Conlang Random Thread

[bbbosborne]

no really can someone please tell me what a scratchpad is

[Dē Graut Bʉr]

It's a thread where you create a new language from scratch and post new bits of it as you make them up.

[mèþru]

It doesn't have to be a new project actually.

[bbbosborne]

ok thanks guys

[storyteller232]

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

Seeing as my singing is already considered a form of torture under the Geneva convention, i try to avoid doing it in multiple languages

[Moose-tache]

I'm trying to think of more ways to encode politeness. There's verb endings a la Korean and Japanese, particles like in Thai, weird avoidance languages in Australia, special pronouns all over the place, and of course every language uses word choice to denote politeness or formality. But what am I missing? What other options are there?

[Vilike]

In addition to special vocabulary, Guugu Yimidhirr's avoidance language has prosodic changes as well:

First, as I have mentioned, BIL words are pronounced in a particularly soft
voice, very slowly - contrasting strongly with rapid ordinary Guugu' Yimidhirr.

(Haviland, J. B. (1979). Guugu Yimidhirr brother-in-law language. Language in Society, 8(2-3), 365. )

[Qwynegold]

I don't know if this counts as avoidance, but another Japanese thing is that you shouldn't talk about what a person in a higher position can or can't, should or shouldn't do.

[mae]

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[mèþru]

Romance-influenced Slavic has been done so many times in Ill Bethisad, but I've never seen an Iranian influenced Balto-Slavic (well, I think some of palatalisation sound changes might have been Sarmatian-influenced)

[Nortaneous]

Here is a phoneme inventory for a Macro-Vengic language, Ahemai /ʔəhəmai/, of the Whatic subgroup.

/p b t c ʔ/ <p b t c 0>
/f s h/ <f s h>
/m n/ <m n>
/w l j/ <v l y>
/a ɒ e ə o i u ai/ <a aw e oe o i u ai>
Complicated word-level tone system TBD, arising from loss of codas and stop voicing contrasts. (/b/ < some *w, current /w/ < remaining *w and some *ŋ, glottal stop was lost unconditionally and replaced with ʔ < *k. no velars. cf. Gimi and Wutung.)
Preinitials can be loosely or tightly bound. Loosely-bound preinitials are written <Ce>, unless the C is a glottal stop, in which case <a>. There is also a set of lateralized labials /pl bl ml/, and a cluster /hl/. No coda consonants.

Thinking about doing an IE conlang that's closely related to Balto-Slavic but makes up a somewhat divergent 'third branch' besides the two eponymous ones. I've got some ideas for the native diachronics but I'm not sure where to put it, so it'll have a lot of contact influence from different sub-branches depending. The two possibilities I'm thinking of both include having it be somewhat towards the south, but depending on whether it's toward the west or the east it could have either Romance or Iranian influence. Not sure yet which one would be cooler

AFAIK, Baltic hasn't been demonstrated to be a clade -- it may just be everything in Balto-Slavic that isn't Slavic.

[mae]

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[Nortaneous]

Does Ukrainian not have [v]? Belarusian merges coda -l and -v as [w], but I think still has [v] elsewhere. Ukrainian could be similar.

It's probably best to think of the most-of-Eurasian u-semivowel the way we think of Japanese <r>. Japanese doesn't really have a trill, or a lateral, or whatever -- it has one sound with a wide range of allophones, conditioned by context, speech style, and so on.

Unless a true /v/ develops from something else, your /w/ would probably be written with Cyrillic ve.

Another possibility is Uralic-influenced Baltic. That's what Baltic already is, but it could be more extensive, like in Tocharian.

[Xwtek]

Why is /ŋ/ uncommon in natlangs? Even when it exists, why is it usually syllable final?

/ŋ/ is easy to pronounce and fills the gap in velar consonant

[burke]

Why is /ŋ/ uncommon in natlangs? Even when it exists, why is it usually syllable final?

