Conlang Random Thread

[Richard W]

I'm reconstructing Proto-Common with the help of several Wikipedia articles. Are any of the changes below, all of which happen anyways, completely odd? Mind you, the language is/was postulated to have been spoken by intergalactic ETs.

1. [*j̊ → l]
2. {*pʰ, *tʰ, *kʰ → ħ}
3. [*J → ʝ], but {*pJ, *tJ, *kJ, *ɾJ → pʰ, tʰ, kʰ, r}, which become interchangeable with [p, t, k, ɾ] due to rarity (no complete agreement on [*J], with it as [j] or [ʝ]; [ʝ] being more likely)
4. [*ʍ → t͡ʃ~d͡ʒ]

1) would need some sort of intermediate, perhaps /ç/.
Any one of 2) is perfectly believable--aspirates become /h/ (or something similar) all the time--but a full-scale collapse seems a bit less believable. Could maybe do *kʰ > ħ, *pʰ *tʰ > h.
On 3), I vaguely recall some Southeast Asian language getting aspirates out of Cr or maybe Cl clusters--Nort would know more. Interchangeability with the lenis stops is...just a merger? Perfectly workable.
4) looks probably impossible in a single step, I'm afraid. However, Arapaho and Cheyenne had *w > j, and then you're just fortiting /j/. This might require a merger of *w *ʍ *j, however.

As a loss of initial voiceless stops is respectably hypothesised for Basque and reconstructed in Australian ('dog' languages, I think), change (2) is not outrageous.

For Change 3, Cr > aspirates is 'known' for Northern Thai and Tai Lue, and evidenced by spellings which comparison with Thai shows to be etymological. Comparative method alone shows it for other Tai languages. It even applies to Pali/Sanskrit loans. The same shift on an earlier set of Cr is respectably hypothesised as the primary origin of aspirate consonants in South-West and Central Tai. The native source of *Cr for the first mentioned change is being hypothesised as *C-t (the hyphen is a heavily reduced vowel).

For 4, unconditional affrication of *Cw for stops C appears to be a Greek change, so if *ʍ was [xw], it seems quite plausible.

[Pabappa]

More than twenty years ago I had a dream where I went to Finland and met a girl whom I had spoken to some years earlier. The name of the town we met in was Ojajojojoojoijo. I woke up that morning and realized I could make a language in which consonants carried very little functional load, and still have a perfectly workable language. So I decided that I would make a language where /r/ was the most common consonant, the next consonant was about half as common as that, and the next one quarter as common, and so on. Soon I realized I liked /l/ more than /r/ and made that the commonest consonant. Later on I decided to use themes instead, so that e.g. a word beginning with /k/ would take grammatical suffixes that use /k/, and so on. The result of a few years of work with this was Late Andanese, a language with only thirty syllables whose words are mostly longer and more repetitive than one would expect even from such a tiny phoneme inventory.

After about four more years I created Pabappa, which is grammatically more like a typical SAE language but has the same phonological design, where the consonants /p/ and /b/ are so common that not much information is carried by the consonants in each word.

So, much of what makes my conlangs distinctive is all due to a single dream I had in high school more than twenty years ago. This is one reason why I enjoy my dreams so much.

[TurkeySloth]

I'm reconstructing Proto-Common with the help of several Wikipedia articles. Are any of the changes below, all of which happen anyways, completely odd? Mind you, the language is/was postulated to have been spoken by intergalactic ETs.

1. [*j̊ → l]
2. {*pʰ, *tʰ, *kʰ → ħ}
3. [*J → ʝ], but {*pJ, *tJ, *kJ, *ɾJ → pʰ, tʰ, kʰ, r}, which become interchangeable with [p, t, k, ɾ] due to rarity (no complete agreement on [*J], with it as [j] or [ʝ]; [ʝ] being more likely)
4. [*ʍ → t͡ʃ~d͡ʒ]

1) would need some sort of intermediate, perhaps /ç/.
Any one of 2) is perfectly believable--aspirates become /h/ (or something similar) all the time--but a full-scale collapse seems a bit less believable. Could maybe do *kʰ > ħ, *pʰ *tʰ > h.
On 3), I vaguely recall some Southeast Asian language getting aspirates out of Cr or maybe Cl clusters--Nort would know more. Interchangeability with the lenis stops is...just a merger? Perfectly workable.
4) looks probably impossible in a single step, I'm afraid. However, Arapaho and Cheyenne had *w > j, and then you're just fortiting /j/. This might require a merger of *w *ʍ *j, however.

One was, originally, [*h → l], with a true fricative [*h], but I didn't like the distance. [*j̊] could've been an intermediary there.

Two results from a collapse similar to yours and a merger of the two into the pharyngeal.

