The CBB

Yinrih long ago abandoned the idea of cybernetics in favor of wearable tech. There are just too many risks associated with body modification to justify it except where a severe disability is being corrected, and even then it's considered a last resort. The biggest risk is obsolescence, planned or o...

Wouldn't the ring render space travel difficult? Our concerns about space debris seem puny in comparison.

I want to attempt another a posteriori diachronic language, after the failures of Techomonic and Goidheug. I'm not quite sure exactly what I'll do, though. I know that I want to go off of something that's well-reconstructed. I'm definitely not going to work from Proto-Indo-European (we know how wel...

This looks quite interesting; I always have a soft spot for languages with /p/ as a gap (as opposed to /g/ or other common stops.) What's the deal with these nominalized verbs? --------- On the Mark Rosenfelder stuff, I'm always appreciative of his work. Verdurian may be a Euroclone, but it's a sel...

I'd say the conversation was more as follows, though: Mark Rosenfelder misused several terms regarding ergativity when he wrote his Old Skourene grammar and some other resources, and that misuse misinformed future conlangers, including Arayaz. Also, his conlangs are overrated and mediocre, Verduria...

To be fair, one has to consider two things. 1. Almea started as a setting for a Dungeons & Dragons game when Mark Rosenfelder was in high school. This shows in a number of points, you can even recognize the D&D playable races: elcari are essentially Dwarves, flaids are essentially Halflings,...

Please don't use the word "experiencer" for 'intransitive subject'. It's WRONG . Rather, "experiencer" is a semantic role that may or may not be an intransitive subject. Many, in fact, most intransitive subjects aren't experiencers. [:x] [:$] [>_<] Thank you; I've looked it up, ...

Please don't use the word "experiencer" for 'intransitive subject'. It's WRONG . Rather, "experiencer" is a semantic role that may or may not be an intransitive subject. Many, in fact, most intransitive subjects aren't experiencers. [:x] [:$] [>_<] Thank you; I've looked it up, ...

Please don't use the word "experiencer" for 'intransitive subject'. It's WRONG. Rather, "experiencer" is a semantic role that may or may not be an intransitive subject. Many, in fact, most intransitive subjects aren't experiencers.

I don't have much to contribute here, but as it happens, I have just finished reading Michael Adams (ed.), From Elvish to Klingon , which is mostly of course about conlangs, but also contains a chapter about language revitalization which addresses just the issues discussed here, such as the question...

There is a theory that the tradition of Dwarves in European folklore is rooted in just that kind of miners.

Yes. Some Uralic languages (such as Nents, Nganasan, Khanty and Mansi) show object agreement only in number, while subject agreement is, as in all Uralic languages, in person and number. There is no gender in these languages.

Oh, I thought retroflexes were typical of Australian languages, and that there were hardly any without them. But hey, I am not an Australianist, and know only little about those languages.

Yes, I am of course not the first to conjecture a conlang. That makes more sense than the assumption that it is encrypted Latin (or whatever known language), given how puerile the ciphers of those times were - it would probably have been broken long ago. Yet, I wouldn't expect a particularly sophist...

I have spent some thoughts on the Voynich Manuscript (VMS) which I wish to share with you. I think I need not tell you what the VMS is, should you have not heard of it yet, see Wikipedia . Nobody has managed to decipher it yet. The many illustrations in the VMS give a hint at the content matter, whi...

Fine - but where are the retroflexes?

The Celtic definite articles are not cognate to the Romance and Germanic indefinite ones. The Romance and Germanic indefinite articles are from the numeral 'one', which is cognate between the two groups, ultimately from PIE *oinos . The Celtic definite articles are from a Proto-Celtic form *sindos o...

I still am sometimes confused by the Insular Celtic definite articles resembling Germanic and Romance indefinite ones:

an, yn etc. vs. a(n), un etc.

I plan to have a base-12 system in Old Albic (based on the thumb against the segments of the other four fingers mode of counting), but I am not sure yet because I don't know how much sense that makes in an Indo-European language of Bronze Age Britain.

The indefinite article indicates number, but the definite article does not, and it's not morphologically indicated on the noun either. This feels wrong to me. Definite NPs are more likely to have number distinctions than indefinite ones. There is not much difference in meaning between 'An elephant ...