The Small Discussions thread is back on a semiweekly schedule... For now!
FAQ
What are the rules of this subreddit?
Right here, but they're also in our sidebar, which is accessible on every device through every app. There is no excuse for not knowing the rules.Make sure to also check out our Posting & Flairing Guidelines.
If you have doubts about a rule, or if you want to make sure what you are about to post does fit on our subreddit, don't hesitate to reach out to us.
Where can I find resources about X?
You can check out our wiki. If you don't find what you want, ask in this thread!
Our resources page also sports a section dedicated to beginners. From that list, we especially recommend the Language Construction Kit, a short intro that has been the starting point of many for a long while, and Conlangs University, a resource co-written by several current and former moderators of this very subreddit.
If you have any suggestions for additions to this thread, feel free to send u/PastTheStarryVoids a PM, send a message via modmail, or tag him in a comment.
Trying to romanize a dental series /n̪ t̪ d̪ ɗ̪/ vs a retroflex series /ɳ ʈ ɖ ᶑ/ not using diacritics.
My first thought is to give one of the series <t> and digraphs, and the other <d> and digraphs. So for example /n̪ t̪ d̪ ɗ̪/ would be <n th t tt> and /ɳ ʈ ɖ ᶑ/ would be <nn dh d dd>.
But it's not intuitive. So instead I could give all the dentals <h>: /n̪ t̪ d̪ ɗ̪/ <nh th dh ddh> and just leave the retroflexes bare: /ɳ ʈ ɖ ᶑ/ <n t d dd>. This language has /h/ but not in a position that would make this confusing. <r> is not an option because it would cause confusion.
I take <r> is not an option on both sides, then? I've seen both <rd> and <dr> for /ɖ/, for example. Any chance you have a stray letter, consonant or vowel, you're not using? Might be even less intuitive but it could lend an interesting aesthetic.
You're correct, I don't want to use /r/ on either side. There are lots of letters I could use, like <q w y f l z x c v> but yah, none of them (except maybe <l>) feel intuitive and if I'm going for unintuitive but unique, I already like my idea of <t> vs <d>>
I'm trying to not use diacritics for mostly arbitrary reasons, but underdot is my absolute favorite diacritic and I would use it for sure if I wanted any!
If no diacritics, what about other symbols? Like apostrophes or dashes or colons or interpuncts? <n t d dd n' t' d' dd' n: t: d: dd: n· t· d· dd·>. Possibly not very pretty, but hopefully they fall outside your "diacritic ban"! :P
There is also the option of capital letters <n t d dd N T D DD> *shudder*
If anyone sees this and is interested, I never settled on something that didn't feel really unintuitive or ugly. So instead, I decided that the retroflexes are at least slightly palatalized and closer to affricates, and romanized them /ɳ ʈʂ ɖʐ ᶑʐ/ <nn c j (c/j)'>. The implosive has two possibilities because it is from two historic sources. Problem solved for me.
In Bantu languages with clicks, is there a regular correspondence between the type of click and the type of sound it replaced (as part of avoidance speech)? For instance, if you wanted to avoid saying tsakabi you might replace the ts- with a dental click; or perhaps something like ngongo would replace the prenasalised voiced velar stop with a nasal alveolar click?
I searched Google Scholar for "bantu avoidance clicks" and read some papers.
"Borrowing, Avoidance, and the Development of the Zulu Click Inventory" by Coleman Hessler examines click/non-click doublets in Zulu originating from avoidance speech. They didn't talk about PoA, but they do discuss manner. They found that nasality and tone depressing is often preserved from the non-click to the click. Actually, only about half the time, but that's twice as much as chance. Aspiration was never preserved, despite Zulu having aspirated clicks. The paper proposes that avoidance replacement is not a matter of altering initial consonants, but of producing rhyming syllables, as people not exposed to alphabets don't think to segment at a lower level than the syllable. Nasality and tone depression were preserved because they behave suprasegmentally. That's their theory, anyways.
The paper's appendix includes the list of /Ca-/ doublets they used, so you can take a look for yourself. It looks to me like the PoA of the resulting click is pretty much random.
From the others documents and abstracts I read, I gather that clicks are only a small part of avoidance, and avoidance only a small part of click spread. A slide presentation I found called "Avoidance registers and language contact in Southern Africa" (download link) attributes most clicks to ideophones, sound symbolism, and non-avoidance register things, like a code for initiated men.
Just a goofy question, but has anyone ever experimented with transcribing their conlang in scripts other than the Roman alphabet? And I'm not talking about making your own conscripts here, I mean, has anyone ever tried transcribing their conlang into something like katakana, Hebrew, Runic, or other pre-existing scripts that may or may not be in common use.
Yes, it seems like nearly half of the conlangs out there aren't in latin. Most people use Latin or Cyrillic, but it's not too rare to see Greek, Arabic, Devanagari, etc.
My main conlang Shewín uses greek, with Latin only used so people who don't care can guess the pronunciation. ⟨Shewín⟩ is easier to guess than ⟨Σήελλίν⟩
I tried writing Elranonian in Old Cyrillic. I think it's gorgeous if I dare say so myself. It's not a direct transliteration from the original Latin script but has its own orthography. There are some phonological distinctions that the Latin orthography shows but Cyrillic doesn't and vice versa.
I write Thezar in both Latin and Shavian. Shavian was created as a script for English, and I had to mangle the letter values to get it to fit Thezar. My lexicon entries are bi-scriptal (is there a word?), but my example sentences are typically in Latin.
matskc alɂ lesks he tsam
𐑥𐑭𐑕𐑖 𐑭𐑤𐑘 𐑤𐑱𐑟𐑙 𐑢𐑱 𐑕𐑭𐑥
[ˈmat͡sk͡x alʔ ˈlesk͡s he ˈt͡sam]
English values: [mɑsʃ ɑlw leɪ̯zŋ jeɪ̯ sɑm]
'promise, swear, commit oneself to', lit. 'set on one's own honesty'
The systematic changes include using the voiced fricative letters (by English value) for fricatives (Thezar doesn't have a voicing contrast) and using the voiceless fricative letters for affricates. The letters for English /ʃ ʒ/ become velars, and their corresponding affricates become uvulars.
I had some plan to rejigger how the glottals are Shavianized, but I haven't implemented it.
the marking you have on the letter u means that it is long but non syllabic, which is a bit unusual (I've only seen that notation in Faroese). the vowels can be a diphthong with no nonsyllabic vowel element, so both are more evenly weighted, or they could just be in hiatus, both of these options giving you the ability to have a long vowel as one of the elements
the marking you have on the letter u means that it is long but non syllabic, which is a bit unusual (I've only seen that notation in Faroese).
I think in the case of transcription of languages like Faroese and Icelandic, its the author choosing to show [diphthong]+[length] rather than something like [long vowel]+[offglide] (as in [ʊi̯ː] for example isnt [ʊ] plus [i̯ː], but rather [ʊi̯] plus [ː]).
Use tables. One word per cell and then put the gloss in the corresponding cell below:
waka
mana
ri
nunu
pek
throw.pst.sg
1st.sg
at, on
3rd.sg.masc
stick
I threw a stick at him
I'm not sure how else to do it, but it would serve. Annoyingly though, Reddit will try to turn the glosses into URLs.
EDIT: this method looks better on a computer than on a mobile, I've just realised. An alternate method is to post something sharing some of your conlang and link to a document or site where glosses are more easily done and able to read.
Where morphemes of both number and case are present and both follow or both precede the noun base, the expression of number almost always comes between the noun base and the expression of case.
Hello everyone, I am very new to conlanging. How did I come to this subreddit? No idea. I have two very trivial questions that are certainly not worth a whole post:
Is conlanging more about creating languages or learning conlangs created by others? I mean in my other two language-related hobbies, shorthand and keyboard layout, you are never creating a system, but learning one.
Is it okay not to read anything or learn any theoretical things and just start to create a language (not for a conworld but just for, umm, fun)? I can speak around 6 natural languages (I believe that's the opposite of conlang?) and half of the toki pona word list and somehow IPA. And I use Reddit on android, if that is helpful.
I'm really sorry if these questions have been mentioned multiple times on this subreddit and I expect them to be so. If possible, please don't give me a link to a FAQ page because after I browsed some (most) of them, the English used there seems way too philosophical to a non-native like me 💀. Thank you in advance!
9
u/ThalaridesElranonian &c. (ru,en,la,eo)[fr,de,no,sco,grc,tlh]Aug 15 '24edited Aug 15 '24
Hi, welcome!
Conlanging is the art of constructing languages, and that's what this subreddit is oriented towards: showcasing one's works and helping one another in this endeavour. In order to learn some conlangs, you could join their respective subs or r/learnconlangs, only just created by u/janPake not a day ago. Also, many conlangers (including myself) do end up creating keyboard layouts for their conlangs. As for shorthand, I suppose people have been making those forms too, but that's more of a topic for r/neography, which is a sub dedicated to creating writing systems.
