The CBB

So could you say that English (spoken English, at least) is like the French of West Germanic? Agreeing with Salmoneus' post, I think that's a fair comparison. I'm a native speaker of both German and Italian and from my perspective I would say that Continental West Germanic languages are similar to ...

Oh boy what have I started. First of all: I never said or meant that Sardinian has nothing particularly interesting going on. Also, Sardinian is in some ways the odd one out (at least in my understanding of that phrase), in that it does have some developments that are different from any other Romanc...

I am reading Grandgent's introduction to vulgar latin and have learned from it that apparently African Latin was the most free with its word formation. Now, I've already started my semi agglutinating romlang (I was sure that it would always be South Romance anyway) and committed to this idea, but g...

I am reading Grandgent's introduction to vulgar latin and have learned from it that apparently African Latin was the most free with its word formation. Now, I've already started my semi agglutinating romlang (I was sure that it would always be South Romance anyway) and committed to this idea, but g...

I keep going through pretty much all of the conlang material I amassed over the years and it's fun and surprisingly inspirational. I've also undusted Hoavi, my oldest conlang still "in operation" and actually managed to solve some problems that made me stop working on it some time back. In...

Why does everyone always seem to forget Central German? That's one of my linguistic pet peeves. Even Germans tend overlook Central German(y) all the time (the fact that in everyday use, mitteldeutsch usually only refers to the states of Thuringia, Saxony-Anhalt and Saxony doesn't help). Modern Stand...

I know some Northeast Caucasian languages that switched consonants in certain roots, like C 1 VC 2 > C 2 VC 1 . I also remember reading about a similar sound change in some Siouan languages, switching vowels: CV 1 CV 2 > CV 2 CV 1 . I'm guessing these sound changes are not unconditional, but I don't...

This is done regularly with foreign names in Latvian: Fransuā Olands, Mišela Obama, Džeimss Bonds.

The La Spezia-Rimini line is not to be ignored. East of this line, all Romance languages form their plurals by vowel change, because the final -s was dropped very early. West of this line, plurals were formed by adding an -s, as it wasn't dropped there until much later. If you want to ‘completely i...

These "summaries" have so many problems that I don't even know where to start. /edit: I was in a hurry earlier and felt bad for just leaving this one-liner, so I wanted to get back to it. But I literally don't know where to start. Your summaries ("Language family: Features X, Y and Z&...

من هیچ سگ دارم
Man hič sag dāram.
I have no dog.

Population genetics do point to a Mesopotamian origin of at least some Caucasian people, especially the speakers of Northeast Caucasian, so chances are that there is some relationship between them and some languages of the Ancient Near East, but we'll probably never know for sure. Shared vocabulary...

It's a minority language, so the sound changes would probably stay similar to that of the majority language, and a lot of the phonemes that are the same have stayed stable in Aramaic and Arabic. That's not how language change works. And both Aramaic and Arabic are a lot younger and, despite that, s...

Don't get this the wrong way, but you do realize that's an awfully low number of sound changes right? I mean, your modern day Akkadian would have changed less in what, 2000-3000 years than English did in a few centuries. Or in other words, it looks like a dialect of Akkadian that hasn't changed at a...

Well, thanks a lot for answering my questions [:D] It does seem the Alarodian theory isn't too strong, but would be very interesting if true. And also very interesting about the small number of languages in the Kartvelian and Northwest Caucasian families (4 languages each, I think) compared to the ...

This thread is embarassing me. Oh well. I've always been interested in the Caucasian languages as well, especially given that a lot of them have ergative alignment. Why is it that there is such linguistic diversity in the Caucasus? Is it mainly a result of the physical geography? Or is there more to...

Es gibt definitiv zu wenig Sprachenbastler in Berlin. Dann mal herzlich wilkommen! And welcome Cenneidi aswell, of course.

Persian-style <a ā> or <a â>.

I'd really like to help you out, but I feel at loss here, and I'm clearly not the only one. You seem to have an overall picture of how you want your conlang to be. Just create that language then. Stop being so damn insecure about it just because someone on the internet said something about it. If yo...