The CBB

I'd disagree with the assessment that trees are "almost useless" for conlanging - you can do all sorts of interesting things with them if you're so inclined. But most conlangers don't use them. I suspect there are various reasons for this - traditional grammars of natlangs don't use them, ...

It looks OK to me - though I'm rather sleepy and not processing things very well ...

SOV languages may tend to mark case, but SOV without case is by no means unattested, so I wouldn't worry about that.

My world, I suppose, could be classified as "realistic" - with two or three elements of sci-fi that I hardly ever actually think or write about. There's no magic and I never go much beyond a "modern-day" tech level. Oddly, in my ordinary fiction writing I would think of myself as...

I agree mostly, but I think the biggest thing is actually the degree of contact. Yeah. I find modern American accents easier to understand than (say) 1950s American accents - though quite possibly the latter are in fact closer to my own (British) English. This is presumably because there's more exp...

In cases of creolisation the grammar of a language can change massively over the course of a few decades. Less extreme but still pretty rapid cases of major language change might occur in contexts where there are very high numbers of second-language speakers, or where a language is pidginised/creoli...

Remember also that writing in a premodern - and especially pre-printing - society is expensive. You need to make things to write on, and things to write with, and take the time to do the writing, and store the things you've written after the fact, if you want to keep them. So you need to be able to ...

Larry Trask's book on the history of Basque contains a very lengthy chapter at the end where he debunks one by one all the attempts to claim Basque is related to some other language. I'd be surprised if people haven't tried to connect Basque and Turkish before, so he may well have a section on that.

-er as you use it denotes an agent so a good gloss might be something like AGT. AGN for "agent noun" might be another possibility as WeepingElf suggests. NMLZ is a bit vague and is more likely to be used for things like the English - ing suffix. The Leipzig Glossing Rules don't list a &qu...

It's always good to think about punctuation - obviously a lot of real-world writing systems don't have very much of it, but at the same time you can do quite fun things with it and yet it's very often overlooked. I like your system and think it makes a lot of useful distinctions, though there are so...

I have lots and lots of conlangs. This is partly because I want my languages to have history, and there's lots of languages in my main setting, and they borrow from each other and everything, and partly because it lets me try out different things. Also, I write science fiction and fantasy not set in...

Ideally I'd closely match patterns of synonymy in the real world. In practice this doesn't happen too much, partly because my lexicons are quite small anyway and partly because I only tend to make new words if I need them - and it's a lot of effort creating a new word when you already have one. That...

<æ> for /a/ and <a> for /ɑ/ would work, I think, at the risk of being slightly confusing for people familiar with the IPA. A language with both phonemes would probably have quite a fronted /a/ anyway. One another idea I have which nobody has mentioned: both could be romanized simply as <a>. We conla...

This is a realistic enough situation. However, there is plenty we don't know. Of course in real languages, too, there's loads of stuff that we don't fully understand where it came from, and loads of stuff that is unexpected based on what we know about languages more generally. I expect any real lan...

Let's be fair, there are plenty of fantasy authors who are much better regarded than Paolini and yet do pretty horribly when it comes to languages ...

A language with lots of cases whose nominative and accusative merge due to sound change is unlikely to just lose all its others overnight, though it may be more likely to lose them eventually. Languages like Latin and German, while they do still make a nominative/accusative distinction, have neutral...

It had never occurred to me that this might not occur ...

How do the priest classes maintain their control? I mean, what's to stop some ordinary person saying "Sod this, I'm going to go off and raise sheep and I don't care what people think!" (Especially if the Sacred Shepherds are off shepherding and not in a position to interfere.) (This isn't ...

The degree of bilingualism will make a big difference. If Pealt and the Hosk-related language were both spoken by a large proportion of the population for several centuries, you'd expect to see stronger substrate effects than if the Pealt speakers simply killed off 90% of the Hosk-related speakers a...

I have lots and lots of files - mostly Word documents - each pertaining to a different topic. A random selection of topics: the history of the unification of Atlia; the design of fortresses in ancient Burra; the practice of giving gifts; in-world approaches to linguistics. I'm not sure it's the most...

Viksen has several that have arisen really just by accident, as two once-distinct words have coalesced in speech but the writing system hasn't caught up. For example yi "law" and yé "diamond", both pronounced /ji/ (the latter was historically /je:/).