Conlang Random Thread

[Richard W]

Accord to Wikipedia, Bouyei fits this pattern. However, if one includes Chinese loans (and quite possibly some expressive forms), there is a contrasting set of aspirated stops.

Whoops! I assumed 'Po-ai' and 'Bouyei' were the same, but they're actually used to identify different lects. Bouyei has a pair of implosive stops (or perhaps preglottalised), whereas Po-ai doesn't. Po-ai has a less impressive set of voicing contrasts, but has eliminated the implosive series.

[Knit Tie]

Could a language running a four-way coronal distinction, i.e. /t̪ t ʈ tɕ/ also maintain an i - ɨ distinction for dentals and coronals? Perhaps with /ti/ being /tsi/?

Is there any reason to think that it couldn’t?

Perhaps articulatory difficulties? Overlapping phonetic distinctions?

[bradrn]

Voicing won't contrast in my setting's Elvish language's plosives but will in its fricatives. Is this attested in any natlang? Does having the language's affricates pattern like its plosives or fricatives sound more natural?

I don't know whether any natlang does that, but in my native Dutch, it's the opposite: plosives have voicing contrast, but fricatives have not*. Also, the languages that I do know that have no voicing contrast in the plosives have other contrasts there, like aspirated/non-aspirated.

*Standard Dutch has phonetic contrast between voiced and unvoiced fricatives, but many dialects/accents do not, and even then, minimal pairs are very hard to find.

I would note that this is common and unremarkable: for some reason, a voicing contrast in plosives seems to be much more common than one in fricatives.

[Pabappa]

Blem tampiompaše pu?
glass wine-OBL-pour-C-1p-LOC-TRANSL-DESIR-2p Q
Do you want the wine I poured into a glass?

This is a followup to my last post, where I created an anomalous verb-first construction. This is similar, but this time the verb is something we'd think of as more nounlike. /blem/ "glass" stranded at the front of a clause can only mean "to glass; to put something in glass". But it doesnt stand alone, either ... it's padded by a morpheme meaning "pour" that carries the verb inflections at the end of the second word. It just so happens that the word for pour has been reduced into just an /i/ by thousands of years of sound changes, and so instead of thinking of it as meaning "pour", the speakers think of /blem/ and think "yeah, that one takes an /-i-/" and use it that way. There could be more derivations from the same /blem/, e.g. it looks like if i wanted to i could make "drink from a glass" be /blem .... -OBL-rš-/ and otherwise appear the same as this sentence. But that doesnt appeal to me so much because pouring is an action that incrporates choiuce ... i can pour into a bottle, a glass, a cup, or a bowl ... but once it's there, i as a drinker dont have that choice anymore.

Blem is not an object, so the verb in this sentence is grammatically intransitive even though it is semantically transitive. The semantic object here is tamp- "wine", which is the head of the verb, and therefore the verb is intransitive.

The traditional way to express this sentence would be

Tampampaše blembebos, pu?
wine-LOC-TRANSL-DESIR-2p pour-TR-1P<past>-GEN, Q

Note that the verb for pour does not appear in this sentence because the word for glass is sufficient.

A narrow, nonstandard translation of the second sentence would be
You want wine — that I glassed — or?

Whereas a similar translation for the first sentence wouldnt make much sense. It could be something like
Glass, you want my poured wine — or?

edit: forgot to mention that this particular subset of the construction is traditionally done with a monosyllabic initial word, and since all Poswa words have initial stress, this produces a spondee. So I call the whole thing a spondee and intend its use to be mostly poetic.

[TurkeySloth]

Reposting because it seems to have been overrun.

My setting's Primordial language has tenuous, aspirated, nasal, and affricated clicks at three POA (cover K) [K Kʰ K̃ K͡χ]. There's at least one language that has [i → e] after [q] (can't remember which). For future reference, is it possible to have [i → e] after clicks? "Future reference" because I'm not changing Primordial, which was used for example purposes.

[chris_notts]

Has anyone ever posted a sentence from their conlang into Google translate and see what language it guesses it to be? I tried this sentence (the start of a translation of "The North Wind and the Sun") from my current project, Pñæk and Google guessed Yoruba:

A heas ŋaa ki mi hok-pcò, kus mi cii "da pasoan rii bi", luo lì ca bambiil i'k hùt m choo'r ntik.