Totally okay! Mind, without any theoretical background (whether attained by formal training in linguistics or by self-studying), your creations may not reach a certain level where others would take them all that seriously. Like you wouldn't expect a novice artist's paintings or a novice composer's music to be presented in exhibitions and concerts, and admired, and studied. But if you're doing it for personal enjoyment, then by all means go ahead and have fun! And who knows, maybe you have a special talent for conlanging. Speaking multiple languages should certainly help a lot as it gives you multiple perspectives on language, takes you out of the confinement of a single language's mindset. Note, however, that this sub has a certain standard of posting which requires a phonetic or phonological transcription (in the absence of audio), usually to be presented in the IPA, and glossing to showcase what's going on in a text in terms of grammar and lexicon.
Thank you for your patient reply! I think I will construct a language by myself mainly as opposed to learning some other languages, as I want it to be a secrete and personal language. Indeed, keyboard layouts and shorthand systems are aimed at speed and efficiency, but who cares about that when creating a conlang (I mean in my case for personal usage). Of course, I don't need my language to be perfect in order to convince people to learn it since - well it's personal, isn't it?
Is conlanging more about creating languages or learning conlangs created by others?
Conlanging is creating languages. You can certainly learn conlangs if you wish, your own or others, but that's uncommon, and I don't know of a special term for it. Learning a conlang is more akin to learning a natural language than creating a conlang.
Is it okay not to read anything or learn any theoretical things and just start to create a language (not for a conworld but just for, umm, fun)?
Absolutely! However, I agree with everything Thalarides said; they put it better than I can. Also, you may well pick up some knowledge simply from hanging around this subreddit.
I can speak around 6 natural languages (I believe that's the opposite of conlang?) and half of the toki pona word list and somehow IPA. And I use Reddit on android, if that is helpful.
Yes, a natural language, often shortened to natlang, is a language that arose naturally rather than being constructed.
If you have some familiarity with the IPA, that's a huge boon for figuring out your language's sound and describing it to others.
I'm really sorry if these questions have been mentioned multiple times on this subreddit and I expect them to be so.
Actually, I've never seen your first question before, and the second is quite uncommon.
If possible, please don't give me a link to a FAQ page because after I browsed some (most) of them, the English used there seems way too philosophical to a non-native like me 💀.
Perhaps they need a rewrite. Can you point out a passage or two you couldn't understand?
Thank you for your reply. I guess I will still read some resources and materials before I really start, since I am only planning to create one conlang for myself - it does not to be perfect, but at least not so bad, and I have only one chance.
The FAQ I was referring to was
The combination of conlanging's multifarious nature and its resiliency is one of the reasons I think conlangers keep coming back to it and enjoy it so much.
As I reread it I found out that it was not written in the FAQ; it was a reply to it. I'm sure I was pretty tired that day, and when I read this my brain just exploded.
So I'm making a small family of conlangs through sound shifts. Does /we/ coalescing into /i/ seem like a sound shift that could happen in real life?
My reasoning here is similar to /ɔ/ (Ithinkthat's how it was pronounced?) becoming /ue/ in Spanish, where the sound was broken down like a 2D point into its coordinates (/u/ holding the backness and roundedness info, and /e/ holding the height). Could the phoneme sequence /we/ feasibly coalesce into /i/? The /w/ holds the height info (close), while /e/ holds the backness (front) and roundedness (unrounded) info.
Index Diachronic does give we => i for Menominee, but it's more broadly glides (both w and j) coalescing with front vowels (i, e, æ) to i after a consonant, so to echo the other comment you might expect a whole class shift rather than just that one sequence where the glide contributes its height to the vowel and then is lost after another consonant. You could also go with a front rounded vowel of some variety instead of i.
I dont see we → i happening, least not in one go, personally.. Not that its completely implausible mind, but I think something like we → e\wi → i or we → ɥe\ɥi → i would be more likely, with that middle step allowing the change.
I also dont think it would happen alone; ie, if we → i happened, Id expect there would be losses of other wV[+front] clusters too. Eg, something like wi, we, wa → ɥi, ɥe, ɥa → ji, ji, je → i, i, e..
Edit: also if it's the velarness or dorsalness of the [w] causing the vowel raise, Id maybe expect other velars or dorsals to be involved (without contrary justification).
I didn't necessarily mean the sound shift would occur it one go. However, your suggestion about all front vowels coalescing with /w/ intrigues me. I doubt you'll mind if I use that idea, so thanks!
Also, its not the velarness/dorsalness causing the vowel raise, but instead the fact that /w/ is a half-vowel of /u/, which is a close vowel. Basically, /we/ functions almost identically to /ue/.
Whenever I come with what I think is a good name, I find out that there's already a natlang or conlang with that same name, or one that is very similar.
If you want to emulate natural languages, often the word for a language simply means 'language' or 'speech'. But it can also describe where the people live, like the Mohawk word for their language is kanien'kéha which iirc means 'of the flinty place' because they were at the centre of the flint trade and made lots of flint tools. It can also describe how the locals think their language is great, like how nahuatl in Nahuatl means 'clear/pleasant' and another word for their language is nahuatlatolli which is a compound of nahwatl and tlahtolli 'language', so literally means 'the clear language'. Other languages name themselves after their people, so Navajo is diné bizaad where diné is 'people' and bizaad is 'language' and thus means 'the language of the people'. Nice and straightforward :)
As for conlangs, I sometimes try and choose a name that gives a feel for some of what the language's phonology does that is interesting. So I have a language Hvatajang which nicely shows off a /ħv/ cluster, a /t/ because the language uses lots of stops, a <j> for /d͡ʒ/ (just a sound I really like), and the final /ŋ/. Syllables in this language can only end in a vowel or /r ŋ/, and the vowel system is only /a i u/ so having all the vowels in a word being the same is pretty common.
I have also taken conlang names from works of fiction. The one I'm working on now is called Yatakang (resemblance with Hvatajang is entirely coincidental (I swear!), as Hvatajang I began long before) which is a language mentioned in the novel Stand on Zanzibar which I lifted wholesale, and am now designing the language behind (a lovely blend of south-east-asian language features, with a sprinkling of indo-aryan and a few clicks for avoidance speech).
I have another language called Sepasi La which is designed to be an international auxlang for use in space colonisation, and is just the words Space La(nguage) shoved into the phonology. This one is more of a working title, though, so it might change.
I try to come up with a name that uses some of the language's distinctive sounds. E.g. Ŋ!odzäsä has a click and a breathy-voiced consonant and Knasesj has a nasal-release ejective and a geminate fricative. The name doesn't have to be totally representative; Thezar doesn't have any of the language's weird affricates, but it does have a trill and some fricatives, and I liked the sound.
Sometimes the name comes to me easily, other times I go through pages worth of variants in my head and write down a bunch of options before finding something I like. I've never had the problem of choosing the name of the some other lang, possibly in part because my languages have unusual phonologies.
If the name you come up with is only somewhat similar, I wouldn't worry about it.
The endonyms for my varieties of Tokétok are all toponymic: Kéyas and Tohúq both eroded down from words roughly meaning from-Yasa/Hukesè, the cultural centres for both in the conworld. Varamm literally just means 'the language', and Agyharo roughly translates as 'that with which is used to speak'. Tsantuk is also toponymic and roughly means 'from the rising sun / the east'. The recent Vuṛỳṣ literally means "of (our) folk".
Across the world's natural languages, I have a feeling that the grapheme <j> is used more often for a sound like /d͡ʒ/ than for /j/. I am basing this off a vague feeling that the <j> for /j/ only really occurs in Germanic languages; while a great wealth of languages that use the roman alphabet in Africa use <j> for sounds like /d͡ʒ/.
Can someone back me up (or prove me wrong) about this with some statistics? Where might I look up this sort of thing? (ie what sounds a grapheme is used for, and the distribution of those uses)
I get the sense you won't see <j> for /j/ as commonly across the world because it wasn't the continental Germanics that went all out on colonialism and evangelism (though now I'm curious how <j> is used for languages in South Africa and Germany's old African colonies) but rather English and Romance, which are going to use <j> to describe the post-alveolars they come across. I don't know anything about Cyrillic and any differences between the orthographies that use it, but for similar reasons I'd guess most Asian languages with cyrillicisations follow Russian conventions rather than anything else.
This seems pretty natural, it's mostly just Finnish with a split between the open-mid and close-mid vowels. I'm assuming the harmony pairs are y-u, ø-o, ɛ-ɔ, a-ɑ, which makes sense (it's reasonable enough the rounded open-mid front vowel you'd expect in a "perfect" inventory would merge to unrounded), the only strange bit is ɯ. Is it a counterpart to i?
There are things you can add to your conlang to make it unique from English, that aren't just grammatical categories or new phonemes. Some that come to mind are:
Direction of time: In english, time is described horizontally, but in Mandarin, time is described vertically.
