Conlang Random Thread

[malloc]

Obviously. Americans are famously accent-deaf (or so I've read more than once), and the British are famously good at guessing where someone's from based on their accent. And given the huge variety of native accents there are, it'll be quite difficult to come up with anything that doesn't vaguely sound "Scottish" or "American" or "West Country" or "Indian English" or "Jamaican English" and so on.

Quite. I have always struggled to distinguish all the various accents of the UK and Ireland even though these differences carry great social weight for people there. People will say "this accent is cultured and sophisticated and that one is vulgar and uneducated" and they just sound the same to me.

[jal]

Quite. I have always struggled to distinguish all the various accents of the UK and Ireland even though these differences carry great social weight for people there. People will say "this accent is cultured and sophisticated and that one is vulgar and uneducated" and they just sound the same to me.

As a non-native speaker, I also have some problems distinguishing various accents (and my progressive hearing loss doesn't help), though I do hear that Sean Bean doesn't quite speak RP :D.


JAL

[Raphael]

Within England, I can definitely tell a posh accent from a working class accent, but I can't tell the different regional working class accents from each other.

[Travis B.]

As EngE varieties go I can tell the difference between RP/SSBE and, say, Estuary or a Northern English variety, which I can tell apart from one another.

[Lērisama]

Within England, I can definitely tell a posh accent from a working class accent, but I can't tell the different regional working class accents from each other.

Outside of some of the most distinct regional accents¹, we're way better at identifying social class from speech than we are at region², so you're in good company

¹ And, I assume the accents of most people's individual local areas
² I saw a study about it somewhere

[Raphael]

Oh, thank you, I wouldn't have expected that. I would have thought that any English person would find it pretty weird if I told them that I couldn't tell Cockney from Scouse.

[jal]

Oh, thank you, I wouldn't have expected that. I would have thought that any English person would find it pretty weird if I told them that I couldn't tell Cockney from Scouse.

Does Cockney even exist anymore? :) And Scouse is pretty recognizable, although no doubt there are Scouse-like accents that people from the area would recognize as non-Scouse, but to me would sound Scouse. Smeg!


JAL

[Lērisama]

Oh, thank you, I wouldn't have expected that. I would have thought that any English person would find it pretty weird if I told them that I couldn't tell Cockney from Scouse.

I would be a little surprised of a native British English speaker couldn't tell those apart, as Scouse is quite distinctive, and people can usually tell Northern from Southern accents¹.

¹ But don't ask me about intermediaries² except for the widely derided Birmingham⁴
² In this context, any accent between Gloucestershire and Cheshire³
³ If it helps, the whole of England that is parallel with Wales
⁴ Which seems a little mean; I don't find a Birmingham accent particularly annoying at all

[äreo]

I'm tinkering once again with how Msérsca handles attributive verbs, of which adjectives are a subtype.

Adjectives can be thought of as acting like verbs predicatively and nouns attributively. When modifying a noun, adjectives show case concord with the noun. There is an additional quirk to this, though, which is that most adjectives also concord with the declension of the noun. Most nouns in Msérsca fall into one of two declensions. To simplify a bit, first-declension nouns end in a consonant in their common (nom/acc have merged) form and second-declension nouns end in a vowel. Adjectives can roleplay as nouns of either declension for the sake of maximal phonetic concord, even matching the final vowel of a second-declension noun (I guess this is not altogether unlike gender agreement in, say, Spanish).

For example (using just the singular to keep it simple):
cír prus red apple / cíe pruri genitive / cirris prussis dative
cír veath red square / cíe veadri genitive / cirris veattis dative
círe físte red glove / círen físten genitive / círes fístes dative
círo porro red sauce / círon porron / genitive / círos porros dative

And then predicatively is red is círoe for all four (with an infinitive círor to be red, redness).

Now with other verbs, there is a similar phenomenon. Relative clauses require the verb to be in one of several attributive forms, or participles, of which the two most common are (what I'm going to call) the agentive and the passive. I'm tinkering with the idea of having these, too, adapt to the declension of the noun being modified, with the first- and second-declension agentives actually having different origins and thus sounding quite distinct. That would give us as follows, for example:

ta lírex cem the man who sees/saw you / ta líreire cemi genitive / ta lírectis cemis dative
ta líréa nella the woman who sees/saw you / ta líréan nellan genitive / ta líréas nellas dative
sá líret cem the man you see/saw / sá lírenda cemi genitive / sá lírettis cemmis dative
sá líreta nella the woman you see/saw / sá líretan nellan genitive / sá líretas nellas dative

The predicative form of see is líre (with infinitive líren).

Does any of this seem remotely plausible?

