Bianca’s last show as a regular host goes into a rather ambitious topic: discourse particles.  Go listen to the show, because it’s too complicated a subject for me to summarize properly here.  We also feature a natlang going by two names. Top of Show Greeting: Amjati Links and Resources: Paper with a typology and some... Read more »

After a big announcement, we delve into the mysteries and wonders of creating dialects, reviewing natlang tendencies and talking about some techniques that can be used to mimic them, and then we talk about a quite interesting conlang as well. Top of Show Greeting: Palezi Urca Links and Resources: Wikipedia on Romance Languages Emesal (a... Read more »

George gets Bianca’s name wrong and no one notices.  We also have some digressions at the beginning and the end of the show, but somehow we end up talking a whole lot about noun incorporation, and the weird and wacky language known as Gevey. Top of Show Greeting: Vaida Mi Ha Links and Resources: Notes... Read more »

Today we talk all about derivational morphology and what can be done with it.  We also spend some time talking about Proto-Deithas Top of Show Greeting: Sindarin (translation by Roman Rausch) Links and Resources: Gary Shannon’s notes on related words Lexical Semantics Agent nominalizations Nominalization in Thai Featured Conlang: Proto-Deithas

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 »