I'll wait on Nort's input about three before messing with it.

Four's [*ʍ] is equivalent to IPA [*xʷ]. But, they transcribe it with the single character because [x] didn't exist at the time. Thus, the full IPA transcription is [*xʷ → t͡ʃʷ~d͡ʒʷ], with the results having extremely weak or no labialization because the labialization's only occurrence fronted the velar. But, that's still likely to need [*j~*ɥ]. Effectively, the h-sound pairing was [*xʷ, *h] before I made [*h] into [*j̊]

Addendum as not to have the edit overlooked: I'd looked up [*h] and [*j] on Index Diachronica to find [*h → l] as absent and [*j → l] excessively rare. Tlapanec's [l] is from Proto-Oto-Manguean's [*j], for example. I just kept [h]'s voicelessness. There's also a language with sporadic [j → ɭ].

[dhok]

For what it's worth, Oto-Manguean is apparently nightmarish to reconstruct and the sketch of the proto-language that's been promulgated is very much an initial stab at the problem, so I wouldn't necessarily take that change as gospel. But then, Hopi had *w > l in the neighborhood of *a *o...

[Raholeun]

For what it's worth, Oto-Manguean is apparently nightmarish to reconstruct

You have any sources you can share here?

For my own language, I have decided to make some small changes. Yet I am undecided whether to make this variety a 2.0 of the same language, or to postulate a dialect or other. The changes are thusfar:
- the /t͡s/ is phonemic,
- phonotactical rules are less complex, as permitted coda consonants are the same for all positions within the word (being: ʔ, m, n, ŋ,r, w, y),
- no deixis encoded in case particles,
- some nouns have circumfixed oblique forms, rather than just a prenominal particle,
- order of constituents in the sentence often is more free; nominals can be fronted,
- lexical differences.

Especially the circumflex obliques I am quite fond of. I wanted to get out more of my postulated *q₁,*q₂, *q₃ than was the case. The original OBL case marker is ta= or t=and is a clitic on the first constituent of the noun phrase. The next step is that in the oblique form all nominals that have any of *q₁,*q₂, *q₃ in the root, reduplicate this postvelar. Sound changes and dissimilation then makes oblique forms quite a bit more opaque and frightening.

[dhok]

For what it's worth, Oto-Manguean is apparently nightmarish to reconstruct

You have any sources you can share here?

Rensch also reconstructs four tones for Proto-Oto-Manguean.[26] A later revised reconstruction by Terrence Kaufman[27] adds the proto-phonemes */ts/, */θ/, */x/, */xʷ/, */l/, */r/, */m/ and */o/, and the vowel combinations */ia/, */ai/, */ea/, and */au/.

The Oto-Manguean languages have changed quite a lot from the very spartan phoneme inventory of Proto-Oto-Manguean. Many languages have rich inventories of both vowels and consonants. Many have a full series of fricatives, and some branches (particularly Zapotecan and Chinantecan) distinguish voicing in both stops and fricatives. The voiced series of the Oto-Pamean languages have both fricative and stop allophones. Otomian also have full series of front, central and back vowels. Some analyses of Mixtecan include a series of voiced prenasalised stops and affricates; these can also be analysed as consonant sequences but it would be the only consonant clusters known in the languages.

(The original reconstruction had eight consonants and four vowels. In other words, the one revision out there doubles the reconstructed inventory--and then most of the daughters have, like, thirty consonants!)

[TurkeySloth]

For the record, [*j → l] appears from Proto-Malayo-Polynesian to Proto-Malayo-Javanic (what'cha know, two proto-langs); a variant, [*j → lʲ], happens from Proto-Slavonic to Polish; and sporadic [*j → ɭ] is from Proto-Malayo-Polynesian to Proto-Chamic. I brought up PMP spawning a second proto-lang cause I remember asking about my planetary lang having that dynamic, either here or on the CBB.

[dhok]

*j > lʲ in Slavic is the rule after labials, which is why you get paradigms like люблю, любишь, любит.

[doctor shark]

They're random, and they're in a conlang, so I figured here'd be a good place for sharing.

[Pabappa]

Nice. I think Ive seen something similar before, but I saved it on my other computer so I cant get at it now. The use of Q is interesting, ... how do you pronounce that?

_____
I think Im going to start up a website again for my conlangs, even though FrathWiki is more efficient for me to work at. The website will host things that are more image-intensive and give me a chance to work with fancy CSS elements like I havent done for years. I just now re-learned a trick I had apparently found out about 10 yrs ago and forgotten: BODY can have padding and margin too, and if I dont set them to zero, I cant get stuff to stick to the absolute edge of the page.

