Infixing Morphological Chain Minimal Game Hillbilly Conlang 6 21 2020

[Bob]

Infixing Morphological Chain Minimal Game Hillbilly Conlang 6 21 2020
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I'm focusing on a famous conlang right now, Atlantean, so here's one of the side conlangs that I made up recently.

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This is maybe the easiest to write conlang I have ever made. It ends up being a bit heavy on morphological chains, that is, noun and verb chains.

Concept:

Nouns and verbs are reduced to their first phonemic consonant, in general.

It's implied that all lone consonants have an implied -a vowel which disappears if the consonant is followed by a non-A vowel or diphthong or such.

Everything else is reduced to its first phonemic vowel, in general.

It's optional to add a second or third consonant to a word root which indicates a further semantic category.

The vowels are then infixed or affixed to the noun or verb root according to morphological chains.

The excessive homonyms are just hand-waived: It's implied that the language has unmarked tones and phoneme variants sufficient.

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Word Order:

It just follows English word order.
Insert major differences otherwise so that it's not English or a cipher for English or such.

I don't think verbs are marked for tense and nouns may not be marked for plurality.

I haven't figure out anything more than this yet.

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Morphological Chains:

preposition-NOUN-possessive.pronoun

NOUN-and-NOUN.ROOT.REDUPLICATED-adjective

preposition-NOUN-adjective-NOUN.ROOT.REDUPLICATED-adjective-relativizer

VERB-subject-VERB.ROOT.REDUPLICATED

directional-VERB-object-VERB.ROOT.REDUPLICATED-subject

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Further semantic category consonants for word root building:

C CLEAR
M MOUTH
R ORNAMENT
N NUMBER
N NATURE
B BEAST, ANIMAL

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These examples are based on lines from various movies:

"Snow Day", early 2000s, Nickelodeon.

hanging strings of about hand sized lights
LR

a single snowflake
SC

"Three for the Road", 1987, film.
> I er R >
I Rer

"Two Rode Together", 1950s cowboy film.

I drink to your health.
> AI DM U ER H-R >
DAIM UHer.


"The Yearling", 1940s film, pioneer / hillbilly film. Like "Little House in the Big Woods" for boys, or "Old Yeller" or its predecessor or something. Yee-haw.

Two hunters and two dogs both chase a bear through swamp and forest.
HU DABU / CO BB / SUN FAN.

[ Can you follow it? I'll try to give some explanations later on. ]

to your health
UHer

monkeys from the South Sea
MB AUSU

a Spaniard which is on a big black horse
S OHIBAC

Pa, you've got the most sense for an old buzzard.
P, GU SO erBOB.

I brought you back a present from China.
ABUBAI P NUC.

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Grammar notes:

DB
dog

DABU
DOG-and-DOG-two

S
sea

AUSU
south-SEA-from

HB
horse
[ So H is phonetic, from English horse, and then the B is for English "beast, animal" and is semantic. ]

OHIBAC
on-HORSE-big-HORSE-black-which

B
bring

ABUBAI
back-BRING-you-BRING-i

[ To accommodate more vowel affixes, the verb root is reduplicated. ]

N
China

NUC
CHINA-from-which


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Postface:

Years and years ago, I once did a conlang that was all infixes between a CV...CV root or such. This one reminds me of that and root and pattern morphology.

The last few years, I've been making a lot of conlangs that resemble Classical Chinese and Mandarin Chinese but without tones written. These are nice because I've been working with the world's largest words in the 1600s Massachusett language (like a Tamil or some Dravidian language, or like Filipino), made longer by the clunky 1600s Anglophone orthography.

This one's a bit of a challenge because it relies on morphological chains so heavily. We'll see if I ever use these ideas again or make one like it. It's a fun conlang because the words are just so very small. The great pain and deterrent of 1600s Massachusett is that when you translate into it, you have to leave room for the gigantic words and space out the English words that they'll translate quite a bit. This conlang especially is the antithesis of that.

