Conlang Random Thread

[Whimemsz]

Mishta-miam tshitishi-tuten!

Something giant?

My attempt at "good work" [with the caveats you've all been discussing, obviously] although I don't know if it's actually idiomatic in any Innu variety. (mishta= "great/very" + miam "exactly" [mishta-miam = "very good"] + tshi-t- "2nd person" + ishi= "in such a way/thus" + tut- "do something (VTI)" + -e-n "1/2>INAN")

[Raphael]

I've got a combined linguistic/political, or, if you will, conlanging/conhistory question:

Suppose there are two closely related speech varieties - let's call them Speech Variety 1, or SV1 for short, and Speech Variety 2, or SV2 for short. At the "start", SV1 is clearly the more prestigious speech variety. It is the speech variety of the capital of the kingdom where both SV1 and SV2 are spoken. In most parts of the kingdom, including the area where SV2 is spoken, SV1 is the written standard. People generally don't write in SV2.

Then, the area where SV2 is spoken revolts and becomes independent, and, a while later, adapts the common writing system to write SV2. So, people in that area stop writing in SV1, and start writing in SV2.

Now, my question is this: how likely, or unlikely, is it that personal names are, at least for a while, exempt from the switch? I'm asking this because I could imagine that people might be more willing to change the way they write everything else than to change the way they write their own names.

[bradrn]

I've got a combined linguistic/political, or, if you will, conlanging/conhistory question:

Suppose there are two closely related speech varieties - let's call them Speech Variety 1, or SV1 for short, and Speech Variety 2, or SV2 for short. At the "start", SV1 is clearly the more prestigious speech variety. It is the speech variety of the capital of the kingdom where both SV1 and SV2 are spoken. In most parts of the kingdom, including the area where SV2 is spoken, SV1 is the written standard. People generally don't write in SV2.

Then, the area where SV2 is spoken revolts and becomes independent, and, a while later, adapts the common writing system to write SV2. So, people in that area stop writing in SV1, and start writing in SV2.

Now, my question is this: how likely, or unlikely, is it that personal names are, at least for a while, exempt from the switch? I'm asking this because I could imagine that people might be more willing to change the way they write everything else than to change the way they write their own names.

Let me query your assumptions: why would everyone in an area suddenly start writing in a different way? Unless it’s government-mandated (e.g. Simplified Chinese characters), I see very little chance that such a switch will happen as suddenly as you’ve implied. Instead, the following scenarios seem more likely to me:

• SV1 remains the prestige written language (possibly except for a couple of revolutionaries), even in the newly-independent SV2 area.
• As the SV2 area becomes independent, people gradually transition from writing in SV1 to writing in SV2 on a per-individual basis. This gradual transition would naturally include names.
• The populace transitions from SV1 to SV2, but as inherently local words, names have always been written in SV2.
• The writing systems for SV1 and SV2 are similar enough that names experience little or no change.

(Note: I assumed in writing the above that SV1 and SV2 are mutually intelligible, and their writing systems are very similar. If this is incorrect, please let me know!)

[Raphael]

Let me query your assumptions: why would everyone in an area suddenly start writing in a different way? Unless it’s government-mandated (e.g. Simplified Chinese characters),

It sort of is. I'm assuming a major literacy promotion campaign relatively shortly after independence, and the people running it decided that it would be easier to teach otherwise uneducated people to write in the speech variety they already know.

I see very little chance that such a switch will happen as suddenly as you’ve implied. Instead, the following scenarios seem more likely to me:

• SV1 remains the prestige written language (possibly except for a couple of revolutionaries), even in the newly-independent SV2 area.
• As the SV2 area becomes independent, people gradually transition from writing in SV1 to writing in SV2 on a per-individual basis. This gradual transition would naturally include names.
• The populace transitions from SV1 to SV2, but as inherently local words, names have always been written in SV2.
• The writing systems for SV1 and SV2 are similar enough that names experience little or no change.

Hm. I'm ruling out scenarios 1 and 3, and I think scenario 2 would work best.

(Note: I assumed in writing the above that SV1 and SV2 are mutually intelligible, and their writing systems are very similar. If this is incorrect, please let me know!)

No, that's correct.

[bradrn]

Let me query your assumptions: why would everyone in an area suddenly start writing in a different way? Unless it’s government-mandated (e.g. Simplified Chinese characters),

It sort of is. I'm assuming a major literacy promotion campaign relatively shortly after independence, and the people running it decided that it would be easier to teach otherwise uneducated people to write in the speech variety they already know.

For me, that changes the situation entirely! I assumed that otherwise-literate people were switching from SV1 to SV2, but if illiterate people are being taught to write in SV2 for the first time, then of course they would also write their names in SV2 as well.

[jal]

Let me query your assumptions: why would everyone in an area suddenly start writing in a different way?

Wouldn't that have been the case in Pakistan after it broke of from India?


JAL

[Raphael]

Conlanging-related computer question, because I'm feeling lazy:

Suppose that, in preparation for writing sound changes, I want a text file with a column where each line has something along the lines of

[fill in vowel here]/[placeholder]/_[fill in consonant here]

with lines for all possible combinations of vowels and consonants in one of my languages. Is there any way of getting there that doesn't require me to, you know, type all those lines by hand?

