Conlang Random Thread

[Nortaneous]

But I just don't have the imagination to turn something like kurpaneddakazen "rostrum, dias" or dapsenadkazen "registry" into something shorter.

how do natlangs (english, russian, etc.) make things ("gasoline", "omnibus", "agriculture", "central intelligence agency", "всесоюзный ленинский коммунистический союз молодёжи", etc.) shorter

[bradrn]

I honestly have no idea what you mean by this paragraph. Why would you need to ‘derive’ adjectives from something else?

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)

This is actually a fairly common situation — you have a small (and presumably closed) class of adjectives, but a large subclass of adjective-y things. So you need a way of distinguishing three things: nouns, verbs, and a small class of adjectives. Most of the words that would be ‘adjectives’ in another language will then end up being pushed into another word class — I’ll call such words ‘non-adjectives’ for convenience. One thing that’s worth noting here is that they’ll often end up as opposite word classes: either your closed adjective class will be verby, and the rest of the ‘adjectives’ will end up as nouns, or the closed class will be nouny, and the other ‘adjectives’ will end up as verbs. So for instance, using ‘big’ as a paradigmatic example of an adjective and ‘married’ as a paradigmatic example of a non-adjective, predication will look something like this:

(nouns / nouny adjectives / verby non-adjectives / verbs)
3s COP person / 3s COP big / 3s married / 3s walk

(nouns / nouny non-adjectives / verby adjectives / verbs)
3s COP person / 3s COP married / 3s big / 3s walk

But note that just going from the above examples, there’s no reason to differentiate ‘nouny adjectives’ from regular nouns, or ‘verby adjectives’ from regular verbs. If you want to differentiate a separate closed class of adjectives, you’ll need some way of making them behave differently from nouns (if they’re nouny) or from verbs (if they’re verby). There’s a couple of patterns which come up here:

1. The simplest option is probably to just say that adjectives are the only word class allowed to directly modify nouns — nominal modifiers must use some sort of linking element (a genitive or classifier, say), and verbal modifiers must use a relative clause.
2. Relatedly, you can say that only the ‘wrong’ word class is allowed to directly modify nouns. So if you have nouny adjectives, for instance, then you can say that although adjectives behave like nouns with respect to predication, only verbs and adjectives can directly modify a noun.
3. In languages with genders, one common option for nouny adjectives is to have them agree in gender with the head, while regular nouns have a fixed gender.
4. A reasonably common option is to say that although adjectives may act like nouns or verbs most of the time, they can’t act as paradigmatic members of the class. e.g. in English, adjectives act almost exactly like nouns, except they can’t head most noun phrases. In a language with verby adjectives, you might say they can’t take TAM markers or can’t be serialised or similar.

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.

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.

Ah, OK, in that case I can’t really help any further.

(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.)

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.

Oh, sorry! I am aware that you and Vrkhazian (IIRC) have been around here a while; I just thought it was worth a mention.

There's just no way I can simulate thousands of years of changes without losing my mind or being burnt out. I do have a general idea of how this or that thing would operate or turn into something else. But I just don't have the imagination to turn something like kurpaneddakazen "rostrum, dias" or dapsenadkazen "registry" into something shorter.

Why would you need to? Those words sound fine to me for such complex concepts. I imagine they’d get abbreviated if they were in regular use: cf taximeter-cabriolet → taxicab → taxi (or cab), autobus → bus. If you wanted to do it via regular sound change, you could look into pervasive syncope à la Nishnaabemwin: kurpaneddakazen → kurpneddkazen, dapsenadkazen → dpsendkazen. (I must share your lack of imagination, because I can’t think of any more sensible way to do it either.)

[Kuchigakatai]

Japanese has a penchant for pervasively, even perversely, abbreviating common English borrowings down to three or four morae. Snowboard(ing) becoming sunobo (from sunooboodo), smartphone > sumaho (from sumaatohon), American football > amefuto (from amerika no futtobaaru).

[dɮ the phoneme]

Japanese has a penchant for pervasively, even perversely, abbreviating common English borrowings down to three or four morae. Snowboard(ing) becoming sunobo (from sunooboodo), smartphone > sumaho (from sumaatohon), American football > amefuto (from amerika no futtobaaru).

This is also done with Sino-Japanese vocabulary, which is, while technically "borrowed" in a historical sense, completely nativized at this point. So it doesn't just happen with loans.

[Ahzoh]

Japanese has a penchant for pervasively, even perversely, abbreviating common English borrowings down to three or four morae. Snowboard(ing) becoming sunobo (from sunooboodo), smartphone > sumaho (from sumaatohon), American football > amefuto (from amerika no futtobaaru).

But how do they even decide what parts of the word or phrase to clip? Besides, clipping doesn’t seem that common a sound change, especially when I look at Indo-European and Semitic developments. It's usually elision or syncope here or there.