[masako]

Been messing around with the idea of different diacritics for the endings –m (or -lo (indicating general plural), -n (indicating adverbial or adjectival use), and –k (or -nke) (indicating negative mood). These endings all are word final and thus far I've been using a mark to indicate a lack of vowel as Moya is an abugida with inherent /a/.

Let me know what you think.

[Ares Land]

I like the new version; it has a more elegant feel to it.

[Whimemsz]

I agree; the greater compactness is a bit more aesthetically pleasing, I think.

[Pabappa]

In 2004 I was developing ciphers of my then-main conlang, Andanese. Andanese has only 30 syllables, so I made ciphers that replaced those syllables with other sequences, thus producing languages that worked just like Andanese but had very different sounds. For example, the word for laugh is hukinaalu, but run through one cipher it turns into piispimpapwaapas . I liked the sound of that cipher, but the grammar was difficult, so I decided to create a language that sounded that way in its true form, and that language became Pabappa.

[Ahzoh]

My triconlang, Vrkhazhian, has come quite a long way from the first time I posted it on the old forum. It's probably gone through a dozen revisions and overhauls. I think I'm quite satisfied with what I have come up with now. Have to redo words until it fits with the aesthetics. It also has a new writing system which is vertical and cursive:
https://conworkshop.com/view_article.ph ... 99079f2f62

[Raholeun]

My triconlang, Vrkhazhian, has come quite a long way from the first time I posted it on the old forum. It's probably gone through a dozen revisions and overhauls. I think I'm quite satisfied with what I have come up with now. Have to redo words until it fits with the aesthetics. It also has a new writing system which is vertical and cursive:
https://conworkshop.com/view_article.ph ... 99079f2f62

Like the script, Ahzoh. Looks Tibetan-y, but more legible. Also, the process of overhauling your conlang sounds very familiar. Now and again I too make some minor adjustments that once implemented, turn out to be not so minor and I have to redo quite a lot. It can be tiresome to rework beloved parts of a conlang, but almost always the language turns out better than it was previously.

For example, recently I decided to change the way the oblique is marked in my conlang Sataw. It used to be marked by a simple, preposed clitic ta=.

First, the historical demonstrative *ta became the oblique case marker. All nominals (besides personal names and titles) get a ta when the noun is in the oblique position. The second phase in the development is that roots that contained a postvelar consonant, any of *q₁, *q₂, *q₃ reduplicate this postvelar.

A significant portion of Sataw's historical phonology is the development of consonant ablaut for postvelars. Which means that a suffixed historical postvelar will affect any consonant of the like earlier in the word,

Finally the suffixed -ʔ became a mandatory part of the oblique marker after word final stems. Which makes for three general paradigms:

1) ta=NOUN
e.g. t=ataw [ˈt‿aðɐʊ̯] OBL=cover, lid

2) ta=NOUN-ʔ
e.g. ta=mata [tə mɐˈtæˀ] OBL=eye-OBL

3) ta=NOUN-ʔ (with internal consonant change).
e.g. ta=hutiʔ [tə hʊˈtʏˀ] OBL=berry-OBL. Compare this with the nominal and dictionary form of Sataw 'berry', utay [ˈuðɐɪ̯].

Personally, I like this change, which is quite minor, but it forces me to rewrite a lot of existing material.

[Zju]

My triconlang, Vrkhazhian, has come quite a long way from the first time I posted it on the old forum. It's probably gone through a dozen revisions and overhauls. I think I'm quite satisfied with what I have come up with now. Have to redo words until it fits with the aesthetics. It also has a new writing system which is vertical and cursive:
https://conworkshop.com/view_article.ph ... 99079f2f62

Do /m/ and /r/ really only occur word-finally?

[Ahzoh]

Do /m/ and /r/ really only occur word-finally?

It just means there are no medial forms for those letters, so the final form would have to be used and the following letter would have to be in isolated or initial form. It's how the Arabic script letters like Zay <ز> and Dal <د> work.

[Knit Tie]

So my latest future English conlang had a pervasive devoicing happen adjacent to voiceless consonants and word-finally, so far the current version of everything happening due fo it is thus:

• NT → N̥T → hT → Tʰ
  VNS → VN̥S → VhS → VːS
  ɹ → ɹ̊ → s
  j → j̊ → ç → ʃ
  w → ʍ → hʷ → h → Tʰ/ Vː / X (h fortitions word-finally)
  l → ɬ

Combined with the simultaneous sound change where /s/ becomes /ʃ/ word-finally, this creates an overabundance of /aʃ/ ending on nouns, from every English <r> and /s/. Could it be reinterpreted as a general noun ending?

[TurkeySloth]

Is [Cʔ] → {C', Ƈ}, depending on the previous consonant's voicing, plausible, or would it go the other way? I couldn't find anything like it on Index Diachronica.