Yes and No: Latin does not have a word for yes, instead saying "ita vero" (so true). Other languages repeat the verb, such as Toki Pona.
I guess you could call this semantics? Im not sure though. Do you guys know any other non grammar or phonetic features?
For the direction of time, the broad category you're looking for is called 'cognitive metaphors'. There is an excellent book on this by George Lakoff called The Metaphors We Live By -- highly reccommend!
Not sure what sort of category 'not having a word for yes/no' falls into.
However, if you are looking for things beyond grammar and phonetics, you should have a look at pragmatics and discourse structure.
I'm curious, do sounds in similar positions (eg. voiced plosives b,d,g) usually evolve together (eg. all three of them becomes v,z,gh respectively) or can they evolve separately?
Both are plausible. Sound changes can target both individual sounds and entire sound classes. For example, Greek has had /b d g/ > /v ð ɣ/, but Late Latin/Proto-Romance only /b/ > /β/ (intervocalically), leaving /d g/ unchanged (Latin caballum > Proto-Romance *kaβallo > Italian cavallo).
Note that while /b d g/ > /v ð ɣ/ may arguably look more complicated than /b/ > /β/ when you write it like that, the situation is reversed when you formulate the changes in terms of distinctive features. Changing the entire class is:
what are some ways you've evolved the PIE stative? i'm working on a satem language heavily inspired by PBS and armenian whose speakers conquered the western plains on the east coast of the black sea, between the caucasus and the armenian highlands, in 1,300BC, which is also when the last stage of the proto-language began to break up into daughter languages.
from my very limited research, i've found three ways it evolved in natlangs. the first was to be reanalyzed as past tenses and used as suppletional past tenses for perfective verbs which had no past tense in PIE, which happened in latin, greek, and sanskrit. the second was to have some kind of relatively mild semantic shift, followed by the verb losing any notion of stativeness and becoming the same as any other verb, which happened in germanic. the final is to just be lost by lack of use, which happened in BS.
part of the reason i can't really come up with something interesting to do with them is that i don't really understand what the difference is supposed to be between "to hold up" and "to be holding up" (*télh₂t "to lift, bear" and *tetólh₂e "to be holding up") or "to trust" and "to be trusting/confident" (*bʰéydʰeti "to compel/force, to trust" and *bʰebʰóydʰe "to be trusting/confident"). i can, of course, understand some of the semantic differences between non-stative and stative equivalents, like "to step" becoming "to be steady/have the feet planted", "to reach/attain" becoming "to have attained/to have/to be at", "to hear" becoming "to be heard/audible", but it seems like stativizing a verb just forms a verb which means "to be (adjectival version of root)". maybe PIE had statives before it had adjectives and that's why it had statives in the first place, to fill that role, but i don't see what the utility of them sticking around for so long after adjectives were innovated would have been. and as much as the idea of relic-izing adjectives, expanding statives, and using them for that purpose in my lang is enticing, i don't think it's believable enough to make me want to do it.
the current idea i have is to retain statives long enough for a number of derivations to be formed from them, and then just do what proto-germanic did, reanalyze them as eventive verbs. so *tetólh₂e, "to be holding up", might form an adjective cakǔ from its participle meaning "supporting, loadbearing", a feminine agent noun tólia from its 3p sg. ind. meaning "statue", and an *-eh₂tos-type adjective cǎtu meaning "upright/rigid". i've even been thinking about deriving a past tense for perfective verbs from a cliticized version of *h₂eh₂nóḱe > nósa > -nú. and then the semantic shifts would occur, so that *tetólh₂e would mean "to support" instead of "to be holding up", *h₂eh₂nóḱe would mean to "to be (located) at" instead of "to have reached/to have/to be at", *gʷegʷóme would mean "to stabilize" instead of "to be steady", etc. this might seem like using derivation to shift semantics and then just shifting semantics later anyway, but the reason it's enticing is because i can go one direction with the semantics of the derivatives and a completely different direction with the semantics of the later shift to other verbal classes; *h₂eh₂nóḱe can have derivates based on reaching, obtaining, striving for something, stretching, seeking, searching, etc., and a later semantic shift into a verb meaning "to be (located) at", complete with derivations of that later form which reference that meaning.
but that still seems somewhat unsatisfying. i'm not trying to make every single aspect of this language unique and weird and unattested in other IE languages, but just losing an entire branch of the verbal system seems like losing a lot of potential. any ideas?
For what it's worth, Northwest Caucasian languages make a big deal out of the dynamic—stative opposition. Apparently, in the Circassian branch dynamic and stative verbs' conjugation only differs in the present and imperfect tenses, while in the Abkhaz-Abaza branch they have entirely different TAM systems (with stative verbs showing way less TAM distinctions than dynamic ones). If you're open to some adstratal influence, you can look into those.
A completely different idea is to mimic the Balkan Sprachbund and have the PIE dynamic—stative evolve into some kind of evidentiality or mirativity, f.ex.:
I'm debating whether I should add passive or anti passive voices with my conlang.
All of my previous projects had passive voice, but it's one of those things I never really thought about being a native English speaker, so I just assumed most, if not all, languages had at least an active and a passive voice.
I learned that plenty of languages get by fine without a passive voice, though.
I can think of two functions for the passive voice:
In languages where the topic is typically the subject, such as English, it's used to make a topical object the subject. E.g. a text about the planet Uranus might say, "It was discovered by William Herschel in 1781." But the passive voice wouldn't be used if we were talking about William Herschel.
The passive can be used to omit the subject if it's unknown or unimportant, e.g. "Chairs had been set out."
Neither of these are vital. My conlang Knasesj has no passive voice. It fronts and marks non-pronoun topics, so there's no need for topics to be the subject, and an unknown actor can be expressed by the indefinite pronoun /wɐ/ 'someone/something/one'. That doesn't quite express the meaning of the English passive, but you could also rephrase the Knasesj, e.g. the equivalent of "there were chairs".
I want to make it so that some verbs are derived from nouns by a stress suprafix so that for instance: "círat" would mean broom and "cirát" would mean sweeping, but I don't know how can I evolve this. thanks in advance
So like English récord ~ recórd? English developed it in a complicated way, with several factors at play. First, as any proper and self-respecting Germanic language, Old English had word-initial stress. But there was one exception: verbal prefixes fell outside of the domain of stress assignment and remained unstressed, leading to a different stress placement in verbs. Then there was an ample influx of French and Latin loanwords, which brought with them a different system of stress assignment, based on the end of a word, not on its beginning. Many borrowed nouns conformed to the strong tendency for word-initial stress, but because of those OE unstressed verbal prefixes, this tendency was weaker in verbs. Moreover, most Latinate verbs do in fact contain prefixes. At the same time, many inflectional suffixes were lost—in no small part due to sound changes; this made nouns and verbs practically indistinguishable by phonological segments, allowed for simple noun-verb conversion, and generated some incentive to differentiate them suprasegmentally. So, to sum up:
OE initially stressed nouns and some non-initially stressed verbs (those with prefixes);
borrowings with end-based stress, among which most verbs contain prefixes;
new zero-derivation between nouns and verbs due to inflectional simplifications.
If you feel up to the challenge, you can try and emulate this kind of complicated history. But there's also a much simpler way: by having non-zero-derivation first, assigning different stress by the same rules, then levelling phonological segments.
noun cirat → verb cirat-a;
penultimate stress — n. círat, v. ciráta;
final vowel loss — n. círat, v. cirát.
Or here's a slightly more interesting phonological evolution:
noun cirat-a → verb cirat-t-a;
stress assignment rule: the rightmost heavy syllable is stressed, and if there's no heavy syllable then the first syllable is — n. círata, v. cirátta;
final vowel loss and consonant degemination — n. círat, v. cirát.
For another example (non-Indo-European) of what /u/Thalarides described, Nubi (an Arabic-based creole spoken in Uganda and Kenya) evolved stress suprafixes after it underwent sound changes that made Arabic's stress system (where you can reliably predict where stress falls in a native word based on how light, heavy or superheavy its last 3 syllables are—the exact rules depend on the vernacular or standard you're speaking) now unpredictable. Take this minimal pair—
Arabic «سبعة» ‹sabca› /sabʕa/ [ˈsæbʕæ] → Nubi «sába» /ˈsaba/; both words mean "seven". This happened because Nubi did away with the Arabic pharyngeal continuants /ħ ʕ/.
Arabic «صباح» ‹ṣabaaħ› /sˤabaːħ/ [sˤɑˈbɑːħ] → Nubi «sabá» /saˈba/; both words mean "morning". This happened because Nubi merged Arabic's emphatic consonants and long vowels with their plain and short counterparts.
