Name That Language!

[Moose-tache]

Oh, I understood -- it's just that if it were the language I've convinced myself it is, the bulk of scholarship on it is in Russian AFAIK, so I will wallow in self-doubt and self-recrimination until I can come up with a more subtle sidelong question

Well shoot, now you've got me doubting myself. I am by no means an expert in the language I presented. It is possible I am mistaken, but I'm going by the scant scholarly information I have.

[fusijui]

I have a horror of co-dependent relationships; let's just let the game ride

[Moose-tache]

Are all the phonemes present in the sample? Not counting the ones occurring only in loanwords.

Yes.
A caveat here: Wikipedia claims there is an additional vowel that does not appear in the scholarly works I have access to. I suspect it may be an allophone mislabeled as a phoneme. There is a one-to-one ratio of letters to phonemes, but as I said before, this is the transcription used by a linguist, not necessarily how this language would be written in the wild, if it is written. EDIT: I just noticed, there is a phoneme that is not in this sample, but I can't find a single example of its use anywhere, so I think it must be extremely marginal, or only in loanwords. Or another mislabeled allophone. In any case, the sample definitely gives you all the significant phonemes.

And since we're on a new page, here is the sample again:

tawa edeni goropci teeluŋu asimuna nari purettei beiŋdexenindee. beiŋdegecci cii biccinindee. xaiddee böyömböni mastaa baramba waaganinda. andailli nari nimerixenindee. töyöbujji gɛɛda waŋgaiwa waaxanindaa. bargixanindaa. bargigacci töyöxönindee. mittei dullee ejjɛɛ böörö uccinindee. tawatakki dullee bööru. esiwi böörö uccinindee. meene depciwi. munalisiwi. tari nari caa dolbonnɛɛ cadu aundaxanindaa. gɛɛda mama unjiweni tolcicixanin. aa. xaiwaddaa gapɛɛddaa xaiwaddaa waapɛɛddaa mittei eccɛɛli böörö. xumanami elee bujiwi. cimanaa sindu gese ŋennɛɛlemi. isumi itetteerii. eri duxu geem taullillaa. sɛɛltee punektee omi taullillaa unjiweni tolcicixanindaa tari nari. cimanaani cimai teegecci ŋenexenindee. gɛɛdara aundagacci isuxanindaa. tededdee tari duxu geem anaanda. laxee isuwacci itexenindee. sɛɛltee punektee omi geem ree tauluxanindaa. cikee biccinde goropci teeluŋu.

[bradrn]

Oh, I understood -- it's just that if it were the language I've convinced myself it is, the bulk of scholarship on it is in Russian AFAIK, so I will wallow in self-doubt and self-recrimination until I can come up with a more subtle sidelong question

Well shoot, now you've got me doubting myself. I am by no means an expert in the language I presented. It is possible I am mistaken, but I'm going by the scant scholarly information I have.

Glottolog keeps a very convenient list of all (or at least most of) the major literature on each language it lists. You could use that to check if there’s anything on this language in Russian.

[Moose-tache]

Oh, I understood -- it's just that if it were the language I've convinced myself it is, the bulk of scholarship on it is in Russian AFAIK, so I will wallow in self-doubt and self-recrimination until I can come up with a more subtle sidelong question

Well shoot, now you've got me doubting myself. I am by no means an expert in the language I presented. It is possible I am mistaken, but I'm going by the scant scholarly information I have.

Glottolog keeps a very convenient list of all (or at least most of) the major literature on each language it lists. You could use that to check if there’s anything on this language in Russian.

OK. According to Glottolang, it does seem that Russians are doing more than half of the research on this language. However, there are many non-Russian sources, and the citations in the literature I have are split between Russian and non-Russian sources. So I will provide an amended answer to the question:

Is the scholarly literature on this language mainly in Russian?

Yes, but just barely.

[bradrn]

Is it spoken in the European part of Russia?

[Vilike]

Is the verbal negation marker a conjugated auxiliary?

[Moose-tache]

Is it spoken in the European part of Russia?

No.

[Moose-tache]

Is the verbal negation marker a conjugated auxiliary?

Yes.

[fusijui]

Glottolog is a pretty poor resource for the languages I've worked on, FWIW. It comes with the authoritativeness of being online, though.

OK, here's a question: Are its speakers (in the 'ethnographic present') found wedged in between two different language isolates?

[Zju]

Okay, I'm pretty confident that now I've got it. In hindsight <ci>, in the context of everything else, should have been a dead giveaway.

Is the language spoken in the present?
Has the language given rise to any other language or languages?

[Moose-tache]

OK, here's a question: Are its speakers (in the 'ethnographic present') found wedged in between two different language isolates?

I don't know about "wedged," but yes there are two different isolates in the vicinity, roughly in opposite directions.

[Moose-tache]

Is the language spoken in the present?
Has the language given rise to any other language or languages?

Yes, just barely.
No, I don't think so.

Since everyone who is actively participating has made their guess, we may be at a stand-still unless some new players arrive. If no new players show any interest in a day or so, I think we may need to let players take a second guess. You've all asked some wonderful questions, and I think we're pretty close to cracking it! We'll wait and see if any other users can swoop in and take advantage of your hard work.