[Ahzoh]

Unrelatedly, I'm wondering if, through deep time, numbers could end up taking a general form like this:

CiCC-
CiCC-
CaCáC-
CaCáC-

CuCC-
CuCC-
CaCáC-
CaCáC-

CaCC-
CaCC-
CaCáC-
CaCáC-

It's a base-12 number system, perhaps with a subbase of 4

Actually it would be very similar to this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yan_tan_tethera

[Ahzoh]

So used to speaking a language without obviation markers that it's hard for me to remember to use them when translating sentences

Māya eḫḫim rēbim eppedim yazūsi bi lûwa rizāḫū nēdemtūwan bar ṣūbu kān

then this-ᴍ.sɢ man-ᴍ.sɢ young-ᴍ.sɢ dream\ʀᴇᴀʟ-3ms ᴄᴏᴍᴘ ᴏʙᴠ.ꜰ foreigner-ꜰ.ᴘʟ ɪʀʀ-come-3fp.ᴏʙᴠ for killing-ᴄᴏɴs.sɢ 3cp.ᴏʙʟ

"Then this young man dreamed that foreigners would come to kill them."

also came up with a formula for distributives (numeral-ADV for numeral-OBL):
Le likkān malīsun tabbasū bar tibsam
"and they took them away one at a time (once for one)"
Le likkān malīsun śaddaṭū bar śiṭṭam
"and they took them away two at a time (twice for two)"
Le likkān malīsun ḫarraṭū bar ḫarāṭam
"and they took them away twelve at a time (twelvefold for twelve)"

[dɮ the phoneme]

I want to start working on a totally new language family, preferably something quite shallow so I can explore dialect variation more easily (which is one of the things I used to enjoy most about conlanging, but recently most of my projects have been very deep families where if I went into detail on every dialect of every stage I'd never get anywhere). However, everything I come up with for the proto-language just feels... uninspired? Dull?

Has anyone had this problem before? What did you do

[bradrn]

Has anyone had this problem before? What did you do

Oh yes, this sounds very familiar to me. There’s a couple of things you can do:

• If the problem is the phonology, make the grammar interesting. (Or vice versa.)
• If you just ignore the ‘boringness’, you might find the language naturally becoming more interesting as you develop it further.
• Or else, if none of these work, you should keep in mind that it’s just a protolanguage — I find languages tend to get more interesting after you apply some sound changes to them.

[Pabappa]

I agree. Im very attached to my phonologies, so I cant really follow that advice myself, but that's just me .... I have sketches for languages with lots of potential but they've been languishing for years because I just dont like the way they sound. Most of these are guttural languages like Tarise, though some are completely flavorless ... what I call applesauce languages .... having an average inventory, an average distribution of sounds, etc. And some are almost right but have just one flaw that brings it all down ... like Dreamlandic, which looks a lot like Pabappa at first sight, such that even I didnt realize what was wrong, but when i started building words i realized i had hardly any /a/. My favorite vowel.

But even so, I can see from working on these less-favored languages that I have more fun with them if they have some sort of connection to something I like. For example, one of the most flavorless of all my applesauce languages, Crystal, has separate dialects for male and female speakers (and yes, it's attested in the wild) .... so I took a boring language and gave it a feature that none of my other languages have, not even the ones like Poswa that have just about everything else going for them.

Likewise Moonshine .... while not a dud, is what I call a very high-maintenance, low-return language .... its main distinguishing feature is ... surprise surprise ... separate speech registers for male and female speakers, but done in a way wholly unlike Crystal. Thus Crystal does not take away from Moonshine's appeal and Moonshine does not take away from Crystal's.

Still, it's possible to get stuck .... if your proto-language itself has a proto-language, and you're working towards it from both ends, there aren't a lot of options, unless you're willing to invent a new feature and then kill it off before the modern languages arise. I havent ruled out doing this with Play, the ancestor of Poswa and Pabappa, where Im in the same situation ... I know what Play develops into, and I know where it came from, but it's been just a link in the chain until now and is not that well developed.

[Kuchigakatai]

But how do they even decide what parts of the word or phrase to clip?

I think Japanese tends to shorten vowels and keep the initial morae of the components, as in the examples above, or rimooto kontorooru > rimokon, ea kondishonaa (コンディショナー) / kondishoningu > eakon (note I've seen "air-con" in English on occasion!).

Besides, clipping doesn’t seem that common a sound change, especially when I look at Indo-European and Semitic developments. It's usually elision or syncope here or there.

Maybe it's because there hasn't been much of a need to clip long expressions? Because affixation was often preferred instead (with -tion, -ism, -icism...), or borrowing. At least in Europe it seems that for a long time, too, nominalization turning adjectives into nouns with the gender of the omitted noun was the preferred method of shortening whatever expressions did come up (technē mathēmaticē > mathēmaticē as a feminine-gender noun in ancient Greek).