On the other hand, the Chinese conlangs allow for all sorts of fun puns with English and to test my memory of Chinese. Which I need quite a bit, I've been studying Classical Chinese a ton the past 5 years and even making significant progress toward some fluency in reading Mandarin Chinese, which would help my research into comparative logographic writing systems quite a bit indeed. Hmm.

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I think my conlangs and presentations are great, and a good fit for what time I have available, so please don't be too negative or I will block you. I will answer clarifying questions. Maybe.

If you just want to tell me how great of an idea it is, that might be the best way to avoid me blocking you, at this point. It takes so much time to type this stuff up and I've already got enough up on my websites and posted to this new Zompist Bboard and old Zompist Bboard to show that I know what I'm doing.

https://anylanguageatall411.blogspot.co ... w=flipcard

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Some pictures to go along with the conlang:

This is from the bear vs hunting dogs scene from "The Yearling", 1940s pioneer film.


"monkeys from the South Sea"
This is the monkey from the 1990s pirate film "Cutthroat Island".


Petroglyph of a Spaniards or conquistadors on horses.
[/url]

https://www.pinterest.com/pin/483996291 ... login=true

[bradrn]

This looks really interesting, and I’m really looking forward to seeing how this develops further! However, I am a bit confused about one thing: what exactly do you mean by ‘morphological chains’? You do give some examples of them, but to me your examples just look like usual slot-based morphological templates, whereas I assume that a ‘morphological chain’ is supposed to be something different to that. Just for the record, I’m not criticising this post in any way, shape or form; I actually found it really interesting, and would just like some clarification on this one point.

[Bob]

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I just typed it up using the best of the terminology that I can remember. A verb chain is a verb chain, and a noun chain is a noun chain, so I maybe made up a term "morphological chain" to refer to either a verb chain or a noun chain. Usually one ever reads of a "verb chain" which is some horribly complex configuration that a minority of languages have, wherein a verb can take many prefixes and suffixes, in a specific order, most of which you never or rarely even see. To me, Sumerian is a good example of this. Egyptian Hieroglyphic, not so much. 1600s Massachusett, I think so, but not as much as Sumerian. Classical Nahuatl (Classical Aztec) is a good example but I haven't worked with it much. Hiligaynon (9 million people, closely related to Filipino) has quite a complex verb chain but I rarely actually work with it.

This is probably going to be as developed as it gets. I usually don't do much more with my own conlangs than this. Several years ago, I spent a lot of time on a PIE based conlang that used the American Heritage Dictionary PIE roots a lot. Other than that, I only spend a lot of time on "famous conlangs" from movies, books, and tv. In part, to make a stand for science and progress. People laugh at languages like Klingon but the joke is on them because behind Klingon is the grammar of every language, and in particular minority languages like Mohawk which are nothing at which to laugh. People enjoy drinking their own poison, so I'm glad to look the fool in the eyes of fools.

"Exotic grammar" and "language science" is crucial and important and most people don't realize it. I have a moral obligation as a scientist to try to reach people, even if it gets me tomatoes thrown at me. My work with "famous conlangs" and "conlangs" is all part of that, me being able to say I did my part and come to terms with the price that must be paid for ignorance.

My work on especially Pakuni but also Atlantean make a subtle point about the importance of science and education. If few are paying attention, well, hopefully the future will be the brighter as a result. And a few people appreciate what I do. Maybe.

[KathTheDragon]

C CLEAR
M MOUTH
R ORNAMENT
N NUMBER
N NATURE
B BEAST, ANIMAL

If these are meant to provide further semantic information, shouldn't "number" and "nature" be different consonants?

[bradrn]

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I just typed it up using the best of the terminology that I can remember. A verb chain is a verb chain, and a noun chain is a noun chain, so I maybe made up a term "morphological chain" to refer to either a verb chain or a noun chain. Usually one ever reads of a "verb chain" which is some horribly complex configuration that a minority of languages have, wherein a verb can take many prefixes and suffixes, in a specific order, most of which you never or rarely even see. To me, Sumerian is a good example of this. Egyptian Hieroglyphic, not so much. 1600s Massachusett, I think so, but not as much as Sumerian. Classical Nahuatl (Classical Aztec) is a good example but I haven't worked with it much. Hiligaynon (9 million people, closely related to Filipino) has quite a complex verb chain but I rarely actually work with it.

