The CBB

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. [from my position of ignorance, your business with the complementizers seems counterintuitive, since at least in Germanic and I be...

Yep - well, I don't know if "reduced" is the right word because I don't think the short vowel are centralised, but yes, it's a 3-vowel system with length, historically, but where a quality distinction has been introduced by the long and short vowels shifting slightly. The long mid vowels i...

Just to give a look, I think /s/ and /ts/ will merge in codas - dance and pants already are getting merged ("the dancing pants"). I think /r/s will change, as per usual. I also think English will split really hard - maybe not now or in 30 years, but it's already starting to happen. East c...

I'd also note that "conservative" and "liberal" are antonyms for Americans, but not necessarily for the rest of us, and both terms mean very different things in the political language of different countries. [eg in the UK there are politicians (and voters) who consider themselves...

I answered your questions, but . . . is "democratic" really a perfect antonym for "authoritarian"? According to thesaurus.com 'democratic' is acceptable and at least clear to all people. Moreover, we can not use synonyms having too negative connotation like t*rannical and t*tali...

Say that's 2050 then. I've actually changed my document to reflect that, and I can see why you say that - basically all I did is "monophthongize" some glides. What might happen afterwards? What mergers and splits could you see happening? I can see the food and book sets merging. It's hard...

I've recently stumbled across the Gutenberg Project release of Chronicle and Romance: Froissart, Malory, Holinshed , by Lord John Bourchier Berners et al. The original documents date back to the 15th century, so written roughly at the change from Late Middle English to Early Modern English, but thi...

I'm nostalgic for several different Web 1.0s! There's the web I gradually learnt about as a child in the early 1990s - a weird, small selection of mostly pointless websites like Blue Dog Can Count and Blue Pig Won't Oink*, big business websites that looked like they were designed by a child, and ter...

How are people able to use LibreOffice for conlangs? I can't find any easy way to use diacritics in it. In Word, it couldn't be easier. You select a symbol in the insert symbol box, and then you can enter an easy shortcut - for instance, I use alt+- as a prefix key to put a macron on a following vow...

Worth saying maybe that it's not always that gods are "named after" their qualities - that's kind of an abrahamic way of looking at things. For the Greeks, for instance, divinity was the same as being an abstract noun - any abstract noun could be the name of a god or goddess. Not because t...

If a language only has a singular/plural distinction, but descended from a proto-lang that marked dual and Paucal (3-5) on the noun, how naturalistic would it be to say that if a noun phrase has 2-5 as a numeral, the language does not require plural marker on the noun? Or is the opposite more natur...

I rewatched the first season of The Americans. It's an almost perfect season of TV. It shows what the show is about, but is still accessible to a wider audience (it's more episodic and action-packed than some of the later seasons were). Watch it! But now I'm rewatching the second season, and... holy...

Conveniently I work in language revitalization for Indigenous languages in North America, that's my full-time job. Thank you for your service! Perhaps what you're really asking is whether the process of recovery would cause this development to happen faster than it does for languages with many spea...

But I'd also say: bear in mind that Latin hadn't even eliminated its own stress irregularities - there were a whole bunch of words that didn't obey the normal rules and weren't regularised. So expecting immediate regularisation of a whole heap of new irregulars may be unrealistic. I didn't know tha...

Yes, I think I'd agree with that. EDIT: I'd also add, a lot of stress shifts aren't really about creating new stresses, but about reprioritising existing stresses - primary stress shifting to a syllable that has some stress already. I suspect "move to initial stress" is common because ofte...

I think I would say that stress "rules" are primarily descriptive. Where a relatively small number of exceptions are created by the diachronics, they can act to regularise those exceptions through analogy. But the more exceptions there are, the less likely they are to be analogised away, a...

I think the stress rule has to go, at least temporarily. The problem is that shortening all long vowels is a massive simultaneous change that effects a vast percentage of the lexicon. If there's a small change - like loss of nasal codas before fricatives - I can imagine that speakers would immediate...

Nobody says the Trinity is an easy explain. :) (its like the Dao in that way) :) Oh, the Dao's easy - just remember that the Dao that can be explained is not the Dao and you'll be fine! And in particular, to say that Jesus was a part of God would imply that Jesus was not the whole of God - that the...

Wellllllllllll...basically, yes to both . Remember that for most Christians, the Trinity is a focal point -- Jesus is Himself, and Jesus is God...while God the Father is also God, and both the Father and Jesus (aka the Son) are part of the same God (or Godhead) while also being distinct enough to b...

Dude, it's a magic sword from beyond the dawn of time. It's not scientific. It's not even physically realistic as a sword, because swords don't have two blades, because that would be a stupid idea with no actual benefits and lots of disadvantages. It's not a coincidence that the whole of human histo...