The CBB

I really like this. Thanks! Some grammatical notes There won't be extensive morphology - mostly just agglutinative. The language will be quite head-initial. Pronouns Pronouns come in three forms: independent, prefixed, and suffixed. The prefixed forms are used as subject markers on the verb; the su...

As usual, I was adding things and taking things out, not liking any of the results. The word /vka/ [fka] popped into my mind, which I really liked, so i thought perhaps this comes from earlier *uká , with unstressed initial *u > /v/. Then I thought why not have unstressed initial *i > /s/, in parall...

I'll call this language Áiuaiu /ˈeβeu/, which I think is befitting the 'theme of three'. Verbs As mentioned, verbs are characterised by their stem vowel changing. I actually quite like the tripartite Irrealis - Imperfective - Perfective thing, so I'll keep that for now. However, I don't like the inh...

This thread is for my random experimental/philosophical/artistic ideas which aren't exactly naturalistic, but might be fun to try out nonetheless. — A recent idea I've had is one where the language is characterised by its features (mostly) occuring in sets of three – in the phonology, grammar, lexic...

Sounds like Hindi. Yes indeed, I will have to take a closer look. It seems like when verbal systems are remodelled, participles taking over finite-forms often play a very large role. Gender As I mentioned earlier in the thread, I am thinking of having a gender system in this language. It will proba...

My guess at a functional explanation would be kind if the opposite of what Davush said. (I pretty much said exactly the same thing) [...] people also like to be able to switch things around for focus, emphasis, etc. [...] If word order then also had to take on the additional load of marking number,...

A current curiosity of mine: for how many grammatical functions do natural languages employ word order? And what are those functions? Though I'd wager the answer will probably be 'everything and anything', so perhaps a more specific question - among the languages anyone here might know about, which...

Another of my 'speculative' questions... How might a language develop an animate/inanimate (or any other binary gender-like) distinction, on demonstratives specifically? I ask about demonstratives, since they are likely one of the first points in the development of a gender system (at least accordin...

A fun idea... 'Simple' (i.e., non-reduplicated) stems show the following : *p, *t, *k, *s > ps, ts, ks, s ~ mb, nd, ng, nz *h > s ~ n *r, *l > y, y ~ r, l *m *n > no change Additionally, -t added to consonant stems causes some changes (as has been previously mentioned) *pt *kt *tt > ut, it, Vt *mt *...

Nice work so far. I like the attention given to the declensional classes; I think having variety in inflection is often something overlooked in a priori conlangs. Thanks! To be honest, I probably tend towards having too many declension classes precisely because of the variety! On a similar note, I ...

A fun idea for plural marking on the participle forms occurred to me, so I'm going to write it down before I forget. Starting with a proto-plural suffix, something like * (i)j . Maybe this is related to the -i in the accusative plural -eri . Initially, this is applied as a regular agglutinative suff...

Not an expert, but since we've raised the question, I'd guess there are three reasons why Latin developed mostly-free word order: a) the word order was probably ancestrally never totally fixed anyway. Strong SOV tendencies in the earliest records may be in part a literary decision, a style of "...

I like that. Reminds me of Arabic, but not too much. It was indeed (partially) inspired by Semitic-like forms! The verbal system will probably have some more non-concatenativity, but not exactly in the Semitic style. More on the participles The tā-tam/active form is (or was) primarily used to comme...

It is retrievable, maybe even more than that. But I agree that the closest should win. That's why I said, I don't want to wait much longer before revealing it. So, why spend more time waiting. Here is the solution I had in mind. The protoform was simple: *ma, my favorite syllable. Ha! Who would hav...

Not to spoil the fun or anything, but I thought part of the game was to reconstruct what is possible from the given cognates. If the exact proto-word is unretrievable on the basis of the cognates, then surely the closest one should just win? Otherwise it literally just becomes a guessing game...

Having said that, there may also be one typological nudge in Latin's case: its prepositions and tendency for post-nominal adjectives conflicted with its tendency for final verbs, and moving to SVO resolved that. But that of course is just shifting the question (why did its mixed order originally ar...

So, I'm not happy with the pronominal system at all. I'll just leave that alone for now. Let's move on to verbs. I feel like doing something that revolves around a participle-like system, starting with something like this: tam- eat tā-tam- eating (active) tam-ām- eaten (passive) With CVCVC roots, th...

I'm afraid I don't know any syntax (in a linguistics sense, imaginary trees and brackets and anagrams and whatnot), so I probably can't give the sort of answer you want. Thank you very much for this! To be honest, my knowledge of syntax/"linguistics" is very rudimentary, and I favour comm...

Related to my recent question about word order, I have another one. Supposing it is true that the shift from SOV starts "top down", what would this look like in practice? Let's use Japanese as an example since it is rigidly SOV/head final. According to the proposed pathway of change, the o...

One intriguing thing is that in VO languages, V-O-Adverb is usually the favored word order when adverbs are involved ─ so if an adverb were to lexicalize into an auxiliary, it would result in V-O-Auxiliary ─ yet this occurs rarely in natlangs, so there must be something else at work! [...] Since au...