perhaps CV? - syllable structure and the basic 3-vowel system, thus giving just 21 or even 18 syllables. /a i u/ /...

I've also thought about this a bit. If you're going the verbal route, one fun thing to do could be verb category indexing on the particle. It's not unusual for different verbs to take different auxiliaries - look at the lexical definition of which auxiliary is used with an abstract noun in English ...

An idea I've had for a while now: A language where basically all of the verbal morphosyntax is borne by a single, essentially opaque or suppletive particle inflected for number, person, and possibly gender or animacy of subject/agent, object/patient, and possibly oblique arguments; transitivity and ...

A 7-phoneme thing /a i u/ /n/ /b k/ /s/ Maximal CVC syllable structure Consonants are [ɾ β k z] intervocalically; [n ɸ k s] word-finally All possible cross-syllable clusters: /nn/ [nn] /nb/ [mb] /nk/ [ŋg] /ns/ [nz] /bn/ [βn] /bb/ [bb] /bk/ [ɸk] /bs/ [ɸs] /kn/ [ɣn] /kb/ [ɣb] /kk/ [kk] /ks/ [ks] /sn/ ...

Wait, how does 'envelope' violate English phonotatics? English phonotactics don't usually permit nasal vowels outside of loanwords; "envelope" is /Q~v@l@Up/ (in the letter sense; /Env@l@up/ in the ambit sense, demonstrating the sporadicity of anglicisation; c.f. the nasal vowels in "...

English has anglicised older layers of loanwords, yes, because they're old. They very much weren't anglicised for the first few hundred years, giving us /Z/ and /y/ and /ui/ and things like that. And more modern loanwords are only sporadically anglicised, which is why words like 'envelope' still vi...

Is anyone here familiar with Pali? This discussion reminded me of it. Just browsing its phonological description on Wikipedia, it very much gives the impression of a typical phonotactically-complex relative of Sanskrit that must have been acquired by a non-Indo-European-speaking people who molded it...

Something almost trivially small I just dreamt up and might develop more. /m n ŋ/ (ŋ transcribed as ng ) /p t k/ /s/ /a i u/ (C)V only; /ti/ is forbidden and regularly becomes /si/. No phonemic vowel length, but adjacent identical vowels may occur in hiatus, usually across morpheme boundaries. Vowel...

The other day I was browsing Raymond Ignatius' "proposed British Romance language," or Britainese . What makes his project interesting is that it takes a different approach to diachronic conlanging than "bogolangs," which apply the sound changes of one language to another languag...

There are some languages that lack (pure) labials. There are some languages that lack nasals. There are some languages that lack fricatives. There is even at least one language that lacks both nasals and fricatives (Rotokas). But there is no language that lacks all three of these categories. Is this...

Any way, could ya'll let me know just how crazy (or not) this mess of an inventory is? And perhaps some pointers to maybe make it a bit more naturalistic. (I mean, I don't even know if /ɹ ɣ / is a sound that exists anywhere!) /m n n ɣ ɲ ŋ/ /p t t͡ʃ g/ /v~w s s ɣ ʃ x h/ /ɹ ɹ ɣ l l ɣ ʎ j/ /ɪ i ɛ e ə ...

Some theoretical consonant inventories which, according to Hyman (2007) , cannot be ruled out in a principled manner according to our current understanding of phonological universals (hinging heavily on our awareness of Rotokas!) Stop vs. approximant: (very similar to Rotokas) /p t k/ /ʋ ɾ ɣ/ Oral v...

Round 17 Okay, well, we have enough submissions to vote, I suppose. And I doubt we'll be getting any more anyways. Kind of mixed feelings about how this has gone. It seemed that everyone was quite anxious to create a more detailed phonological sketch, but it turned out it was a rather intimidating ...

Also, I hadn't wanted to do this - I wanted to stay completely hands-off with submissions and voting, since I have so much influence on the process as organizer - but I think I am going to make a couple of submissions myself, since things are going slowly and this is a rather crucial moment for the ...

I barely understand enough to vote on what’s been proposed so far, much less enough to propose an alternative. It’s all too complicated. ... Can someone explain it to me like I have Asperger’s? ... Or like I’m a back-bencher MP? Okay, let's refer back to what we have established so far: Segmental p...

For some time I've imagined a consonant inventory that starts out like this: /m n ŋ/ /p t k/ With a five-vowel system, in which unstressed front and back vowels become [j] and [w] respectively, leading to the coalescence of coronals and velars with following [j] to form [c] and [ɲ], becoming phonemi...

Thank you for the submissions, Creyeditor!

It would be great if we could get some submissions for phonotactics/allophony and tone/stress from another user so we're not just voting on one person's ideas.

Romlang that goes through the High German Consonant Shift and has some other German-like features. I'm sure this has been done before, but I wanted to provide my own take on it. Rough list of sound changes Shared with Vulgar Latin/Proto-(Western)-Romance Neutralization of intervocalic /b/ and /w/ to...

Thank you, Creyeditor! That looks great. I was just about to post a sample sketch (made for Spanish, since I didn't want to influence anyone's thoughts on this language) which I'd been putting off for the past day. The sample sketch I made is just a bulleted list, but the way you did it looks perfec...