Ah, right. So by ‘morphological chain’, you’re just referring to the situation in which many different affixes can attach to a root word? That makes sense, although I’ve never heard of the term ‘morphological chain’ being used for that; I’ve only ever heard it being called ‘agglutination’ (or ‘polysynthesis’ if the system of affixes is complex enough). But I’m not convinced that this is as rare as you said it is; I can think of many different language families with this sort of ‘verb chain’ construction. (e.g. Bantu, Algonquian, Na-Dene, Turkic, NW Caucasian, Salishan, Mayan, Dravidian…)

[Bob]

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OHIBAC
on-HORSE-big-HORSE-black-which

HB
horse

O-
on-

I
-big-

-A
black

-C
which

Different sorts of affixes fit in different slots in the morphological template. There's some hierarchy to them, though, so they move around based on that. The first position is

ROOT1-between.root(-ROOT1)

And then it goes from there.

Maybe:

slot.2-ROOT-slot.1 ((-ROOT)-slot.3) (-ROOT.REDUPLICATED-slot.4)

[Bob]

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If these are meant to provide further semantic information, shouldn't "number" and "nature" be different consonants?

No, one of the premises of the language is that it's all differentiated already but you just can't see it. This is just an easy way to write it. It's like writing Mandarin or especially Classical Chinese without tones, or Sumerian without the orthographic numbers provided for it by modern transliteration: It's easier to write that way but there's some ambiguity that comes about as a result. Or Biblical Hebrew written without any vowels at all. It used to be a spoken language so they could just figure it out. Plus I think it had some implied vowel letters, the matres lexiones perhaps they are called.

If you read the whole post, it's explained. I realize it's a long post and too much to read at once, though. Shrug. But I've done pioneering research on languages for 15 years and languages and writing systems are like that, and science: It's always some problem that arises and you can never quite overcome it.

The language science of logographic writing systems is actually quite alien to most linguistics (I like to call it language science) and to most of what anyone talks about here on the new or old Zompist Bboard. Most logographic writing systems are epigraphic and hardly have anything to say at all. The complexity is in the words and in the writing system and what all it does and why. Even the big corpus logographic writing systems, like Egyptian Hieroglyphic or Classical Chinese, almost everything about the language is overshadowed by the writing system. Which, if you study it enough, makes a whole lot more sense than most people could ever imagine.

But the reason nobody has studied all the logographic writing systems in depth yet is more or less that everyone's hooked on the alphabet and the system is not set up to support comparative logographic writing system scientists. And as a result, people are really missing out.

Everything has its limitations.

[Bob]

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If these are meant to provide further semantic information, shouldn't "number" and "nature" be different consonants?

Actually, I think the N NUMBER is a hold-over from an earlier conlang that I replaced and wrote over. Originally everything was consonants but then I made all non- noun and verbs into vowels so I could affix them all over the place.

But it would be funny if N was for Number and N was for Nature. But none of it is supposed to be distinct from eachother anyway. And real-life languages and etymology is like that, especially for someone who's more of a reader than an exact etymology creator, like me.

[bradrn]

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If these are meant to provide further semantic information, shouldn't "number" and "nature" be different consonants?

No, one of the premises of the language is that it's all differentiated already but you just can't see it. This is just an easy way to write it. It's like writing Mandarin or especially Classical Chinese without tones, or Sumerian without the orthographic numbers provided for it by modern transliteration: It's easier to write that way but there's some ambiguity that comes about as a result. Or Biblical Hebrew written without any vowels at all. It used to be a spoken language so they could just figure it out. Plus I think it had some implied vowel letters, the matres lexiones perhaps they are called.

So: if there is an unwritten difference between those two consonants, then what is the phonetic nature of that difference?

If you read the whole post, it's explained. I realize it's a long post and too much to read at once, though. Shrug.

I wouldn’t agree; I certainly found it short enough to read at once.