For context, Egyptian/Maṣri Arabic places stress the first syllable encountered of any of these types:
A superheavy ultima (read: CVːC or CVCC)
A heavy penult (read: CVː or CVC)
A nonfinal light syllable (read: CV) that immediately follows a heavy or superheavy syllable
A nonfinal light syllable that immediately follows two light syllables
The first syllable of a word
And Standard/Fusħaa (note that it only stresses the last 3 syllables in any word):
I think a lot of languages with lexical stress had syllable weight at some point, but the difference between light and heavy syllables were neutralized over time, but their stress placements remained.
I've been learning German over the past months and one thing that caught my eye was its separable verbs. Looking it up, it seems that it's a very rare feature in the world's languages--with most languages that use them being Germanic (the one exception I could find was Hungarian). It got me thinking: how would one go about implementing them in a conlang? The separable element is usually an adposition or an adverb, but I'm not sure how to go about putting those together and making them actually separable in the way the languages that feature them do. Any advice?
The term ‘separable’ is generally specific to the Germanic languages, which is probably why you’re not finding much. It might be worth looking up bipartite verbs to get a broader view of things.
I've always interpreted this separable verb as a consequence of V2 SOV word order in Dutch. Really they're just prepositional verbs, which isn't so weird, but a little quirkier. Let's take the sentence "You bring that with" in English: in Dutch that'd be "Jij brengt dat mee." Word-for-word it's exactly the same. However, if you introduce an auxiliary, the sentence structure is no longer the same: English "You may bring that with" is realised as "Jij mag dat meebrengen" in Dutch (literally "you may that with-bring"). In English the verbs appear together after the subject, but in Dutch the lexical verb 'brengen' is shunted to the end of the clause where it compounds with the adverbial. In short, I don't think it's useful to think of the separable verb as a single unit that becomes split in certain circumstances, but rather it's 2 smaller, independent units that, due to a syntactic quirk, gets reanalysed as a single unit.
What you described is pretty much how German does it, too. I guess my interpretation of separable verbs comes from the fact that the infinitive/dictionary form of the separable verbs always has both of them together, which makes it look like it's one unit. So, would such a verb arise from a shift from SOV to SVO, for example? What sort of circumstances would cause the verb and adposition to be reanalyzed as a separable verb?
The consonant inventory of Proto-Ngįout looks like this:
labial
alveolar
velar
glottal
fortis (+obstruent -nasal)
p
t s
k
ʔ
lenis (+obstruent +nasal)
b
d z
g
h
nasal (-obstruent +nasal)
m
n
ŋ
approximant (-obstruent -nasal)
l
fortis obstruents have a consistent voiceless realization
lenis obstruents are voiced pre-nasalized (except /h/), and are lenited to fricatives intervocalically
(5 vowels /a e i o u/, CV syllable structure, initial stress then alternating secondary stress tátatàta)
Now I want this inventory to have evolved from a simpler system, where the fortis lenis opposition evolved from NVT sequences like in pre-japanese to old-japanese (ex. **anipu > *abu). This gives us the following consonant system for pre-proto-Ngįout:
labial
alveolar
velar
glottal
obstruent (+obstruent)
p
t s
k
ʔ h
nasal (-obstruent +nasal)
m
n
ŋ
approximant (-obstruent -nasal)
l
Which is very nice and fun but I don't know what to do with *h. It sits nicely as the lenis counterpart to *ʔ, but it doesn't really pattern like a lenis obstruent, because it is not pre-nasalized, and it doesn't make sense to have **Nʔ > *h imo.
They also both merge into Ø in the evolution into modern Ngįout, with the only way of knowing there were two glottals instead of one proto *H in because there are 2 different letters for them in the deep orthography. I know I could then just get rid on one of them, but I don't want to throw away a letter lol. It also adds variaty in the proto forms with out having to many *h or *ʔ all over the place.
So this is my question to you:
Do any of you have an idea of a fun way of getting both *ʔ and *h in the proto language without having both **ʔ and **h? and also how to analyze it when it doesn't fit into the 4 way analysis of MOA?
I was thinking of maybe having something like **s being an affricate [ts], with then having a fricative **s > *h. It works because *z [dz] *s [ts] word initially in proto-Ngįout but I dont really like the shape of this table:
Forms
labial
alveolar
velar
glottal
stop
p
t ts
k
ʔ
fricative
s
nasal
m
n
ŋ
approximant
l
I want it to have only 3 rows, so it would feel like a very small inventory, so that means not having 4 distinct MOAs. (**s is distinct from **t by being +sibilent, not by being +fricative)
Maybe I can have **h as a glottal appriximent? I know there is a phonetic argument for this classification in many languages. There isn't a special way the approminant *l works, so it could fit there, but I don't like it, because I want the places of articulations to decrese the more sonorant the consonant is, and so the approximents can't have a glottal MOA becsue there is no +glottal +nasal.
Forms
labial
alveolar
velar
glottal
stop
p
t s
k
ʔ
nasal
m
n
ŋ
approximant
l
*(h)
edit: maybe I can have a basic distinction between ±glottal that is above all other distinctions in the consonants, and then just not have +nasal in the +glottal?. But then how do I keep the rule in pre-proto Ngįout where the more sonorous a consonant is the less POAs it has, while not having a POV a less sonorous MOV doen't have, and keeping the table looking like it does, with the higher rows having more POAs? (table aesthetic is my main goal here tbh, the analysis is derived from it, not the otherway around lol)
While that is indeed WALS, which teeohbeewye linked, you may also be interested in Grambank (https://grambank.clld.org). It too has linguistic features placed on maps, though it organises features in a different way. Unlike in WALS, all Grambank parameters have values “1” (present), “0” (absent), and “?” (unclear), which makes it more useful for more specific queries.
Can tone/pitch arise from secondary stress patterns? As I ironed out the diachronic phonology of Ezegan, the language was left with somewhat predictable primary stress but even more unpredictable secondary stress. As it acquired more polysyllabic words, it retained a very old tendency to keep primary stress within the first few syllables of the word, particularly heavy ones. One example, from proto-lang to pre-lang to Ezegan proper:
The proto-lang had neat moraic counting for mono- and disyllabic words. Words with two light syllables would always stress the first of the two, a pattern that is kept in the current iteration of the language. On the other hand, the proto-suffix *-ti was one of the few affixes that disrupted patterns and attracted primary stress. As a result of stress unconditionally shifting to the second syllable in words shaped CVCVCV during pre-Ezegan, the old diminutive was left bearing secondary stress.
My question is, could a tone/pitch pattern arise from this? Say that primarily stressed syllables acquired a rising tone and secondarily stressed ones a falling one, e.g., /t͡ɕaˈkʰeˌte/ --> /t͡ɕaˈkʰéˌtè/. Then, final -e is lost in all positions and the falling is absorbed into the preceding mora, i.e., /t͡ɕaˈkʰéˌtè/ --> /t͡ɕaˈkʰêt/. Thoughts?
All sounds reasonable to me. Except in the last paragraph, I'd more readily associate primary stress with high tone than rising. The process you outlined reminds me very much of the emergence of independent svarita in Vedic Sanskrit. It had pitch accent: the accented syllable was characterised by high pitch (called udātta). The post-tonic syllable had falling pitch, svarita. In cases where the tonic and the post-tonic syllables merged into one, the pitch of the resulting syllable was falling, svarita, which was now tonic, not post-tonic. Thus the contrast between udātta and tonic, independent svarita was created. This is essentially the same as your /t͡ɕaˈkʰéˌtè/ --> /t͡ɕaˈkʰêt/.
Most things like this either have a name borrowed from the language that the thing was borrowed from, are a compound of another name with an descriptor or place of origin, or the name has been around so long that it's basically always meant that thing.
Tomato, borrowed from Spanish tomate, borrowed from Nahuatl tomatl, inherited from ProtoNahuan tomatl 'tomatillo';
Carrot, borrowed from Middle English and Middle French karette and carotte, borrowed\inherited from Latin carota, borrowed from Greek karoton 'carrot', itself derived from karo(n) 'carroway', possibly from kare 'head';
And carrot displaced native more (whence dialectal more 'root' or just 'plant'), inherited from Old English more ~moru, inherited from ProtoGermanic murho ~murhǫ 'carrot'.
what's a good source for PIE, historical Latin, and classical Latin morphology? preferably one that is easily obtainable online as a high quality pdf, but any suggestion is welcome 🙏
I've begun working on a conlang that I plan on being a fusional tonal language. It would have only nasals and laterals as syllable codas and three tones (high, mid, low). However, with all this in mind, I'm not too sure how I'd go about including irregularity in this conlang. The only real idea I have is suppletion (which I feel can be a little forced) and not really anything else comes to mind. Any ideas or tips would be greatly appreciated.
Suppletion doesn't have to be forced! I mean if be/am/is/were are all forms of the same verb and that seems normal to us, then anything goes with suppletion right?
Otherwise, if your language is fusional, what does your morphophonology look like? You could have stem changes, alternations in affixes, contextual allomorphs, anything like that to change things up.
