The CBB

Wightish would be, because of its distance from other related languages, be one of the most innovative Romance languages, if not the most innovative. That's not quite how it works, though - isolated, peripheral languages are generally more conservative, not more innovative. However, it is of course...

Thank you all for your help. As per usual you are all very knowledgeable and have a lot of resources. I should give a bit of context, though I am happy with all of the resources I have been given. I think the context would help narrow stuff down. Remember the old British Romance Language thread? I ...

I must say, I'm surprised by the way people seem to have had no difficulty translating this syntactically peculiar idiom! And I'm disappointed by how many people have chickened out in glossing and just written 'who'! The English uses an interrogative clause instead. But many languages do not have i...

Not really a translation, but I just wanted to mention that in some languages you can only have one wh-word at a time. In such a language, I guess you would talk about who loves someone and whom somebody loves. I wouldn't be so sure. First, you have to be careful about blanketly replacing interroga...

If so, to save time, you can start with: /m/ lost in final position* /n/ lost before /s/ /h/ lost everywhere short /i/ is added before words begining in sC clusters loss of intertonic vowels between a velar and a liquid (eg -cula > -cla, etc) /e/ and/i/ become /j/ before a vowel vowel length becomes...

You have to make up your own sound changes - otherwise it would just be the same as an existing language. You can take inspiration in this regard from the sound changes undergone by other languages, which are easy enough to find - I suggest starting with Wikipedia. There's only a relatively small cl...

Time isn't as much of an issue with writing as people think. If you type at the average of 40wpm - and if you're writing novels and conversing on forums, you're probably someone who types much, much faster than that societal average (60wpm doesn't seem unreasonable or uncommon for fluent young compu...

"Predictable allophonic alternation becomes phonemic when conditions change but phones don't" is basically how sound change works. And doing that in the middle of an inflectional paradigm is how non-agglutinative paradigms work.

I've often wondered, over the years - from Kennaway's List and Langmaker all the way down to CALS - whether anyone's tried assembling a list and/or database of all the conlang lists and/or databases...?

You and I have had discussions about Auntimoany’s constitution, for instance. Yes, indeed! I'm sure that, like the UK, they've got some kind of agreed-on ways of determining what's part of the constitution and what isn't. And how to dispose of the bodies when someone runs afoul of it. [xD] Aristotl...

The British constitution is really quite similar to those anywhere else: it's fundamentally a matter of unenforceable conventions. Other countries have attempted to codify their constitutions - but how those codifications are interpreted and applied must still rely upon convention. The US is the wor...

The central government didn't tax the states (at least, in this regard). It taxed the inhabitants. The principle is: the government couldn't just say "let's tax every land owner 2$ an acre!" - it had to instead say "we want to raise $X. That means that the inhabitants of Virginia have to in total pa...

Err... OK? One thing that’s remarkable to me (YMMV); although the Constitution says amendments to it have to be ratified by 3/4 of the states, the clause that says when it goes into effect says, it goes into effect among the states ratifying it as soon as nine states ratify it. By that time there we...

Currently trending on twitter in the UK: cumin, dogging, Phil Collins, "Allahu Akbar".


...this is a strange country.

Having read Aevas’s reply, and re-read what you (aliensdrinktea) said about “neutral vowels”, I think I should say something about what I think I understand about neutral vowels. If the feature of vowels getting harmonized has at least three values, then vowels with the middle value count as neutra...

There are four different kinds of vowel harmony a language can have. (Well, four that are listed in the Wikipedia article.) No language would reasonably have any two of them in my opinion; and as far as I know no natlang does in fact have any two of them. This is very misleading. In reality, it's v...

I'm not well-versed on vowel harmony, but I'm trying to understand it. I think I have the gist of how it works, but I'm a bit confused about diphthongs. If a language has, say, rounding/backness harmony, could /ai/ coexist in a word with /u/, or /au/ with /i/? (Let's assume that /a/ is neutral.) I'...

I think his misuse of terminology suggests he's not consistent with his analysis either. Especially as his relative clause begins not with a relative pronoun, but with the subject of the relative clause, I imagine that throws off how he thinks of his sentence. I think he confused the nominative-mar...

I find it odd that you're confused, Update: reading this post, I'm now even more confused! but I think I've figured out what's tripping you up: when I talk about participles agreeing with particular nouns, I'm referring to them agreeing with them in declension and case , similar to how adjectives i...

I don't mean to interrupt, but I just realized the definite affix in Yuraalian is a heavy syllable, and because it affixes onto nouns, it affects stress placement in certain words (and vowel quality in turn). For example: jalun [ˈʑɒln̩] '(a) road' ol-jalun [ˈolʑəˌlun] 'the road' Is this naturalisti...