The CBB

Firstly, if the timeframe is only a few hundred years, the result is basically just English with a different accent. Honestly, I'm a bit surprised. I have difficulty understanding broad Aussie English. I imagine that after even 200 years, in isolation it could become downright unintelligible. (Of c...

I'd say yes. Maybe not you - I'm jealous of your ability to wrap your head around really non-Old-World languages - but at least plenty of us. And forgive me, but that bias is there even still. Bias creeps in subconsciously. We can become aware of it and strive to decrease it, but like it or not, we...

The problem with future English languages in my experience is twofold. Firstly, if the timeframe is only a few hundred years, the result is basically just English with a different accent. If the timeframe is thousands of years you can create a distinctly new language... but then the attraction of ha...

The only difficult bit here is explaining why every verb in the entire language has a diphthong in it! But something close could certainly be very plausible. -------------- To think about the entire language, let's imagine four verb classes: Class 1 : simple-onset monosyllables: sat , kip Class 2 : ...

Feel someone should point out that while Australian diminution often produces words that aren't used elsewhere, and sometimes they use diminutive affixes that are old-fashioned abroad, the process itself is hardly unique to Australia, and many of the words Vap mentions are also found in England. Not...

Overheard a discussion as I was getting on a train in London yesterday: a polite but clearly exasperated older American man was exclaiming "but if this is the right platform, this must be the right train!", while a long-suffering London girl was trying to explain, and I quote, "there ...

Jackson founded Games Workshop (though he sold out at the start of the 90s) but didn't create Warhammer. He did, however, create (with Livingstone) Fighting Fantasy (and wrote some of the books) and then Sorcery!; he also founded a video game studio with Peter Molyneux (which created Black and White...

In a similar vein (though I've known this a long time), Corey Sanders and Corrie Sanders were both heavyweight boxers prominent in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Wow! According to Wikipedia, one is American and the other was South African. Kind of like the American Steve Jackson and the British St...

Or just say "consonants not in clusters are pre-glottalised, [...] English. Wait, are English intervocalic consonants preglottalized? Not usually, no, so far as I know (although, let's be honest, I wouldn't be shocked if in some dialect they were). But that's I said "in a monosyllabic lan...

In a similar vein (though I've known this a long time), Corey Sanders and Corrie Sanders were both heavyweight boxers prominent in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

One thought that I had was that you could say that vowels in open syllables lengthen, and then all long vowels become creaky and then creakyness is unpacked into a vowel+glottal stop sequence. Or just say "consonants not in clusters are pre-glottalised, and epenthetic allophonic glottal stops ...

Gosh guys, same. Sometimes someone just says a word, and I just start wondering where the word possibly could have come from. Etymology is such fun. Also, just so you know, the name sycamore actually comes from the name of a kind of bona-fide fig - the mulberry fig (Ficus sycomorus). A variety of t...

How on earth does Marshallese "break our phoneme categorization schemes"? If you mean the vowels, it has four vowels, /æ ɛ e i/. Nothing scheme-breaking there. It does have extensive allophony, so these are frequently not realised as [æ ɛ e i], but may be backed and/or rounded. Reflecting ...

I’m pretty sure it’s fish-tongue (curving the sides of your tongue upward). So I've been doing this correctly: I attempt a velar position, but back the hindquarters of my tongue by just a bit more, and raise its edges. It does make an ᵓ-ish sound. Welcome to English! At least, to many British speak...

Sliiightly worrying night tonight. The riots that have been going on for the last week(ish) in the UK have come to Darlington. 15 minute walk from my house, can hear sirens and helicopter going on overhead. Very much "REMAIN INDOORS". I don't think it's a big group from what I can tell fr...

I'm baffled how anyone could claim that higher melanin concentrations in the skin are the product of "cultural adaptation"? And no, saying that people with higher levels of melanin have lower levels of skin cancer is not "the heart of racism". Of course, melanin concentrations a...

I'm baffled how anyone could claim that higher melanin concentrations in the skin are the product of "cultural adaptation"?

And no, saying that people with higher levels of melanin have lower levels of skin cancer is not "the heart of racism".

While race is more of a social construct than of a biological reality in our world (well, there of course are differences in pigmentation, facial proprotions, etc. between different regions of our planet, but what do those mean ?), it may be different in fictional worlds, but that could easily be c...

I want to create a number of Kankonian races [...] and then have them all interbreed with each other and migrate. If they're interbreeding then they won't remain distinct "races" for more than a couple of generations. Melanin in dark-skinned populations like Sub-Saharan Africans, Australi...

I'm thinking about the adjectives of my IE lang. They agree their head in gender number SG.M, SG.F and PL. A simple solution would be SG.M -o SG.F -a PL -i But it would be very boring. Any ideas how to make it more interesting? ...if it's an "IE-lang", would you not be evolving your adjec...