[Zju]

Back to the drawing board, I guess. Is it spoken in the Ural mountains?

(Actually, if questions about genealogical affinity are prohibited, how come questions about geographic placement aren't?)

[Moose-tache]

Back to the drawing board, I guess. Is it spoken in the Ural mountains?

No. I think geographical questions are... imperfect, but at least it takes way more thought to ask a geographical question than a genealogical question. If we're just asking regions of Russia from left to right, then yeah, that's pretty stupid. But there is definitely a smart way to do it. Also, don't fool yourself into thinking that knowing the region will tell you the sub-family.

[cedh]

I'll have a guess. Ulta?

[Vilike]

I cannot advance much further without googling. I'll throw my piece: Evenki?

[Moose-tache]

I'll have a guess. Ulta?

Yes!
Uilta/Ulta, also known as Orok, is a Tungusic language spoken on Sakhalin island. The Tungusic languages are pretty hard to distinguish from Uralic unless you know what to look for, but there are differences. Some clues that it isn't another Tungusic language include lack of /y/ and palatals almost exclusively before front vowels. For the curious, the reason I was confused about the scholarship is because many of the early and recent scholars on Uilta were/are Japanese.

Excellent work, everyone! cedh, do you want to present a language?

[bradrn]

OK, now that this initial round is over, a few reflections on how it went:

• From what I can see, everyone seems to be in agreement that these new rules are more fun than the old ones, or at least more engaging.
• Perhaps because of this, we seem to have several more active participants here — always a good thing!
• As we are no longer allowed to ask about genealogical affiliation, we’re starting to see a lot more interesting questions than before, a similarly excellent development.
• On the other hand, we can no longer use subgroupings to narrow down the language, so instead we are starting to see guesses being refined by the use of more and more baroque questions as the game progresses. This led to questions which are unanswerable — or worse, wrongly-answered — which is certainly not a good thing. (Say what you like about ‘is it X’, such questions are at least easy to answer!)
• Another problem is that we’re allocated only one guess each, so we rapidly ran out of people who could guess the language. If cedh hadn’t come in and guessed Ulta at the last minute, we probably would never have found it without having to get another guess each!

And some miscellaneous thoughts on how I think we should run this game in the future:

• I think it should be stated that I see the primary aim of this game to be about having fun. In particular, I think this should be achieved by tryING to make the game go as quickly as possible, so we can prevent rounds from dragging on forever and let everyone have a turn at both guessing and presenting a language.
• To that end, I think this game would run quite a bit faster if we were to allow people to guess language families and subgroupings. (I think a simple ‘is it Uralic?’ would have done wonders for guessing Moose-tache’s language.)
• Also, I think we should give people more guesses — as I said above, we very nearly did that anyway.
• A good compromise might be to give people 5 or so guesses (possibly more), but then count both languages and families as taking up one guess each. That way we still encourage more interesting questions and stop rounds from going too long, but also allow people to guess families if they’re confident.
• Perhaps, if everyone still runs out of guesses, we could then say that the winner is the person who guessed closest to the correct answer. (I happen to really like this approach, as I mentioned earlier… the really soul-sucking part of the old game, I think, was when we had to find the exact language within Chadic or Sino-Tibetan or whatnot. This way, we could just guess ‘Biu-Mandara’ etc., and be confident that this is good enough if no-one else guesses any closer.)
• If we’re really keen on making each round as quick as possible, we might even institute a time limit, something like ‘language must be guessed within 2 pages, else use the closest guess’.

Finally: if we all agree on a permanent rule change, could we make a new thread please? (Call it ‘Name That Language! v2.0’ or something.) I just think that that would work better than having a rule change on page 35 of a pre-existing thread…

[cedh]

I'll have a guess. Ulta?

Yes!
Uilta/Ulta, also known as Orok, is a Tungusic language spoken on Sakhalin island. The Tungusic languages are pretty hard to distinguish from Uralic unless you know what to look for, but there are differences. Some clues that it isn't another Tungusic language include lack of /y/ and palatals almost exclusively before front vowels. For the curious, the reason I was confused about the scholarship is because many of the early and recent scholars on Uilta were/are Japanese.

Excellent work, everyone! cedh, do you want to present a language?

Yay! Like many others, my first guess was that this would be an Uralic language, probably Khanty or Mansi. But those are not spoken in the vicinity of two different language isolates. My next thought was Kolyma Yukaghir, but there "the region won't help finding the subfamily" wouldn't make sense, and it also doesn't use an auxiliary verb for negation. So I decided that it must be a language from another family in eastern Siberia, most likely Tungusic. The vowel inventories of Even and Evenki (my first options here because of the mention of reindeer herding) didn't quite fit though, and the consonant inventory of Nanai didn't quite fit either. Udihe and Ulta both have a compatible phonology - and the wikipedia page for the latter contains the word goropci 'old', which is also present in the sample text.

And yes, I'm going to present a language later today. I'm also going to comment on bradrn's reflections; it might be a good idea to discuss some of that before the start of the next round.