The CBB

Not today, but recently I learned that Yimas has two kinds of NP structure. https://chrisintheweeds.com/2024/01/24/non-recursive-nps/ "In any case, one interesting thing about Yimas is that it has two kinds of noun phrase structure, a tightly integrated but non-recursive structure, and a much l...

Oops, posted it in the wrong forum.

I've just been flicking through "The Study of Stress and Word Accent", and there's a chapter that makes the claim that stress location and branching order is correlated. The initial data they have seems to suggest a weakish but statistically significant correlation, but Tokizaki argues tha...

This page compares various open source fonts which are good for IPA characters: https://www.vulgarlang.com/ipafonts/ Of these, EB Garamond looks the best by far to me, and it's also the one I'm currently using. A fellow EBG user, hi! I love EBG; the only font that could possibly compare is Alegreya...

This page compares various open source fonts which are good for IPA characters:

https://www.vulgarlang.com/ipafonts/

Of these, EB Garamond looks the best by far to me, and it's also the one I'm currently using.

One thing I've been struggling with recently is nicer font(s) for my PDF grammars. I got a bit bored of Times clones like Libertine/Libertinus so I looked at various other old style serif fonts, but the issue is that many free fonts are either terrible at rendering combining characters, or are missi...

And, indeed, in Old Irish, where the verb complex has more and less essentially attached elements, depending on when they became attached, and certain sound changes only effect some and not others. You can also just make sure that alternations, while dramatic, are predictable and easily explaining....

I've been working or reworking a phonology with apocope and syncope This sounds like a really cool morphophonology idea. I have been thinking about radical syncope languages for some time (or at some point in the past) and I like how you get radically different allomorphs if you combine syncope in ...

I thought it might be amusing to create a cover page for a conlang grammar that looks a bit like it was published as part of a series by a linguistics institute / publisher. The format of this draft is based on some old SIL grammars I have, but with the series name, publisher name, logo etc. all cha...

I've been working or reworking a phonology with apocope and syncope, and I was considering how it might be interesting to add ditropic case clitics into it. A ditropic clitic is a clitic that attach one way phonologically but another way syntactically. For example, Belep has case clitics which attac...

On final thing is that when the elements are adjacent, there are slightly different combining forms in some cases. E.g. le=a' = lela' = "This", le=o' = lelo' = "That".

Just thought I'd share something I ran into and am using in my current project. In some Mayan languages, deictic distinctions (this/that, here/there, …) are not marked by individual words or morphemes but are split between a distance neutral deictic trigger word which determines the function (presen...

Apart from Salmoneus' advice, the other thing you can do is read grammars of natural languages and get a feel for what questions you might want to address and what logical organisation of the information makes the most sense to you. I realise that not everyone has budget for books and/or is willing ...

Kind of? I think my most recent project, which started off as Mayan inspired with bits of Navajo, Algonquian etc., is closest. Verbs are inflected for agreement with two arguments, TAM, polarity, motion, for various subordinate/adverbial functions, plus it has a preference for complex predicates (co...

In a minimalist experiment I expanded this system to pairs such as push/pull, stretch/squeeze, tell/listen but ended up adding a number of directional markers that blurred the initial logic. I am not sure what it could have evolved into if kept on its track. Interesting pairs. I know that in langua...

Another reason I've been thinking about this is I've been writing the chapter on subordinate clauses, and the agreement patterns raise some questions for me. For example, if you start with a clause like: it.started he.sang the man = the man started to sing and you want to focus the argument, which p...

I've been thinking some more about simplifying the agreement system a bit. Currently, there are separate marking systems for argument focus (anti-agreement) and for other direct/inverse alternations, but this still feels a bit over-complex to me. In Sint as documented, the focus forms are used: 1. W...

I really like this, not least because of the heavily Algonquian feel, and would like to read and comment on it properly, but I happen to be a) ill b) working on the relay torch, so it will have to wait a bit. Thanks! Sorry I didn't reply earlier, the CBB seemed to go down for a few days and I just ...

The inventory of Sint is:

t k
m n
ts tɬ č
v s ɬ š x
w r j

i e a o (ɨ)
ai ao oi

ɨ is primarily an epenthetic vowel and is never stressed.
Stressed syllables are either short, glottalised (short, falling tone), or long rising tone.