/ŋ/ is easy to pronounce and fills the gap in velar consonant

This probably comes down to acoustics and ease of articulation. We also see that in languages with ejectives, bilabial ones are more likely to be absent than velar or uvular if a uvular series is present. The opposite applies to implosives

Similarly, /g/ is commonly a gap in languages with voiced sounds.

[Xwtek]

Why is /ŋ/ uncommon in natlangs? Even when it exists, why is it usually syllable final?

/ŋ/ is easy to pronounce and fills the gap in velar consonant

This probably comes down to acoustics and ease of articulation. We also see that in languages with ejectives, bilabial ones are more likely to be absent than velar or uvular if a uvular series is present. The opposite applies to implosives

Similarly, /g/ is commonly a gap in languages with voiced sounds.

But /ŋ/ is no harder than /g/ and syllable final is not a traditional place for voiced consonant. (By that I mean there is no language where voiced consonant is only allowed syllable finally. The closest to this is Arrente, but Arrente don't have voicing contrast)

[Nortaneous]

There are some word-initial consonant restrictions that are common in northern Eurasia -- the restriction against /N/ happens to be the most common one, but you also get restrictions against /r/ and so on.

In IE, /N/ mostly comes from place assimilation of /n/ to a velar (followed by loss of following /g/, as in Germanic, or cluster simplification, as in Tocharian), so it doesn't develop word-initially because there were no word-initial /nk ng/ clusters. (Albanian and some dialects of Italian have developed these, however.) My guess is that the same applies to Turkic languages, although for all I know /N/ is reconstructed for Proto-Turkic.

As for Mandarin, maybe it spread areally.

WALS isn't entirely trustworthy here. Hmong is strictly CV -- they're calling nasal vowels final velar nasals, I think.

[Zaarin]

Why is /ŋ/ uncommon in natlangs? Even when it exists, why is it usually syllable final?

/ŋ/ is easy to pronounce and fills the gap in velar consonant

This probably comes down to acoustics and ease of articulation. We also see that in languages with ejectives, bilabial ones are more likely to be absent than velar or uvular if a uvular series is present. The opposite applies to implosives

Similarly, /g/ is commonly a gap in languages with voiced sounds.

But /ŋ/ is no harder than /g/ and syllable final is not a traditional place for voiced consonant. (By that I mean there is no language where voiced consonant is only allowed syllable finally. The closest to this is Arrente, but Arrente don't have voicing contrast)

Restricting nasals in general to coda position isn't strange, however, and if only one consonant is allowed in coda odds are it's either a nasal or a liquid.

[Zju]

I've been cobbling up the following phonology lately:

/p t k ʔ/ <p t k q>
/b tʼ kʼ/ <b d g>
/?/ <j>
/ɸ s ʃ θ x ħ/ <f s c z x h>
/m n ɫ ł/ <m n w l>
/a i u/ <a i u>

The syllable is (C)V(C), and as follows maximum C word initially and finally and maximum CC word medially. Plosives don't occur syllable-finally. (There is more to the phonotactics (and the allophony), but it's not relevant to the question)

Now, to the allophony:

/tʼ kʼ/ are [d g] intervocally, /b/ is always [ b ].
The question is, what phoneme is /?/ if it's [t͡ʃʼ] word-initially, [d͡ʒ] intervocally and [t͡ʃ] after a consonant? It mostly patterns with edjectives, but from the preliminary randomly generated words its most frequent allophone is either [d͡ʒ] or [t͡ʃ], about evenly distributed, with [t͡ʃʼ] somewhat rarer. IIRC a phoneme is its most frequent allophone.

Other than that, does the phonology seem stable/plausible? Is there a case of ANADEW?


edit: I've been also thinking of adding /t͡s/ and removing plain [t͡ʃ] as allophone of /?/, but that would strain the already stretched non diacritic, non digraph orthography and honestly I'm not sure which case I like better.

[Pabappa]

the general conventioin is that the strongest allophone is taken as the primary, even if its not the most frequient. so that sound would be /tʃ'/, with [tʃ] and [dʒ] as allophones. this may be because lenition is more common than fortition and because there are often sounds that merge when lenited but few that merge when fortified.