A breakdown of the example just in case anyone is interested:

[ʔɑ xæ͡ɑs ŋɑː ki mi hokʰpʰt͡ʃoˀ kus mi t͡ʃiː dɑ pɐso͡ɑn ɾiː bi lu͡o liˀ t͡ʃɑ bɐmbiːl ikʰ xuˀtʰ m̩ t͡ʃoːɾ ntikʰ]
ART wind and.ART sun PROG press-chest, all/each PROG say "1.aor strong pass you", then come LNK.ART wanderer LNK-REL carry ART cloak-LNK warm.
"The wind and the sun were arguing, each saying `I'm stronger than you', then came a wanderer carrying a warm cloak."

[bradrn]

Has anyone ever posted a sentence from their conlang into Google translate and see what language it guesses it to be?

I seem to remember seeing something like this a while ago, although I don’t think I can find it now.

I tried my own language, using an entry in the Conlang Fluency Thread; Google Translate tells me it’s Telugu. I’m not entirely sure how it came to that conclusion, given that I write it with the Latin alphabet.

[Kuchigakatai]

Has anyone ever posted a sentence from their conlang into Google translate and see what language it guesses it to be?

Someone did that at the CBB for the texts of their Conlang Relay IX. And here are the texts, if you wanna judge whether Google Translate made adequate choices.

[akam chinjir]

I put in an Akiatu sentence, it guessed Japanese, and tried to guess what I really meant to type (but had no translation for either version of the sentence, of course).

[Knit Tie]

Could a language that generally disallows plosive-plosive and fricative-fricative sequences and assimilates voicing in clusters prioritise altering the adfix while leaving the stem as intact as possible? E.G. /av-sɨp/ > [apsɨp] (soup-GEN), but /tuk-d̪ij/ > [tuksi] (dog-PL)?

Also, could the only exception to the above rule be when the borrowed definite article al- precedes a coronal phoneme, in which case the /l/ in it becomes gemination on the phoneme? E.G. /al-tɕiɾki/ > [atːɕirki] (Turkey)?

[bradrn]

Could a language that generally disallows plosive-plosive and fricative-fricative sequences and assimilates voicing in clusters prioritise altering the adfix while leaving the stem as intact as possible? E.G. /av-sɨp/ > [apsɨp] (soup-GEN), but /tuk-d̪ij/ > [tuksi] (dog-PL)?

Also, could the only exception to the above rule be when the borrowed definite article al- precedes a coronal phoneme, in which case the /l/ in it becomes gemination on the phoneme? E.G. /al-tɕiɾki/ > [atːɕirki] (Turkey)?

Well, I don’t see anything obviously implausible about any of this. (Although admittedly I don’t know all that much about morphophonology.)

[Pabappa]

Here are some ideas descended from what I call hatelangs .... languages that I created to either be bad on purpose, or to embody ideas which I dislike in order to serve as a foil for a different language. These are in reverse chronological order by date of creation, meaning they get increasingly silly as I dive further into my childhood.

Palli
Verbs must be followed by particles denoting the gender of the agent. These are thus like inflecting verbs for gender, but with separate words. Thus one must say the equivalent of "the boy eats malely", and so on, even when the noun makes clear what gender it is.

This language also has many inflections that are "broken" but still remain part of the word, as if Greek still said e.g. /morphos/ for "shape" but had to express plural & case marking by adpositions instead of changing the /-os/ suffix.

Umunisses
This was a language in which all words, or at least all nouns, had to have 4 consonants and, at the time, also 4 vowels. It was thus extremely inefficient, the very opposite of Moonshine.

I've revived this idea for a language I call Owl, though in Owl not every consonant pairs with a vowel and the surface realization of a word is often wildly unlike its spelling (e.g. /npwamtk/ could be [bɔŋkk] or possibly even [bɔŋk]), whereas in Umunisses my plan was to have the words pronounced as spelled.

Bé
Ridiculously fast sound changes, so people can hardly understand their own grandchildren, combined with a suffusion of dialects that also can't understand each other because they are all going through different sets of ridiculously fast sound changes.