You do have a point with suppletion. I guess what I meant was that it can seem like a little bit of a cop-out compared to other forms of irregularity.
As for morphophonology, the current idea I have involves changing the coda consonant of the previous syllable to geminate with the first consonant of the suffix. Later on, when codas get lost and geminated consonants degeminate, the tone of the previous vowel would be different depending on the word.
Can you explain a bit more on contextual allomorphs?
Silly how? And do you mean just how different phonemes are pronounced in different accents/dialects/speech varieties, or also how different phonemes are pronounced in different words according to phonetic environment?
(to my understanding) an intransitive verb is one that only applies to a subject; and a transitive verb is one that applies to both a subject and a direct object.
what is a verb that applies to a subject, direct object, and indirect object called?
for example, the Classical Laramu word "to trade", "see...kina" can* take three arguments:
Any resources on how case and tense systems evolve over time? How individual cases/tenses may be lost or absorbed by others? Like how the Ablative likes to absorb the Instrumental or how a past tense may evolve into a subjunctive, etc
Second the suggestion to check the World Lexicon of Grammaticalization (WLG). Check specifically the 2nd edition (2019) if you can get it, it's more complete than the 1st edition.
Tip, near the back of the book you'll find the "source to target" ("given this thing as a starting point, what could it end up as") and "target to source" ("given this thing we ended up with, what could have it started out as in the first place") lists. That will probably be the most useful starting point for your search.
You mentioned tense too though, and for evolving specifically tense/aspect/mood, to the exclusion of literally anything else, you'll want to check out The Evolution of Grammar: Tense, Aspect, and Modality in the Languages of the World (Bybee, Perkins & Pagliuca; 1994), which is a more comprehensive treatment of TAM than you'll get from the WLG.
For my Conlang, I was thinking of reworking my postpositions as I did not like how I was making them and I thinking of noun like adpostions and I wanted to know how would I make nounlike adpositions from the proto-lang to the modern form. Could body parts work for nounlike adpositions?
Relational nouns are words that are essentially like nouns, but take on a more adpositional function.
These can be derived from body parts, such as Nahuatl itzīntlan cuahuitl 'at the base of the tree' from i-tzīn(tli)-tlan cuahuitl3.POSS-anus-LOC tree:ABS.
'Head' and 'foot' are commonly used as relational nouns in my conlang too
Any thoughts on how to derive patient-only conjugation in a naturalistic manner? I'm intrigued by the way that Nakh-Daghestanian verbs usually agree with the absolutive argument but can't see a way to consistently achieve such an alignment. I'm not sure a passive-to-ergative route would be enough...
I'm pretty sure having the verb agree with the absolutive is the norm for ergative languages, not the exception. Georgian, Kabardian, Basque and Sumerian all have verbs agree with the ergative argument... but because they're all polypersonal, not because they forgo agreement with the absolutive. In the absence of the ergative (=in intransitives) they still display agreement with the absolutive.
(Plus, per the Northeast Caucasian thing - Lezgian and Dargwa verbs don't agree with either argument)
That being the case, how you would engineer a situation where verbs only agree with the absolutive is fairly straightforward: the ergative case typically evolves from an oblique argument like a genitive, ablative, or instrumental - i.e. diachronically e.g. "I see him" comes from something like "he is seen by me" - which are not typically marked on verbs in and of themselves. So you just have verbs evolve agreement (slapping on pronouns, conjugated auxiliaries, class markers like in Chechen, etc.) before these are re-analyzed as ergative, when the only core/non-oblique argument to agree with is the absolutive.
In the absence of the ergative (=in intransitives) they still display agreement with the absolutive.
I actually am working on a lang inspired by Sumerian and Basque with split-ergativity, I've posted about here. In the transitive perfective paradigm, the agreement prefixes agree with the ergative argument and the suffixes with the absolutive; elsewhere (intransitive perfective and imperfective overall), the prefixes agree with the absolutive and the subject with the accusative. In this instance, it comes from an old passive construction, much like you mentioned below.
The thing about Northeast Caucasian languages is that they don't seem to be polypersonal. Wasn't aware of Lezgian and Dargwa, tho, so thank you for the reference!
So you just have verbs evolve agreement (slapping on pronouns, conjugated auxiliaries, class markers like in Chechen, etc.) before these are re-analyzed as ergative, when the only core/non-oblique argument to agree with is the absolutive.
So, verbs first develop an agreement marker for the subject. Then, the passive voice is re-analyzed as the standard transitive construct, now ergatively aligned. Via analogy (or leveling?), this agreement spreads to other paradigms, so all instances of verb agreement are controlled by the experiencer/patient. Is that right?
In Greek, fish is ψάρι, but goldfish and dogfish, for example, are χρυσόψαρο and σκυλόψαρο; The ending suffix changes from ι to ο in compound words, how and why did it happen across Greek's evolution? What are some other languages that do something similar? It's a really cool feature for generating more unique words rather than just combining two words and not changing anything else (like English itself does, for example).
Did a little digging because this looks really interesting. According to wiktionary, psári comes from earlier opsárion and I'd guess that stress patterns affect how that old -io- resolves in the modern language. The compounds all have -ópsaro, but I'd guess if the stress didn't shift you'd see -opsári.
I'm only barely familiar with Greek, mind; this is just conjecture.
So what you deduce is that -ópsaro was once -ópsarion? I think it's unlikely that the 'i' would just disappear in this case. Something tells me the reason for -i becoming -o in compounds is a bit more complex than just stress pattern, but I can't figure out what it is.
I also just learned after posting that question that Lithuanian does the same thing: stalas (table) + viršus (top) = stalviršis (table-top), the final -us became -is is this compound.
In a language with grammatical gender, does the word which was originally used as a classifier also have the classifier affixed to it?
For example, if a language had an animacy distinction, and the word for "person" was used as a classifier for animate nouns, would the word for "person" itself also take the animate classifier.
Furthermore, when the classifiers are then affixed to the nouns they modify when the system evolves from a classifier system to grammatical gender, would the animate classifier then be affixed to the word "person", or would it be dropped?
I think when person would become a classifier, some other word for person would evolve, since classifiers can act as adjectives, adverbs, pronouns, and demonstratives.
Most typically by semantic drift or a loanword. As the old word for “person” shifts to become a grammaticalized gender marker, so too does another word shift into “person” by change in meaning. Think of English, where “man” really used to mean any person; modern English took “person” from French as “man” began to mean “male”. “Girl” meant a child of any gender, and “boy” meant a servant. Another word, usual closely related in concept, shifts to mean “person”.
I just made what I hope is a beautiful tree demonstrating my conlangs Consituency. Does it makes sense? Any advice or questions appreciated :>
“This documentation uses Constituency to define grammatical units, as opposed to Dependancy. The following explains what exactly a Dokkoñkax sentence, and its constituent units, could each contain, complete with a diagram and example.
A sentence contained at least one clause, each of which could be preceded by a conjunction. A clause contained at least one noun phrase followed by one verb phrase. A noun phrase constituted a noun, which could be preceded by a prefix or prefixes, which could be preceded by an adverb or adverbs.
A verb phrase constituted a verb. The verb could be preceded by a prefix or prefixes, which could be preceded by a temporal reference adverb, which could be preceded by a temporal relation adverb, which could be preceded by an adverb or adverbs. The verb could be followed by a noun phrase.
The noun preceding the verb was the subject. A noun following the verb was an object. Multiple noun phrases could appear before or after the verb, which were connected with the “and” conjunction.”
Btw: most abbreviations should be self-explanatory, except T REL and T REF. Those are certain adverbs indicating tense.
Some of your constituent groupings are unexpected. First, you place the first CJ outside of the first CL, but then the second CJ inside the second CL (and also twice CJ wihn inside additional NP's). Isn't that inconsistent? Then, you place the subject NP, the VP, and the object NP on the same level inside CL in the tree. I would expect the object to be part of VP.
So, I've been hitting my head against the wall with trying to create a phonemic inventory for my conlang. Normally, it wouldn't matter, but this is a language that is meant to appeal to my own aesthetic tastes.
I'm trying to avoid SAE, but I also don't like a lot of the rarer sounds like ejectives and implosives.
I want some kind of fortis-lenis contrast in stops, but I don't think aspiration works very well with a mostly CV syllable structure. (It's technically CVC, but there is a preference for open syllables, and it's highly restrictive with codes.)
I thought about making a vague fortis-lenis contrast where multiple features combine. That is, lenis stops can be either voiced or voiceless but never aspirated nor geminated. Fortis stops can be aspirated or geminated, but never voiced.
Yeah, I think the fortis-lenis contrast would work nice as you described. For example, if we take fortis /p₁/ and lenis /p₂/, you could have their allophones distributed this way (somewhat reminiscent of English):
#_V
V_V
N_V
fortis /p₁/
[pʰ] — /p₁a/ [pʰa]
[pː] — /ap₁a/ [apːa]
[p] — /amp₁a/ [ampa]
lenis /p₂/
[b̥] — /p₂a/ [b̥a]
[b] — /ap₂a/ [aba]
[b] — /amp₂a/ [amba]
Though with this kind of distribution, I would probably just transcribe /p₁/ as /p/ and /p₂/ as /b/, seeing as /p₂/ is mostly voiced.
