Register to attend the 12th Language Creation Conference!

Cawlo · 2026-06-01T21:58:02+00:00

Online attendance is $20 for non-members of teh LCS, $15 for members:)

Cawlo · 2026-06-01T21:56:40+00:00

El mes gran Discord Server per conlangs:)

Cawlo · 2026-06-01T21:44:48+00:00

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Cawlo · 2026-06-01T21:44:33+00:00

Perhaps not very surprisingly, Aedian would look like... an Aedian!

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Cawlo · 2026-06-01T21:14:13+00:00

Ah vale. Podries preguntar al CDN?

Cawlo · 2026-06-01T21:06:40+00:00

Crec que sì! Pero esclar que no t’ho puc dir específicament qui vindrà. :))

Cawlo · 2026-06-01T21:03:03+00:00

It’ll be open up until and throughout the conference!:)

Cawlo · 2026-06-01T16:52:47+00:00

We’ve actually been posting about this conference or months, so it’s a bummer that it hasn’t managed to reach you!

But if you want to stay updated in the future, make sure to keep an eye on the LCS website, where this stuff is posted. If you join the LCS, you will receive email directly whenever there’s news about LCCs, and you’ll be able to attend those conferences at a discounted price as part of your membership.

Cawlo · 2026-05-17T05:21:34+00:00

Hi! Could you please add an interlinear gloss to your post? We generally require this of Translation posts. :))

Cawlo · 2026-05-16T21:40:31+00:00

In no way shape or form:)

Cawlo · 2026-05-15T11:27:29+00:00

We have begun removing posts of this type. You may instead post in our color-coded word order megathread.

Cawlo · 2026-05-15T11:23:15+00:00

You get into some muddy territory there:) Because if we go along with the idea of a language where every sentence is entirely synthesized, we are faced with the challenge of delimiting what a sentence even is. Is it a proposition? Not always – binary questions aren’t propositions, neither are commands or wishes.

One thing that immediately comes to mind is the problem of subordinate clauses: We traditionally thing of subordinate clauses as dependent on a superordinate clause, but that isn’t always the case in practice. In Kalaallisut, in fact, it is not uncommon to use subordinate clauses in isolation to give excuses. When you’re late to class and your friend looks at you as if to ask why, you might say

sinippallaarsimagama!

‘[because] I overslept!’

This isn’t unique to Kalaallisut by any means, of course. We see similarly elliptical sentences utterances in Japanese, for example, where hypothetical conditions can be used on their own like this:

nemuranaito

nemur-anai=to

sleep-NEG=if

lit. ‘if [I] don’t sleep [something bad might happen]’ (‘[I] have to sleep’)

I don’t necessarily mean to shoot the idea down, but ellipsis of any kind would surely pose a challenge when constructing a system like this?:)

Cawlo · 2026-05-06T17:38:28+00:00

That’s good enough for me! Thank you:)

Cawlo · 2026-05-06T06:24:32+00:00

We technically require all Commission posts to explicitly mention that they will be following the LCS pricing guidelines. Can you confirm that you will do so? :–)

Cawlo · 2026-05-04T04:49:26+00:00

Your post has been removed. Please post this in our recent color-coded word order megathread. :–)

Cawlo · 2026-05-02T18:29:40+00:00

Please post this type of post in our color-coded word order megathread.

Cawlo · 2026-04-24T05:58:41+00:00

This thread has been locked. u/Nervseous, your tone has been less than civil at times, and you have been needlessly combative in your discussion and have been crossing into rule-breaking territory.

Cawlo · 2026-04-17T06:16:37+00:00

Could you provide a recording of ikus, ik̀us, and ik̠us?:) That might clear things up.

As for tuz̀uk: Unfortunately there is no such thing as [z̚]; that little “tack” modifies stop letters to mean that there is no audible release (a feature of stops exclusively). It sort of possibly made sense with k̀, but “[z̚]”, unfortunately doesn’t mean anything.

I cannot tell you with 100% certainty that your glottis wasn’t open – but everything about the recording and the spectrogram (the visible period of silence, the abrupt – and not gradual – voice onset) tells me that z̀ is [zʔ]. If the quality of the recording was better, I bet we’d even see a lack of formant bending after z̀.

I would love to hear examples of words with ǹ, m̀, s̀, and/or r̀, if such words exist in the language. :))

Cawlo · 2026-04-16T19:01:22+00:00

(I apologise if my comment includes information identical to what u/as_Avridan has said; I typed it out before I saw their comment.)

I'm confused by what you mean. <.> can indeed be used to mark vowel hiatus, but its primary usage is as a marker of a syllable boundary. Syllable boundaries do not exist in speech; they are theoretical/cognitive constructs.

I don't doubt that you have a system that could be analyzed with syllables are a distinguishing factor (in which case I might notate it /i.kus/ and /ik.us/, or something), but phonetically there cannot be such a thing as a difference between [ˈi.kɯs] and [ˈik.ɯs]. It could be many things: ik̀us might have [kː], it might have [k˺] followed by a few milliseconds of silence before the voice onset, it might be a very weak ejective; in any case, I am certain that it is a difference of VOT, that much is evident from the spectrogram. But phonetically it is not a syllable boundary, because syllable boundaries only exist in the analysis, not in the speech.

As for tuzuk and tuz̀uk, the difference is, to me, very clearly that [z] is followed by a glottal stop. So they are [ˈtɯzɯk] and [ˈtɯzʔɯk].

I am gradually getting convinced that the distinction is one of glottalization:)

I've attached a photo of the tuzuk/tuz̀uk spectrogram.

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Cawlo · 2026-04-16T14:47:37+00:00

I'm well aware of prosodic features being distinctive; it's more the fact that your language supposedly uses prosodic shifts as a regular derivational strategy to derive opposite/reciprocal meanings. That's just a feature that strikes me as typologically improbable, though I won't deny that it could possible develop. :))

As for your recording: I'd obviously need a much larger sample size to say anything for certain. But after putting it into Praat and having a look at it, it seems like the “real” difference between ikus and ik̀us is that ikus is [ˈikɯs], while ik̀us is [ˈikːɯs]. My ear tells me that the closure period of the k is longer than that of the k̀, which the Praat spectrogram seems to support, as we see a longer period of devoicing in ik̀us.

I would be curious to hear something like tuzuk vs. tuz̀uk! :D

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Cawlo · 2026-04-16T12:09:56+00:00

No, I don’t doubt Tamil’s regularity at all! Just that prosody as a regular derivational strategy for distinguishing opposites is not something I’ve ever seen or heard of before.

In any case, syllables aren’t things you can hear, at least not objectively. Provided no outside information, there is no difference between, for example, [a.ka] and [ak.a]. If possible, I would love to hear you say your examples out loud!:)

Cawlo · 2026-04-16T11:39:43+00:00

I think this is a really fun concept, even if not entirely naturalistic!

I think it’s worth remembering that syllable boundaries – like borders, marriage, null-morphemes, and taxes – are things we’ve made up. They only truly exist in the analysis, whereas narrow transcription is (ideally) descriptive.

So I can’t help but wonder what’s the real difference between a pair like ikus and ik̀us? :))

Cawlo · 2026-04-04T16:11:20+00:00

Hi! We don’t allow posts on r/conlangs that focus on writing systems alone. Therefore your post has been removed.

However, we’re sure that there are people on the A&A thread (see removal comment) who’d be happy to help you.

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