The CBB

I like the thought you put into your orthography. I feel most conlang orthographies are too exact and miss the underspecification of real languages.

Why don't you?

Personally, I think such a language would have several "surface" vowels anyway, and the single vowel would be a matter of analysis. Especially since you're saying it would be aposteriori.

This is very subjective. I agree with elemtilas on the main point: just start and don't worry about what you don't know. You'll get better as you go. It's like sports: you can read all you want about running, but if you never go out there and run, you'll be terrible at it. When you conlang, you run ...

Hello. Are there any latinised names for grammatical cases matching with the expressions "according to" and "far from"? Which ones should have grammatical numbers matching with "many", "more" and "less" (these two last like in "more/less chairs...

Is a tense-based split-erg protolang more likely to evolve split-s or fluid-s? I think the evolution of split-s vs fluid-s has to do mostly with the lexical items available in the language. If the proto-language tends to have separate volitional vs non-volitional verbs, it's somewhat less likely to...

Yeah, sounds realistic enough. Why send mothers to be nuns though? Wouldn't they be more useful as grandmothers? There's a reason why in most cultures, monasticism is linked to celibacy, not parenthood.

a pre-industrial society with most of the population get ordained as monks and nuns sometimes in their lives. In that society, there's a custom for every family to send a daughter to the local temple to be ordained as nun when she is born; besides, the most smart child of a village is usually sent ...

An alternative history which came to my mind when stepping out of the shower two days ago: What if Rome had adopted the Etruscan language, and built its empire speaking and spreading that language? (After all, they did once have an Etruscan nobility.) So the whole Romance branch of Indo-European wo...

My triconlang also has four voices similar to yours, although my causative analogue is more of an instrumental applicative and my cooperative has adjutative (helping) functions and doesn't detransitivize. The latter two make for some interesting nouns: śutñe "one who hears" > śəttuñe &quo...

I never really understood assigning genres to worlds. Worlds are too big. This is an excellent point to bring up in this thread. Worlds are too big. But how many settings are really "worlds"? Most of the time, there is one or two focus cultures and an under-defined "here be dragons&q...

Ok so that's clear now, thank you. Now I have another doubt: is it effective to some point to mark noun definiteness sintactically instead of using a declension? I'm curious what you have in mind. Sounds like a cool idea. And another question: in a language with more than one noun declension, are c...

You know of Spelljammer!? I've never played in that setting but I've read about it. I think I first came across it when trying to find inspiration for a fantasy-scifi crossover setting. Forgotten Realms was terribly generic. Which was the setting's strength, in a way. It was almost like a blank can...

So are you asking about underused (as in the topic) or underrated (as in the OP)? I feel these are completely different things. The answer to "underused settings" would be "almost all of them". There's a few popular cliches which get reiterated seemingly endlessly. And there's a ...

John-NTR walked into the barn. John-NTR saw-ANTIP a horse. John-NTR walked into the barn and saw-ANTIP a horse. I feel that something is missing from your example. With an antipassive, the horse would have to be removed or demoted to an oblique, right? Here it looks like it's still a transitive sen...

So, while browsing The Other Board , I've stumbled upon an interesting observation concerning climate: that Geoff's climate cookbook (the usual beginner's resource) is not quite accurate when things deviate too much from Earth, especially when there are east-to-west coastlines in the wrong place . ...

You've never heard of Ravenloft!? Ugh, kids these days! Next you'll be saying you don't know about Dark Sun, or Spelljammer, or Planescape... I know these three. :) Ravenloft is/was the D&D setting for horror stories. Different 'Domains' have different horror flavours, reflecting their differen...

I just had a random idea I thought I'd share. What if god(s) of a setting were like developers of a MMO game, releasing patches and expansions when they discover exploits or create new content? I have noticed that conworlds which have god(s) usually fall into one of two categories: either there is ...

Phonology b d c m n ɲ ʀ ɾ ç h ɺ ʎ s' p' t' q' i u e o a This is a very strange consonantal inventory. I guess if humans are programmed to speak like this due to the gods making them, it's fine, but this whole thing would collapse the second natural processes start to happen. What jumps out as weird...

Did I understand right? Pseudo-examples: [dog][cat][chase] 'The dog chases the cat.' [cat][chase] 'The cat is chased.' Would an easier analyses just be that the verbs are lexically absolutive-ergative, i.e. dropping the agent argument also drops it from the argument structure. I think "Potatoe...

Today, let's discuss voice. Voice is marked through affixes with the exception of the Causative which alters the stem. I have divided voices into "syntactical" and "lexical". Causative and cooperative are characterized as "lexical" because they often cause a semantic sh...