[Ares Land]

Yep; that seems plausible to me; I can't think of any objections.

[rotting bones]

Honestly, I don't know if the Hashi grammar was ready to post from either the linguistic or storytelling perspective. Then again, I have spent years not completing any of this.

[äreo]

Is it plausible that a language might have nominative and accusative collapse into a direct case, but then have a not-always-obligatory demonstrative or topic marker that preserves the distinction?

[Darren]

Is it plausible that a language might have nominative and accusative collapse into a direct case, but then have a not-always-obligatory demonstrative or topic marker that preserves the distinction?

Yes that sounds very plausible. There's a few languages in New Guinea which have an explicit direct case marker, so all subjects and objects have an overt suffix.

[WeepingElf]

Is it plausible that a language might have nominative and accusative collapse into a direct case, but then have a not-always-obligatory demonstrative or topic marker that preserves the distinction?

German at least gets close to this: it has a system of four noun cases, but often the case is only visible on the article. For instance, the word Hase 'hare' declines like this:

nom. sg. der Hase, pl. die Hasen
gen.sg. des Hasen, pl. der Hasen
dat.sg. dem Hasen, pl. den Hasen
acc.sg. den Hasen, pl. die Hasen

[bradrn]

Is it plausible that a language might have nominative and accusative collapse into a direct case, but then have a not-always-obligatory demonstrative or topic marker that preserves the distinction?

Yes that sounds very plausible. There's a few languages in New Guinea which have an explicit direct case marker, so all subjects and objects have an overt suffix.

Wait, which languages are those?

[hwhatting]

Is it plausible that a language might have nominative and accusative collapse into a direct case, but then have a not-always-obligatory demonstrative or topic marker that preserves the distinction?

Not a demonstrative or separate topic marker, but the Turkic languages I know mark the direct object with a case ending when it is definite (IIRC, animacy also plays a role), while othereise nominative and accusative are identical.

[Darren]

Is it plausible that a language might have nominative and accusative collapse into a direct case, but then have a not-always-obligatory demonstrative or topic marker that preserves the distinction?

Yes that sounds very plausible. There's a few languages in New Guinea which have an explicit direct case marker, so all subjects and objects have an overt suffix.

Wait, which languages are those?

Idi is the one I was thinking of; it has a "core" case suffix -a ~ -æ (harmonising based on tenseness class) for agents, subjects and objects

gæd

child

-æ

CORE

lu

tree

-æ

CORE

kkʎ

climb.INFIN

yera

TR.AUX:1|3SG>3SG:PRES

"The child climbs the tree."

There's a nominative-accusative system too, restricted to pronouns, names and kinship terms (but not animates like gæd above). There's a range of other cases which can fill the same slot as -a ~ -æ; allative, locative, ablative etc.

[äreo]

Thank you guys for the replies.

So I'm imagining something like this: *prus apple.NOM and *prusso apple-ACC became *prus and *pruss, then final geminates were eliminated, making them identical as prus. But following the topic marker -(V)n(a), the geminate and final vowel (or perhaps what could be analyzed as an epenthetic vowel) of the accusative are preserved. So we get:

prus-na íride-nea
apple(.NOM)-TOP be.delicious-PST
The apple, it was delicious.

prusso-n nama-nea
apple.ACC-TOP eat-PST
The apple, (I) ate it.

but

nápa-na prus íride
fruit-TOP apple.DIR be.delicious.NPST
When it comes to fruit, apples are delicious.

ga-melex-na prus nama-nea
last-night-TOP apple.DIR eat-PST
Last night, (I) ate an apple.

[hwhatting]

Looks good to me! I guess in the long run, such a system might be eroded or interpreted in a different manner, if the Nom-Acc distinction isn't supported by other parts of the grammar.

[äreo]

Looks good to me! I guess in the long run, such a system might be eroded or interpreted in a different manner, if the Nom-Acc distinction isn't supported by other parts of the grammar.

Yeah, it could be unstable. But it does have some further support:

1. Relative clauses are formed with attributive/participial forms of verbs that encode whether the modified noun is the subject or object
2. Verbs have retained number marking for subjects even though sound change has eroded person marking
3. A new first-person singular nonpast marking has been innovated (ironically, this is based on a reinterpretation of the accusative suffix, which had fossilized in a couple of common phrases)
4. Some nouns might still have salvageable accusative forms (haven't decided yet)

I'm kind of playing a game here, trying to see what kinds of quirky things an agglutinating (with fusion creeping in) extremely left-branching SOV language might do to adapt if it lost (most) nom/acc marking on nouns. Like, moving from SOV to SVO would be one obvious coping mechanism, but I want to see how Msérsca can avoid that and do something more interesting.