The CBB

Yes, Arabic songs use habiibii [ħaˈbiːbi] a lot, as much as English songs use baby if not more so.

The specifically feminine version is habiibtii [ħaˈbiːbti ħaˈbibti] (spoken eastern Arabic; standard Arabic has habiibatii), but in songs, habiibii can also refer to a woman.

"Nonconcatenative morphology" is another key term.

The least common triggers for height harmony are low vowels. I think pre-Romanian provides a nice example of this. At some point, fairly late in development, mid /e/ (from both earlier close /e/ and /ɛ/, so often /je/ from the latter) assimilated to a following /a/ by breaking into [e̯a], and mid /...

I've updated it now and added a fix for the rhotic issue. It's not very elegant, because you have to use <_`> instead of <`>, but at least it should work. Thank you for the fix! One thing I didn't know I was missing in particular was the inventory of suprasegmentals as buttons. In particular, for s...

I've never seen any acronym for them at all. I just see them called "glosses" for short.

https://cbbforum.com/xipa.html I hope that you will find it useful [:)] Feel free to give feedback if you feel like something could be improved. Thank you so much for this revamped version of XIPA! I see it both looks nicer and also has more things, like the zero-morpheme marker ∅ (through a button...

So you think he thinks that: - his verb agrees with the subject of the relative clause - the English relative pronoun agrees with the object of the matrix clause - thus they are different? But Pazmat has a relative pronoun that, just like in English, seems to agree with the object of the matrix cla...

I don't think I understand. To start with, I think your terminology is unusual. When you say "a nominative", do you mean a subject? Or anything that happens to be in the nominative case? It's best to distinguish role from case (marking of role). I also don't understand about relatives "agreeing" pa...

jhcampbell wrote: ↑10 Jun 2019 06:53I'm a native speaker of Burmese, having spoken daily for 20 years before resettling in Oregon.

If you're willing to take on suggestions, I'd love to hear your take on the ongoing tone decay in Burmese. To what extent is the pasage on Wikipedia true?

I really like this. I've thought about doing an "extreme isolating" language before with minimal word-class distinctions but at the time I didn't know about the possibility of eliminating adpositions. It goes a ways beyond a creole, since even those tend to have a couple or a handful of adpositions...

Does it make any sense to have a negative particle only for irrealis verbs? I think it's fine, even if I don't know of a natlang example. For what it's worth, Standard Arabic has four words for 'not': لا laa - used with indicative present, subjunctive, jussive and imperative ما maa - used with indi...

Hmm, I see. Those are very good points, thanks!

I always like this irony of "they were very likely in a worse state; the very lack of records/evidence itself tells us that". It's true of the dark ages early middle ages (6th century - 10th century) too.

Similarly, I don't imagine the Romans - unless it's only a few hundred of them - abandoning their culture and adopting the more economically and politically primitive one of Han China... although of course over time influence would be inevitable. I'm kind of curious why you consider Han China to be...

Hi. A group of us are starting a new Conlang Database, to be housed on the Language Creation Society's website. We will progressively add basic data about the world's conlangs to a database which will be publicly searchable and able to produce reports involving stats or lists according to people's ...

Oh, good. And nah, I actually laughed at your post. I get the irony of eternally complaining about YAEPTs, when it could've been solved all along with a dedicated EPT!

Dormouse559 wrote: ↑11 Aug 2020 02:33A dedicated YAEPT!

I tried to find an existing one, in order to not create YAEPT. Is there any? (If so, please move these posts there. Better now than later when there might be multiple pages...)

A thread for asking questions about the pronunciation of words in English. I often have questions about what's in dictionaries vs. what people actually use, but even you who are native speakers may feel occasional curiosity about what other people here might say. Let me start with one: "naïve", "naï...

What do you guys think is the origin of the Latin Fifth Declension? I just read an interesting paper on it. Do you think it has any parallels outside of Italic? Was it present in Proto-Italic? I guess this isn't a "quick question", but just interested to hear any thoughts on it. It might be one of ...

eldin raigmore wrote: ↑06 Aug 2020 20:50MSA Morpho-Syntactic Alignment
MSA Modern Standard Arabic

That one has long been the cause of confusion in discussions on conlanging forums...

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