This language was spoken next to Spācōin, a language which had changed hardly at all over the past 5000 years, and was a foil for Spacoin.

"French"
A gang of teenage superheros called the Islanders conquers the world, and everyone except the French agrees to start speaking the teenagers' language (a descendant of English). French then comes to be seen as a language not fit for humans, and the Islanders point out that French has a word e, pronounced /ə/, and meaning "anus". By contrast in the Islander tongue obscene concepts are not so commonly mentioned as to need such short words.

"Pabappa"
Way back in 1993 I created a sketch of a language that I consider to be the original form of Pabappa. It was spoken in a village on planet Namma in which the main character of the story interacts only with other kids his age and younger, and the language was a stereotypical baby babble just as it is now, except that in the original sketch there was no astoundingly complex grammar and syntax hiding beneath the surface phonology ... it was a language that might exist if the only people who spoke it were small children with simple minds. Thus it was a lot like Toki Pona.

This language wasn't so much a hatelang as a language that served a purpose in the story. The superhero kids brought back other kids from Namma and all of the adults on the superheros' planet expected the Pabappa kids to have the minds of babies because they talked like babies. They were wrong .... one girl had mental powers that vastly exceeded those of the adults who had expected to boss her around.

Hi! I'm Gabby!
When I was nine years old I wrote comic strips in which a boy who appears to have a speech impediment is bullied and beat up several times a week, and at one point (though I never got around to it) I intended to reveal that the boy did not have a speech impediment, but that he spoke that way because his native language was Wamian, a language so degenerate that it did not even have /w/, and the speakers had to call themselves Bamians. The boy's name was Gary, but he could only call himself Gabby.
_______________
Arguably this list should have an entry for Repilian, a language for a society in which women have all the power and men occupy a lower social status than domestic animals. When men are allowed to speak at all they must use a much more complicated speech register than women use, and when women speak to men, they use a speech register that deliberately omits information so that men have to think hard to figure out what a woman is telling them to do. These women do not consider themselves feminists because men in their society are so pathetic that the concept of feminism is meaningless.

Around this time, a girl had convinced me that in French, the words for pleasant things are feminine while words for things like toilets and doormats are masculine. But I didn't conceive of Repilian as a wholly independent language until long after I had created, discarded, and then revived the idea of Repilia as a hyperfeministic society.

[Kuchigakatai]

Could a language that generally disallows plosive-plosive and fricative-fricative sequences and assimilates voicing in clusters prioritise altering the adfix while leaving the stem as intact as possible? E.G. /av-sɨp/ > [apsɨp] (soup-GEN), but /tuk-d̪ij/ > [tuksi] (dog-PL)?

This is by all means what languages normally do. For example, English [n] > [ŋ] in the prefix in- in "ingratitude" [ɪŋˈgɹæɾəˌtʰʉd] (but also [ɪn-], probably due to "un-", which never assimilates: "ungrateful" [ʌnˈgɹeɪtfəɫ]), and English [z] > [s] in "cats", "caps", "carts", "cranks".

I would be much more interested in the opposite question: are there languages where stems are sacrificed in favour of affixes or short functional words as a rule, rather than as an exception? Maybe something could be said about Irish word-initial mutation?

Maybe I could mention French and its deletion of stem-internal schwa (inside an open initial syllable) after a word ending in a vowel: tu secoues /ty səku/ [tysku] 'you shake sth', sa cheville /sa ʃəˈvij/ [saʃˈfij] 'his/her ankle', j'ai bu de l'eau /ʒ e by də lo/ [ʒebydˈlo] 'I drank/swallowed water', c'est ce que je dis /se sə kə ʒə di/ [seskøʒdi] 'that's what I'm saying'. (Contrast elle secoue [ɛlsəˈku] 'she shakes sth', notres chevilles [nɔt-ʃəˈvij] 'our ankles', ils boivent de l'eau [ilbwavdəˈlo] 'they're drinking water'...)

Also, could the only exception to the above rule be when the borrowed definite article al- precedes a coronal phoneme, in which case the /l/ in it becomes gemination on the phoneme? E.G. /al-tɕiɾki/ > [atːɕirki] (Turkey)?

