Aszev of the CBB joins us for a little talk about the many kinds of phonological processes: what they are, what you can do with them, why the order of processes in important.  We also review the awesomely well-developed Novegradian with its 500-page grammar and excellent dictionary. Top of Show Greeting: Talmit Links and Resources:... Read more »

CORRECTION: A commenter below graciously corrected me on a point I (George) raised in the show.  When I talk about desiderative languages, please replace that word with dechticaetiative.  Look to the comments below for a relevant link.  I apologize for misidentifying the phenomenon I was talking about. We talk a lot about morphosyntactic alignment, outlining the basic... Read more »

What do you do when you want to make a language without case marking?  Or with very little case marking?  That is what we attempt to explore in this episode.  If you would like to take up George’s “homework” challenge, make up a sketch of a language and send an example of some sort of... Read more »

Alternate Title: Genders, Classes, and Agreement, oh my! We talk today all about gender.  Or noun class.  Or both.  Really, they are the same thing, at least we think so.  Anyway, after a vivid and lively discussion on what can be done with the wonderful world of arbitrarily classifying nouns we review Taruven Top of... Read more »

We get right to it talking about suprasegmentals: mainly stress, phonation, tone, and nasalization.  After a long and fascinating (if incomplete) discussion, we finally get around to talking to DJP’s Kamakawi. Top of Show Greeting: Kinál Links and Resources: Phonation Types Mark Liberman has doubts about stress-timed vs syllable-timed Nambikwara (lots of suprasegmental distinctions) Featured... Read more »

George reveals a peeve, which leads to a bit of a tangent before we get to talking about the wonderful world of evidentials and all the stuff you can do with them.  Then we cover a very curious language by the name Talossan. Top of Show Greeting: Gówa Links and Resources: Evidentiality in Tibetan Evidence... Read more »

Today we talk about demonstratives.  Chiefly, what distinctions are common for demonstratives, and what crazy out-there distinctions you can make.  We also review a conlang that should be very familiar to you all. Top of Show Greeting: Zelsen Featured Conlang: Quenya Thorsten Renk’s Quenya Course (archive download) Ardalambion on Quenya Feedback: Email from Stephen Rogers:... Read more »

George has put up a grammar!  Also, we talk numerals — what base to use, how to construct higher numerals, cardinal vs ordinal, etc.  Then we feature a little bogolang called Wenedyk. Top of the Show Greeting: Celinese Links and Resources: WALS Numerical Base WALS Ordinals WALS Distributives WALS Numeral Classifiers Alyutor (Wikipedia) Pame number... Read more »

After some discussion of one little New York Times article that quoted William(!), we move along to talking about designing your sound system and romanization, though it’s mostly about romanization.  After that, we break a pattern and for the first time feature a natlang rather than a conlang — going from a grammar that just... Read more »

A very special guest host joins us for this episode, where we try to talk about correlatives as a thing, but as correlatives is actually many different things, we end up just talking about indefinites the whole time.  We have much more Top of Show Greeting: pr̝̊ɛmɪsl Links and Resources: Esperanto correlatives WALS on Indefinites Featured... Read more »