The CBB

I heard these songs one after the other on the radio a few weeks ago. Turns out there’s a decadelong conversation between Bruno Mars and Miley Cyrus: When I Was Your Man (2013) - Bruno Mars I shoulda bought you flowers and held your hand, Shoulda gave you all my hours when I had the chance, Take yo...

Personally I'm in favour of deleting them, because "I'll randomly let this one morpheme ignore both the normal sound changes and the normal phonotactics" feels sloppy to me, but it's up to you, of course (and I'm not saying I've never done that myself!). A way to avoid an arbitrary except...

I heard these songs one after the other on the radio a few weeks ago. Turns out there’s a decadelong conversation between Bruno Mars and Miley Cyrus: When I Was Your Man (2013) - Bruno Mars I shoulda bought you flowers and held your hand, Shoulda gave you all my hours when I had the chance, Take you...

The trouble is, I really like -g, especially how weird and cludgy it is after stops or consonant clusters. So I'm thinking of reintroducing it in these environments via analogy. Which option sounds best? 1. Have it be reintroduced by analogy, regardless of the new consonant cluster rules. 2. Have i...

Oh, I guess I misinterpreted your meaning. Apologies if I came off as rude.

The thread seems unamenable to slow, incremental, unflashy progress. No one will stop you from posting about it, though. [;)] However, I'm still feeling great about my increasing and ever-more cohesive tweaks to things like moods, temporal nouns, root patterns actually being attested, etc. There’s ...

I have locked this thread. Oligey, perhaps you should take some time to cool off and get a sense of the people here on the CBB and their interests. Then, if you want to make a new thread, you should choose a topic that doesn’t involve you enforcing prerequisites. It evidently leads to more frustrati...

I am happy to exchange opinions, but please make sure the following before participating in the discussion: Hi Oligey, I’m one of the site moderators. Since you’re new to the forum, I’d like you to read the House Rules , with particular emphasis on the first. You’re behaving more than a little rude...

Attempting a Faux Phrygian translation: Θί μέλιτον ου έσσι έν δοΰτρα (μελερίνα); Thí méliton ou éssi én doǘtra (melerína)? /ˈtʰi ˈmeliton uˈu̯‿essi ˈen ˈdou̯tra meleˈrina/ why honey-NOM NEG be.3S in pot-DAT (clay-DAT.F) Why is there no honey in the clay pot? Saying δοΰτρα μελερίνα rather than just δ...

But as for the actual pronunciation though, that seems incredibly weird to me. Does your dialect reduce vowels to /e/ instead of schwa? Or does it lack the alternation between reduced vowels in unstressed syllables and for some reason realise <a> as /e/? In unstressed syllables, I have /ə/ and /ɪ̈/...

I determined that thematic adjectives and nouns in Faux Phrygian can be divided into five groups based on the stress shifts they undergo. While thinking about what to name the groups, I realized that I can just number them, because, by coincidence, each of the first five ordinals fits into a differe...

Which kind of Phrygian phonology are you using? Because some people say that Phrygian underwent an Armenian-like shift of the stops, while others say that it didn't. The Armenian-like shift. You can actually see an example in the endonym I provided (Greek pʰ g = Faux Phrygian b k). I find that hypo...

Besides Silvish, I’ve been working on two new conlangs lately. The first is an Indo-European language loosely based on Phrygian. Right now, I call it Faux Phrygian or βρουκικά /brukiˈka/. The early sound changes are similar to what has been reconstructed for Phrygian, but beyond that I’m using it a...

Besides Silvish, I’ve been working on two new conlangs lately. The first is an Indo-European language loosely based on Phrygian. Right now, I call it Faux Phrygian or βρουκικά /brukiˈka/. The early sound changes are similar to what has been reconstructed for Phrygian, but beyond that I’m using it as...

Chiot “puppy” has no feminine form in French. I can’t claim causation, but that absence is probably no coincidence because the obvious feminine form, chiotte, happens to be identical to a (separately derived) vulgar word for “outhouse.”

What happens to a script when two characters "merge"? (e.g. c and e in some people's handwriting in some contexts are written the same, or a and c) Are diacritics introduced? Are the differences between them intentionally accented and emphasized, transforming the glyphs in the other direc...

One can nasalize every vowel? How do you nasalize things like /y/? Yes, any vowel can be nasalized. I’m not sure how to answer your second question, because you can nasalize /y/ in the same way you would nasalize any vowel; no special trick to it. The technical explanation is that you lower your ve...

Aràukuàx x·masaúḳ z·rá láktal x·ḳaẓaṭa Ḷuìmtumraıá. [˹ɐˈ˻rɑvgvɑχ xmɐˈ˹sˤuŋ ʃrɛ ˈɬak˻tɐl ˈxŋɐd͡ʒɐtʼ ˈt͡ɬfem˹dɤmrəja] ru<àv>k-u-à-x xa=mas<aú>ḳ za=rá lákt<a>l xa=ḳaẓ<a#a>ṭ ḷu<ì-mtu>m-ra-ı-á choose<1.4>- DEO-CONC-VOL.ACT BEN =costume< PAT > GEN =this linguistics.department< OBL > BEN =party< OBL > gre...

I guess it’s not surprising that a big city would have a whole herd of museums, but it’s still striking to see so many listed so systematically in one place. That section on past and future museums is a neat idea. It's not complete, unfortunately - one I spotted is that they don't mention the Anaest...

I've never heard anything but /ˈvi.ə/ for "via". I know I say /ˈvi.ə/. Checked Wiktionary and it turned out one can rhyme it with "shyer" or "Mariah" Carey. Huh. For me it's always rhymed with how do you solve a problem like "Maria"? Perhaps the/ˈvai.ə/ pronu...