If natlangs were conlangs

[bradrn]

https://pastebin.com/TLRt3UXF

I did see that, actually, but didn’t see it as being a joke. Tok Pisin has the same thing as well:

3s: em (< “him”)
3d: tupela (< “two-fellow”)
3t: tripela (< “three-fellow”)
3p: ol (< “all”)

It has the same thing in all it’s other pronouns as well; Wikipedia has a nice chart.

The 'joke' lies in the etymology of tugeta. Allegedly it derives from English together, with the first syllable being misanalysed as the numeral tu. It's not sure as there doesn't seem to be a second person pronoun *yutugeta, and the phonetics are a bit odd. I'm not aware of Tok Pisin having a pronoun *tugeta, so it's not quite the same thing.

Oh, that makes sense! I really like that example of reanalysis — thanks for explaining it!

[bradrn]

So… Dahalo. Repeat after me: I will not make kitchen-sinks. I will not make kitchen-sinks. I will not make kitchen-sinks…

Anyway, the grammar looks fine, but your consonants are a mess. It looks like you’ve just taken all your favourite sounds and lumped them next to each other. Which would be fine if you had bothered to arrange them in some semblance of an order like Ubykh did. But no, you just had to arrange them as irregularly as you could, with lots of gaps in the non-alveolar series. And I see that you were so busy putting in epiglottals, ejectives, implosives, clicks, labialisation, prenasalisation, pitch accent, and a laminal/apical contrast, that you completely forgot to put in normal sounds like /z/ and /j/. So you pulled in a bunch of loanwords with /z/, and added one word with /j/, and thought I wouldn’t notice. I think that’s very sloppy. And no, don’t attempt to justify all this by muttering something about substrates and superstrates; I know a bad excuse when I see one.

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(While proofreading the above I started to wonder if it might even be too ironic to post here… but I like Dahalo’s phonology too much to leave it off this thread.)

[masako]

Rotokas is a jokelang made to fool outsiders and their real language is more akin to Ubykh.

[FlamyobatRudki]

Rotokas is a jokelang made to fool outsiders and their real language is more akin to Ubykh.

xD This gives me an idea!

[bradrn]

Rotokas is a jokelang made to fool outsiders and their real language is more akin to Ubykh.

xD This gives me an idea!

Could you elaborate?

[Nortaneous]

Not bad at all, but this is rather ingenious and funny. In Bislama, the third person pronouns are:

SG: em
DU: tugeta
TRI: trigeta
PL: olgeta

Even if this is actually unrealistic, it's worth it.

Why do these have -t-?

Rotokas is a jokelang made to fool outsiders and their real language is more akin to Ubykh.

Loss of nasals in Central Rotokas might be due to influence from the related language Konua, which also doesn't have nasals. (/p t k β r g s h/ - and because there's a Konua wordlist that was taken down with Roviana orthography, which distinguishes between /g/ <q> and /ɣ/ <g>, we can guess that /g/ isn't fricated, unlike in Rotokas)

The problem is that Rotokas isn't spoken immediately adjacent to Konua (there's a mountain in the middle that can be crossed but isn't inhabited, IIRC), and Keriaka or Austronesian influence would be more probable - but the Austronesian languages of Bougainville Island all have nasals (I think - the adjacent ones do) and Keriaka isn't documented because the Keriaka ransacked the mission and destroyed its materials.

[mae]

-

[Frislander]

Dear creator of Japanese, what the heck's going one with your vowel devoicing process? Everyone else just uses it on all vowels regardless of quality, but you've linked it to height of all things! What on earth is it about high vowels that makes them more prone to voicelessness than other vowels I ask you! I certainly can't think of anything.

[Xwtek]

Dear creator of Japanese, what the heck's going one with your vowel devoicing process? Everyone else just uses it on all vowels regardless of quality, but you've linked it to height of all things! What on earth is it about high vowels that makes them more prone to voicelessness than other vowels I ask you! I certainly can't think of anything.

High vowel is shorter than low vowel (I don't know particularly about Japanese, but this tends to be true cross-linguistically).

[Nortaneous]

The correspondence of English intervocalic dental obstruents to Neo-Melanesian /r/ is generally inconsistent. The collective plurals are less commonly used than the normal plurals so it may be that flapping occurred generally in the earliest layer of the Melanesian Pidgin lexicon and -geta forms in the Bislama variety were a later development (this seems plausible to me at least).

But why was the voiced /D/ borrowed as the voiceless /t/, instead of /d/ or a (voiced) sonorant?

High vowel is shorter than low vowel (I don't know particularly about Japanese, but this tends to be true cross-linguistically).

