The CBB

You said there's a snake in your boat (/o:/), not boot (/u:/).

Iyionaku wrote:Is this really a conlang, or do you mean an Austrian dialect of German? Or is it a con-accent?

East Germanic conlang.

Are you really not going to fix the German..? ;)

:deu: German Da ist eine Schlange in meinem Boot! [daː ʔɪst ˈʔaɪ̯nə ˈʃʷlaŋə ʔɪn ˈmaɪ̯nəm boːt] there COP.3SG INDEF.FEM.NOM snake in 1SG.POSS.MASC.DAT boot There is a snake in my boot! So this is a riff on the famous hovercraft one or what? ;) -- :con: Austrian It haus vorm in minam stivla. it hab-s...

I feel like there is quite a story behind this. English father, South America, and now Poland? Expat dad marries local woman? Not that interesting. The Poland bit is a tad weirder, sure, but I came here later, nothing to do with my parents. Yiddishisms? I guess Rosenkohl is of Polish Jewish ancestr...

If everybody is thinking the same thing at the same time, they must be doing the same thing as well. And this is impossible. What if every single one of us decided to take our Audi A4 onto I-5? Well, if we all lived near I-5, we'd all crash into eachother trying to get into the onramp. And is someh...

Maybe that's extrapolating a bit (since OP was asking about English), but the distinction between prepositions and conjunctions can be quite clear-cut. Take, for example, languages with case marking (cf. "I ate two- ACC apples- ACC plus three- ACC bananas- ACC " vs. "I ate two- ACC ap...

1. I wouldn't call it that. 2. Seems more like a conjunction to me. I don't see why it's so different from "and". Surely someone could point out how, in some languages, comitative case markers/prepositions develop from/into additive conjunctions, and there does seem to be some overlap. I t...

qwed117 wrote:Is austrian your conlang?

Yes.

Austrian I'm including two translations. One is faithful to the structure (uses a single intransitive verb, which vaguely just means "eat"), and the other is more faithful to the meaning (it specifically refers to "dinner"). Si lōks alge agřo, for i ite. [sɪˈluːkˈs‿alkɛ‿ˈwɔʒʊ fɔɾ...

Not many 'quirks'. I grew up in South America with an English-speaking father (I live in Poland now). I think my English pronunciation is very close to my dad's as far as I can tell (he's from North London and has a somewhat polished accent, but not completely unplaceable). We do drop some h's and h...

Mangos liban, hve ferzynan dōd. Jag sumos diugan, hve ferzynan liben. Magt zu, i it im gibes? Horzi sik bid skad, i in dōd stojes. Many live who deserve death. And some die who deserve life. Can you give it to them? Do not hurry, then, to sentence to death. /ˈmaɲus ˈliːvan fe fr̩ˈzyːnan ˈðoʊ̯ð jɔ ˈ...

zest wrote:maybe I could distinguish them with an accent in the written language, like Portuguese.

They actually are (used to be?) pronounced differently in [some] European varieties, /ɐ̃/ vs /a/, IIRC. This is one of those things about European Portuguese that strikes me as gratuitous silliness.

I would consider to, instead of having a list of sounds, to instead have each sound be represented by a selection of choices. E.g. instead of [p] have [bilabial],[pulmonic[stop],[tenuis]] +1 Doing this in terms of feature geometry gives you more flexibility, as sound change often happens in terms o...

You may be thinking of language change as linear , when it might be more helpful to think of it as cyclical ? If we never compounded or borrowed words, then yeah, apply a given set of unidirectional sound changes all tending towards lenition, and we'd expect every single language to eventually sound...

Good point! I can think of at least three ways of having long vowels: I wasn't saying you must have them, simply pointing out that it caught my eye. There's nothing wrong with a paradigm shift! Maybe the Sprachbund favours languages without long vowels? Maybe you want to make it heavily syllable-ti...

This is my Germlang. I don't think it belongs to any established subfamily, but it shares some properties Old Saxon, Old Norse and Gothic. It has some unique innovations though. 1. Sang emenas rikes vatvareng ja sang makares valzang ja es menommeng no azjanang skolom /səŋ emenəs rikəs vatvəreŋ jə s...

I like the lines you've picked, they seem well-suited for the undertaking. I'm looking forward to seeing other people's renditions. For the purposes of comparison, how about adding Swadesh? We could PM it to you so as to not clutter up the thread, or add it in spoilers. Just a thought. Here are my t...

Very interesting indeed, definitely watching this space for more. :) Particularly, your relativising morpheme -n has caught my eye. The SAE thing to do would be to use a relative pronoun strategy ( yawn , I know), and, after skimming WALS, I couldn't really find anything that quite fits your ACC -> ...

Thank you for posting this! Very interesting, and I'll make sure to make use of your references. I don't know of any Hebrew grammatical features that were adopted? This may be pushing it a bit, but I think there are several nouns of Slavic origin (usually with the singular ending in -e ) with plural...

Actually, this is something computers are good at, at least in theory: going through a large dataset and detecting patterns. Yes, you're right. Even though you mentioned it, I was still not taking into account that you'll have an integrated word generator. With a rich enough corpus, you can definit...