The CBB

Newspeak: good, gooder, goodest; ungood, ungooder, ungoodest. So, yeah. Makes sense. Now, Newspeak was a government engineered conlang; whether this works naturally for human language, I don't know. I mean, we do, for example, have fair, fairer, fairest, unfair, unfairer & unfairest, so I suppo...

Going by the examples in the grammar, Viksen sentences are typically a bit shorter than English ones: u xasan lili yidak 1PS eat quickly very “I am eating very quickly” ta æ sla tés you IMP wash t-shirt “wash the T-shirt!” wa kazjil bird fly “the bird is flying” The absence of articles and a less co...

Mark Rosenfelder (Zompist)'s Verdurian has a 105-page grammar . My Kankonian has a 125-page grammar . Ketumak's Õtari has a 146-page grammar . Lao Kou's Géarthnuns is in this thread , and had 181 pages of grammar when copy-pasted into Corel WordPerfect, at last count. Madeline Palmer's Srinawésin a...

Greater Atlian is ku alloka ohoyissu "the great Atlian speech", where the allo- root is from Imperial Naktic atolus "of the east" via Early Takan atl- . (Early Takan is the ancestor of Greater Atlian; Imperial Naktic is an important ancient language from which Early Takan borrowe...

However, I'm looking for deeper things like how it does relative clauses, how each thing is ordered within the main clauses compared to the relative clauses, how it does infinitive phrases, how it does compliment phrases, etc. all that. Whether I'm doing that correctly or not. It would probably be ...

I have a fairly loosely sketched world which may or may not feature in a finished novel one day which is a mixture of (1) and (2) - the basic idea, if I remember rightly, being that environmental disaster led to nuclear war. The story is set quite a while after the disasters though so by this point ...

Lots of cities have buildings built by rich people in the centre that are much younger than the city itself, with poorer people tending to live further out. So I think your idea is reasonable. The oasis is presumably where people want to be, and rich people have the money to effect that for themselv...

The world is filled with many things. We have far right capitalists like Ayn Rand to far left revolutionaries like Karl Marx, we have advocates for transhumanism, we have advocates for pastorialism, we've fought wars, we've invented medicine, we kill animals, we save animals, we fly to space, we ex...

I'm extremely interested to see how the culture(s) of such a universe work out.

The Basic English word list has 850 words.

Sound change has a lot of knock-on effects, e.g. it often has a role to play in getting rid of morphological distinctions. So that's something to consider if you haven't already. Some other common ways in which languages change include: - Grammaticalisation , whereby elements move from being less to...

it is very easy to rattle down a list of a conlang's phonemes and declare that one has much more frequency than another. It's easy for me to state, regarding a constructed language, "/n/ has a frequency of N", but it's a lot harder for me to actually work that out in practice. Using a wor...

It varies massively I think, and depends heavily on extralinguistic factors - English lost a lot of vocabulary as a result of the Norman Conquest, for example. Or again, I believe Armenian has far fewer Proto-Indo-European words left than other Indo-European languages. Swadesh's value of 14 words lo...

They're definitely possible to pronounce, unless I'm completely mistaken about the sound I'm making right now. It's not even all that difficult. But given that /θ/ is pretty rare, and retroflexes aren't all that common, you wouldn't expect the number of languages that have a retroflex variant of /θ/...

"Particle" = (often) "word we don't know how else to classify" ...

The absence of particle-like things in conlangs is maybe quite striking, though, now you come to mention it. I use them quite a bit, though maybe not enough ...

The problem with people not using IPA in general is that it can be quite hard to know how the language is actually pronounced, and it's quicker for people who are familiar with it to process "<u> = " rather than "U stands for the 'oo' sound in 'food'" (plus the latter runs into p...

Maybe this is too late now, but one possibility might be that the magical species are immortal (as they often are in these settings), so don't actually need to reproduce at all, and hence don't. Or maybe they could make bodies for themselves, or (if you want to go a bit darker) steal them from humans?

This is essentially the same scenario as a conlang becoming a standard language, and has all the same problems faced by, say, esperantists. My thoughts, too. That said, it's not totally implausible that a constructed language could become widely accepted, in the right social situation. So I'd say i...

Quite frankly, I've never been at all bothered about whether my languages are ones I can pronounce at all ...

I don't consciously base my system off anything in particular, and things vary quite a bit. I'll most usually use carons for postalveolars (e.g. š ž č ), but sometimes I'll use digraphs with h instead ( sh zh ch ), and sometimes other things entirely. Long vowels I'll generally use either an acute o...