zompist bboard

Now that's what I mean! Great job, clawgrip!

It's true that mountain building and volcanism goes on near plate boundaries. Older, more eroded (lower) mountains can be found elsewhere. If you want a realistic world, it's probably better to start with tectonics and see where that leads to. Do you have a tectonic map you could use as a base? Mind...

Indeed, that's what I did for continents and island in my own conworld. Sometimes I also take photographs of patterns, like peeling paint. They're unbeatable if you want islands à la Sulawesi!

Another option would be to have it as /p pʰ b/, etc and drop /gʰ/, and instead say that breathiness is a phonetic detail of the voiced set: /b d g/ are [bʰ dʰ gʰ]. It's not uncommon for that to happen, though if it does the voiced fricatives and affricates would probably be expected to do the same....

I've been revising Rautahi's phoneme set, taking into account vokzhen's comments. About the degree of naturalism: let’s say I want Rautahi to be acceptable. If there are some features that occur very rarely in natlangs, that’s ok with me, but I’ll tend to avoid things that make the language “weirder...

Thanks for your input, vokzhen. Your comments make sense to me and I'll try to revise my phoneme set accordingly. Not sure if I can do that today, though.

Hi all, new user here. I've been lurking here for a while but I thought the beginning of 2015 was a good time to register. And so I did. Before I embark on my first post: I am not a linguist, just an amateur who's interested in the subject. So I probably make lots of mistakes. Please bear with me… T...