Im skeptical of that Wikipedia article ... a few samples from elsewhere on the page: The other cultural influences that are evident throughout Pingelapese history is the Spanish era portrayed in the Pingelapese dance called "Din Dihn" which is loosely translated in English to "Tin Tin". The dance re...

What counts as "stumbling in prayer"? Forgetting the words? An inopportune coughing jag? This varies from place to place. Ridia is big on rules and regulations by design, but each priest is given broad authority to create those rules rather than relying on a universal higher authority. This is beca...

I like it thanks. https://dl.dropbox.com/s/auawgeyar51tlvf/andan100btms-SMALL-bw-3.png <----- another one.... a HYPER-minimalist script of 100 letters thats about as small as it can be. There are actually 400 letters, depending on whether the bottoms are drawn in or not. These are for tones.thus ca...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyrgyz_language might be up soon.... It looks like they've got a similar phonology, though maybe a bit lighter than Uzbek and Kazakh. Still they have the same vowel problem, and a TV station has decided to use w for / u/.

I saw a thread asking about a conscript that was designed for digital media such as stock tickers etc .... I cant find the thread now but this is my entry: https://dl.dropbox.com/s/me2y60d53m84byq/very-tiny-vowel-script10.png Each row is a diff version of the same alphabet, which has only 30 syllabl...

So if I have /a ə/ as my only two vowel phonemes, I'm guessing I'm gonna need a fairly large consonant inventory to make up for the small vowel inventory? I know I can have allophones as /e i o u/, but they only occur as a part of palatalization and labialization. My current consonant inventory is:...

I think I read about a religion in e Africa with precisely 16 gods, but these were 4 modes of 4 gods, who were themselves 4 modes of a single supreme deity, so they could be considered monotheistic.

I came up with an isolating language where normal sentences were SOV, and passive sentences were VO. Thus word order marked the voice. I'm not sure there's any significant correlation between SOV and degree of inflection, though ... I can't really see an advantage to my old idea that would lead me t...

Yes, <wu uw ji ij> are all invalid as per the phonology post a bit further down. The language isn't supposed to be directly or indirectly based on Japanese, it's just that the writing system looks a fair bit like Katakana. The grammar and lexicon shouldn't end up being noticeably Japanese-y at all....

I like the script. The glyphs look like they've been slowly simplified over time from ligatures of previously existing consonant plus vowel signs. This is *unlike* Japanese, though in Japanese the glyphs seem to have evolved towards a convergent shape anyway. One minor question about the phonology t...

Can you make a 3 way distinction of /k/ vs /ci/ vs /c/? If so then the /c/ has to be phonemic. For the other question, I'll try to word my answer better if I think of another way, but the Semitic langs may be a better example anyway, as they have neologisms formed from elements that are the exact sa...

Well, I like to keep words alive, so to speak, by passing down derived forms of words in their abstract form rather then succumbing to sound change and becoming ordinary opaque roots. Some polysynthetic languages have less than 2000 roots and they get along fine.... even placenames can be derivation...

I tend to make sample sentences only of nouns I'm familiar with. I know that I haven't memorized the entire lexicon of even my smaller conlangs like Khulls (~400 words), and I likely never will. But I've memorized the entire diachronic history of most of them, and so given any proto-form I can deriv...

Yes, [y] triggers palatalization in many languages. French doesn't have it but it's likely that it didn't have [y] when the palatalization began. Mandarin [y] always palatalizes velars before it. I think German [y] selects the ç allophone of its ich-laut.

My conlangs are entirely a priori , and almost entirely without loans. Outside of names, there is only one loanword in Poswa out of ~4000 roots in its dictionary, and one loanword in Pabappa in its ~3000 word dictionary. There will be more, but they will all be cultural terms that did not exist in t...

I had a bit of a look there: some interesting concepts! Of course, I'd like to hear more the idea of "lack of sin". But I do wonder how this is squared with the concept of blasphemy and its really rather terrible sounding punishments! Thanks. Blasphemy does not harm anyone, but it is proof of a spi...

Afaik, Indo-Aryan refers to what we now call Indo-European, not to a subgroup. Since Persians were the original Aryans, it's possible it's been used as a synonym of Indo-Iranian, but it wouldn't make sense to call the Indic branch alone by any hyphenated name when Indic already covers it. Edit; appl...

I believe modern Dutch has /sx/ for German /š/, which indicates one possible path you could take, even if it was not quite the same path that German took, since x ----> š is easy to justify. But even so , I'm going to label this ❎unlikely if your/ h/ is a true h... A cluster of /h/ and /s/ in either...

This is much harder than I expected, and probably harder than you expected too ... I havent even really gotten anywhere. What I can get of this, which may be all wrong, is this: 1) Some letters seem to function both as vowels and consonants, so the script probably does not consistently write a schwa...

Tapilula, the parent language of most of my conlangs, has an ejective /k_>/. The daughter languages vary from no ejectives to keeping just this one to having a full set, like Khulls which has /p_> pw_> t_> k_> kw_>/. But no implosives. I have a very minor sideline project that has clicks, but they'r...