[akam chinjir]

Conlanging-related computer question, because I'm feeling lazy:

That's easy to do with basic programming. If you want to PM me a list of the vowels and consonants, I could do it for you, if you want.

[TurkeySloth]

While mapping out the ancestry of my roleplay setting's Common language (CMMN), I've come to a point where I'm reconstructing the genesis or Old Common's /ɛ ɪ ɔ ʊ y/ vowels. However, I don't feel comfortable using a single proto-lang because most of them reconstruct from coalescing diphthongs. Are there any natlang families with multiple proto-langs?

[jal]

with lines for all possible combinations of vowels and consonants in one of my languages. Is there any way of getting there that doesn't require me to, you know, type all those lines by hand?

I'd use Excel. It's pretty easy to accelerate what you want, even though you still need some manual activity. For example:
1) put all your vowels in column A (one per row);
2) put all your consonants in column B (one per row);
3) put a formula like "=$A$1&$B1" in C1 (you can expand that of course with any text you like), click it, drag the handle down. Excel will automatically create "=$A$1&$B2" etc. for every combination of first vowel + consonants;
4) copy the column C to D, change the formula to "=$A$2&$B1", double click the handle, and you've got your second vowel;
5) repeat at will.

There may be quicker ways, but without macros and such this is still pretty fast.

[jal]

While mapping out the ancestry of my roleplay setting's Common language (CMMN), I've come to a point where I'm reconstructing the genesis or Old Common's /ɛ ɪ ɔ ʊ y/ vowels. However, I don't feel comfortable using a single proto-lang because most of them reconstruct from coalescing diphthongs. Are there any natlang families with multiple proto-langs?

Observations:
1) /y/ is an odd one, all other vowels being "tense", I'd expect /ʏ/
2) Languages influence each other constantly, so depending on how close contact was, there can be quite some interference.
3) I don't understand what you mean by "because most of them reconstruct from coalescing diphthongs", and why that would make you "[un]comfortable using a single proto-lang"
4) "multiple proto-languages" doesn't make sense though, I don't think there are any languages that have a 50/50 (or 33/33/33 or whatever) ancestry of different languages.


JAL

[TurkeySloth]

While mapping out the ancestry of my roleplay setting's Common language (CMMN), I've come to a point where I'm reconstructing the genesis or Old Common's /ɛ ɪ ɔ ʊ y/ vowels. However, I don't feel comfortable using a single proto-lang because most of them reconstruct from coalescing diphthongs. Are there any natlang families with multiple proto-langs?

Observations:
1) /y/ is an odd one, all other vowels being "tense", I'd expect /ʏ/
2) Languages influence each other constantly, so depending on how close contact was, there can be quite some interference.
3) I don't understand what you mean by "because most of them reconstruct from coalescing diphthongs", and why that would make you "[un]comfortable using a single proto-lang"
4) "multiple proto-languages" doesn't make sense though, I don't think there are any languages that have a 50/50 (or 33/33/33 or whatever) ancestry of different languages.


JAL

Okay.

1. /y/ reconstructs as /iu̯~ɨ͡ʉ/, /ɨ͡ʉ/ being an ambiguously-rounded high central vowel
3. /ɛ, ɔ/ reconstruct as /ea̯, ao̯~ʌ͡ɔ/, /ʌ͡ɔ/ being an ambiguously-rounded low-mid back vowel. I'm unsure if /ɪ ʊ/ reconstruct similarly. I guess I was initially uncomfortable using a single proto-lang because I like the idea of /ɔ, y/passing through the ambiguously-rounded vowels better than free variation. After all, the language is spoken in another galaxy.

[Raphael]

jal: Thank you!

akam chinjir: Thank you, but I've managed it to get jal's method to work now!

[bradrn]

Conlanging-related computer question, because I'm feeling lazy:

Suppose that, in preparation for writing sound changes, I want a text file with a column where each line has something along the lines of

[fill in vowel here]/[placeholder]/_[fill in consonant here]

with lines for all possible combinations of vowels and consonants in one of my languages. Is there any way of getting there that doesn't require me to, you know, type all those lines by hand?

It looks like you’ve figured out a solution already, but this looks like a good opportunity to promote my SCA. Although it doesn’t provide functionality to do this directly, it does include an ‘affixer’ which allows words to be created with multiple prefixes/infixes/suffixes. So you could potentially pretend that your sound change is actually a word, use the affixer to insert all your sound changes into the ‘words’ section, and then copy the newly-created sound changes into the ‘sound change’ section.

[Salmoneus]

I've got a combined linguistic/political, or, if you will, conlanging/conhistory question:

Suppose there are two closely related speech varieties - let's call them Speech Variety 1, or SV1 for short, and Speech Variety 2, or SV2 for short. At the "start", SV1 is clearly the more prestigious speech variety. It is the speech variety of the capital of the kingdom where both SV1 and SV2 are spoken. In most parts of the kingdom, including the area where SV2 is spoken, SV1 is the written standard. People generally don't write in SV2.

