Conlang Random Thread

[mèþru]

I just feel random stuff related to conlanging should be in the Conlangery section

[mèþru]

New seizurific Quijada song:
Ôrödyagzou

[bbbosborne]

i feel like the translations take longer to make than the actual music

[mèþru]

Herman Miller redid the first conlang song he posted on Youtube, and it is amazing!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xj967N0vXNE

[alynnidalar]

i feel like the translations take longer to make than the actual music

Indeed. I've done a couple of Tirina songs, and the actual singing/audio editing/video editing is significantly faster and easier than doing the translation part. The problem with songs is that you can't just do a direct translation and call it a day--you've got to worry about stress and meter and translating figurative language and all that jazz.

[malloc]

Trying to develop an interesting accent system for a polysynthetic language. Fixed accent (on the penultimate for instance) feels rather unsatisfying when words can easily reach a dozen syllables. Yet lexical accent complicates things considerably, without even the ability to reliably distinguish morphemes like proper tone.

[Zaarin]

Trying to develop an interesting accent system for a polysynthetic language. Fixed accent (on the penultimate for instance) feels rather unsatisfying when words can easily reach a dozen syllables. Yet lexical accent complicates things considerably, without even the ability to reliably distinguish morphemes like proper tone.

Quechua and most Northern Iroquoian languages have fixed penultimate accent (I know too little about Cherokee to comment on it). Saanich has lexical stress. Most dialects of Haida, Tlingit, and Lakota are tonal. Georgian and Iñupiat have weak stress. In short: any kind of stress that is possible in analytic or agglutinating languages are certainly possible in a polysynthetic language.

[Pabappa]

Trying to develop an interesting accent system for a polysynthetic language. Fixed accent (on the penultimate for instance) feels rather unsatisfying when words can easily reach a dozen syllables.

Just letting you know that it can be done .... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inuit_phonology#Stress has fixed stress on the last syllable, so presumably fixed stress on any other syllable would also work.

My conlangs mostly have word-initial stress, including Poswa, which is right up there with Inuit in terms of polysynthesis and can have some very long words. Of course the stress means that a lot of sound changes take place in the unstressed syllables, but ... that's the whole point, for me. Poswa wouldn't be the same if it didn't have 7-syllable mouthfuls like babioppompompibopom that seem at first to be indivisible wholes because of how much elision and mutation goes on in the unstressed syllables. Im pretty sure I was in fact inspired by Inuit here ... though Im not sure if Inuit's opaque morphology is due entirely to the fixed stress or if there are other factors.

edit: sorry i wrote this from a cached copy and didnt see the previous reply. still, one more attestation of what you are currently using to add to the list .... although it seems to me you might prefer to find examples of poly languages that *dont* have setups like this, which i cant help with.

[Travis B.]

In Early Middle Laqar, which is a highly fusional language which can have rather long words, stress is placed on one of the three last syllables of a given word and is mobile. This is derived from stress in Proto-Laqar, which is agglutinative, which was on the left-most heaviest syllable of the last three syllables in a word, through elision of every other unstressed short vowel, after some other sound changes which produced new long vowels conditionally, and followed by loss of phonemic vowel length which obscured the conditioning factors for the development of mobile stress.

[mèþru]

What would be the name of Rouen in its local dialect during the Carolingian era? Old French at 9th/10th century in general is also fine.
I need it for an endonym.

[mèþru]

I found it: Rodomo/Rodom
How would that be pronounced in Rouen just before Rollo came?

[mèþru]

Those questions are for this new Germlang I'm doing

[bbbosborne]

what is a scratchpad??

[mèþru]

I can't tell if you don't know or if you are making fun of me.

[Aftovota]

[deleted]

[Salmoneus]

...
so, I'm more carefully producing Wenthish this time, with a huge SCA sound change list and everything. And I know I'll have missed some things, so rather than just going from proto-germanic to the modern language in one go, I'm currently just developing some Old Wenthish vocabulary (this also makes it easier to deal with loanwords properly). At first of course I found a number of unintended things, little loopholes I'd forgotten or just plain coding errors. But I got it pretty much in hand. Once I've done a fair quantity of these words, I'll move on to Middle Wenthish, and so on.

I've gotten up to about 215 words of Old Wenthish... and suddenly, whoops, no, new rules required! Turns out I'd failed to give adequate thought to the resolution of tetraphthongs!

Thankfully, the fix required isn't major, and doesn't actually affect any other words (though one other word changed slightly as a result of a slight change in opinion and/or minor unrelated fix I made in the process of fixing the main problem). It's just... I really thought I had it, there! But vocabulary and sound changes are so complicated, you could have a thousand words work perfectly and then stumble across something you hadn't considered...


[FWIW, the problem was what happens if you add *-wardaz to *saiwiz (i.e. the equivalent of English "seaward"). Because both those Ws should drop. Turns out the result is sēorda, but it got a bit complicated trying to get there. And the word may very well end up replaced by **sēwarda, the 'regular' descendent anyway (that is, if the suffix isn't destressed and hence doesn't lose the W)...]

[Salmoneus]

...and then of course there's a couple more modifications to the high vowel loss rules. Honestly, those are the most ridiculously disproportion irritation, in terms of time-and-code-required vs actual-consequence...


On the positive side: Huat! Gāisadeinō, abuisfūthon wi glōirēn, theodcynningen in dagem iērō, huu fremdon thā etheleng ēchtō!

[approx: /ʍat/ /ɣʲaːzʲədʷejoː aβʷyzʲfʲuːþʷonʷ wi gʷlʷoːrʲeːnʲ þʷeoðʷkʷynʲnʲəŋʲgʲənʷ inʲ dʷɑɣʲəmʷ jeːrʷoː/ /ʍu fʷrʷɛmʲðʲon þʷaː ɛþʷəlʲəŋʷgʷ eːxʷtʷoː/ or something like that...]

[Zaarin]

I like the aesthetic of the language. Makes me want to go read Beowulf.

[Pabappa]

Can the coarticulations differ across a syllable boundary when morphemes meet? e.g. is /þʲkʷ/ a valid cluster?

[Salmoneus]

Can the coarticulations differ across a syllable boundary when morphemes meet? e.g. is /þʲkʷ/ a valid cluster?

Yes; and indeed within morphemes, though that doesn't happen often (usually when an intervening vowel has been deleted).