The language science of logographic writing systems is actually quite alien to most linguistics (I like to call it language science) and to most of what anyone talks about here on the new or old Zompist Bboard. … But the reason nobody has studied all the logographic writing systems in depth yet is more or less that everyone's hooked on the alphabet and the system is not set up to support comparative logographic writing system scientists. And as a result, people are really missing out.

I know that zompist (the founder of this board) was interested enough in logographic scripts spend a whole chapter talking about them in his book Advanced Language Construction, and I can think of at least one highly-developed logographic con-script (the Caber logographs) which was published on this board. So I wouldn’t agree that we’re ‘hooked on the alphabet’ — we talk about logographic scripts fairly regularly here.

[bradrn]

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OHIBAC
on-HORSE-big-HORSE-black-which

Could you give an English translation please? I can figure out that this is something like ‘on a big black horse’, but I’m not sure what grammatical category -C (glossed as ‘which’) is supposed to represent.

Different sorts of affixes fit in different slots in the morphological template. There's some hierarchy to them, though, so they move around based on that. The first position is

ROOT1-between.root(-ROOT1)

And then it goes from there.

Maybe:

slot.2-ROOT-slot.1 ((-ROOT)-slot.3) (-ROOT.REDUPLICATED-slot.4)

Actually, the thing I find most interesting about this is the extensive nonconcatenative morphology — verbal slot/template systems aren’t that rare, but extensively nonconcatenative ones are.

[Bob]

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It's in the first post:

a Spaniard which is on a big black horse
S OHIBAC

S
a Spaniard

OHIBAC
which is on a big black horse

O-
on-

HB
horse

-I-
-big-

-A
-black

-C
which is

[bradrn]

...

It's in the first post:

a Spaniard which is on a big black horse
S OHIBAC

S
a Spaniard

OHIBAC
which is on a big black horse

O-
on-

HB
horse

-I-
-big-

-A
-black

-C
which is

That would make -C a relativiser then — thanks for explaining! I must have missed that in the first post.

(As it turns out, I did something very similar in one of my own conlangs: e.g. sampeng-em lee yaa-di=nem home-GEN in 3s-is=REL ‘which is at home’.)

[Bob]

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I know that zompist (the founder of this board) was interested enough in logographic scripts spend a whole chapter talking about them in his book Advanced Language Construction, and I can think of at least one highly-developed logographic con-script (the Caber logographs) which was published on this board. So I wouldn’t agree that we’re ‘hooked on the alphabet’ — we talk about logographic scripts fairly regularly here.

I'm probably the most advanced scientist of logographic writing systems to ever exist. So as bad as my conlangs probably look to most people on this group, logographic conscripts look far worse to me. If I wanted to tear them apart, I could, but there wouldn't be much point except for me to wear the jerk badge.

There's a million and one little details to logographic writing systems which I hope to put into a book or two by the end of my life. But can be found discussed nowhere else.

I've been posting my conlangs on here and making clear what I research and my success with it. And then I don't have the patience anymore to be given that sort of hassle. Doing what I've done has been very demanding.

[Bob]

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Actually, the thing I find most interesting about this is the extensive nonconcatenative morphology — verbal slot/template systems aren’t that rare, but extensively nonconcatenative ones are.

"In" takes Genitive, huh? That's unusual.

I'm not sure if it's nonconcatenative morphology. I prefer root and pattern morphology as a term. Nonconcatenative is a monstrous word for something that's already very complicated. Also, despite it being on Wikipedia, it doesn't strike me as common in the academic literature. Unless there's been some sort of recent deterioration making this eye-sore a common menace. Why don't they just call it supercacoxylophonious morphology? I tell you, 1/2 of what these modern academics do is make up new terms that are far worse than the old ones, and the other 1/2 of how they waste their time is not something I'm going to discuss here.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonconcat ... uentially.

If a root is HB "horse", big -I- is an infix in it, making HIB but then otherwise everything is affixes unless the vowels run out of consonants to attach to, then one of the consonants of the root word reduplicates to supply the need.