Maybe it wasn't made clear to you, but that's what Arabic has. Arabic doesn't have assimilation for /l/ + consonant aside from the definite article al-: al-durj [ædˈdʊrdʒ] 'the drawer' but jildun [ˈdʒɪldʊn] 'leather'.

[chris_notts]

Has anyone ever posted a sentence from their conlang into Google translate and see what language it guesses it to be?

Someone did that at the CBB for the texts of their Conlang Relay IX. And here are the texts, if you wanna judge whether Google Translate made adequate choices.

I knew someone must have done it. Maybe I should drift back to the CBB again... but whenever I've tried in the past somehow I've always lost interest in the place. Not sure why.

[Kuchigakatai]

I knew someone must have done it. Maybe I should drift back to the CBB again... but whenever I've tried in the past somehow I've always lost interest in the place. Not sure why.

I've had the same experience again and again; it's just a different ambience than here. There has always been a wider range of conlanger types there, and much more tolerance for people using terminology in wrong/weird ways, and in general it has also been slower. Historically the ZBB was also a lot more elitist and demanding of basic concept awareness, and meaner, although that has been toned down in recent years. (For example, it used to be that when a newbie here asked a question about some basic topic, they'd be met with a Let-Me-Google-It-For-You link, although eventually people began insisting on the "don't bite the newbies" thing.)

[Pabappa]

I posted a sample of my conlang into Google Translate or some other language detection program long ago and it came up as Bemba, a language spoken in Zambia. At that time, my language was not as far from average as it is today. I dont remember whether it was Pabappa or Poswa that I tested.

My guess is, any sample of Poswa that I put in today is going to be recognized even by an AI as not being a traditional human language, and if it picks a language at all it will just be due to one or two random words that happen to match up, even if the rest is unintelligible ... e.g. pipo is a word in several major languages, and happens to mean "my city" in Poswa, so I could try a sentence with /pipo/ in it and see what it does. When I typed /pipo/ by itself just now it said it was Finnish.

instead of sticking with /pipo/ I typed in pipombo pumbapio and it already stopped trying to translate, although it still says "SPANISH - DETECTED". I think it might be waiting for me to type more, but anything else I add isnt going to produce a meaningful result so I'll stop here.

It's possible that the change from African to European languages is because my languages now have a lot more /p/ and less /b/, and Bantu languages in particular are known for the high proportion of voiced stops and less occurrence of voiceless stops and nasals. Still, Swahili, Zulu, etc have a lot of voiceless stops too and it didnt pick either of those for my sample.

[zompist]

This is by all means what languages normally do. For example, English [n] > [ŋ] in the prefix in- in "ingratitude" [ɪŋˈgɹæɾəˌtʰʉd] (but also [ɪn-], probably due to "un-", which never assimilates: "ungrateful" [ʌnˈgɹeɪtfəɫ]), and English [z] > [s] in "cats", "caps", "carts", "cranks".

Un- can definitely assimilate-- in fact, I'd wager that it normally does in normal speech. (Checking a few dictionaries... they think both un- and in- retain the [n]. I think it's a spelling pronunciation tho'.)

There may be some difference, though... I think un- tends to receive secondary stress, unlike in-, so we don't rush through it quite so much.

[bradrn]

This is by all means what languages normally do. For example, English [n] > [ŋ] in the prefix in- in "ingratitude" [ɪŋˈgɹæɾəˌtʰʉd] (but also [ɪn-], probably due to "un-", which never assimilates: "ungrateful" [ʌnˈgɹeɪtfəɫ]), and English [z] > [s] in "cats", "caps", "carts", "cranks".

Un- can definitely assimilate-- in fact, I'd wager that it normally does in normal speech. (Checking a few dictionaries... they think both un- and in- retain the [n]. I think it's a spelling pronunciation tho'.)

There may be some difference, though... I think un- tends to receive secondary stress, unlike in-, so we don't rush through it quite so much.

I can confirm that ‘ungrateful’ assimilates for me: I say it [ɐŋˈɡɻʷæ͡itfɯ].

[Bob]

Here are some ideas descended from what I call hatelangs .... languages that I created to either be bad on purpose, or to embody ideas which I dislike in order to serve as a foil for a different language. These are in reverse chronological order by date of creation, meaning they get increasingly silly as I dive further into my childhood.