Then, the area where SV2 is spoken revolts and becomes independent, and, a while later, adapts the common writing system to write SV2. So, people in that area stop writing in SV1, and start writing in SV2.

Now, my question is this: how likely, or unlikely, is it that personal names are, at least for a while, exempt from the switch? I'm asking this because I could imagine that people might be more willing to change the way they write everything else than to change the way they write their own names.

People would have always had their names in SV2 anyway.
[think of it the other way around: the names SV2 speakers call themselves ARE the SV2 names, even if they're all borrowed. It's not likely that everybody in the country would suddenly hire a philologist to reconstruct what their names "should" have been in SV2 all along*]

What could happen is that people used to have names both in SV2 and SV1. This could be that the SV1 name was their 'real' name and the SV2 name was a 'nickname'. Or it could be that their SV2 name was their 'real' name and the SV1 nickname was their 'scholarly' name. In Europe it was sort of a mixture of the two. It's worth bearing in mind that in a culture with multilingualism, it's likely that people will see 'name in SV1' and 'name in SV2' as just versions of the (Platonic ideal of) the name, rather than different names (Mozart signed things Amadeus, Amadè, Amadeo, Gottlieb, and Theophilus; Beethoven signed as 'Luigi' and 'Louis' as well as 'Ludwig'; often this means we don't know historical figures' 'real' names - John Cabot was also known as Giovanni Cabotto, and actually apparently went by, including in signatures, Zuan Chabotto, which is the Venetian form... but he wasn't actually Venetian in origin, which means he wouldn't have been called 'Zuan' in his childhood or by his parents, and we aren't actually sure where he was from (and hence what his 'real' name was; contrariwise, Columbus probably spent his early years being caled Cristoffa Corombo, but he left home at ten and never wrote in Genoese as an adult, so is he 'really' Cristoffa, or Cristoforo, or Cristobal, or...). But also remember that in a culture without mass literacy, most people won't have any reason to use names other than their regional version. A Provencal intellectual living in, say, Picardy in the mediaeval or early modern period would of course know their Provencal name (but probably never use it), their Picard name (used on a daily basis), their Parisian French name (used on trips to the capital, in letters, and in communication with sophisticated visitors) and of course their Latin name (used in scholarly writings). But the farmer living next door might only know their name in Picard.




*well, there might be a brief fashion for this around independence. In Ireland, for instance, there was a Gaelicising craze, and many politicians and writers retconned Irish names for themselves. However, while some of these have stuck around, there was never a mass conversion of names out of English. Then again, the fact that everyone speaks English is a confounding factor in this case.

[Raphael]

Thank you, Salmoneus!

Conlanging-related computer question, because I'm feeling lazy:

Suppose that, in preparation for writing sound changes, I want a text file with a column where each line has something along the lines of

[fill in vowel here]/[placeholder]/_[fill in consonant here]

with lines for all possible combinations of vowels and consonants in one of my languages. Is there any way of getting there that doesn't require me to, you know, type all those lines by hand?

It looks like you’ve figured out a solution already, but this looks like a good opportunity to promote my SCA. Although it doesn’t provide functionality to do this directly, it does include an ‘affixer’ which allows words to be created with multiple prefixes/infixes/suffixes. So you could potentially pretend that your sound change is actually a word, use the affixer to insert all your sound changes into the ‘words’ section, and then copy the newly-created sound changes into the ‘sound change’ section.

Thank you! I've already installed your SCA, though I haven't used it much yet, because I've installed it under Windows, and I tend to do my meager attempts at conlanging under Linux.

[dhok]

fwiw there was a similar shift in Finland after independence, where Finns (who didn't necessarily speak Swedish) with Swedish last names switched en masse to Finnish last names.

miekko might know the history in better detail

[Xwtek]

Is it realistic if my universal quantifier is formed with this syntax:

Noun 3SG/PL-all

How about existential one?

[Kuchigakatai]

Is it realistic if my universal quantifier is formed with this syntax:

Noun 3SG/PL-all

I am happy to report that this is basically attested in Standard Arabic.

الرجال كلهم
ar-rijaal-u kull-u-hum
the-men-NOM all-NOM-3PL.MASC
'all the men'

I don't know what you mean by "3SG" though. Do you mean something that'd mean "whole" or "entire" instead, as in "the entire thread"? In Arabic, the singular is only used in this construction for collective nouns that trigger singular agreement:

الشعب كله
aš-šaʕb-u kull-u-hu
the-people-NOM all-NOM-3SG.MASC
'all the people'

Another word that can behave like this is نفس nafs 'same'.

الفكرة نفسها
al-fikrat-u nafs-u-haa
the-idea-NOM same-NOM-3SG.FEM
'the same idea'

النساء نفسهن
an-nisaaʔ-u nafs-u-hunna
the-women-NOM same-NOM-3PL.FEM
'the same women'

How about existential one?

What do you mean?

[Vijay]

The existential quantifier, so 'there is/are', I guess. You'd probably have to use another construction for that.