The CBB

New question: Imagine a conlang that allows clusters of any two consonants for the coda of a syllable, including two of the same consonant. This conlang also has geminate consonants. This creates pairs of words like, for example, /amm/ and /amː/. These are both pronounced [amː]. The only way these ...

Nice!

(I'd probably use ə for /ɯ/, by the way.)

Linguifex's band's EP is gooood. How the Gods Punish reminded me almost of Auðn, so I nice atmospheric intro, kicking into something more akin to, what is that, technical/progressive death metal? Really like the lyrics too, and the vocal style, and throwing in the clean vocals every so often was a ...

Most good art encapsulates duality - it lives in a state of tension. Things in the world present themselves to us as the things they are - unitary and discrete (likewise events). A large part of the artistic response to the world is attempting to conceive of the things that would fill the gaps betw...

I've created a couple of glyphs for a logographic writing system which I think look good, but I have no idea what their meaning should be. The culture in question is early bronze age, with cities but not yet any large kingdoms. Any suggestions? (Ideas suitable for rotated variants of these glyphs ar...

wintiver wrote: ↑12 Jun 2018 01:19 i ɯ u
e ɤ o
ɛ ʌ ɔ
a

Low tone:
i ĭ u
e ŭ o
ĕ ă ŏ
a

High tone:
í î ú
é û ó
ê â ô
á

If Nahuatl is a VSO head-marking language, why does it have postpositions instead of prepositions? I get that it might not be that unusual in Mesoamerica, but I think the tendency is for Verb initial languages to have prepositions. The simplest answer here is just that tendencies are not absolute. ...

I feel like I've exhausted every possible variation of the basic shapes. If you want more fairly simple glyphs, you'll probably have to allow glyphs with only vertical and horizontal lines too, giving you possibilities such as ‡ Π Ш. That said, you could of course also simply rotate the latter thre...

Let's get some numbers into this. Let's start with a swadesh-size vocabulary. Around say 150 common nouns, and around 50 common verbs. We want to make 'statemes' out of these. How many statemes would we need? Well, at least 50, one for each verb. And then for each verb, we'd need a different versio...

I need new ideas for new glyph shapes. Some ideas: - v (i.e. like your "f-" glyph, but without the additional line on the left side) - two ^ above each other - something similar to // - something similar to ʎ - something similar to ψ (but with diagonal strokes at the side) - an inverted t...

Thanks for the explanation. I like this a lot!

After, what, three years? After three years, Alál finally has properly-derived axis markers, which have always been some of the most important derivational (and sometimes inflectional, since they also mark tense) morphemes of the verb. This looks and sounds interesting. What do the axis markers do?...

Pabappa wrote: ↑26 Apr 2018 03:06...on the basis that a pharyngealized stop cannot also be aspirated...

Chilcotin has a pharyngealized aspirated alveolar affricate. It even appears in the language's self-designation: [ts̠ˤʰᵊĩɬqʰotʼin]

Certain variants of English (IIRC mostly in Australia, New Zealand, and parts of England) have something like [ə͡ʉ] for the GOAT vowel. If the hypothetical speaker speaks one of these dialects, I'd expect something like okray . Otherwise, oykray (with CHOICE) or akray (with FACE) would probably be m...

Yes, changes of that sort are attested. A fairly well-known natlang example is the palatalisation of *k → tʃ → ʃ before /a/ in French. But: Usually there's a phonetic motivation somewhere underneath; in this case most likely that /a/ was pronounced a bit closer to the front of the mouth than today w...

German does have a distinction between a phonemic affricate /t͡s/ and a cluster [t.s] that occurs across syllable boundaries, but the latter is best analysed phonemically as /t.z/ since /s/ normally doesn't occur in onset position in native words. Accordingly, the phonetic distinction is mostly a fo...

How are constructions like "I saw him sitting on a bench." analysed? Here are a couple of Wikipedia articles on related topics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exceptional_case-marking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raising_(linguistics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_clause https://en....

It turns out the Silvish numbers sí [ˈsi] "six" and sé [ˈse] "seven" are pronounced the same in a very specific circumstance. Before a word with an initial nasal, they both end up pronounced [sɛ̃]. This ambiguity is more than a little onerous. (Is that 6 million or 7 million eur...

D is the donor of a detransitive clause, T is the theme of a detransitive clause, and R is the recipient of a detransitive clause. You mean "ditransitive"; detransitive is something else entirely (it's when a verb that was originally transitive has had its transitivity reduced). Also the ...

Wow, this text really changed a lot! Very nice! I'm the one who introduced the elders and the megalith. This happened because (a) I always try to make relay texts fit in with my concultures (in this case, a late chalcolithic / early bronze age society in which astronomy has religious significance, a...