The CBB

[cross] I don't turn English words into monstrosities of German phonological accidents, and neither do I mistreat Latin words that way (excluding loanwords) — I even pronounced Magna Carta as [ˈmaŋna ˈkʰaɾta] when we (= the class) talked about it in English (which was in 2012). I got some laughs ba...

Will there also be a timely companion thread, "demystifying the Caucuses"?

I had this idea for deciphering the Indus Script, before you guys complain, I already know that it won't work, is useless endless pandering and depends strongly on my biases. There are ~400 symbols of the Indus script. There are nearly 40 Toda consonants and 10 Toda vowels. If we assume that Toda i...

They both have /u/. Although I think some Scottish dialects have them have /U/.

Yes, a possessive construction could be used for benefactives. But these are not core possessive meanings, so there's no need to conjure a third 'possessive' structure in English. [Otherwise we'd have to do that for all prepositions and a lot of verbs, since we can say "there is a limit to X&qu...

Sorry, but you still seem to be just changing the meanings to make bold statements. You say your language only has verbs and no nouns - which is weird, and new, and striking. But I don't see why you wouldn't just say that there is no lexical distinction between verbs and nouns in this language, or t...

Were I to guess, I imagine they'd line up with a key with the sound values of each column, and that glyphs in the same column are variants with different inherent vowels? Actually, columns are historic - up is old, bottom is 'current'. Numbers are just numbers of the characters, so that I can refer...

Having only verbs doesn't mean that your words for entities must be derived from more verby meanings. For example, your word for tongue doesn't have to be 'sits.within-chews-speaks' ... it can just be 'is a tongue'. The English word Ngolu comes from the Ngolu word golu meaning 'is a person' And how...

The Là call themselves Là , which means 'Là'; cognates of this word have become autonyms in most related groups also, and in some cases by extension ethnonyms applied by the Là - so the sister ethnicities that call themselves the Jìe and the Lē (both cognate to 'Là') are known to the Là as the Jìa a...

Right! Well that was a right hassle, but eventually (via discovering that pointlessly opening and closing an Inkscape dialogue was somehow important in the process) I managed to export a vaguely useable version... So, here you go: https://vacuouswastrel.files.wordpress.com/2015/10/refungchart1.png?w...

That's generally true, and probably explains why, eg, Indonesian may often look quite long. But Mohawk isn't exactly CV... Another issue is that translations are likely to add, iirc, 10-20%, just because the translation isn't normally perfectly idiomatic. This may be more of an issue for Mohawk, whi...

So, I was going to post a chart of a conscript... but I can't. I have accidentally made it ridiculously enormous. But that's OK. I can shrink it down to fit on an A4 sheet (in Inkscape), and the resolution is still good enough that it doesn't look horrible when you zoom in. But when I export it as a...

Consequently, I kind of imagine the following English sentences with a/o possession. Pau's bone [a chicken bone from what she's eating] - a-possession Pau's bone [her actual bones in her body] - o-possession My car - a-possession My car [the car was inherited and is like a family heirloom] - o-poss...

Well, any planet rotating really quickly will have fast winds, regardless of locking.

FWIW, AIUI current models of tidally-locked planets do not predict hurricane-force winds, unless the planet is so hot that the atmosphere is basically being stripped from it. Instead, there's a more gradual temperature gradient - the key is that there would be hurricane winds if you just suddenly cr...

Sorry, didn't mean to be dickish. It was just a joke - post a three-line 'phonology' and there'll be three pages of comments, but post something even slightly more developed and there won't be a single reply...

You certainly don't need to apologise, it's not your job to reply to everything.

...but I though phonologies were what people like to talk about?

So... the language is taught in schools, there are children's story books in the language, there are youtube videos in the language, there are going to be textbooks for teenagers in the language... surely your starting point would be to just learn the language as it is used currently?

Posted in the phonology thread already, but what the hell...

https://vacuouswastrel.files.wordpress. ... sketch.pdf

Sorry for the .pdf, it's just that the board will eat my formatting (as will wordpress).

Comments, questions, complaints, all welcome!

I'm looking for info on Possession. Specifically, different types of possession and how they work. I'm most interested at the moment in Austronesian possession. There are at least three significant Austronesian possession systems. The first is alienable/inalienable. The key here is not so much that...