The CBB

Supreme among the versos de arte mayor is the eleven-syllable line, or verso endecasílabo . As an import of the Italian Renaissance, it is typically used in sonnets, ottava rima , and other Italianate poetic forms. The stress constraints of the line (always on the tenth syllable, never on the fifth...

If anyone is interested in Hyman's paper, here's a link to the pre-publication draft.

I find it difficult to wrap my head around this kind of defectiveness because there just isn't a similar example in English. "Drink" is an example of a defective verb in English. Some people accept "I have drunk mojitos before", but a lot of native speakers simply have no past/&...

I came up with an alignment where - a single subject argument is typically marked with case #1 - by default, if there's both a subject and object, the subject is marked with case #1, and the object with case #2 - if pragmatic focus falls on the subject, the subject is marked with case #3, and the ob...

Yes. I have never had such a good lexicon game that polysemy needs to be carefully thought about, aside from a few words. Zompist recommends in one or both of the LCKs to look at bilingual dictionaries to get inspiration / an idea of what can be covered in a word, but I notice his conlangs' lexica d...

Latin Pulvis et cinis tantum sum. dust.NOM and ash.NOM only am "I am dust and ash only." Prō mē mundus factus est. for me.ABL world.NOM made.NOM is "For me, the world was made." (factus est is a past-tense construction, the present form would be "fit", a conjugation of ...

This is perfectly normal and common, and I'm surprised to hear that it could go against what you've been taught about sound change. Maybe someone inadvertently omitted it. Some natlang examples off the top of my head include: - the reduction of Old Spanish -ades, -edes, -ides (2PL endings in conjuga...

The languages that I refer to "doing this" and "not doing this" is the more strict hab- [suffix] + verb + -[coronal obstruent], which German and Dutch do not do. Dutch has a circumfix ge- -t, and German has -t. French eroded the coronals in the suffixes to the point where it's j...

Then again, I'm a bit surpised by Sequor's post, for that matter. I knew that the construction was colloquial in German, but I thought it was more accepted in other Germanic languages (I once read a paper on how these constructions differ in different languages, but didn't come away thinking it was...

Ancient Greek καλέω kaléō 'to call'
English to call

This is a pretty interesting challenge. One thing that I think is peripheral regarding verbs is the use of a periphrastic construction involving a non-finite verb form to express progressive/continuous aspect in the standard language, in an unmarked way, practically as part of the verb paradigm. Fre...

Transitive verbs are accompanied by a voice particle (direct, inverse, and maybe other voices too). It appears between the arguments. Main 'cat' Guff 'dog' Sicc 'chase' Smuuf 'sleep' Guff yi main sicc. 'The dog chased the cat.' Guff ma main sicc. 'The dog was chased by the cat.' Guff smuuf. 'The do...

Some guy online called Romandalusí has expanded the vocabulary mostly by using Spanish calques, and even got a translation of The Little Prince published in it (with copyright permission!). I just wish he didn't try to pass it as real Mozarabic, which he often does (to my great annoyance) because in...

English /aɪ-/ in is land, previously written i land and pronounced *[ˈiːland] (from Proto-Germanic *awjō, cognate with Swedish ö) Hebrew אי romanized ’î 'island' Latin Jovem *[ˈjɔwẽˑ] 'Jupiter' (one of the main gods of the Roman pantheon) Hebrew יהוה‎ YHWH, probably [jahˈwe] in ancient native Hebrew...

Greetings, new member here (just registered last weekend). I've been interested in the conlanging world for quite some time and have since read about the relatively prominent/successful conlangs (eg. Auxlangs like Volapük, Esperanto, Interlingua; Artlangs like Quenya, Klingon, High Valyrian etc.) M...

What about a language that only has polar switches (inspired by a talk that showed that some languages use the same morpheme for causatives and anticausatives). So you have an intransitive verb qe 'sleep'. You want to make it transitive? No problem, just add -r and you get qer 'put to sleep'. Now, ...

I've wondered before whether languages with zero-marking (or something close to it) are attested with VSO or SOV order where the ambiguity is kept down by making the arguments mandatory with pronouns... What do you mean by making the arguments mandatory with pronouns? Basically like English. Non-pr...

If it's true that languages "considered to be zero-marking" are strongly verb-medial, it isn't because they're considered zero-marking - so whether yours is 'considered' zero-marking doesn't matter. If it's true (and I assume it is to some degree), it's because of the underlying processes...

So, what if you had words like /'kaː.po/ vs /'kam.po/? It'd be allophonic, then, right? Like, the stressed vowel is only long if the stressed syllable is open. If it's closed, then it's short. Then that's allophonic, not phonemic. /'kapo/ ['kaː.po] vs. /'kampo/ ['kam.po]. However if you have /'kapo...

Egyptian Arabic is another example where long vowels only appear when stressed and the vowel length distinction is also phonemic. Examples of languages where this happens and it is not phonemic, but rather just allophonic, include Italian and Late Latin (at least as reflected in the descendant langu...