Conlang Random Thread

[Ahzoh]

I have a list of various nouns and the differences between the major registers

https://linguifex.com/wiki/Appendix:Vrkhazhian_stems

It is hard for me to say which dialect I like most. I like the simplicity of Common and the phonemes feel more stable, but I like the look of Imperial's romanization.

One day I will finish the native script, which will reflect the historical pronunciation of the words from Old Vrkhazhian

It seems that Common Vrkhazhian has simply lost the tone that is reflected by Imperial Vrkhazhian. Have you thought of doing something creative with it, e.g. falling tone > low tone > voicing of the preceding consonant

I could make the high tone aspirate stops and low tone voice stops which becomes voiceless unaspirated.

But I don't want a situation where you have something like /gak/ or /kag/

Actually, I thought more on it and this kind of tone shenanigans would not result in nice-looking words, and at least with the words I have so far, doesn't change most of them.

[xxx]

For a language that has a consonant inventory of /p t k s m n r w y/ and a vowel inventory of /a i u/ and syllables that are uniformly CV, monosyllabic, disyllabic, and trisyllabic roots provide a total of 20439 roots. This is probably enough.

for an oligosynthetic language, it's an orgy...

[bradrn]

I keep wanting to write things in my conlang and then not being sure whether a clause is an indirect question or just something that looks like one in English. I have question-words and syntax for direct/indirect questions and relative clauses but not for ... some other things.

'What should I do?' -- direct question
'I asked what I should do' -- indirect question
'I told you what you should do' -- object clause I think? (equivalent to 'I told you that which you should do', right?)
'I don't know what I should do' -- ???

It is for these times that I keep handy a (digital) copy of Huddleston & Pullum’s Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. Unfortunately, the syntax of these constructions is quite annoying and often ambiguous. Besides, other languages can easily make different choices to English in terms of how they express such sentences.

In this case, they do give the helpful syntactic test that you can reduce open interrogatives to single question words, but not fused relatives. In this case:

A: ‘You should do something.’ B: ‘What?’ (direct interrogative, obviously)
‘He told me I should do something, so I asked what.’ (open interrogative)
‘You asked what you should do, so I told you what.’ (open interrogative! not a fused relative)
‘I need to do something, but I don’t know what.’ (open interrogative! not a fused relative)

So in fact none of these are relative clauses at all. Huddleston & Pullum give the following example of a true fused relative:

‘He lost what she gave him.’
→ *‘Jill gave him a book last night, but he lost what.’

Another good test they mention is that you can replace ‘what’ with ‘whatever’ in fused relatives (perhaps with a slight change of meaning), but never in interrogatives. This gives the same results as above: you can say ‘He lost whatever she gave him’, but not *‘I told you whatever you should do’.

[malloc]

For a language that has a consonant inventory of /p t k s m n r w y/ and a vowel inventory of /a i u/ and syllables that are uniformly CV, monosyllabic, disyllabic, and trisyllabic roots provide a total of 20439 roots. This is probably enough.

Sure but my impression is that trisyllabic roots are generally far less common than monosyllabic or bisyllabic ones across languages.

[Travis B.]

For a language that has a consonant inventory of /p t k s m n r w y/ and a vowel inventory of /a i u/ and syllables that are uniformly CV, monosyllabic, disyllabic, and trisyllabic roots provide a total of 20439 roots. This is probably enough.

Sure but my impression is that trisyllabic roots are generally far less common than monosyllabic or bisyllabic ones across languages.

That was just to illustrate what could be done with a rather minimal inventory and only CV syllables ─ you could also allow CVC, CVCVC, CVCCV, CVCCVC, etc. roots if you want in the place of trisyllabic roots.

[Leilis]

@bradrn thank you! This is amazingly helpful! I think I do have all the words/syntax I need to handle all these kinds of clauses, then.

[bradrn]

@bradrn thank you! This is amazingly helpful! I think I do have all the words/syntax I need to handle all these kinds of clauses, then.

No worries!

[Richard W]

I keep wanting to write things in my conlang and then not being sure whether a clause is an indirect question or just something that looks like one in English. I have question-words and syntax for direct/indirect questions and relative clauses but not for ... some other things.
...
'I told you what you should do' -- object clause I think? (equivalent to 'I told you that which you should do', right?)

As far as I understand, some languages, such as Sanskrit, entirely lack indirect speech, making no distinction between quoted and paraphrased speech.

I'm not even sure how well the example sentence translates. It is not impossible that it might even be a very English (or North Sea Germanic?) idiom. Substituting a verbal noun for the clause feels elliptical to me. By contrast, I advised what you should do has no such problem.

