The CBB

I do love the sounds of Celtic languages, and I enjoy listening to Celtic music, but learning them is a bit daunting. I'd probably be interested in a historic approach, on how you go from Proto-Celtic, which basically just resembles Proto-Italic and looks like a Standard Old IE Language, to the &qu...

Well, rhotic is a pretty ill-defined term, which can refer to almost anything ;)

Salmoneus wrote: ↑28 Jun 2023 20:47 In short: none of these solutions are really satisfactory. We need to take more drastic action: so let’s try taming us some wolves!

So, one could call a tempered interval a 'dog'? ;)

Which other high vowels? PIE had only /i/ and /u/ as high vowels. Don't honestly know much about Indo European linguistics ... I suppose I had the misconception that the RUKI rules happened after proto-Germanic (or whatever branch it applies to) had already gained more vowels. I stand corrected. Bu...

Others have suggested something like retracted tongue root or velarisation to explain RUKI, iirc - i.e. something made /r/ sound like /k/. [the real question: why the hell would /i/ be treated like /r/, /k/ and /u/?] Re: the *i in RUKI, I've often wondered the same thing myself, but so far I haven'...

Wiktionary says of 'Afghani' in this sense: "uncommon and deprecated by some style guides". In my experience it's also strongly deprecated by Afghans and people who work with Afghans, who don't generally like white Westerners inventing names for them as though they're conlanging. Afghani ...

My Indo-European "elflang" Old Albic has no "true" prepositiions. It has four cases, and a number of "relational nouns", i.e. nouns that express notions such as 'front', 'back', 'left', 'right', 'inside', 'outside', etc., which take nouns as possessors and are used in l...

Probably not the most original idea, but I've toyed with making a conlang that is the only surviving descendant of the East Germanic branch. There are several such conlangs, including one of myself (which is incomplete and not on the Web yet, but I plan to put it up in the next update of my conlang...

Well, trade goods, especially coins, may end up in places where the people who produced them never were. We know that there was trade between Rome and China, involving middlemen, along the famous Silk Road, and there also was trade between China and Vietnam, of course, so Roman coins may have ended ...

Ooh, I just rediscovered this thread. Romlang in West Africa (from Wikipedia ot seems we know more now about possible North African Romance natlangs, so it might have become easier) or in Western China. Greeklang in Northern India, an Austronesian lang in East Africa with a Nilotic substratum. So m...

Another example are the PIE deverbal nominals of the type *tómos 'a cut' vs. *tomós 'cutting, sharp'.

Yes, those maps rock.

Anyway, you'll be pleased to know that the 53-tone harmonium was built at least twice (in England and independently in Germany) in the 19th century! If you look up 'orthotonophonium', wikipedia has a photo of a 72-tone variant, if you want an impression of how one might look... Ah, the humungous or...

I am chiming in late, but I have just read through the entire thread, which explains these things in an understandable way. Great work, Salmoneus! In fact, I have now decided to toss the bizarre harmonic-scale-based tuning that I imagined for my Elves on this page because it apparently just doesn't ...

two between Ukrainian and English (though involving loans from other language): dream ~/~ дрімати /ˈdri.ma.tɪ/ `to nap' practice ~/~ праця /ˈpra.t͡sʲa/ `work, labor' region ~/~ район /raˈjon/ `second-level administrative division of Ukraine' in fact dorm ~~ дрімати , forth ~~ праця , ray / radius ~...

1. Georgian - the most rocking cool language I know of, doing many things in similar ways as Old Albic. =2. Welsh - just sweet. Nice phonology, cool initial mutations, all that jazz. =2. Irish - same reasons as with Welsh, I don't understand why Tolkien disliked it. 4. Hittite - the most interesting...

Perhaps <wu> is so rare in English because <w> once was <uu> (hence the name "double U"), and <wu> would have been <uuu>.

Znex wrote: ↑22 May 2023 07:20 I keep everything in .txt files for some reason that I've forgotten.

Relevant.

Working backwards this way is not easy. What you are essentially doing is what historical linguists call internal reconstruction ; however, it is somewhat easier because your goal is not reconstructing the ancestor of your language but merely a possible ancestor that you can declare valid in your co...

Now this is an interesting variation of the otherwise overdone Romance conlang theme, I must say.