The CBB

Does it still count as phonemic if long vowels can only occur in stressed syllables, or would that make it allophonic? I have heard some languages claimed to have long vowels, but that these vowels are always stressed or are only found in stressed syllables. As long they aren't predictably long in ...

Not very familiar with the surrounding environment where this happened but it'd seem to be a sonority thing. Plosive+Plosive clusters often lenite into Plosive+[something more sonorous] in order to better conform to the sonority hierarchy and affricates are more sonorous than plosives. I feel like ...

Isn't this more of a question of English rather than theory? What is the difference between " fish is one syllable" and " fish is one syllable long"? To me, the former, " fish is one syllable", just sounds like questionable English... Maybe you mean " fish is a [va...

I got rid of same subject / different subject marking in Dleesoop. It doesn't have relative pronouns either. How does it differentiate relative clauses (whose topic is the antecedent) and coordinated clauses who share a topic. Could there be some prosodic element like a pause? Or should Dleesoop ju...

Chinese 臺 /tʰaɪ̯³⁵/ "tower; lookout; stage; platform; support; stand; base; etc." v.s. English dais Not to mention 塔 tǎ 'stupa, pagoda, tower', plus the word "tower" itself... I got the following regarding Mandarin from a website years ago, and I had forgotten to post them here....

I was reminded of list intonation. Some languages with tonal morphology, such as Kinande, have a special tone pattern on words in lists (the other kind of enumeration [:D] ). Lists often involve numbers+nouns, in some cases even with special syntax. It's not the same, but maybe an inspiration to so...

Iyionaku wrote: ↑31 Oct 2022 09:50Nouns have three cases as well, but different ones: nominative, genitive, enumerative (the latter being used with counting).

Hey, I like that enumerative case. Do you happen to know of a natlang that has something like it by chance?

My mother once remarked that I use "bien" meaning 'very [adjective]' a lot more than is normal (in Spanish). Some people have remarked I use "ya veo" 'I see' (as a conversational quick response, to say I heard what someone else said) a lot too.

I have so many short-lived projects. Vtayn (the name slightly changed) is one of the most developed ones. Its clear cases are: Intransitive case Ergative Accusative Dative Then there are two adjectival cases, which could be analysed as productive adjectival derivational suffixes as well. They still...

:hkg: 切 cit3 "to cut; to slice" - :eng: cut Also Vietnamese cắt, which is unrelated to the Chinese terms 切 cit3 and 割 got3 'to cut', cắt being < Proto-Mon-Khmer *kac 'to pluck, break' Vietnamese bò 'water buffalo; cow' Latin bōs 'cow, bull, ox' < PIE *gʷṓws English better Persian بهتر beh...

If you have the energy and time, you can always go "¿por qué no los dos?" on this, writing both normal lessons and more linguistics-minded ones.

It's a vague but useful term. There's no hard cut-off like (the possibility of) having 12 morphemes (in the verb).

A natlang example, but years ago when I asked this very same question elsewhere, I was pretty amused to be informed that Japanese has a suffix that derives nouns meaning 'woman/girl with a characteristic', namely -っ娘 -kko: 魔女 majo 'witch' > 魔女っ娘 majokko 'magical girl' (an anime/manga trope) 眼鏡 megan...

Mongolian also seems to have ɮ > ɬ too, does it not? Judging from my ears, not descriptions.

Name of the conlang: Nukôr. /b t d k ʔ/ <b t d k ʔ> /ts dz kx/ <ts dz kx> /m n ŋ/ <m n ng> /f s h/ <f s h> /w l j/ <w l y> /iː ɛː ɔː uː/ <î ê ô û> /ɪ æ ɐ ɒ ʊ/ <i a e o u> /ɛɪ ɑɪ æʊ ɔʊ/ <ei ai au ou> Major syllables: CVC, CV:C, CV: Minor syllables (pre-tonic or post-tonic): CV A little "poem&quo...

Do you have any examples from a conlang or conlangs you've made? I guess... but isn't this a strange question to ask? In a conlang I'm free to do whatever I want, say, making "sa" the word for "hypothesis". In natlangs at least such words are interesting because they manage to e...

You may be interested in this thread from the old ZBB archive, "One-syllable words with specific technical or rare meanings", containing English words that fit the title. Examples include "to trach" (to insert a breathing tube into someone's trachea), "zax" (a roofing t...

What is the origin of Serbo-Croatian /t͡ʃ/ vs /t͡ɕ/ and /d͡ʒ/ vs /d͡ʑ/? Did the palatals develop from dentals before front vowels as in West-Slavic or is the origin something more complicated? Mind you I know nothing about Slavic linguistics, but this seems the kind of thing that could easily be de...

Lexicon is indeed a problem, although Wiktionary does have a lot. The best resource I've seen was actually a spreadsheet drawn up by a conlanger over on the ZBB (goatface? iirc?), but that was a decade or more ago now so I don't know if it's still around (or has been superceded). Goatface's/Morriga...