7
votes
What are the most common sound changes in natlangs?
By far the most common changes are assimilation, one sound becoming more similar to a nearby sound, and lenition, a sound shifting to require less articulatory effort. These are both broad categories ...
- 4,016
7
votes
Accepted
Is it natural that "future possibility" is a separate tense?
Instead of "tautological", the usual name for that in linguistics is gnomic aspect. Lingála, for example, has this type of marking.
Similarly, your "historical" marking is usually ...
- 4,016
6
votes
Accepted
Is it natural that different quantities with the same physical dimension are distinguished by adverbs?
Sure. Not to the extent that you're doing it here, but English uses "far away", "far down", "far up", "far apart", and so on to indicate physical length in ...
- 4,016
3
votes
What are the most common sound changes in natlangs?
Here are a couple sound changes I use when I'm not sure what to do:
Voiceless consonants becoming voiced between two vowels (intervocalic voicing)
[u] and [o] becoming [y] and [ø] in the environment ...
- 413
3
votes
What are the most common sound changes in natlangs?
Things are probably hard to quantify, but some specific sound changes seem to be more frequent than others, most notably:
/h/ -> /∅/ (loss of /h/)
The consonant system often has gaps at /p/ and /g/:...
- 11k
3
votes
Is it natural that "future possibility" is a separate tense?
To address the "future possibility": Spanish subjunctive mood is used to describe possibilities, attitudes or wishes. Historically, future subjunctive was very much alive, but has almost ...
- 1,239
3
votes
What's the best repository of spoken language samples with romanization included that I can use for inspiration?
Romanization is the act of converting text from a different writing system to Latin script using a consistent method. As such, technically, if you have either a sound or text sample and a certain ...
- 71
2
votes
Accepted
How to create a Romance-based conlang?
There are several approaches to this task.
One of them is in fact creating an altlang, based on an alternate history where a Romance language survived or develops in some region outside the Romania as ...
- 11k
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