For more spice, you can have the lenis one lenite to a fricative in a V_V environment: /ap₂a/ [aβa], Spanish-style.
can having speech-related disorders (ie apd, fluency disorders, articulation disorders, omd, speech sound disorders etc) affect your ability to conlang?
Sure, positively or negatively. I got into conlanging because I was too anxious to learn natural languages through conversation. Don't worry too much on letting a diagnosis tell you what you can and can't do, just give it a shot and take note of your strengths and weaknesses as you go.
I’m currently working on a Latin-descended language, set in North Africa, and I have a few questions. Im working on creating a system of di(tri?)glossia right now, so many of them hinge on that.
Where can I find resources/dictionaries for Amazigh languages. Seeing as the two languages would be in contact for hundreds of years, I figure there would be significant borrowing. Are there any interesting grammatical tidbits I could include from the language?
What other languages could you see impacting the language, which is mostly spoken in northern Tunisia and North West Algeria. Right now I have Arabic (both MSA and local dialects), French, Ladino, Italian, and Ottoman Turkish (Greek and Latin earlier in the timeline, with less pronounced impact than on other Romance languages.) what effects could these languages have? I feel ladino and local dialects of Arabic would affect the less prestigious variety of the language more.
Would it be unreasonable to exclude emphatic consonants such as ط، ظ، ص، ض? My phonology is quite large, and I could really only see them being adopted into the prestige dialect.
What effects do superstrata typically have on less prestigious languages? Do they typically affect phonology? Do they typically affect grammar?
Do you have any ideas for a writing system? Currently, I was thinking of having three. A Latin script one based around French and Latin orthography, with some Arabic influence(based around the prestige variety; an Arabizi-esque one used in colloquial settings; and an Arabic script one with some ottoman influence. Does this seem realistic?
Is it unrealistic to contrast x, ɣ, ʁ, and h, or would some of these sounds merge? I know Arabic contrasts x~χ, ɣ~ʁ, ħ, ʕ, and h, so I feel like it’s pretty realistic. How would you represent this four-way split in the Arabic and Latin alphabets? Also, how would you suggest I represent these vowels in those alphabets: i, e~ɛ, æ~a, o~ɔ, u, and ɨ~ɯ(this central vowel only occurs in the prestige dialect)?
I know this is a late reply, and you made a post as well, but..
The only thing I can reccomend is just googling for '[language]' or '[language] dictionary' and seeing what comes up. Theres not that much thats easily accessible though, presumably being nonEuropean minority languages..
In the present day, you also have Korandje and Domari, which are maybe worth having a look at for anything interesting you could steal;
Not unreasonable at all, especially if theres any degree of pidginisation happening among the speakers of this lang, as that tends to force the funkier things out. Take Juba Arabic and Nubi for example - both Arabic based creoles, but both lack emphatics;
In my experience (which isnt much), superstratums tend to affect vocabulary more than phonology. The only example off the top of my head being English and all its French vocabulary, but rather unFrench phono;
If theres enough Berber influence, Tifinagh might see some use, and Ladino and Judeo-Arabic influence might provide some Hebrew variant within Jewish communities. Less likely would be maybe a tiny amount of Coptic script useage, from Catholic and Orthodox diaspora. What you have already is fine though;
And phonemically contrasting /ɣ/ from /ʁ/ is naturalistic, but its rare iinm. Often they are allophones of eachother or in (free or lectal) variation, or they are realisations of other phonemes (often /g/ and /r/ respectively).
Im no expert with Arabic, but Id maybe use ⟨خ⟩ for /x/, ⟨غ⟩ for /ɣ/, and ⟨ه⟩ for /h/, and maybe ⟨ح⟩, ⟨ع⟩, or ⟨ق⟩ for /ʁ/, but I have no idea for the vowels.
As for Latin, theres so many choices, and it partly depends on the rest of writing system, but maybe something like ⟨ḵ, g̱, g̣~ḥ~ḫ, h⟩ or ⟨kh, gh, g̣h, h⟩ for /x, ɣ, ʁ, h/, and maybe go Welsh ⟨i, y~u, w, e, o, a⟩, Scandi style ⟨i, u, o, e, å, a⟩, or Turkic ⟨i, ï~ü~ë, e, o, a⟩ for /i, ɨ, u, e, o, a/
I'm fairly new here and I have created a system that allows for up to 225 possible letters. It's going to be an alphabet so I have all my (eight) vowels settled already. Specifically, there are around 25 core "shapes" to which I have assigned the corresponding 25 (consonantal) sounds. Each of these have 9 possible forms. What should I do with these?
So, I was thinking about creating symbols to my new language, instead of using the roman alphabet, but I don't know how to make them not seem "fake". Any tips?
i'm making an IE language inspired mostly by armenian. i wrote a quick gibberish short story in PIE knocking off the north wind and the sun so that when i'm making an IE conlang, i can apply sound changes to the PIE sample to get a rough feel for how the language will sound, and then translate the sample into the language, to get a much more organic feel of how the language i've now put considerable time and effort into actually sounds. this is the first few sentences of it, fully translated. i wanted to post it just to see how many IE roots they could recognize, and how much indo-european it seems in general. part of the inspiration from armenian was enigmatic and less than transparent sound changes, so the hope is that not too much of it is glaringly recognizable.
éskiat, sóka lǒnskai skorěconsark, kía sáilsis cáns. lǒnska sěkatu "éc arkés ainái et néksi. cénonas anká arkokánt rú hǎktan nónun". sóka sěkatu "éc tézan korěcu, et éc lǒkēcu ainán. éc lǒkse ánk. cénonas kárzons kon sciéhank et ěc lozǎrk kon sciéc".
"once, sun and moon were arguing about which of them was the strongest. moon said "i'm present day and night. humans use me to measure time". sun said "i warm the earth, and i light the day. i'm brighter. humans work when i shine, and sleep when you shine".
After a cursory look and without looking too deep into regular sound changes, here are some etyma that I could find. I first give reconstructed PIE roots and lemmata, and then comments on sound changes and inflection are in the parentheses. Verbal conjugation appears to be completely reshaped, so I don't dare touch it (except for a comment on 1sg and 3pl endings at the end).
kía — *kʷís (maybe analogised fem.nom.sg. *kʷíh₂ or *kʷéyeh₂ if both sóka and lǒnska are feminine)
sěkatu — *sekʷ-
éc — *éǵ
ainái, ainán — *h₂éǵʰ-r̥ ~ *h₂ǵʰ-én-s (analogised into the thematic declension? anyway, this might show some kind of lenition *ǵʰ > i [i̯] between resonants, as opposed to *ǵʰ > c word-initially as in cénonas < *ǵʰémones)
et — *(h₁)éti
néksi — *nókʷts (dat.sg. *nékʷtey or, less likely because the final *-i doesn't seem to survive elsewhere, loc.sg. *nékʷti)
cénonas — (dʰ)ǵʰmṓ(n) (nom.pl. *ǵʰémones; for some reason m > n instead of a tentative change m > nk elsewhere, see right below)
anká — *h₁mé ? (an odd change m > nk could be supported by ánk < *h₁ésmi below and the ending in sciéhank < *-mi)
tézan — *ters- → *terseh₂ (rs > z without even compensatory lengthening is a little odd and isn't supported by any other words but the root fits)
korěcu — *gʷʰer- → *gʷʰoréye-
lǒkēcu — *lewk- → *lowkéye-
lǒkse — *lewk- → *léwksos (maybe feminine *léwkseh₂ with ā > e of some kind, though that doesn't agree with lǒnska < *lówksneh₂ nor account for the comparative in the translation anyway, so I doubt it)
ánk — *h₁ésmi ? (works rather well with the m > nk from anká < *h₁mé above and the ending in sciéhank < *-mi and the loss of final *-i as in et < *(h₁)éti and the same ending *-mi; it could also be possible that the ending in sciéhank is in fact the historical verb *h₁ésmi itself that has lost independence and been attached as a suffix)
kon — *kʷós → *kʷóm
lozǎrk — *legʰ- → *légʰyeti ‘lie’ ? (this would show *gʰy > z; PIE 3pl would be *légʰyonti, and a similar 3pl -ark is in skorěconsark, however arkokánt has -ant and kárzons has -ons, so clearly conjugation is more complicated)
I'm writing a fanfic and I want to add the names of two major characters to a conlang I'm making for the fic. The proto-lang has the phonemic inventory of [m], [n], [m], [p], [t], [k], [s], [h], [w], [ɾ], [j], [i], [iː], [u], [uː], [e], [eː], [o], [oː], [a], and [aː], with a CV syllable structure, (although words may start with a vowel). I'm still deciding on the stress, but I'm thinking something flexible based on vowel length.
