The CBB

I'm curious about what manner of hiatus is permissible in a language; I know some languages allow it and others do not - and that there are various ways to avoid it - but I'm wondering if I can get away with it in the following:- Fyri /fɪ.ˈʁiː/ Animate Noun (A) Fox > Fyrián /fɪ.ʁi.ˈan/ Animate Noun ...

Would such restrictions on syllable formation be non-sensical, or is it perfectly fine? I understand it's one way to give the language a unique flavour, and also a vital feature to figure out. It will allow me to decide what words are and aren't possible, and which ones might be possible but just d...

I'm making some progress with my consonant and vowel structure to syllable formation, and wondering if what I'm (currently) opting for is anywhere near realistic. What I have currently is a system where vowels must be preceeded by a consonant, otherwise they form a separate syllable. For instance, ...

I'm making some progress with my consonant and vowel structure to syllable formation, and wondering if what I'm (currently) opting for is anywhere near realistic. What I have currently is a system where vowels must be preceeded by a consonant, otherwise they form a separate syllable. For instance, I...

I don't do much of my conlanging since I excel in procrastination (why don't I procrastinate on procrastination?), but my recent research of Japanese and Chinese fox mythology has led me to decide that I do not need different nouns for distinguishing between normal foxes and foxes with abilities in ...

Been looking up on apophony because I might be using an ablaut system for my conlang. The bit that gets me on Wikipedia (I know...) is: "Most instances of apophony develop historically from changes due to phonological assimilation that are later grammaticalized (or morphologized) when the envir...

But as I researched it I realized gender, as implemented by the languages I was familiar with, was a useless, needless complication. Gender does serve various purposes in natural languages. What are they? I read Peter Trudgill's Sosiolinguistic Typology (2011) and he actually said that genders are ...

Honestly, I just assumed it was like the IE systems but with more genders. The safest thing to do is never assume anything when it comes to languages. There are so many out there with so many different features that while some of us may be familiar with Indo-European* languages due to our greater e...

I've also seen no evidence that current gender systems serve to disambiguate anything. "La busa" doesn't convey any semantic information beyond what "the bus" tells me. Researched Swahili by any chance? It features a gender/noun class system that does indeed serve to disambiguat...

English doesn't have gender, but WALS reports it as having sex-based gender. Swedish has animacy-based gender, but is not included in the survey at WALS. Swedish has sexed pronouns like English. Maybe it's true that around 50% of all languages with gender has animacy-based systems, but half of thos...

That may work fine in the military since the general can't fire the junior officer. But it could be suicide in the private sector. Try it out on R Lee Ermey, I dare ya. [:D] I'm going for honorifics myself, but it's based on the physical form an individual has taken rather than social status or tru...

Well, it's actually variable, but in Earth's case, it's only fractions of degrees so far, I think. Small changes in temperature can have pretty drastic effects though. I think you may be getting a little mixed up between the greenhouse effect and global warming/cooling. Without the atmosphere, the ...

Been slow going on this conlang due to laziness (I'd also say confidence, but it's mainly laziness!). Thought about it the past week or so, building up a few words and possible features. The following remains relatively the same: /əqijɨ/ Fox /əqijɯɱ/ Male fox /əqijɯn!/ Female fox */n!/ is being used...

So, no one? Couldn't even get an answer in the Q&A thread...

Might have better luck getting my question answered here... Given the significance of foxes and fox spirits to the people who speak the language, I've been considering having a unique sub-gender, or separate gender completely, in which the nouns can have affixes applied (or be inflected - not entire...

Just been thinking about certain words in my conlang (still unnamed), and how nouns are modified to reflect that they are referring specifically to a male or female individual. Given the significance of foxes and fox spirits to the people who speak the language, I've been considering having a unique...

That last n is meant to be the dental nasal (it's /n/ with a side-ways [ underneath). It appears differently in my browser on the forums compared to Wikipedia's IPA consonant table (which they appear to have overhauled since I last looked at it). I'm going to still go with distinguishing Human/were ...

It's been quite a while since I posted here, and then I didn't post that much. I recently decided to get back into conlanging since I have a conculture in my head that I absolutely love, a culture of were-foxes (and hopefully will lead to stories being written about it at some point, but it's too so...

Thank you Eldin, Micamo and Trailsend, thank you very much. [:D] I didn't realise that site existed, and it's a lot to take in. I'll have to really think about this. Maybe SVO would be easier (and possibly more sensible - definitely sounds better than some of the other combinations for my test phras...

I'm gonna alter my question...what are the consequences of going with an OSV language? Been playing around with sentence structure, and I have two possibilities for a test phrase: /ɛl ɜːnɪn̪ kɜlin̪a/ - I am a were /kɜlin̪a ɛl ɜːnɪn̪/ - A were I am I've considered other possibilities, and obviously w...