Conlang Random Thread

[Knit Tie]

So anyway, are there any attested languages with a large inventory, but no liquids? Diachronically adding liquids to mine would be a trivial thing, but I wanted to see if I could make it special and skip them entirely.

Not that I know of. Kpelle and Ngishe are closest to what you have here, but they both have a rhotic. Prominent rhotic allophones of other consonants would probably be fine as an alternative. Would also expect non-syllabic allophones of /i u/.

I see, thanks!

[Knit Tie]

I'm wondering - is there any reason why lateral retroflex fricatives are so ungodly rare? They seem to be fine, articulatory-wise. Considering that my latest conlang has both pervasive devoicing and pervasive retroflexion happening diachronically, do you think it would be plausible for it to have retroflex lateral fricatives?

[malloc]

I'm wondering - is there any reason why lateral retroflex fricatives are so ungodly rare? They seem to be fine, articulatory-wise. Considering that my latest conlang has both pervasive devoicing and pervasive retroflexion happening diachronically, do you think it would be plausible for it to have retroflex lateral fricatives?

I would imagine it's partly because retroflexes and lateral fricatives are both somewhat rare. Combining both would logically be even rarer.

[Xwtek]

http://fiatlingua.org/2017/03/

Why is David Peterson embarassed with the conlang. It seems fine, if not a bit too SAE.

[jal]

Why is David Peterson embarassed with the conlang. It seems fine, if not a bit too SAE.

Well, he's a bit of a snob, so it's probably no longer a match for his elite taste :).


JAL

[Xwtek]

Well, he's a bit of a snob, so it's probably no longer a match for his elite taste .

That paper is about the Dai language, David Peterson's own conlang. And he's embarrassed about it when I read it, it's not even bad. It's actually decent.

[Knit Tie]

http://fiatlingua.org/2017/03/

Why is David Peterson embarassed with the conlang. It seems fine, if not a bit too SAE.

That looks pretty good, honestly.

[jal]

That paper is about the Dai language, David Peterson's own conlang.

I understood that. But still he might've found it no longer to his taste :).


JAL

[WeepingElf]

Yes. I think that it is not unusual for an experienced conlanger to consider his own early works not to comply with the level of sophistication he has attained since then. Surely, Dai and Megdevi aren't bad conlangs, but David may feel that they are not as good as his later work. I feel the same about my earlier conlangs such as Nur-ellen (a descendant of Sindarin) or Germanech (a Romance language made by applying German sound changes to Vulgar Latin), or the (mostly lost) conlangs I made as a teenage boy. I have seen many conlangs that are considerably worse than these, but since then, I have become more sophisticated.

This kind of feeling often arises with other people's conlangs, too. There are some conlangs which I remember as "impressive" from years ago, but when I look at them now, I often think, "What the heck was it that impressed me that much in this?" The answer to this question is, of course, "My lack of sophistication those days".

[Xwtek]

I have a character named Kaahtkw'eid (which is actually an adopted name after he is teleported). For some reason, he is teleported to a plane (it's originally called Sakha, but I am going to change the name). People there are never exposed to Kaahtkw'eid's language. There is no schooling at any kind. People there is a seminomadic culture that stays during summer (when there is no night) and is nomadic during winter (when there is no sunlight). How do you expect Kaahtkw'eid to learn their language?

Another question, do you have a sound change framework, where you can use it inside python, instead of having to deal with interprocess communication? My plan is to do a grammatically sensitive sound change (because of analogy and the fact that some affix is agglutinated to the word much later than other affixes)

[bradrn]

I have a character named Kaahtkw'eid (which is actually an adopted name after he is teleported). For some reason, he is teleported to a plane (it's originally called Sakha, but I am going to change the name). People there are never exposed to Kaahtkw'eid's language. There is no schooling at any kind. People there is a seminomadic culture that stays during summer (when there is no night) and is nomadic during winter (when there is no sunlight). How do you expect Kaahtkw'eid to learn their language?

I don’t know about how he would learn the language, but you may be interested in the curious case of Narcisse Pelletier. He was abandoned on the Cape York Peninsula in Australia and was found by the Uutaalnganu tribe. He learnt their language and belief system readily, and to such an extent that he forgot his native French language; he only remembered it after he was found by other Europeans and boarded a trip back to France.

Another question, do you have a sound change framework, where you can use it inside python, instead of having to deal with interprocess communication? My plan is to do a grammatically sensitive sound change (because of analogy and the fact that some affix is agglutinated to the word much later than other affixes)

I seem to remember a Python sound change applier a while ago, but can’t remember its name. For something like you want to do, I’d be sceptical of the use of a premade SCA anyway; I imagine it could be much better to simply use an ad hoc function for each rule using regexes etc.

Additionally, what sort of sound changes are you doing that require the use of Python? I’ve never heard of ‘grammatically sensitive’ sound changes.

[KathTheDragon]

I seem to remember a Python sound change applier a while ago

I wrote one, though I'm not entirely sure it'd suit Xwtek's needs at present (I really should get on making it more versatile...)

