Conlang Random Thread

[masako]

So, it seems like <aa> is my best option.

Why? (To be clear, I’m not criticising you, I’m just curious about your reasoning.)

It appears to be most favored by the respondents here.

[Pabappa]

So I want to make the central feature of my conlang's grammar a system of completely separate and obligatory marking for TAM and evidentiality, and I'd like to ask you guys how many grammatical functions can eventually be offloaded onto this system if we say that it's both old and highly productive?

Person marking maybe? I dont know if it's been done in a natlang, but in Poswa (the language in my sig), the person markers -o/-e/-a are derived from earlier evidentials meaning respectively "feel", "see", and "know". I needed to do this because the old person markers, -p/-s/-Ø, were not audibly distinct enough once the language shifted all of its words to initial stress. Previously, the verb inflections had attracted the stress.

Moonshine is going to derive male & female speech registers from the same evidentiality markers, and from the speech registers I plan to derive grammatical markings for speech act participants as the society moves away from its "golden age" politeness as economic conditions decline. This probably has not happened in any natlang either, though.

[jal]

Yeah, <á> is also used in Hungarian and all Slavic languages with a Latin orthography.

No it ain't. Polish doesn't use it (as it lost vowel length), and I don't think South Slavic languages use it either (at least not Slovene and Bosnian/Croat/Serbian). Only Czech and Slovak do, afaik.

It appears to be most favored by the respondents here.

<aa> is indeed, I think, the best in case you don't have /a.a/ (or you'd need something like <aä>). <aa> is used in Jamaican (in the Cassidy system and later the JLU). In Sajiwan (like Jamaican a CEC) I use <ah>, to indicate the diachronic presence of /r/.


JAL

[Xwtek]

Usually, an animate noun tend to be marked accussatively. However, in my language, the animate noun is marked ergatively, and inanimate noun receives no case marking. The complete rule is as follows:

1. Inanimate noun always receives passive case.
2. Unaccussative intransitive verbs always make the subject marked with passive case.
3. Pronoun is always marked accussatively, except for some intransitive verbs (active).
4. Verb derived from synthetic causative voice or benefactive applicative voice (both which are really common in this language) obligatory marks the agent as active case if the agent is animate.
5. Subject/Agent is marked with active case if it's volitional, otherwise it uses passive case.

Is it realistic?

[mèþru]

Slovene and Serbo-Croat have acute and other vowel diacritics that mark both length and tone, but these are generally not used outside of dictionaries.

My preference is to go with a macron in languages which distinguish /a.a/ from /aː/, and just double a vowel in languages which don't.

[malloc]

Still not satisfied with my conscript. It seems like it has too many horizontal lines and the implementation of features is rather complicated and abstract. I have been trying to find inspiration for alternative proposals but it seems like all the good ideas for scripts are taken. My sketches keep turning into imitations of Hangul blocks or South Asian loops and arches and incorporating featural distinctions yields repetitive and awkward characters.

[linguistcat]

Still working on my cat Japanese sisterlang, and wondering if I should focus more on word substitutions and then think about sound changes later or whatnot. Because right now, if I use sound changes that don't complicate the conjugation patterns of certain words in ways I don't like, then the phonology hasn't changed enough, nor does it sound more "catlike" to me. But if I change things enough to fit that goal, it makes verb and adjective conjugations get messed up in ways I don't want to deal with.

[quinterbeck]

Still not satisfied with my conscript. It seems like it has too many horizontal lines and the implementation of features is rather complicated and abstract. I have been trying to find inspiration for alternative proposals but it seems like all the good ideas for scripts are taken. My sketches keep turning into imitations of Hangul blocks or South Asian loops and arches and incorporating featural distinctions yields repetitive and awkward characters.

I like what you have so far. At the very least it's a good base to refine

Have you thought much about the writing medium? That can be a good way in to refining your script. Think about the surface, the implement and pigment if there is one (the more specific the better). Maybe pick a set that's different to the styles you tend towards? Actually using it will get you the best understanding of the subtleties in the shapes it produces than anything else

ideas for...
surface: paper, stone, wood, clay
implement: stick, stylus, knife, chisel, brush, quill pen
pigment: ink, paint

[bradrn]

Still not satisfied with my conscript. It seems like it has too many horizontal lines and the implementation of features is rather complicated and abstract. I have been trying to find inspiration for alternative proposals but it seems like all the good ideas for scripts are taken. My sketches keep turning into imitations of Hangul blocks or South Asian loops and arches and incorporating featural distinctions yields repetitive and awkward characters.