[malloc]

As far as I understand, some languages, such as Sanskrit, entirely lack indirect speech, making no distinction between quoted and paraphrased speech.

That sounds quite interesting and surprising considering that Sanskrit has a reputation for rarefied sophistication. If anything, I would have expected it to have quite a panoply of reported speech constructions.

[xxx]

due to the lack of a distinctive logogram,
I don't distinguish between the two in Lackslang...
in other words, I only have the indirect speech form...

[Qwynegold]

I have put a conlang through some sound changes and the word for woman ended up being ['kønt]. Is this too similar to a certain English word or...? Do I need to do something about it?

[Qwynegold]

For a language that has a consonant inventory of /p t k s m n r w y/ and a vowel inventory of /a i u/ and syllables that are uniformly CV, monosyllabic, disyllabic, and trisyllabic roots provide a total of 20439 roots. This is probably enough.

Sure but my impression is that trisyllabic roots are generally far less common than monosyllabic or bisyllabic ones across languages.

If the number of possible syllables in your conlang is few, then I don't think having trisyllabic roots is any odd at all.

[jal]

I have put a conlang through some sound changes and the word for woman ended up being ['kønt]. Is this too similar to a certain English word or...? Do I need to do something about it?

Unless said conlang is going to be featured on national tv, I doubt you'll get in trouble for it .


JAL

[bradrn]

As far as I understand, some languages, such as Sanskrit, entirely lack indirect speech, making no distinction between quoted and paraphrased speech.

That sounds quite interesting and surprising considering that Sanskrit has a reputation for rarefied sophistication. If anything, I would have expected it to have quite a panoply of reported speech constructions.

’Sophistication’ comes in lots of different forms.

[xxx]

I have put a conlang through some sound changes and the word for woman ended up being ['kønt]. Is this too similar to a certain English word or...? Do I need to do something about it?

"False friends" are commonplace between languages, but for a planned conlang, their presence casts doubt on the conlanger's judgment...
but for my part, I couldn't care less...

[Leilis]

'need' to, maybe not, but it wouldn't be hard to change if that's less awkward. You don't have to change the ancestor-word or the sound-change rules, you can just decide that the daughter language (for whatever reason) uses a slightly different form, like a diminutive or honorific, or borrows a different word (either from another language or from within that language). IIRC the German cognate of 'wife' is not very polite so a word for 'lady' is used instead (but I don't speak German so I may be misremembering). For that matter, in English, people often say 'lady' instead of 'woman'!

[Travis B.]

For a language that has a consonant inventory of /p t k s m n r w y/ and a vowel inventory of /a i u/ and syllables that are uniformly CV, monosyllabic, disyllabic, and trisyllabic roots provide a total of 20439 roots. This is probably enough.

Sure but my impression is that trisyllabic roots are generally far less common than monosyllabic or bisyllabic ones across languages.

If the number of possible syllables in your conlang is few, then I don't think having trisyllabic roots is any odd at all.

While Japanese typically has disyllabic roots, derived trisyllables are common in it.

[Ahzoh]

Came up with some verbs

Code: Select all

*sVḥ-/*ḥVs- "to burn (intr.)" > (fades out of use)
                              > ḥ-s-n "become ash" > "become white"
                              > sVḥin- "ash" > no change
                                             > s-n-ḥ "cover with ash" > "whitewash" > "erase, remove"
                                             

-i-n = attributive/resulative verb/noun suffix
-V-ḥ = instrumental denominative suffix and andative suffix

√s-n-ḥ "erase, remove" (from *sVḥin- "ash") Mesennē zānas "you shall remove the name"
√ḫ-t-ḥ "sail, go by boat" (from *ḫVt- "boat?") Neḫtâ ku Usmalas "We sailed to Ossmal"
√k-m-ḥ "rise, wake" (from *kVm- "???" plus andative suffix)
√w-ś-ḥ "uncover, reveal" (related to wāś- "animate, wild fire")

[malloc]

’Sophistication’ comes in lots of different forms.

Speaking of which, another concern regarding my project is whether the minimalist qualities leave it feeling unsophisticated. Originally one of my inspirations was the C programming language, widely regarded as both minimalist (or close to the metal) and sophisticated. Yet I worry that it feels more like BASIC.

[Qwynegold]

Thanks for the input on ['kønt], everyone! I'll see if I can find justification for why this word would be replaced by some other world. It is a bit hard to find a reason for why such a basic word would be replaced by a new word.