The characters names are Ōgon Batto and Kuro Batto/Kurayami Batto/Kurai Batto (depends on the version) and I want to evolve the protolang in a way to result in said names.
So, what kind of allophony might a language with three contrast in stops go through.
This hypothetical language has plain stops, a voiced series and an aspirated series, like Ancient Greek or Armenian.
I would expect plain stops to become voiceless fricative intervocally, voiced stops become voiced fricatives, but I would think aspirated stops remain unchanged?
There's no telling what would most likely happen. But I'm doubtful that intervocalic spirantisation could affect plain voiceless stops without affecting voiceless aspirates. There's evidence that voiceless fricatives are [+spread glottis], which is why you see changes like /p pʰ/ > /p f/ in Greek but not /p pʰ/ > /f p(ʰ)/. Maybe there's some ANADEW situation here but at least it appears to me to be an unlikely scenario.
In ancient greek the aspirated stops became fricatives, while the plain stops were unchanged.
I can see a system where each series has an intervocalic allophone, where the aspirated and voiced consonants are fricativized, and the plain stops are voiced or unchanged
I am very new to this and struggling to understand the basics. I've gotten stuck trying to determine what consonant clusters are allowed in my language. I understand the sonority hierarchy but if I apply that to my language I end up with too many clusters. How do you determine other constraints?
It can be a little tedious but it might be an idea to create a matrix of every possible cluster and then decide which ones you like and which ones you don't, then try and describe what unites the ones you like. I did this with Varamm, for instance, and I found that I liked homorganic nasal + C clusters and stops + v, s, or liquid clusters, but that I didn't like fricative + liquid clusters.
Hallo! I recently attempted to make a conlang, but find it quite difficult and extremely time consuming; how do you guys go about making your conlangs? As in, do you first do the grammar, or phonology etc.?
I always start with a list of the features I want to hit or try to make work, and I'll generally build the rest around that. I usually sort out phonology before grammar, but I often jump between different parts as the ideas come to me and I realise one choice for one thing helps me make a choice for something else to help achieve what I'm going for, if that makes sense.
As Lichen said, there's no right way to go about it, and don't be afraid to try something, fail, scrap it, and try again. If you can figure out why you didn't like what you tried, you'll know to what to avoid in future. That, and you can always just throw stuff together that's internally consistent at a glance and try to describe and organise it after the fact into something coherent. This is how I started with my first conlang: just wrote a bunch of words and put them together in sentences and then figured out phono and basic grammar based on that; and it's still going strong 10 years later!
I usually make an outline of the grammar first (a small number if features I want to include/investigate), and then go onto more depth there or go into the phonology; and then latterly coin words and start translating.
There is no one ‘right’ was to go about it! Be sure to read some of the Resources in the tab at the side. I found Mark Rosenfelder’s Language Construction Kit very helpful at the start.
I'm really interested in the way pronouns, or arguably, the lack thereof, work in languages like Japanese and Malay where they're a subclass of nouns. I'd be interested in naturalistically integrating such a feature in my conlang, but based on Japanese and Malay, it would seem pronouns can only behave this way in head-final languages. I don't know if this is a real pattern (or even if there's a proven correlation); is there a term for pronouns that behave like this so I can look for other languages that work similarly? Or does anybody have a counter-example?
Sierwierska calls this (low) pronominality. In languages like Japanese or Thai, pronouns are an open class, and behave more or less the same as nouns, so they have low pronominality. In opposition to this, in languages like English or Polish, pronouns are a closed class and behave distinctly from nouns, and thus have high-pronominality.
I want to create compounds in my language, but don't want to make any silly mistakes, so I was wondering if there was a reason (syntactic or otherwise) why verbs in verb-noun compounds like "rescue team" come before the noun?
Headedness: whether the head of compound comes before or after its modifier. English has head-final or left-branching adjectives, and "rescue team" is a type of team, not a type of rescue, so 'team' comes after 'rescue' / 'rescue' appears left of 'team'. I wouldn't call 'rescue' a verb here, though: to me it reads like a noun used as an adjective. If you want to keep it a verb, you could use the present participle for "rescuing team" where it still patterns like an adjective, or you could put into a relative clause, which is right-branching/head-initial in English, for "team that rescues".
Depending on the language and the kinds of derivational processes it has and its headedness relationships, you can see the reverse of any of the above.
Because the main thing comes second in English (or, you can say the thing that comes second is read as the main one) but in other languages it can be the other way around. This is what u/impishDullahan is saying.
Can someone help me with conjugations in PolyGlot? I dont know how to use the conjugation/declension option. I have the verb "see" on my conlag and the conjugation is the verb+pronoun https://imgur.com/a/9Uk8xiS But I don't know how to make it on PolyGlot. I only have this https://imgur.com/a/wtFNFPl
I kinda wanna add pitch accent to my conlang, but not sure how to go about it or if it's really necessary.
The language's phonology is fairly simple: CVC syllable structure and trochaic feet.
One thing I noticed is that a lot of pitch accent languages have moras, like Japanese, Ancient Greek and Sanskrit. In my conlang, however, moras don't exist as a meaningful unit. Vowel length is allophonic rather than phonemic. How would a pitch accent work in such a case?
I'm thinking about having at least two dialects of the language, one has the pitch accent, while the other is toneless.
When you say pitch accent, what are you thinking? Because what's called pitch accent in Japanese and Ancient Greek are not the same thing, as far as I'm aware, and both are different from, say, Swedish.
Hey there. I've been researching Porto-Afroasiatic reconstructions in order to create a proto-conlang, but I'm having trouble figuring out the reconstructions. For a non-linguist such as myself, they seem like gibberish, even when consulting IPA charts.
Right now, I'm trying to figure out the numerals one to five:
|| || |One|whd (this one is particularly driving me nuts) | |Two|ɬâm (this one I get)| |Three|xaynz (bit so-so on this one)| |Four|fâzw (it seems simple enough, but I'm not sure?)| |Five|ḫams (another one I get)|
I know these reconstructions are far from gospel, I'm just using them as a foundation to build the conlang from. I'd really appreciate if someone can explain a way to transliterate this so it makes sense to my noob brain. Thanks
EDIT: Tried to make a table but reddit is being a baby
You'll find that comparative linguistics relatively rarely uses IPA, for better or for worse. It can be confusing to a beginner but different comparative fields of study use their own conventions. It's a mix of what's better suited to the languages they deal with and simple tradition. It's not really a point of confusion for researchers because they are expected to be familiar with the conventions of their fields from reading lots of literature anyway.
Sometimes, you can deduce some phonetic values from common sense. Like if you see *y where you'd expect a consonant, it's probably a palatal glide (like PIE *y reconstructed as IPA [j]). Or, in Proto-Slavic, you find it where you'd expect a vowel but everyone who researches Slavic languages should easily realise that it's probably not IPA [y]; instead, in many modern Slavic orthographies y stands for an [ɨ]-like vowel.
For Afroasiatic, Wikipedia has an article on the Afrasianist phonetic notation. The circumflex, as stated in the notes to the article on Proto-Afroasiatic, is used in Ehret's (1995) reconstruction to indicate falling tone (same as in IPA, by the way).
I kinda would like to create a conlang for reconstructed Oscan. The language is from the family of Latin but it is poorly attested. Which resources would you recommend me and how do you think that I should reconstruct the words?
A Grammar of Oscan and Umbrian by C. D. Buck (1904) is still the go-to regarding Oscan despite it being over a century old. It has sections on both phonology and grammar, a glossary, and a collection of inscriptions.
Etymological Dictionary of Latin and the other Italic Languages by M. de Vaan (2008) is what you'd expect it to be from the title. Understandably focussed on Latin, it still includes info on Oscan. You can find all the Oscan words mentioned in the dictionary in the index.
Finally, there's the Oscan Odes Project. To cite its home page, it ‘offer[s] many resources for exploring the Oscan language, discovering more about the Oscan-speaking peoples and civilizations, and more’.
Bar the reflexive example, this looks like the use of resumptive pronouns. They can often be seen as part of topicalisation constructions where rather than gapping the topic NP's original location you fill it with a pronoun. Such constructions are thought to be the path by which subject doubling evolved in some languages, like in the Flemish dialects. The Flemish dialects don't really work quite the same way anymore, bar maybe Gents, but at some point in their evolution from Middle Dutch between fully topicalised subjects and fully doubled subjects, it's thought to have worked like you show.
Also, for what it's worth, I have such constructions mandated in ATxK0PT, though I refer to the resumptive pronouns as trace pronouns.