I like what you have so far. At the very least it's a good base to refine

Have you thought much about the writing medium? That can be a good way in to refining your script. Think about the surface, the implement and pigment if there is one (the more specific the better). Maybe pick a set that's different to the styles you tend towards? Actually using it will get you the best understanding of the subtleties in the shapes it produces than anything else

ideas for...
surface: paper, stone, wood, clay
implement: stick, stylus, knife, chisel, brush, quill pen
pigment: ink, paint

My favourite example of this: SE Asian scripts were often written on banana leaves, which tear with straight lines. Hence the extreme curviness of Malayalam, Tamil and other related scripts.

[Vijay]

SE Asian scripts were often written on banana leaves, which tear with straight lines. Hence the extreme curviness of Malayalam, Tamil and other related scripts.

1. Why do people keep calling South Asia "Southeast Asia"? Thai, Khmer, etc. got their scripts as a result of South Asian (mainly Tamil) influence there, not because of writing on leaves. Indians wrote on leaves.
2. Malayalam is curvy. Tamil has way more straight lines.
3. Palm leaves, not banana - we'd write on palm leaves and (still to this day in some contexts) eat on banana leaves.

[bbbosborne]

after evolving, the word for magic in my conlang is now /u/, like someone saying "oooooh" and it was totally unintentional also

[bradrn]

SE Asian scripts were often written on banana leaves, which tear with straight lines. Hence the extreme curviness of Malayalam, Tamil and other related scripts.

1. Why do people keep calling South Asia "Southeast Asia"? Thai, Khmer, etc. got their scripts as a result of South Asian (mainly Tamil) influence there, not because of writing on leaves. Indians wrote on leaves.
2. Malayalam is curvy. Tamil has way more straight lines.
3. Palm leaves, not banana - we'd write on palm leaves and (still to this day in some contexts) eat on banana leaves.

Sorry Vijay! Evidently I knew less about the writing systems (and the terminology!) of the region than I thought I did… serves me right for declaring that ‘fact’ so confidently. Well, at least I learnt something

And as for point (2): as someone who doesn’t know the script all that well, Tamil still looks fairly curvy to me. So do Odiya, Telugu, Sinhala and indeed most of the scripts around that region. Of course, some are more curvy than others, with Malayalam definitely being near the top.

[Vijay]

No worries! I'll admit, Tamil is still pretty curvy. Just not as curvy as Malayalam! And I'm pretty sure that's because Malayalam script is more similar to how people in both Kerala and Tamil Nadu (and Tulunadu) wrote on palm leaves.

[malloc]

Have you thought much about the writing medium? That can be a good way in to refining your script. Think about the surface, the implement and pigment if there is one (the more specific the better). Maybe pick a set that's different to the styles you tend towards? Actually using it will get you the best understanding of the subtleties in the shapes it produces than anything else

Maybe so, but I feel like the problems are more conceptual and rooted in the difficulty of harmonizing the featural principle with aesthetic and practical considerations. Characters built from purely featural components often feel repetitive with all labials or all nasals, etc. looking too similar. The script in the sample tries to mitigate this by expressing some features in rather abstract ways like rotating and rearranging graphic elements and obscuring the basic shapes by rounding them off.

[bradrn]

Have you thought much about the writing medium? That can be a good way in to refining your script. Think about the surface, the implement and pigment if there is one (the more specific the better). Maybe pick a set that's different to the styles you tend towards? Actually using it will get you the best understanding of the subtleties in the shapes it produces than anything else

Maybe so, but I feel like the problems are more conceptual and rooted in the difficulty of harmonizing the featural principle with aesthetic and practical considerations. Characters built from purely featural components often feel repetitive with all labials or all nasals, etc. looking too similar. The script in the sample tries to mitigate this by expressing some features in rather abstract ways like rotating and rearranging graphic elements and obscuring the basic shapes by rounding them off.

I think there’s nothing wrong with being repetitive! For me, the point of a featural script is that similar consonants look similar.

