The CBB

What do you think of this vowel harmony system? Is it plausible? It's /a e i ɤ o ɯ u/ /o u/ are rounded /ɤ ɯ/ are unrounded /a e i/ are neutral /a/ is usually unrounded/back in rounding/backness harmony systems and paired (or re-paired) with a back rounded or front unrounded vowel. Are there any ot...

I don't think anything and everything is the correct answer. I know of no language that uses only word order to distinguish person, number, tense, aspect, modality, or evidentiality. But I might be wrong of course. I can't name any, but I'd be surprised if there are no languages that at least secon...

lurker wrote: ↑13 Mar 2024 20:53 Does anyone miss the "old" internet? I mean before about 2005 or so, definitely before the dot com bubble burst?

FWIW, though, the dot com bubble burst in 2001.

Late 19th and early 20th century Russia was an amazing time period, culturally. Diverse political engagement, and a fantastically rich artistic culture - graphic art, literature, music, architecture. There's various modernists, alongside both conservatives and populists, all in dialogue with one ano...

Another of my 'speculative' questions... How might a language develop an animate/inanimate (or any other binary gender-like) distinction, on demonstratives specifically? I ask about demonstratives, since they are likely one of the first points in the development of a gender system (at least accordi...

I'm a bit confused by the economics/ideology here - is this a totalitarian state of some sort? How have you broken the universal human need for status symbols? If something is expensive, people will powerfully want to own it. In our world, for instance, ownership of white goods, cars, even houses is...

Not an expert, but since we've raised the question, I'd guess there are three reasons why Latin developed mostly-free word order: a) the word order was probably ancestrally never totally fixed anyway. Strong SOV tendencies in the earliest records may be in part a literary decision, a style of "...

Just encountered a beautiful Irish sentence glossed for me: An t-ealaíontóir gur mhór aici an damhan alla agus gur mhór a cuid damhan alla, Louise Bourgeois, fuair sí bás ar na mallaibh. Literally: "the artist that big with her the spider and that big her lot of spider, Louise Bourgeois, found ...

I'm afraid I don't know any syntax (in a linguistics sense, imaginary trees and brackets and anagrams and whatnot), so I probably can't give the sort of answer you want. Thank you very much for this! To be honest, my knowledge of syntax/"linguistics" is very rudimentary, and I favour comm...

I'm afraid I don't know any syntax (in a linguistics sense, imaginary trees and brackets and anagrams and whatnot), so I probably can't give the sort of answer you want. [from my position of ignorance, your business with the complementizers seems counterintuitive, since at least in Germanic and I be...

Yep - well, I don't know if "reduced" is the right word because I don't think the short vowel are centralised, but yes, it's a 3-vowel system with length, historically, but where a quality distinction has been introduced by the long and short vowels shifting slightly. The long mid vowels i...

Just to give a look, I think /s/ and /ts/ will merge in codas - dance and pants already are getting merged ("the dancing pants"). I think /r/s will change, as per usual. I also think English will split really hard - maybe not now or in 30 years, but it's already starting to happen. East c...

I'd also note that "conservative" and "liberal" are antonyms for Americans, but not necessarily for the rest of us, and both terms mean very different things in the political language of different countries. [eg in the UK there are politicians (and voters) who consider themselves...

I answered your questions, but . . . is "democratic" really a perfect antonym for "authoritarian"? According to thesaurus.com 'democratic' is acceptable and at least clear to all people. Moreover, we can not use synonyms having too negative connotation like t*rannical and t*tali...

Say that's 2050 then. I've actually changed my document to reflect that, and I can see why you say that - basically all I did is "monophthongize" some glides. What might happen afterwards? What mergers and splits could you see happening? I can see the food and book sets merging. It's hard...

I've recently stumbled across the Gutenberg Project release of Chronicle and Romance: Froissart, Malory, Holinshed , by Lord John Bourchier Berners et al. The original documents date back to the 15th century, so written roughly at the change from Late Middle English to Early Modern English, but thi...

I'm nostalgic for several different Web 1.0s! There's the web I gradually learnt about as a child in the early 1990s - a weird, small selection of mostly pointless websites like Blue Dog Can Count and Blue Pig Won't Oink*, big business websites that looked like they were designed by a child, and ter...

How are people able to use LibreOffice for conlangs? I can't find any easy way to use diacritics in it. In Word, it couldn't be easier. You select a symbol in the insert symbol box, and then you can enter an easy shortcut - for instance, I use alt+- as a prefix key to put a macron on a following vow...

Worth saying maybe that it's not always that gods are "named after" their qualities - that's kind of an abrahamic way of looking at things. For the Greeks, for instance, divinity was the same as being an abstract noun - any abstract noun could be the name of a god or goddess. Not because t...

If a language only has a singular/plural distinction, but descended from a proto-lang that marked dual and Paucal (3-5) on the noun, how naturalistic would it be to say that if a noun phrase has 2-5 as a numeral, the language does not require plural marker on the noun? Or is the opposite more natur...