And MidJ/EMJ /u/ was probably consonantalized (cf. Nuosu) - which would explain its use as an epenthetic vowel in Chinese loan adaptations, the development of /mu/ into a moraic nasal, 'palatalization' of /t d/ to [ts dz], and attestations of forms like mume (probably [m.me]) for ume. Raising and consonantalization of high vowels is a common development in Japonic languages; for the development of 'super-close' vowels into high central vowels, see the Grassfields languages of Cameroon. So the devoicing process could parallel the high vowel devoicing in Oogami that produced moraic /s f/ - which is from Proto-Japonic *i *u between voiceless consonants. (The developments are complex, but the default outcome is merger as /ɯ/.)

[FlamyobatRudki]

Rotokas is a jokelang made to fool outsiders and their real language is more akin to Ubykh.

xD This gives me an idea!

Could you elaborate?

Basically exactly what you described.

[Xwtek]

Halkomelem, /kʼ/ is not something you use for baby talk.

[Vijay]

Baby talk is pretty unrealistic in general, though (i.e. the way adults talk to babies is not really an approximation of how babies actually talk even when it's intended to be).

[Ryan of Tinellb]

I remember doing a lot of /! !ʷ ! !ʷ/ clicking when I was a child. Onomatopoeia for a clock, I suppose. But it doesn't seem that far from there to glottalised sounds.

[Xwtek]

I don't know who named the lannguage like nasal, geez and anus, but that person must be smartass.

[Xwtek]

I'm furious about the fact the Austronesian Trigger System exists, while the simpler Conlang Trigger System doesn't. It's even diachronically simpler:

Initially, the word order is

V nom S acc O pp N

Later, one of the preposition is fused with the verb. That noun is then focused and put on the front:

S V-nom acc O pp N
O V-acc nom S pp N

It doesn't even requires any reanalysis, compared with the Austronesian Trigger System.

[Kuchigakatai]

I'm furious about the fact the Austronesian Trigger System exists, while the simpler Conlang Trigger System doesn't. It's even diachronically simpler:

Initially, the word order is

V nom S acc O pp N

Later, one of the preposition is fused with the verb. That noun is then focused and put on the front:

S V-nom acc O pp N
O V-acc nom S pp N

It doesn't even requires any reanalysis, compared with the Austronesian Trigger System.

Hah! That's beautiful, yes.



Do you, or anyone else, know about current speculation or theories of how the Austronesian Trigger System came into being? I mean, I look at it, and my first suspicion is that historically it might have involved a reinterpretation of nouns (in a nominalized construction) as predicate verbs.

The real Austronesian alignment is basically:

V-agt gen O trig S pp N
V-pat gen S trig O pp N
V-obl gen S gen O trig N
(other constituent orders are available, naturally)

This reminds me a lot of the use of the genitive case in Arabic and possessive de in Spanish, which can also mark either the subject or the object of a deverbal noun. Meanwhile, the trigger particle clarifies what the subject of the verb is, which reminds me a lot of the Indo-European cleft construction (it was Akangka who bought the book) as well as its sister the headless relative clause identified as an argument of a copula (the one who bought the book was Akangka; Akangka was the one who bought the book).

Could it be that Austronesian verbs were actually ancient verbal participles, that the Austronesian "indirect-genitive" particles were originally just genitive markers, and that the trigger particle was a copula?



I can imagine a process where, say, pseudo-Late-Latin gets reinterpreted in such a way:

emptor de libro est acanca
buy.AGT.PARTIC of book is Akangka -> buy-AGT GEN book TRIG akangka
'The buyer of the book is Akangka.' -> 'Akangka bought the book.'

emptum de acanca est libro
buy.PAT.PARTIC of akangka is book -> buy-PAT GEN akangka TRIG book
'The thing bought by Akangka is the book.' -> 'Akangka bought the book.'

I haven't read any of the relevant literature, but I imagine this is probably one of the hypothesis thrown around, since it's low-hanging fruit. What others are there?

[Xwtek]

I haven't read any of the relevant literature, but I imagine this is probably one of the hypothesis thrown around, since it's low-hanging fruit. What others are there?

https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/begus ... slides.pdf

Could it be that Austronesian verbs were actually ancient verbal participles, that the Austronesian "indirect-genitive" particles were originally just genitive markers, and that the trigger particle was a copula?

It's not and the result should be at best Indonesian voice system. First the syntax would be:

acanca est emptor de libro
libro est emptum de acanca

Then if you use Latin without applicatives, the result is symmetric voice system, not Philipine voice system. Even with applicatives, the result is Indonesian voice system.

[Xwtek]

Shilha, how are human supposed to distinguish the pronunciation between: i-fri and y-fri?

[Richard W]

Shilha, how are human supposed to distinguish the pronunciation between: i-fri and y-fri?

It seems to be a morphophonemic distinction. As far as I can make out the descriptions, a high vowel becomes a semivowel, is dropped, or sprouts -y- before the former, while it remains before the latter. Note that the latter form does not occur at the start of an utterance.

Documentation is contradictory on whether a semivowel can be a nucleus without turning into a vowel.