I've thought about doing conlangs with huge verb chains but if I did, I'd just put the elements in some random order for the most part and then step back and feel accomplished.

If I ever did a Biblical Hebrew conlang, I don't think I'd even trouble myself beyond a few examples to show that many words are all derived from the same triconsonantal roots. I might do it one more time in my life: I study Biblical Hebrew etymology a lot and am probably sufficiently sick of all that by now. It's more of something an amateur or beginner would do: Here's my own version of Biblical Hebrew and or Arabic!

Then again, I did the same thing to Thai and Vietnamese about a month or two ago. So I'm not thinking this through enough. Hmmm.

[Bob]

Here's the problem with this conlang:

to your health
UHer

( to-HEALTH-your )

your-HEALTH-to : This would be too much like Latin, you see. Or Okrand Atlantean, a conlang. 1600s Massachusett has your-HEALTH also, and even has a -LOCATIVE word-final case ending.

I went with the Biblical Hebrew and Egyptian Hieroglyphic to-HEALTH-your but it's annoying that the to- is before the noun like English to is before the noun but not an affix but a particle or preposition or whatever.

But it has to be this way because it's a very minimal conlang and the root is consonants and the affixes are non-A vowels and diphthongs.

HEALTH-your-HEALTH-to : That would be interesting. It's less minimal, though. Hmph.

[bradrn]

I'm probably the most advanced scientist of logographic writing systems to ever exist.

I’ve tried as best as I can to avoid critiquing your writing style in my last few replies, but a quick word of advice: maybe try to avoid saying stuff like this? Even if it may be true, this sort of bragging doesn’t give a terribly nice impression. (I’m willing to ignore it, but other people might find it a bit off-putting.)

So as bad as my conlangs probably look to most people on this group, logographic conscripts look far worse to me. If I wanted to tear them apart, I could, but there wouldn't be much point except for me to wear the jerk badge.

People are forever critiquing each others’ conlangs and conscripts here — that’s the whole reason the ZBB exists! If you reply to someone’s post with some well-thought-out constructive criticism on some areas where they could be more realistic, and you don’t do it in a nasty way, I certainly wouldn’t think of you as a jerk. (Of course, other people might have different views on this — but I strongly suspect that most others here would think much the same way.)

I'm not sure if it's nonconcatenative morphology. I prefer root and pattern morphology as a term. Nonconcatenative is a monstrous word for something that's already very complicated. Also, despite it being on Wikipedia, it doesn't strike me as common in the academic literature. Unless there's been some sort of recent deterioration making this eye-sore a common menace. Why don't they just call it supercacoxylophonious morphology? I tell you, 1/2 of what these modern academics do is make up new terms that are far worse than the old ones, and the other 1/2 of how they waste their time is not something I'm going to discuss here.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonconcat ... uentially.

I dunno, I’ve seen ‘nonconcatenative’ used reasonably often as a term. But it’s not quite synonymous with ‘root and pattern morphology’ — it generally refers to any form of morphology which doesn’t just involve concatenation. So infixing, ablaut, umlaut, consonant gradation/mutation, triconsonantal templates, tone alternation etc. are all considered forms of nonconcatenative morphology. I find it particularly useful when talking about conlangs, as it’s so common for conlangs to avoid any sort of nonconcatenative morphology.

[KathTheDragon]

I think it's pretty easy to agree that Bob's opinions on terminology aren't worth the electricity used to display them.

[bradrn]

I think it's pretty easy to agree that Bob's opinions on terminology aren't worth the electricity used to display them.

Sure, maybe that’s true in some other cases, but what’s so bad about disliking ‘nonconcatenative’? (For comparison, I greatly dislike ‘adverb’, which surely is no less of a controversial view.)

[KathTheDragon]

Well, adverbs in English aren't really ad-verbal the way they are in Latin (even once you tease out the multiple word classes lumped in there), so it's just a bad word to use for the English word class.

[bradrn]

Well, adverbs in English aren't really ad-verbal the way they are in Latin (even once you tease out the multiple word classes lumped in there), so it's just a bad word to use for the English word class.

Yes, that’s my reasoning exactly.