Wow, Pabappa, this is such great work! I'm actually a big fan of goofy concept conlangs because I do a lot of very serious and laborious work with real languages and super-complex writing systems and their greatest intricacies.

My favorite is the "Hi, I'm Gabby!" one. It's mean-spirited, though, but also realistic and it's hard to do a good job of holding the work of children up to grown up standards.

[Bob]

* Wu is actually a very diverse group of mutually unintelligible Chinese varieties; Shanghainese and Suzhounese are nice examples but are not necessarily representative of the whole group. Why, then, is Wu often talked about as a single language, you ask? It is because, as Nort once observed with regard to the Bai family "language", in China, language families are "languages" and languages are "dialects"!

Wu Languages interest me a lot. I've worked mostly with Ningbohua and then some with Shanghainese. And then I think that's it, aside from readings in books surveying the different Chinese Languages. I'm quite fluent in Classical Chinese and can even read some Modern Chinese and Japanese. I love Classical Chinese.

It's a lonely road, though. I've posted conlangs based on Chinese Languages and Classical Chinese writing and language but they didn't go over very well, so I try to nurse my wounds and carry on as time heals me. Fortunately, my saving grace for "social conlanging" and "social history and ancient language studies" is my vast knowledge of Latin and things Latin. And the Celtic people have really warmed up to me but I haven't found so many of them on Zompist Bboard from my memory. Well, I haven't posted much for Celtic conlangs or conscripts. Or if I did, it was the sort of obscure writing system and orthography matter which goes over the heads of most conlangers.

Sigh! Whatever. I can try. Perhaps as I age, I will grow inherently cooler by virtue of the "cool uncle" factor. "Uncle Bob, tell us about your conlangs!" "Gee, that's cool, Uncle Bob!" Ah, the ingenuity of youth. Likewise, I think my tastes are at variance with some of the older members of this forum. At least on facebook, I have more of a sense of the age, gender, and origin of members so I can guess what they're after. Here, it's all Xwmaslyag from ??? and maybe I get the hint if their favorite forum is "The Big Book of British Politicks" and their last post was about "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" and or 1970s "Doctor Who". It's like listening to a cricket game on the radio. But not getting rewarded for trying to meet anyone halfway.

One of my last jobs, back in 2016, was in Ningbo, actually, very close to Wuhan and I used to play soccer with all these guys from work and all over, English teachers. And the guy who invited me gave me, a Scot, hassled because Americans don't take soccer as seriously as Europeans. Well, come on, working in South China is hard and things are different in America. Also, I'm one of very few Americans who ever played soccer in their lives and this guy was finding fault with how I did it, some 15 to 20 years down the line. That was a really stressful job. All my coworkers were total bigots against everyone not from their corner of their country and most of them didn't like me for not joining them in heckling Chinese peoples for being like Chinese peoples.

Now it's even on my resume that I have a Concentration in Anthropology and I have a BA in Linguistics. And the boss couldn't look that up and no one else could be bothered, despite being in a foreign country and doing work involving multiple languages, dialects, and foreign languages?

See, I get spoiled by these facebook polyglot groups where there's people from all over Europe, and some from all over the world, and they're just so happy to see me and act like what I have to say is clever and welcome. You know, because I'm one of 5 Americans in the whole group, maybe, and write in pretty good English, maybe have a nice mug.

Here, I think it's all British and people older than me. Or was a year ago or maybe 5 or 10 years ago when I used to come around here from time to time.

But I've studied a ton about China and will always love China. But, sorry, mostly Ancient China. Because that's just when all the really interesting stuff happened. Modern China is much more like Modern America than Ancient China was, and is therefore more of a challenge and delight to study. Alas, a lot of Chinese do not seem to grasp this and keenly wonder why I'm not clamoring to learning Modern Chinese and read newspapers about things like the coronavirus plague or how polluted the air is in modern Beijing. Gee, folks, I wonder why I'd rather read of c 1500 BCE China when it was covered in dense jungle and wild rhinoceroses and Confucius teaching about the sage Shang Emperors teaching how governments should care for their people and rise to the occasion ...