The CBB

bororo wrote:My suggestion would be to keep /y/ and /u/ as monophtongs (as well as /i/).

But diphthongs are so much prettier....

Regarding the moods, if I understand correctly, the "emphatic" is used with subordinates, while the "tentative" is used with superiors, which makes me think there's also some honorific speech going on here. It's a bit subtler than that: In any given conversation, the superior is...

Setting aside, for the moment, my head-spinning confusion over mood, modality, and evidentiality, I'm going to reintroduce diphthongs to this phonology, thus: (1) Front unrounded vowels: /ij/ /ey/ /ɛ/ /a/ (2) Front rounded vowels (mostly): /yj/ /øy/ /œ/ /aʊ/ (3) Back rounded vowels: /ju/ /ow/ /ɔ/ /ɒ...

Another option, should you choose to include diphtongs, would be for /ø/ to become /øʏ̯/ (as in Dutch). Diphthongs are awesome; I included them in my original set of vowels and should probably restore them here. There's this episode of Ollock's podcast, or this chapter of WALS, for a start. So that...

Thanks to you both. 2) /ɶ/ What about a diphtong instead? For example with /aʊ̯/ (as in RP "loud") you would keep both the /a/ and the added roundedness.... ...[ɶ] (which looks nice in IPA and sounds nice to my ear) still could exist in some language that would not appear on our planet ......

In brief: /i/ /e/ /ɛ/ /a/ /y/ /ø/ /œ/ /ɶ/? /u/ /o/ /ɔ/ /ɒ/ /adʒin/ /adʒen/ /adʒɛn/ /adʒan/ emphatic tentative optative hypothetical Any advice? To elaborate a little: More than a year ago, I started posting bits and pieces of a conlang called "Royal Speech" for a setting my wife and I had ...

Interesting that both the hypothetical example (with "thiefle") and the real-life sort-of example (Quecha) are both agglutinating rather than fusional. I have a perverse fondness for fusional inflections myself....

Thanks for the answers; that's a very useful model of how to derive this. Can anyone think of an alternative way evidentiality marking on nouns could evolve? Also: The thiefle "Thiefle" is such an adorable word (I want to pronounce it "thieffull") that I must figure out a way to ...

Is there any natural language that inflects nouns to show evidentiality, rather than or in addition to verbs? Any conlang people know of? Backstory: A year ago I was mucking about with some thoughts, and my lack of clarity in conveying them sparked a misinterpretation (in this post: http://cbbforum....

Gender in Alifé is quite simple. The gender classification system is based on shape rather than sex or animacy. The two genders are circular and non-circular..... Perhaps it's just my dirty mind, but "circular" strikes me as somehow evolving from or related to the feminine, while the masc...

Hierarchy When listing several nouns they follow a hierarchy order depending on what nominal category the noun belongs to. There are three hierarchy groups: H1 {liquid, elemental,animate}, H2 {small, big, round}, H3 {tool,body-parts,abstract,flat} The order is of course: H1 - H2 - H3 .... Interesti...

/yj/ sounds like a lengthened form of /y/.... Which makes it tempting, since the justification that's emerging for the diphthongs /ej/, /ij/, /ju/, and /oʊ/ is that they evolved from long forms of the tense vowels /eː/, /iː/, /uː/, and /oː/. Plus using [j] to form the diphthong is nicely consistent...

One last question! As I look over the fifth vowel sequence I proposed above 5th Quartet (the new sequence using those French rounded front vowels I can’t resist) /yː/ = u, ue = as in French “tu,” “chute,” but longer /øː/ = œh = as in French “peu,” “ceux,” but longer /œ/ = œ = as in French “sœur,” “j...

eldin raigmore and Ossicone wrote: [absurdly erudite, arcane, and adorable exchange]

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how conlangers flirt on the Internet.

Many thanks to everyone who’s helped. I think this phonology’s gotten significantly better. I. Consonants are good to go? Yes, now that's a bit less English-y, definitely. I like the idea of strong vs. weak consonants. Reminds me for some reason of Russian, which contrasts between "hard" a...

Well, I suppose Valoski could be arguing I shouldn't have asked the question in the first place. But I really like the answers I'm getting. you might add in /q/, which is the stereotypical Arabic /kh/ sound you make at the back of the throat - and not that hard to learn, in my opinion. Let’s try tha...

Do you speak any languages other than English, or at least know a bit from languages other than English? That might help you a bit, actually. My wife and I both know French fairly well; she has some Latin; I have a smattering of Polish and German. So it's all the European half of Indo-European, alt...

If you look at the diacritics section of Wikipedia , you can see quite a number of distinctions that have IPA symbols. Common contrasts and/or alternations in natlangs (or least so I remember) include palatalization and Labialization . English actually does have them too, to some degree, although I...

And http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_phonology says English has 18-19 vowels in General American, 23 in Received Pronunciation! So I feel empowered to add even more vowels! Now, since this is supposed to be a lingua franca, I suppose it shouldn't be too hard to learn, but then English with its 1...

Many thanks for the suggestions and critiques, which have inspired some new questions for the forum, which I’ve put in underlined boldface type [/u]. I. Making the inventory a bit different isn't that difficult - you can simply add or remove entire dimensions of phonemes, and/or add or remove differ...