Clipping is pretty common in today's French at least (e.g. personnellement > perso, dictionnaire > dico, bibliothèque > bib, librairie software > lib, sympathique > sympa). And Standard Arabic has portmanteaus (rather like "Japanimation") fitted into the usual word templates, a derivational process called "naħt", which you could vaguely think of as clipping too. Some examples:
- subħaana llaah 'glory be to God' > sabħala 'to say "glory be to God" '
- dʒamara 'to gather [people]' + dʒahara 'to be public, speak loudly' > dʒumhuur 'crowd, the general public' (an old word, acc. to Wiktionary, with no citation, already existing by 18th c. when dʒumhuuriiya was derived from it to render 'republic')
- fawqa 'above' + qawmiiya 'nationalism' > fawqawmiiya 'supranationalism' (this one could also be due to haplology applied to *fawqa-qawmiyya, I guess...)
- kahrabaaʔ 'electricity' + maɣnaatˤiis 'magnetism' > kahratˤas 'electro-magnetism'

I think this process is generally felt to be conscious and a bit artificial in standard Arabic though.

Has anyone had this problem before? What did you do

Yes, and I just try to remember how Latin > Romance happened. A lot of the fancy morphology was dropped, and the syntax was also significantly altered. You can have a lot of thorny details in the proto-language that are dropped with few or no traces. There is no way to reconstruct the Latin passive conjugations from Romance languages, nor little things like ignis 'fire' having an irregular ablative singular ignī, or famēs 'hunger' also having an irregular abl. sg. famē (in fact, even going from the medieval Romance languages, there's no way to reconstruct the ablative as a distinct case). Syntax-wise, there's no way to reconstruct the Latin's Wackernagel-position conjunctions, nor its use of particles for yes/no questions...

[Moose-tache]

Clipping in Japanese is both phonetic and semantic. Consider the common abbreviation of Akihabara (aki-autumn, ha-leaf, bara-field), "Akiba." If we were just removing morae from each element, we would end up with "Ahaba." The first Element is kept intact even though it is two syllables, and the second element is removed entirely. This, to me, suggests that the name is analyzed as "The BARA of AKIHA," and each part loses its final two morae. Alternatively, it's possible that aki couldn't be clipped without sounding stupid, and if they're going to keep the entire word for autumn, they don't need the word for leaf, and you end up with something like "Autumn Fie-".

[KathTheDragon]

(note I've seen "air-con" in English on occasion!).

"Air-con" is the standard way to say "air conditioning" in my family, and I'd be surprised if it weren't pretty widespread.

[Rounin Ryuuji]

Is that maybe a British thing? I think I remember seeing it in Banjo-Kazooie, but not much of anywhere else growing up (the standard abbreviation was "AC").

[quinterbeck]

Is that maybe a British thing? I think I remember seeing it in Banjo-Kazooie, but not much of anywhere else growing up (the standard abbreviation was "AC").

I think it is. "Air-con" is standard for me, too. I've only ever heard Americans refer to it as "AC".

[jal]

Funny, in Dutch we refer to it as "airco". Never occured to me that's not a native thing.


JAL

[Ahzoh]

I've encountered exactly the thing I was worried about when it comes to geminate roots.

g-l-l "to see" > galā́l-um "one who sees, seer" and gállal-um "seen" (stress marked with acutes):
galā́lali "seer-OBL.DEF.SG"
galālā́li "seer-OBL.DEF.PL"
gállalali "seen-OBL.DEF.SG"
gallalā́li "seen-OBL.DEF.PL"

On the other hand, I kind of like this cursedness.

maggalluli geleltessi lâ galālāli gallalāli galalti
[mɒgˈgɒl.lu.li gɛ.lɛlˈtɛs.si lɒː gɒ.lɒːˈlɒː.li gɒl.lɒˈlɒː.li gɒˈlɒl.ti]
The seeing watchtower sees those seen seers.

[Man in Space]

Kálhinkúlitłi: "Áge r höge hae teðe łn ðéku hé ĝöl saman itü r hae łn."

Kálhinkúlitłi

Calvin.Coolidge

áge

COP

r

NEG

höge

possible

hae

SUB

teðe

punish

łn

2SG

ðéku

1PL

hé

3SG

ĝöl

because.of

saman

speak

itü

CONT.PERF

r

NEG

hae

REL

łn

2SG

"They can't get you for what you didn't say." – Calvin Coolidge

[Raholeun]

After working for a couple of months on my other hobby, converting the source code of the PC version of Rick Dangerous 2 to C++ and SDL, having more or less finished that I felt a sudden need to go conlanging again.

What happened to the translation of The Hobbit? Is it finished?

[xxx]

What happened to the translation of The Hobbit? Is it finished?

a long text that gives strength to the language