Yeah. I started working on the Foundation series, where these where I imagine supposed to be worn out English, but it's funny how much it matches a lot of SF. (I tried it on names from Iain Banks' Culture series, and it fits a lot of names!)quinterbeck wrote: ↑Fri Jan 15, 2021 12:57 pm
I love this aesthetic.
The sample has a surprising number of English words in it (I count 21 out of 150)
Kudos! Very cool.Yalensky wrote: ↑Thu Dec 31, 2020 10:21 pm Congrats to the Board Lord for receiving David J. Peterson's Smiley Award. A very nice write-up of Verdurian and Zompist's overall influence on conlanging.
Bad advertisement; should've listed some sample features.dɮ the phoneme wrote: ↑Sun Feb 07, 2021 4:36 pmI'm beginning to feel that all my conlangs are ripoffs of Burushaski.
Well, not really, but Burushaski does contain a really implausibly high number of my favorite features. Honestly I'm surprised it doesn't get more discussion here, it's exactly the sort of language (isolate, typologically unusual, etc.) I'd assume would generate a lot of interest from conlangers.
| _vowel | _glide | |
| i_ | n | d |
| u_ | m | g |
| orthographic | IPA | |
| a | aa | ɑː |
| e | ea | ɛ͡ə |
| o | oa | ɔ͡ə |
Yeah, you don't gloss it. It's like you said non-morphemic and doesn't have any meaning, it's just allophony or sandhi etc.quinterbeck wrote: ↑Sat Mar 27, 2021 1:38 pm Are there any conventions for glossing intruding non-morphemic material
Yes, you just put E or EPEN(TH) to indicate an epenthetic "morpheme"quinterbeck wrote: ↑Sat Mar 27, 2021 1:38 pm Are there any conventions for glossing intruding non-morphemic material? I looked through the Leipzig rules but didn't find anything relevant. I don't how prevalent such a process is in natlangs (or even if it's an acceptable analytical approach).
Sometimes it's important to indicate epenthesis so people don't get confused about the random insertion of a phoneme and/or erroneously think the epenthetic morpheme is part of this or that actual morpheme.jal wrote:Yeah, you don't gloss it. It's like you said non-morphemic and doesn't have any meaning, it's just allophony or sandhi etc.
Aha! Thanks, avoiding confusion was exactly my concernAhzoh wrote: ↑Sat Mar 27, 2021 9:56 pm Yes, you just put E or EPEN(TH) to indicate an epenthetic "morpheme"
Sometimes it's important to indicate epenthesis so people don't get confused about the random insertion of a phoneme and/or erroneously think the epenthetic morpheme is part of this or that actual morpheme.jal wrote:Yeah, you don't gloss it. It's like you said non-morphemic and doesn't have any meaning, it's just allophony or sandhi etc.
Been there, done that… you’re hardly alone!
You may be interested to know that there is a rather strong set of statistical universals — covered quite well in Stassen’s article on Black and white Languages — depending in part on whether adjectives are nouny or verby. For instance, nouny adjectives correlate with VO word order, non-tensedness and casedness, while verby adjectives correlate with OV word order, tensedness and non-casedness. You may find this helps somewhat to make a decision.It is a rather verb-heavy language, so I'm not sure whether my adjectives should behave more noun-like (participles) or more verb-like (verb with relative suffix).
I sometimes end up with this problem (mostly when trying to come up with numbers), so I’d also like to know what other people have to say about this.I also worry about words being too "long" for the commonness or simpleness of the information conveyed (e.g. a 4- or 5-syllable word meaning "red"). I don't wanna pull a Navajo where some nouns are basically a dictionary definition.
Perhaps try deriving them diachronically if you aren’t already? (If you do derive them diachronically, then copying Semitic is absolutely fine, since you’ve justified it as a coincidence.)I also feel like I've limited myself because it's hard to come up with affixes because they either accidentally copy Semitic or they don't harmonize well with other consonants. I also feel like choosing against subject prefixes has limited me somewhat as well (because my lang is tricon and I don't wanna copy Semitic).
