The CBB

No, [] is not just for 'allophones'. <> is for the letters the word is spelled with. So 'cat' is <cat>, composed of <c>, <a> and <t>, 'skate' is <skate>, 'write' is <write> and 'right' is <right>. [] is for the sounds, 'phones', the word is pronounced with. So 'cat' is something like [kʰætʰ], 'skate...

I use X-SAMPA for four reasons: a) it's what I know best b) I can type quickly in X-SAMPA by just pressing these here keys, and it works whatever program I'm in. I don't need to set up keyboard mappings that don't always work and are just as much work to type in anyway, or rely on shortcuts that onl...

Cross-posting from the other place; maybe people here might be interest too. This is an English-descendent spoken around AD 2530. I'm posting the sound changes one stage at a time, then i'll post a bit about the grammar. In the following, note that I use /L/ instead of /l/, for reasons of clarity. A...

A small piece of advice? When somebody uses a "big word" (and this is inevitable - all hobbies have their own jargon terms), there are (at least) two possible responses: a) "I'm sorry, I'm not familiar with that term, could you explain what you mean by that?" b) "I'm constan...

I know what the cultures of my conworld are like, and the kinds of environments they live in, but how do I get the landmasses to work? There area also a lot of islands, many of them basically out in the middle of nowhere. I'm having a hard time not making the landmasses look too much like Earth to ...

I'm afraid that many things that have been said here appear to me to be purely sophistical - defining words to meet the desired results. And some elements - like saying that 'suffer' is 'stative', or that 'fred is acting in a silly manner' is 'dynamic' seem frankly absurd (a state, after all, is onl...

First, I think I should clear up my own terminology. I don't consider "stative" to be an aspect, just a verb class. I think where we are missing each other is that you are looking from the bottom up, and I am looking from the surface down. I am looking at the various "tenses" of...

And of course, the Experiential aspect. I don't know what tense it can be used in, nor exactly what it means. My understanding is that it indicates that an action has been done before. Consequently, this is sort of how I see it working in each tense. The experiential aspect seems to be a sub-catego...

I see people unnecessarily mixing and confusing things, so I think before this gets too far, we have to recognize a few things: 1. the names of the English conjugations do not necessarily reflect their actual aspect, so just because something is "simple" or "continuous" or "...

This is somewhat tangential but... I am wondering how best to present the dictionary of proto-Ardanian to the world, and I have been thinking about setting up a read-only spreadsheet (either Apple Numbers or Google Sheets) and sharing it. This way, I can work on only one copy of the document (since...

Hi, Hi. Please don't think the following is meant to contradict anybody; just giving my own opinion. You'll often find here (and on the ZBB and any other conlanging places) that individuals (myself most of all) are frequently wrong or ignorant, in isolation, but that as a group we know about a lot ...

Here's an idea. Most of the inflation happend in the 1940-1950 era, during and after the war. An opportunity! Say Yabushio adopts the 'yen' early on, but then switches to the gold standard based on the [insert name here], equivalent to the british sovereign. [In my last post I forgot about the gold ...

Well, I just went for mon because it felt cooler to me - an older currency, probably lots of zeroes by now (that conversion I gave was a guess at then-mon vs now-poun), some nationalism.... of course, you're the Japan expert! You could also use yen, of course. Or they could go back to koban or ryoo,...

I figured that a government dealing with dwindling silver resources coinciding with colonial occupation would cause trouble and incite currency reform. Also, as Yabushio entered the modern age, it would need to abandon foreign coinage and develop its own currency. I've gone with 圓 yen as the curren...

That sort of behaviour is also found in extreme forms, iirc, in south american contact languages. There, all the verbs can be spanish, but the morphology is marked on native-language auxiliaries, which there can be very few of. Like if in English all our sentences were along the lines of "we we...

So what exactly does Peterson mean? Everyone repeats him, often with embarrassed footnotes saying "I don't understand the difference but I'm sure he must be right", but what exactly is he trying to get at? Well, my understanding was that the Austronesian system is simply about having two ...

What would be gained by claiming that?

It may be as simple as how some more conventional languages are ergative-absolutive and others nominative-accusative—there might be something similar going on with languages using this alignment. I wonder if it's proper to call 'Austronesian alignment' a kind of morphosyntactical alignment at all –...

So just from looking at Wikipedia, I get the feeling that in the above, the verb has patient-alignment with an applicative that raises store from oblique to patient. Why do you think that? The defining features of Phillipine alignment are the the 'voices' are symmetrical: they have the same valency...

What do you mean by dominant word order, if you don't think German has one?