The CBB

What causes nominative and ergative alignments? They're both more economical than tripartite, and more economical than "Austronesian/Phillippine" or "Split-Transitive", so that's part of the "cause". Why Nom or Erg instead of Active/Stative or Split-Intransitive or Spl...

These are only applicatives if they increase the transitivity of the verb by incorporating object(s) from obliques; No, I don't think that's exactly correct. If a clause already has a direct object before applicativization, then applicativization not only promotes some oblique argument to the direc...

My conlang, and its w ie rd verbs. My conlang, and its w ei rd verbs. _________________________________________________________________________________ Copulas needn't exist in a language. If they do exist they needn't be verbs. In some languages they're just third-person pronouns. English's and ot...

I have 15 optional affixes on verbs that carry the function of describing the location, direction of movement, or the dynamic nature of the movement. ... What should I call these affixes? Locationals? Directionals? They kinda carry both depending on the function of the verb. Call them either, or ma...

alexander wrote:.... a very much refined mood affix system (though there is still much to do).

Tell us about that? :-)

Micamo wrote:Sounds like an aspect distinction of some sort to me. Probably a Generic vs. Continuous thing.

Thanks.
You reply-ninja'ed me :-D while I was editing.
You may want to read the new stuff in my last post.
(Or not.)

You know how in several languages we have something like: present perfect for transitive verbs = "have" + active participle ("I have eaten") present perfect for intransitive verbs = "be" + participle ("he is gone") to (in the future) become verbed (enter the s...

I basically agree except reading proficiency is included. Also, Three different writing systems and two syllabary systems add to the language's difficulty. [/size] Ze hell? Reading proficiency is included as one of the things to learn, and Japanese writing often includes the Hanzi or kanji logogram...

Does it mean "over here smoke rises up; over there smoke rises up"?
Or something close?

-----------------------

Is it spoken in Africa?

------------------------

Is it spoken in a mostly-Christian country?

Why do an auxlang when there already is one? For fun. Otherwise, no compelling reason. The methodology by which IALA was put together was; they picked (by some criterion) a set of root languages (all of which were European), and then, any vocabulary item which was common to half or more of those la...

But those regions already have a ( or often times multiple) lingua franca(s). So what's the point? Maybe use different regions? Centered at each of the points whose longitude and latitude are some whole-number-multiple of 22.5 degrees (east or west, north or south), draw a circle with radius 1350 n...

Our understanding of language acquisition and processing is abysmally poor; We can't even say "This child will be able to form these types of constructions in this language in exactly this many days from now." That's true. There are plenty of things we know very little about. "Imposs...

I'm wanting the word for "God" to be etymologically "invisible friend".

I dont like it, looks too chinese =/ Not to say "I don't like it", but: I do think many of them look very similar to Hanzi or kanji. Is that a good thing or a bad thing? It's up to you to tell us, IMO, rather than the other way around. --------------------------------------------- Is your...

what I MEANT was that you aren't just magically 'cut out' to be a conlanger, you need to learn and practice and all that. Sticking with the same expression, I used 'cut yourself out.' Oh, OK. Yes, if that's what you meant, I agree with you. And I think it's helpful advice. A person can "fit&qu...

If you collect together the natlangs with over 100 million speakers, that is, the ten natlangs with the most speakers, they'll include a Sino-Tibetan language spoken in Asia, four Indo-European languages spoken in Europe (two Romance, one Germanic, one Slavic), three I-E Indic languages spoken in So...

Dual It's probably not necessary to include the "p" for "person". Also, we (or at least I) recommend using the Leipzig Glossing Rules (the Leipzig rules for Interlinear Morphemic Glossing). Especially their list of glossing abbreviations: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_glo...

@ Eldin Raigmore : I don't think you can compare Sambahsa to Interlingua, whether you like Sambahsa or not. Interlingua is a predominantly Romance auxlang, while Sambahsa extends to all Indo-European languages. Furthermore, the spelling of Interlingua is irregular, they just take words as they're w...

Seriously, that guy did a huge work and you're really underrating it. It's been done before, long ago, better, with more success. Look up "Ila" "Interlingua" "International Language Association" . For me the big disadvantage in even considering someone else's auxlang i...

Over the past couple of weeks I've been considering a new conlang I've been internally calling "secretlang." Why? Because I have absolutely no idea what to do with it phonologically so I can't come up with a con-name that will stick. But enough of that... Dependency The most important asp...