The CBB

Update: It's a really tough decision to lock a thread on someone's conworld, but here, it seems like the original poster had already stopped participating in the discussion and it had been rekindled (after no posts at all for several days) by other people for the primary purpose of arguing about re...

Okay, this thread seemed fairly civil initially, but it seems to be going downhill, and now there are reports. So, locked pending further review by the administration.

* I'm assuming the etymon of "to necro" is "to necromance"? And even if it isn't, at any rate a back-formation and abbreviation from the noun "necromancer". Oh wow, internet terminology is now old enough that people are making assumptions about its etymologies. [:|] But yes, as a relic from those d...

Happy twenty-third, Shimobaatar! As the fortune cookie goes: "May you live in interesting times". Isn't that a bad thing? "Interesting times" refers to things like rebellions, famines, general upheaval. It's "uninteresting times" that's the good one, isn't it? That's how Pratchett ended up using it...

I'm not certain how speakers of such languages change their speech when they move away from the landmark their language is geared to. This actually came up in a discussion with a bunch of my friends recently; there appear to be at least some anecdotes about speakers of such languages just using the...

Finnish sitten Swedish sedan both meaning 'then, subsequently' Also 'ago'... Which, come to think of it, makes the set of meanings kind of suspiciously specific. This is one of those cases where I'm quite sure that one of the words has influenced the other (ie. Swedish has influenced Finnish, most ...

But that person is talking about linguistics. There can be all sorts of immutable laws in linguistics, since linguists seem to be happy to prioritise linguistic rules over naive interpretations of languages. A linguist can just ignore a language that has a counterexample, or redefine it - a naive s...

Thankfully, I've changed a lot, both as a conlanger and just as a person in general, since then. Looking back, there's a lot I would do differently. I can't stand my username, for instance. It's something a 15-year-old came up with on the spot without putting much thought into. Could be worse, you ...

Wikipedia actually claims that Nenets has a phonemic contrast between /n nʲ ŋ ŋʲ/, but AFAICT there aren't any words with <ӈ/ң> before a vowel that induces palatalisation or followed by a soft sign at least on Glosbe or this Nenets dictionary, so I'm a bit sceptical about that. Incidentally, someth...

Is it true that no language distinguishes /ɲ/ and /ŋʲ/, or even /nʲ/ and /ŋʲ/? If so, what's the implication for languages that eg. palatalise all consonants before /i/ and have a phonemic /ŋ/? Does it merge with /n/ before /i/? Does it depend on the language? The reason I'm asking is that while [ɲ...

A thought: Does the CBB House Rules post need a mention of bringing drama from other conlanging communities like the ZBB or the Conlang WorkShop over here? From what I recall, there used to be a part of the "Be Civil" rule that read, "Don't go posting that some random dude you met in another forum ...

If initialisms count..... I'd say that's moving quite far from the original purpose of this thread, so at the very least, I'd recommend starting a new thread for them. Personally, I'm also inclined to think that of course  any two- or three-letter abbreviation is going to have multiple uses, even w...

Please do not bring personal vendettas from elsewhere on the internet onto this board. Also, a reminder on the House Rules here: no personal attacks. Civil criticism and advice on how to improve certain things are fine - and indeed, the main reason why a lot of people bother posting their work at al...

A Grammar of the Hittite Language https://www.academia.edu/13160223/A_GRAMMAR_OF_THE_HITTITE_LANGUAGE_Part_1_Reference_Grammar?email_work_card=view-paper Neat, thanks for linking this! Not that I expect to have the time to actually read it anytime soon, but hey, Hittite's been waiting for millennia...

/m n ŋ/ <m n n ŋ> /p b t d k ɡ q/ <p b t d k q> /(t͡ɕ)/ <ç> /f v s z ʃ ʒ (x) ʁ h/ <g v s z ş j h ğ h> /l j w/ <l ı w> /r/ <р> /ɘ~ɪ ʉ ə ʊ/ <i ü y u> /əj~ɘj ʊw~əw~ʉw~ɘw <ı w> /i̯ɘ y̯ʉ~ø~œ u̯o/ <е ö о> /æ ɑ/ <ä а> That usage of <y> and <ı> seems kind of... exactly backward from what I'd expect, both b...

Then again, if we exclude recent(-ish) loanwords, Hungarian doesn't really have word-initial clusters at all, AFAIU. This does in fact seem to be the case too. It's particularly noticeable in the word Görög (Greek). There's also words like iskola 'school' - or indeed the aforementioned István – whi...

https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/35134811.pdf says Hungarian does have some word-initial three-consonant clusters. I'm quite sure most European languages have those by now... Kind of inevitable when people are highly literate, orthographies are mostly phonemic and new scientific and technological co...

:hun: föld "earth, soil, field" :eng: field I would have guessed this was a borrowing from some variety of German but evidently not For what it's worth, Hungarian Wiktionary does suggest that it's "maybe" a borrowing from German Feld . There's also the possibility in cases like this that the associ...

Portuguese(/Iberian and Neapolitan) o ' DEF.ART.MASC ' and Romanian o ' INDF.ART.FEM ' have been causing me some annoyance recently... I see a sequence like Rom. o casă 'a house' and I immediately want to parse it as definite. By extension I guess Portuguese a ' DEF.ART.FEM ' also adds to this, bec...

It's strange, yeah, but how can you control your feelings like that? Could you please cut it out with the 'everyone but me is a heartless monster' business, please? I kind of doubt that was the intended interpretation. Again, benefit of the doubt, and all that. Most people probably experience some ...