[Xwtek]

I don’t know about how he would learn the language, but you may be interested in the curious case of Narcisse Pelletier. He was abandoned on the Cape York Peninsula in Australia and was found by the Uutaalnganu tribe. He learnt their language and belief system readily, and to such an extent that he forgot his native French language; he only remembered it after he was found by other Europeans and boarded a trip back to France.

Thanks, but how long is readily? Because I want it as the background for my MC of a shonen-esque story.

I seem to remember a Python sound change applier a while ago, but can’t remember its name. For something like you want to do, I’d be sceptical of the use of a premade SCA anyway; I imagine it could be much better to simply use an ad hoc function for each rule using regexes etc.

Additionally, what sort of sound changes are you doing that require the use of Python? I’ve never heard of ‘grammatically sensitive’ sound changes.

The "grammatically sensitive" things are like analogy, and the fact that some affix postdates (i.e. was a separate word) some sound change like vowel harmony.

[bradrn]

I don’t know about how he would learn the language, but you may be interested in the curious case of Narcisse Pelletier. He was abandoned on the Cape York Peninsula in Australia and was found by the Uutaalnganu tribe. He learnt their language and belief system readily, and to such an extent that he forgot his native French language; he only remembered it after he was found by other Europeans and boarded a trip back to France.

Thanks, but how long is readily? Because I want it as the background for my MC of a shonen-esque story.

Not a clue — I can’t find any easily accessible information about this online. I was just saying that it’s certainly realistic for someone to learn a completely foreign language with no prior experience if required.

I seem to remember a Python sound change applier a while ago, but can’t remember its name. For something like you want to do, I’d be sceptical of the use of a premade SCA anyway; I imagine it could be much better to simply use an ad hoc function for each rule using regexes etc.

Additionally, what sort of sound changes are you doing that require the use of Python? I’ve never heard of ‘grammatically sensitive’ sound changes.

The "grammatically sensitive" things are like analogy, and the fact that some affix postdates (i.e. was a separate word) some sound change like vowel harmony.

I think this could be done with only a regular sound change applier, using the following technique:

1. Apply the sound changes which go before the analogy.
2. Take the resulting words and apply the analogy ‘manually’. Also add the new affix at this point.
3. Apply the sound changes which go after the analogy.

I think this would work better than automation: in particular, I can’t see any easy way to automate a fundamentally irregular process such as analogy.

I seem to remember a Python sound change applier a while ago

I wrote one, though I'm not entirely sure it'd suit Xwtek's needs at present (I really should get on making it more versatile...)

Yes, I was thinking of yours — thank you!

[Whimemsz]

I don’t know about how he would learn the language, but you may be interested in the curious case of Narcisse Pelletier. He was abandoned on the Cape York Peninsula in Australia and was found by the Uutaalnganu tribe. He learnt their language and belief system readily, and to such an extent that he forgot his native French language; he only remembered it after he was found by other Europeans and boarded a trip back to France.

Thanks, but how long is readily? Because I want it as the background for my MC of a shonen-esque story.

Not a clue — I can’t find any easily accessible information about this online. I was just saying that it’s certainly realistic for someone to learn a completely foreign language with no prior experience if required.

I actually discussed this a bit earlier in this thread, based on another real-world example. My conclusion based on that example of two people was:

So for someone with a decent natural talent at languages but no linguistics training, this would suggest at least conversational by 4-5 months, and maybe 6-8 months to become quite skilled if not entirely fluent. 22 months is plenty to become fluent, though, even for someone with less of a natural talent with languages.

In cases like this -- which have happened plenty of times -- (and in monolingual linguistic fieldwork, for that matter) people learn the language by being exposed to it day in and day out and because their lives literally depend on it, so they have an incredibly strong incentive for working tirelessly at it. It's relatively easy to figure out how to ask what the name of something is in a language you have no knowledge of (or barring that, to just point at it with a quizzical look; someone will get the hint and say its name), and with that you can at least gradually learn most nouns, and verbs for simple actions. And after a certain level of basic understanding you have enough that, combined with contextual clues, you can figure out a lot of the rest.

[TurkeySloth]

My roleplay setting's Elvish language has the six vowel system /ɐ ɑ ɪ ɨ ø̞ ɵ̞/. Is it more logical to Romanize it with unmarked central (/ɐ ɑ/ as <a ä>) or peripheral (/ɐ ɑ/ as <ä a>) vowels?

[Kuchigakatai]

My roleplay setting's Elvish language has the six vowel system /ɐ ɑ ɪ ɨ ø̞ ɵ̞/. Is it more logical to Romanize it with unmarked central (/ɐ ɑ/ as <a ä>) or peripheral (/ɐ ɑ/ as <ä a>) vowels?

I'd suggest doing whatever is less annoying, that is, using <a> for the more common vowel.

Much less strongly, if you go for the unmarked /ɐ/ route, I'd also suggest using <â> for /ɑ/. This is because <ä> by convention usually only denotes [ə ɐ] due to Amharic or [æ] due to German and Finnish. <â> would be often more readily understood because of (historical and modern Canadian) French and common romanizations of Persian. It doesn't really matter though.

