ConLing - How does ergativity work?

Almost regardless of how you go about being interested in language, a basic understanding of morphosyntactic alignment is, in the words of Kanye, "something that you need to have." It's what takes you from thinking about syntax in terms of the languages you know, to the world of ever-ineffable true thematic relations, a realm where theta roles are made up, that's kept generations of high linguistics students up at night.

I apologize for making this.

If, for instance, you only know English, or even if you're a well-read pan-European polyglot comfortable with French, German, Latin, and Russian, the concept of a grammatical subject seems absolute and immutable, a truth of the universe up there with gravity. As soon as you work up the gall to crack open a grammar of Basque or Tagalog or Guarani, though, this sure footing starts slipping away beneath you, and you turn to the only place you can - morphosyntactic alignment. The best way to start thinking about this is with a nice, clean example  - ergativity.

ConLing - How does allophony work?

Those of us who construct languages have probably seen it before - someone new to the art posts up their newly created phonology to reddit or a bulletin board, and... it's a list. If you hop on Wikipedia or read an academic description of a natural language page down to the section on phonology, it's typically a little bit longer. What gives?

If you're reading the phonology section of the Wikipedia article on Greenlandic, it starts with some lists - vowels, consonants, syllable shapes - but then it starts in on several paragraphs full of rules and sound changes. This is what was missing from the forum post! But maybe new makers of languages are just visible examples of a certain conception we have about the way we speak. It's easy to notice the fact that languages all contain distinct "sounds" (which is to say, phones), but words of course aren't just lawless noise sequences. In early infancy, the rules our mother tongue applies to our native language is irreversibly wired into our brain, so anyone can be forgiven for being blind to them, but the truth is that every word in every language has been run through a phonological filter - allophony.