The CBB

The complete cat story; with some lexical/grammatical changes to the previously-posted lines: bã māu zhu have-A cat female 'There was a cat.' zhu is used of animals; the parallel term is cha 'male (animal)' mīu rá tsi sai cat-C this-T small white 'She was small and white.' I've decided it's more in ...

Actually, before moving onto the next sentence, I want to talk about Lashu motion/position words. There are, as it currently stands, sixteen of them, in static/dynamic pairs. As noted previously, they function both like motion verbs and spatial prepositions: pe - spe 'be in, within' - 'go into' po -...

So, I guess I'll start on a translation of Ossicone's cat story, which I found out about from Omzinesý. Also, now spelling Lashu with one <a> since the doubled no longer appears in the orthography - lā shu in the native orthography. bã mau have-A cat 'There was a cat.' In Lashu, existentials are for...

Okay, the results for Round 8 are in! And...we have a three-way tie! Rather than cast a tie-breaker vote, I would prefer to hold a runoff - I feel I already have enough influence on the language creation process as it is. Our next step was going to be something quite interesting - tone and stress. B...

Changes to the phonology Okay, I've decided on an extensive phonological revamp. I like the aesthetics of this much better. I've greatly reduced the consonant clusters - in fact, if you whimsically/questionably count the /s/+stop clusters as unitary "presigmatized stops", the language now has a CV ...

Quite a cool idea. Gave me food for thought. :) Thank you! If I post more about grammar, I think I'll talk about parataxis (i.e. the "unmarked construction") or the passive construction (itself built out of the basic five constructions). But I'm feeling hesitant about the phonology. It's very unaes...

I would also like to vote for A and M, but M has eleven consonants even though the maximum is ten. Could we maybe agree to remove a consonant from it or in some other way remedy this? Oh! Wow, thanks for pointing that out! Somehow I totally missed that. Well, it's my fault for not checking the subm...

Syntax: Basic constructions - continued Topic - comment I will briefly discuss the Laashu topic-comment construction. It's pretty much much it says on the tin, it's basically the same as topic-comment constructions in many East Asian languages. I decided to add it to the other three constructions i...

Syntax: Basic constructions - continued Construct - modifier Okay, so...the construct-modifier construction is perhaps the most multifunctional construction in Laashu. So I'm not sure if I'll get to everything in this post. As we saw above, it can be used in a manner akin to an adverb or prepositio...

Syntax: Basic constructions - continued Action-goal The action-goal construction is quite multifunctional, and is used to express things that would be expressed in English with prepositional phrases and verb phrases, including transitive verbs and their objects, as well as motion verbs. Action-goal...

Syntax: Basic constructions I have vacillated between saying there are four and five constructions in Laashu. The subject-predicate, action-goal, construct-modifier, and topic-comment constructions are all explicitly marked on their respective heads. The absence of one of these markers can be just ...

In Bloomfield's Language (1933), Is this a paper in journal "Language" or is Bloomfield's Language a conlang or is it a term I shoul know? Sorry this is a stupid question, but I am interested to check how those constructions are defined. AFAIK, Language is the title of classic linguistics textbook ...

Okay, here are the results for Round 7 ! Chapter 10: Vowel Nasalization - B) Contrastive nasal vowels absent In Round 8 , we will be voting on the submitted consonant inventories! As with the vowel quality inventories, they will be listed without usernames here, but the user who submits the winning ...

Morphophonology The syllable rhyme encodes lexical and grammatical information in Laashu - more grammatical than lexical, in fact. I'm not all that pleased that more lexical contrasts aren't possible, but this was basically my compromise system that I came up with after abandoning tone and suffixes...

Phonology Laashu has a maximum syllable structure of CCCVN, or more specifically, sCRVŋ, where R is any of /w j r l/ and V may be a diphthong. However, it is more helpful to think of it in terms of onsets and rhymes. Different consonants may combine in different ways to produce different onsets; no...

This is an idea I have been puzzling over for a week or two, and I am finally ready to present an initial sketch of it. In Bloomfield's Language (1933), he presents a fragmentary sketch of Chinese, stating that Chinese can be described largely in terms of just three constructions. I decided I wanted...

Consonant inventory submission /ɓ t k k’/ /m n/ /ʋ s h/ Oh! I'm very sorry, I made the mistake of omitting it from the parameters, I'll go back and add it - for WALS Chapter 7: Glottalized Consonants, the language falls into the category "Ejectives only" - meaning no implosives or glottalized reson...

Okay, Round 6 is complete! The winner is vowel quality inventory G , contributed by shimobaatar, with the tie-breaking vote cast by Ratsawn! G) /i ɨ u/ /e/ /a/ This also means that our consonant inventory may have no more than 10 consonants, in order to stay within the bounds of consonant inventory ...

We're currently at a tie, so anyone who hasn't yet voted is welcomed to do so. (The tie is between G and K, but by no means feel limited to those two.)

Today I was browsing the updates for the loglang Toaq (a project that I admire) and suddenly recalled Bloomfield's sketch grammar of Chinese in Language . I was inspired to make a grammatically minimal/constrained engelang type thing based on a reworking of the Chinese grammar sketch, with influence...