I also personally think that if used extensively, repetitivity can become its own aesthetic. For instance, consider Odia:

ଶାଠ କହେ ଋତୁରେ ନଈ କଡ଼େ ଝଟା କି ଲଟାଟିଏ ଅହିରାଜ ଯଥା ଗଛରେ ଘର କରି ତା' ଦେହେ ମାତଇ ଆଉ ପ୍ରକୃତିରୁ ସକଳ ଜୀବନୀ ଖୋଜା ଊଣା ହେଲେ ଐକତାନେ ପଚା କଢ଼, ଫୁଲ ଓ ପତର-ଔଷଧୀ ଆହାର ଭରି ବଞ୍ଚେ ।

Or Mon:

ဇၟာပ်မၞိဟ်ဂှ် ကတဵုဒှ်ကၠုင်လဝ် နကဵု ဂုဏ်သိက္ခာကီု နကဵု အခေါင်အရာကီု တုပ်သၟဟ် ရေင်သကအ် သီုညးဖအိုတ်ရ၊၊ ကောန်မၞိဟ်တအ်ဂှ် ဟိုတ်မၞုံကဵုအစောံသတ္တိ မပါ်ပါဲ ဟိုတ်ဖိုလ် ကေုာံ ခိုဟ်ပရေအ်တအ်တုဲ ညးမွဲကေုာံညးမွဲ သ္ဒးဆက်ဆောံ နကဵု စိုတ်ကောဒေအ်ရ၊၊
(ပိုဒ် ၁၊ လလောင်တရး အခေါင်အရာမၞိဟ် ဂၠးကဝ်)

Or my favourite featural script, SIGIL Panel:

I think the message here is that if you’re concerned that your script looks repetitive, it might be interesting to go in the direction of more repetitivity rather than less.

[Kuchigakatai]

2. Malayalam is curvy. Tamil has way more straight lines.

I think referring to Tamil as a curvy script is some kind of meme among conlangers. Very often, when discussing the influence of writing materials on the writing system, curvy writing on palm leaves is often mentioned, giving Tamil as the example even though Telugu, Sinhala and Malayalam (and to a lesser extent Kannada and Odia) would be better examples.

[bradrn]

I think referring to Tamil as a curvy script is some kind of meme among conlangers.

Possibly, but I don’t think it’s entirely unjustified: there’s graphemes like ணலஊஇ, which are certainly more curvy than most graphemes. Still, as you mention below, there are much better examples.

Very often, when discussing the influence of writing materials on the writing system, curvy writing on palm leaves is often mentioned

Well, it’s a particularly good example of this type of influence.

giving Tamil as the example even though Telugu, Sinhala and Malayalam (and to a lesser extent Kannada and Odia) would be better examples.

I do agree with this (although I think Kannada and Odia are just as good as examples).

[Jonlang]

I have a quick question which I don't think warrants a new thread:

I have a highly inflecting conlang (currently named 'L'). Nouns decline for genitive and possessed, i.e. the thing possessed by the noun in the genitive takes a "possessed" case marking. I don't think this is a thing in European langs (as far as I can tell from a quick search) and need a better name than "possessed" for it. I thought of "possessive" but this could be confused with genitive.

This case only exists in the more formal, conservative literary form of the language and is not a feature of the spoken language any longer which relies more on word-order.

The literary form would be X-possd Y-gen in any order but the spoken form requires the possessed noun (in the nominative) to be in direct contact with the possessor (in the genitive), usually following it: Y-gen X-nom (preferred) X-nom Y-gen (allowed).

Anyway, is there a better name for this "possessed" case?

[akam chinjir]

I have a quick question which I don't think warrants a new thread:

I'm afraid that sort of thing often is just called possessive marking or somesuch. I'm not sure it's ever considered a sort of case: it's a form of head marking, and case is dependent marking. In fact most often what you see is agreement with a possessor (so the inflection might vary with the person and number of the possessor). This is very common. (WALS has two relevant chapters, Locus of Marking in Possessive Noun Phrases and Position of Pronominal Possessive Affixes, the latter based on many more languages.)

[Jonlang]

I have a quick question which I don't think warrants a new thread:

I'm afraid that sort of thing often is just called possessive marking or somesuch. I'm not sure it's ever considered a sort of case: it's a form of head marking, and case is dependent marking. In fact most often what you see is agreement with a possessor (so the inflection might vary with the person and number of the possessor). This is very common. (WALS has two relevant chapters, Locus of Marking in Possessive Noun Phrases and Position of Pronominal Possessive Affixes, the latter based on many more languages.)

Ah okay. Because this "possessed case" thing I've got further develops into pronominal suffixes later on where it joins with the genitive forms of pronouns and becomes a suffix. In my notes (which were made some time ago) I said that the noun lassa 'house' becomes lassó (possessed) and is followed by manta 'my' (genitive of man 'I, me'). This later becomes the suffix -on (from -omanta > -oman > -om > -on).

This gives the literary register: lassó manta 'my house' and the colloquial register: lasson 'my house'.