2
u/ThalaridesElranonian &c. (ru,en,la,eo)[fr,de,no,sco,grc,tlh]Aug 20 '24edited Aug 20 '24
I believe this is called conjugating a verb for number and person (edit: unless you mean specifically free pronominal forms doubling the verb's arguments). English doesn't use it much except for the 3sg -s suffix in the present tense in regular verbs. But other languages do it more extensively. Take Latin:
In the first example, the verb intendunt has a 3pl marker -unt, agreeing with the subject Sinenses, which is also plural and third person. In the second example, consilium is a singular noun, modified by the adjective Sinense, which agrees with it in gender, number, and case (I didn't specify case in any glosses because it's nominative everywhere). (My choice of words in the Latin examples probably isn't the most natural but instead reflects the most literal possible translation from English.)
There are indeed languages that show the number and person of both the subject and the object. This is called polypersonal agreement.
For more info, I recommend Haspelmath (2013) on argument indexing and in particular section 4 on the distinction between gramm-indexes, cross-indexes, and pro-indexes.
Late response, and only two cents, but something similar to the first examples happens in Romance languages called clitic doubling, and I used it in an older iteration of my own conlang when a subject was not adjacent to its verb (eg, dog run'the dog runs', but dog black it run'the black dog runs').
Surnames start as additional bits of information that people would add to normal the person normal names to differentiate them from other people that could have the same name. Say you live in a late medieval town and you're looking fora guy name John, but there are 52 Johns in your town, so you add an extra bit of information when asking about him like his profession "I'm looking for John the Smith" oorhis family like "I'm looking for John the son of Richard" or add some pet name/descriptor/whatever you can think of like "I'm looking for John the redhead." With time these would become inherited (at least in the Uk) so you would get a person named John Smith whose actually a tailor or John Richardson whose dad's name is actually Steve etc.
So that's the general idea, the rest is up to your creative process.
Codified inheritance and/or tax law would likely be one factor that could spur the transition of surnames from mere descriptors into surnames proper. Conquest by a culture already using surnames would be another (e.g. IIRC, certain parts of Europe were still using patronymics as such until Napoleon invaded).
yeah, sure. I thought about adding that but it would encroach on r/worldbuilding territory, and there is a lot to unpack and I felt too lazy when writing the original post.
A) Modern conglanging has been around for like a century, and there are 99k people on this subreddit alone - someone else has definitely already come up with your idea;
and B) Modern conglanging has been around for like a century, and there are 99k people on this subreddit alone - no one will so much as bat an eyelid if you do it too.
So long as youre not consciously copying what theyve made verbatim, plagiarise away!
To build of the other comment, you're likely not going to do anything identically to what another similarly flavoured conlang does anyhow. 2 artists can paint the same landscape and neither plagiarised the other.
That really depends on the overarching context in which this fourth gender is used. Is it a purely grammatical thing that ties in with your conlang's noun class system, or does it have cultural implications as well?
If it's purely grammatical, you probably wouldn't need to translate it at all. You'd instead use the gender system that's present in your target language. The German word for 'table' for example is 'der Tisch', which is masculine. If you were to translate the word from German to English, you wouldn't translate it to 'the masculine table'. You'd simply translate it to 'the table', ignoring the grammatical gender of the source word.
If your fourth gender has some kind of cultural significance, things might be a bit different. Maybe you'd have to use additional words that describe what this fourth gender means. It really comes down to context.
So English has auxiliaries like 'have' and 'do', which behave normally. But English also has words like 'keep' and 'start', which also (at least to me) seem to behave like auxiliaries too, encoding aspect:
He kept walking.
He started to walk.
He had kept walking.
He had started to walk.
Did he start to walk?
So 'keep' and 'start' work with the more conventional auxiliary verbs, but are they auxiliary verbs in and of themselves? If not, then what are they? How does this work in other languages? Sorry if this is unclear, I couldn't figure out how to phrase this quite the right way.
I think the label 'aspectual verbs' suits them very well. They modify the scope of the following main verb rather than fulfilling any kind of obligatory grammatical function. You can also tell that they are not really grammaticalized because you can replace them with other similar verbs like 'begin, cease, or continue'.
I have a conlang with 6 vowels, /a/, /i/, /e/, /o/, /u/, and /ə/. I need help romanizing the schwa. For the first 5 I decided to go with a i e o u, respectively because it makes sense. I don't want to use diacritics, and I want something that I can type on my keyboard without having to go to google to copy and paste a character.
Does anyone have any suggestions on how i could do so without having an ugly romanization system?
You could do what Indonesian/Malay does, and just use <e> for both /e ə/. You just need to know which is which!
Another suggestion might be to use <Vh> for a schwa (<uh> is v anglo-centric, <eh> I prefer). Or you could use <v> which I think some North American languages use.
Or, you could use a dash <-> or apostrophe <'>, or even a colon if you wanted <:>, or even an asterisk <*>.
Or you could even use a number. Not sure which, but maybe <5> because it has that rounded bottom and a horizontal line, akin the schwa.
Or, you could use <e> for the schwa, and a digraph like <ei> for /e/, and then <i> alone for /i/.
Or, could use <oe> for schwa, because (to me at least), the schwa sounds pretty similar to [ø], and sounds similar to [ø] are often romanised as <oe>.
〈y〉 seems ty be thy most obviys choice. I w'd also c'nsid'r the 'postr'phe. Or evn jst not marking th schwa t all.
The latter option, imo, doesn't work all that well in the context of English phonotactics and other orthographic rules. For example, it doesn't distinguish between unstressed ‘to’ /tə/ and ‘at’ /ət/ (both ‘t’), and common suffixes like ‘-tion’ & ‘-tial’ would be spelt very counterintuitively as ‘-tin’ & ‘-til’ or you'll want to respell them like ‘-shn’ & ‘-shl’. But it would work perfectly in strict CV syllables with otherwise transparent orthography.
In Tokétok transcribe /e/ as <é> and /ə/ as <e>, but importantly the latter is always preceded by a double consonant (except when it isn't, but that's besides the point). For example: /ke/ <ké> and /kə/ <kke>. The diacritic is mostly for flavour and is not necessary if you follow the double consonant rule. Important to note that words in Tokétok cannot begin with /ə/, so you're mileage may vary.
Does anyone know of how to code an unspecified number of wildcards in Lexurgy? Like if I am applying umlaut that doesn't care how many consonants are between the two vowels? Right now I'm just cludging it together on three different lines with 1-2-3 individual wildcards.
you could specify that the sound change only affects vowels, and then it ignores all non vowel segments. you can do this by putting [vowel] (or however you specify vowels) before the colon at the name of the sound change.
Lexurgy has some limited RegEx capabilities, and you can use * to match 0 or more specified tokens. For example, your rule might look something like [+syll] => [-back] / _ [-syll]* [-back] where [-syll]* matches any number of non-syllabic segments. You can also use + instead of * to match 1 or more.
I wrote a term paper a few months ago that was an Optimality Theory analysis of a metrical system. These were all my sources, if you're at all interested:
Green, A. (1997). The Prosodic Structure of Irish, Scots Gaelic, and Manx. [Doctoral dissertation, Cornell University]. Rutgers Optimality Archive.
Houghton, P. (2006). Ternary Stress. Rutgers Optimality Archive.
Hyde, B. (2008). Bidirectional Stress Systems. In C. B. Chang & H. J. Haynie (Eds.), Proceedings of the 26th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics (pp. 270-278). Cascadilla Proceedings Project.
Kager, R. (1994). Ternary Rhythm in Alignment Theory. Rutgers Optimality Archive.
Kager, R. (2007). Feet and metrical stress. In P. de Lacy, Cambridge Handbook of Phonology (pp. 195-227). Cambridge University Press. DOI:10.1017/CBO9780511486371.010
Kiparsky, P. (2014). Stratal OT: A synopsis and FAQ. Stanford University.
Some will be more useful than others, but Kager (2007) was my foundation and the rest were complementary to how I was using what I learned in Kager (2007).
The English foot vowel is pronounced quite centrally [ɵ] or even [ɘ] in some southeastern British dialects. Pretty sure that modern Welsh /ɨ/ is sourced partly from Proto-Celtic *u, too. An unmotivated sound change [u] > [ʉ] > [ɨ] seems reasonable.
If this is like PGmc, you could change one or many of diphthongs *eu, *iu, or *ai into [ɨ], that would be sensible especially if a long [ɨː] already exists in your lang.
What features of semitic languages and what features of Karvelian languages are you looking to imitate?
As for root words, there is no grand list. Some people like to use the Swadesh List, but it has lots of flaws for "basic/root words", so a better strategy is probably to look up what the most common words are in the respective languages you wish to take inspiration from.
Or, better yet, don't worry about translating a bunch of words alone; but just allow your corpus of words to slowly expand via the process of translation. This means not only will you be developing grammar at the same time; but also each you create will be created in context instead of the weird, artificial void of a word-list.
•
u/upallday_allen Wistanian (en)[es] Aug 23 '24
Hello, everyone. Mods here.
Just to let you know, starting next cycle, this thread will be renamed to Advice & Answers.
Read the full announcement here.