The distant ancestor of Vrkhazhian started off as a head-initial VSO language, but Vrkhazhian has become strongly SOV and displays some elements of other head-final properties (somehow), like being primarily postpositional. I do imagine that its primary distinctions, the realis and irrealis mood, have developed into non-future and future and whatever cases it may have had has collapsed into a mere Nominative-Oblique system and it has obivation markers on the verb.bradrn wrote: ↑Tue Mar 30, 2021 3:59 am You may be interested to know that there is a rather strong set of statistical universals — covered quite well in Stassen’s article on Black and white Languages — depending in part on whether adjectives are nouny or verby. For instance, nouny adjectives correlate with VO word order, non-tensedness and casedness, while verby adjectives correlate with OV word order, tensedness and non-casedness. You may find this helps somewhat to make a decision.
I do some level of diachronics but not too far because that's the path toward frustration and dissatisfaction if you're not a diachronics wizard. That's another source of frustration. No matter how many books of diachronic developments in various languages I read I can never think of them myself and the words will barely look like they changed or shorten. Or they will break stuff and lay waste to my paradigms undesirably.Perhaps try deriving them diachronically if you aren’t already? (If you do derive them diachronically, then copying Semitic is absolutely fine, since you’ve justified it as a coincidence.)
I honestly have no idea what you mean by this paragraph. Why would you need to ‘derive’ adjectives from something else?Ahzoh wrote: ↑Tue Mar 30, 2021 4:36 am I got my verbs down pat and even a means of turning nouns into verbs by way of a causative lexical derivation. Still I'm uncertain where to derive adjectives. The relativizer suffix is a good way but that should be active in meaning but I also want passive adjectives but I have no passive voice.
I also had the same problem a while ago. What fixed it was reading more about diachronics — not general books about historical linguistics, that is, but about the specific sound changes which specific languages have gone through. I’d recommend Blust’s The Austronesian languages as a starting point; it has a nice chapter (Chapter 9) about the sorts of sound changes found in Austronesian. In recent days, I also found it useful to participate in the Phrase evolution game — my suggestions were pretty horrible at first, but even after just a week I feel a lot more confident now. It’s particularly helpful to look at the sort of changes other people have been doing.I do some level of diachronics but not too far because that's the path toward frustration and dissatisfaction if you're not a diachronics wizard. That's another source of frustration. No matter how many books of diachronic developments in various languages I read I can never think of them myself and the words will barely look like they changed or shorten. Or they will break stuff and lay waste to my paradigms undesirably.Perhaps try deriving them diachronically if you aren’t already? (If you do derive them diachronically, then copying Semitic is absolutely fine, since you’ve justified it as a coincidence.)
There are very few adjectives that just exist and they're usually only interrogatives, demonstratives, or numbers. The rest have to be derived, either from nouns or verbs. That's my entire problem, I don't know what the "pattern" should look like or if it's just verb stem + gender-case ending (which would work better in a lang where adjectives can behave like nouns and vice-versa)
Oh no, I wasn't talking about generalist books, but books of specific languages, like Akkadian and Tigre, and some other languages of other families.I also had the same problem a while ago. What fixed it was reading more about diachronics — not general books about historical linguistics, that is, but about the specific sound changes which specific languages have gone through.
Don't take this the wrong way, but I'm far from a noob regarding triliteral systems or the languages's pervasive vowel mutations and analogizing, and also their limitations. In fact, that book is quite old hat to me now.(Also, I should point out that for triliteral systems, you want to start with a normal system and ‘lay waste’ to it, as you say. Past that point, you can maintain regularity even with massive sound changes, since analogy immediately restores any paradigms which might have been broken. Deutscher’s The Unfolding of Language has a nice explanation if you want one.)
Then mention it once, and gloss without the inserted phones. Having it in each and every gloss would become bothersome quickly.
