The CBB

I was intrigued to learn of Oceanic natlangs which lack dedicated reflexives: see, e.g., section 2.2 (pp. 10-11) of the paper " Reflexives and middle in some Polynesian and New Caledonian Languages ". Does it arise elsewhere on the globe that 'he injured him' can equally mean 'he1 injured...

If a language has different cases (affixes, clitcs, or particles) for the terminative(s) 'as far as X' and orienative(s) 'towards', is a normal directional case (lative, illative, allative etc.) even needed? I'm trying to ask, if the basic directional case really has just the terminative and otient...

Your East Norse forms are closer to 13th or 14th century Early Old Swedish (which was written in the latin alphabet) than to 9th century Old East Norse (Runic Norse). The latter would display many of the archaic features described in this thread, the 9th century is definitely the early part of the O...

I think it depends on the language, but could be something like optative = "I (the speaker) want [subject] to [verb]" while "desiderative" = "[subject] wants to [verb]". E.g. desiderative expresses what in some other languages would normally be expressed with an indepe...

Okay, one thing I wanted to know from Latin: Some 3rd declension nouns that have nominative in -s, have other forms in an alveolar stop, like dens, mons, pons, etc. vs. genitive dentis, montis, pontis, etc. And we can presume that the nominative underlyingly is *dents, *monts, *ponts, etc. But what...

Does anyone know where :eng: this and related Germanic demonstratives come from? The only thing I can find about it says it's *þat + *-s , although I have no idea where *-s comes from or what it means, and the explanation doesn't seem to fit other forms like :deu: dieser , :non: þessar/þessir , etc...

See this lecture by Edward Vajda, especially 15:30 and a bit forward. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ABFZs5N4Q6g This is awesome to watch during a daily commute! Do you have other similar videos to recommend besides Vajda's? Unfortunately, I don't know of a lot of recorded linguistics lectures. Va...

Is there any natlang that uses a sound that is produced by emitting air through closed teeth? Like a dental fricative, just with closed teeth and the tongue away from them? If so, how is it actually called? That sounds like a bidental fricative <h̪͆>, which is apparently only attested in the Black ...

I have a question about diachronics: I have two conlangs and I want to make them sisters. Now I noticed that long vowels in the first conlang and high toned vowels in the second conlang? Do you think that this plausible/naturalistic? What would be a good proto-sound? A coda consonant in the proto-l...

I've linked to that PDF many times now in different threads. The question of how different inflectional categories can develop seems to be a common one among conlangers (which is hardly surprising, it's far from obvious how languages can gain abstract inflection), and for case, that chapter is the b...

Postpositions are probably the most common source of case endings, but by no means the only one. See this chapter by Leonid Kulikov on the "Evolution Of Case Systems", it has many examples of new cases developing in different languages: https://openaccess.leidenuniv.nl/bitstream/handle/188...

Is it totally unnaturalistic to have a construction meaning "Used to belong to"? For example, if in English had this with the suffix -ag "Wolfag head" would mean "Wolf's decapitated head" and "Doctorag wife" to mean "Doctor's ex-wife" or "Docto...

Looks good so far! I don't have much to add at this point, since I've already left some comments via PM, but I will be keeping an eye on this thread.

Does anyone know a rough distribution of how commonly what personal agreement is used for languages that are erg/abs? No agreement Agreement with Ergative Agreement with Absolutive Agreement with both Other (e.g. agreement follows nom/acc patterns) No agreement, S/O agreement (agreement with the ab...

Carl Sagan's famous pronunciation of billion (with an implosive [ɓ] according to some descriptions) was apparently a deliberate choice to distinguish it from million . https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Sagan#.22Billions_and_billions.22 ——— Not a sound change, but from what I understand, Brazilian P...

What I understood of that was helpful. So if I understood correctly, I want to merge simple and generic into one and add a perfective (which takes the place of past simple)? Then inceptive and inchoative are backwards. Thanks for the help [:)] I'm not quite sure what the "Simple" aspect i...

Is this person-tense infix table ok? A lot of them are quite similar but I want to keep the uniformity of it without them being too long. http://i.imgur.com/PVjt71Y.png Is your goal to be naturalistic? If not, the table is fine as long as you like it. If naturalism is your goal, there are some thin...

OK, I think I'm going to go through and make hierarchies for different categories somehow, since no one seems to know. I kind of suspect the basic distinction is with either perfective/imperfective or continuous/habitual (or whatever exactly the technical term for the English "I walk" vs....

ok thank you (: looks like it is from the merge of two suffixes? Yes. Or possibly three, if *-ōm- also shifted to *-um- in English and North Germanic (it didn't in High German, but I'm not sure about other languages). But for stems that had *-im- (i-stems) and *-aim- (adjectives) in PG, the ending ...

I think the Old English -um was from Proto-Germanic -amaz, which is in turn from Proto-Indo-European -omos However, I am not an expert of this, I only made a guess from data I could find. let's go back to linguistics, I said that the Old English -um was from Proto-Germanic -amaz, however, there wer...