[Kuchigakatai]

And after a certain level of basic understanding you have enough that, combined with contextual clues, you can figure out a lot of the rest.

Or, very importantly, learn it subconsciously...

Although I took English classes when I lived in El Salvador, I really learned most of my English playing SNES/N64/Gameboy/Gamecube/Playstation2 single-player videogames in English, which as a tween/teen I'd do for too many hours every day. The classes were most useful to learn to somewhat pronounce things... And as those EFL classes were mostly of the Communicative style, I was taught little about grammar, and I was usually bored becuase I easily understood what I was supposed to understand...

When I was around 19 years old and I actually started reading about English grammar because by then I had found some love for languages/linguistics, my usual reaction was "oh yeah!, that sounds natural!", "that makes sense!". It was a funny realization: there were some things that I had consciously figured out, like the fact "had done" was equivalent to the similarly-looking había hecho in Spanish (and I remember I was very proud to have noticed this when I was about 11 years old), but for the most part it was all statistical and subconscious...

There were also things I never figured out or learned, consciously or subconsciously (which meant I'd always be making mistakes), until I explicitly read about them at the age of 19 or so, like the difference between locational "at" and "in/on" (until then, I had just memorized or statistically/subconsciously learned phrases with "at", e.g. "at home/school/work", but I would say "in the 35th second" when I meant "at the 35th second"), or the placement of simple adverbs within verb complexes (had been always doing, had always been doing, always tried doing, always tried to do, tried to always do (or Latin-ish prescriptive "tried always to do"), was never going to do...)

Maybe this will help Xwtek think about how naïve but fairly successful learning works...

So for someone with a decent natural talent at languages but no linguistics training, this would suggest at least conversational by 4-5 months, and maybe 6-8 months to become quite skilled if not entirely fluent. 22 months is plenty to become fluent, though, even for someone with less of a natural talent with languages.

I find this timeline surprising... I know that 6-12 months is what linguists often manage to get funds to stay somewhere, but I've always assumed they just concentrate on collecting data about some particular topics, rather than try to fully learn the language and claim native-like usage (or even native-like understanding).

I'd like to mention I moved to Canada when I was 16 (in the middle of my 16th year, 6 months away from my birthday), where I cut off my personal ties to El Salvador and lived about 90% of my life in English (Spanish being limited to talking to my family plus very occasional books, with some limited amount of Mandarin/Arabic autodidactic learning with books). Even then, by the time I was 19 or 20 (about 3-4 years of immense immersion) there was a lot of important stuff I couldn't get right, and to this day my oral skills are still rather bad (e.g. I still can't distinguish /ʊ u/ (look Luke) and /ɐ ɑ/ (luck lock) when I hear a native speaking).

I was ignorant of linguistics and was likely not a talented learner either, but I find 22 months too optimistic... I'm sure it's enough to make any adult competent enough in whatever they need to do in their life (maybe that's what you meant by "fluent"?), but that adult learner's acquired usage would still be a far cry from native-like usage (at least for the average naïve learner).

[bradrn]

My roleplay setting's Elvish language has the six vowel system /ɐ ɑ ɪ ɨ ø̞ ɵ̞/. Is it more logical to Romanize it with unmarked central (/ɐ ɑ/ as <a ä>) or peripheral (/ɐ ɑ/ as <ä a>) vowels?

I would do it as ⟨a ä⟩, but they’re both perfectly fine — you could do it either way. If you’re really struggling, you could post your phonology on the Romanization Challenge Thread as well.

(Also, that vowel systems is very weird. I imagine it would shift to something like /ɐ ɑ ɪ ɯ e u/ fairly quickly.)

[Whimemsz]

I find this timeline surprising... I know that 6-12 months is what linguists often manage to get funds to stay somewhere, but I've always assumed they just concentrate on collecting data about some particular topics, rather than try to fully learn the language and claim native-like usage (or even native-like understanding).

I'd like to mention I moved to Canada when I was 16 (in the middle of my 16th year, 6 months away from my birthday), where I cut off my personal ties to El Salvador and lived about 90% of my life in English (Spanish being limited to talking to my family plus very occasional books, with some limited amount of Mandarin/Arabic autodidactic learning with books). Even then, by the time I was 19 or 20 (about 3-4 years of immense immersion) there was a lot of important stuff I couldn't get right, and to this day my oral skills are still rather bad (e.g. I still can't distinguish /ʊ u/ (look Luke) and /ɐ ɑ/ (luck lock) when I hear a native speaking).

I was ignorant of linguistics and was likely not a talented learner either, but I find 22 months too optimistic... I'm sure it's enough to make any adult competent enough in whatever they need to do in their life (maybe that's what you meant by "fluent"?), but that adult learner's acquired usage would still be a far cry from native-like usage (at least for the average naïve learner).

Yeah, sorry, I meant "fluent" in a looser sense of being able to understand everyone and communicate what you need to, not necessarily having native-like command over the language. (Although I do suspect that for as much pressure you were under and daily exposure you had, in literal life-or-death situations like Hussey, Lay, and Pelletier were in, learning will be accelerated beyond a situation like yours.)