Conlang Random Thread

[Hallow XIII]

I recommend this paper for a more in-depth treatment, including an exploration of how you can derive it diachronically.

[Ryan of Tinellb]

Has anyone ever posted a sentence from their conlang into Google translate and see what language it guesses it to be?

The other fun thing to do is have Google's text-to-speech engine read it out in different accents / orthographies.

[jal]

Eddy, you're overthinking it - calm down and just start conlanging if you feel inspired - it's not like you're selling imitation headdresses!

Though I agree that conlanging shouldn't concern itself to much with cultural appropriation, and I don't think it has ever lead to problems (has there been any protest against Klingon, which is partially based on North American native languages?), I can somewhat relate, having created a Caribbean English Creole language while being a white European. I could imagine speakers of a CEC could find my attempt to create a "new version" of a CEC as cultural appropriation.


JAL

[Pabappa]

Sounds interesting. Unnaturalistic languages are always fun. Will you be posting about it here?

One thing I’d quite like to see, if you’re interested, would be a complete reference grammar of either Poswa or Pabappa. They always seem so interesting when you post about them, and I’d love to know more. (I know there’s some stuff on FrathWiki but it’s a bit incomplete and hard to follow.)

Thanks for your interest ..... i've had less free time lately, so while I have been planning a writeup like this for more than a year now, Ive made no significant progress on it and I dont know when I ever will. Discord occupies much of my time lately and everything I do there just vanishes .... it'd be nice to have a hobby that I can show off again.

[malloc]

Another problem I have found is that the small phoneme inventory and tight phonotactics make it difficult to keep inflectional suffixes distinct. This presents quite a problem given the highly agglutinative nature of the language.

[bradrn]

Another problem I have found is that the small phoneme inventory and tight phonotactics make it difficult to keep inflectional suffixes distinct. This presents quite a problem given the highly agglutinative nature of the language.

Could you give an example? I struggle to think of a situation in which this would be a problem.

[Nortaneous]

Another problem I have found is that the small phoneme inventory and tight phonotactics make it difficult to keep inflectional suffixes distinct. This presents quite a problem given the highly agglutinative nature of the language.

Rotokas is pretty agglutinative and it manages - you could see what it does

[zyxw59]

Imagine a language which 1) is pro-drop; 2) extensively uses auxiliary verbs. Could those auxiliary verbs come to be reinterpreted as tense-marked subject pronouns?

[Petrichor]

I'm a long-time lurker and very occasionally poster around these parts, but I've been struggling for quite a few years with finding sufficient inspiration. But over the past day or so I've been playing around with an old nominal system and have created a feature which I enjoy quite a bit.

There's a particle in this language, ja, which is used in two main situations.

Before nouns and adjectives, ja marks the plural, it's pretty simple.

ja mynin anta
PL fish
"these fishes"

ja molarka twaro
PL white-GEN moth-DEF
"The white moths."

But before numerals, the use of ja indicates a distributive sense:

Mädäcärka ja puo hihan ogysi.
committee-GEN DIST two report read-TRAN
“The committee (members) read two reports each per week.”

If there was no ja, the implication would be that the committee members read two reports total.

[Creyeditor]

Imagine a language which 1) is pro-drop; 2) extensively uses auxiliary verbs. Could those auxiliary verbs come to be reinterpreted as tense-marked subject pronouns?

I think this happened in Hausa. At least I was taught so.

[Raholeun]

Mädäcärka ja puo hihan ogysi.
committee-GEN DIST two report read-TRAN
“The committee (members) read two reports each per week.”

That these committee members read two of them each week, rather than two per day or per month must be inferred from context?

[jal]

That these committee members read two of them each week, rather than two per day or per month must be inferred from context?

I think their glossing is a bit lacking (also the first one, three words in the original, three words in the translation, but only two words glossed) :).


JAL

[Petrichor]

Ah, alas, the classic fallacy of "copy-pasting from your drafts without carefully proofreading."

It should read:

Mädäcärka ja puo hihan ogysi.
committee-GEN DIST two report read-TRAN
“The committee (members) read two reports each.”

The missing members is because this language allows speakers to drop possessed nouns when they're inferrable from context--it's a bit analogous to the way in which some languages allow adjectives to stand in lieu of nouns, since in this language genitive structures and adjectives aren't differentiated.

[Znex]

Imagine a language which 1) is pro-drop; 2) extensively uses auxiliary verbs. Could those auxiliary verbs come to be reinterpreted as tense-marked subject pronouns?

I think Wolof does, it's pretty famous for doing so.

[xxx]

Natural languages are not afraid of ambiguities, what about your conlangs...
(mine is a 3S a priori language (1sign=1sound=1sense) where ambiguities are forbidden...)

[Qwynegold]

If a language has unconjugated modal verbs, how do you know that they are verbs and not adverbs or prepositions or particles or something? Btw, I saw that there was some language that had a word translated as "should" but classified as an adverb. I'll post that example later when I've found it. Can't remember atm which language it was.

[Richard W]

If a language has unconjugated modal verbs, how do you know that they are verbs and not adverbs or prepositions or particles or something? Btw, I saw that there was some language that had a word translated as "should" but classified as an adverb. I'll post that example later when I've found it. Can't remember atm which language it was.

Another example is Thai เคย /kʰɤːj˧/ allegedly 'used to', which is claimed to be an adverb. (It doesn't mean 'used to' - a single occasion suffices. It can be used to translate 'have ...ed before'.) In Thai, the boundaries between verb and adjective and between adjective and adverb are fuzzy to absent. Now, for most TAM markers, terse negation can be done by sticking ไหม่ /maːi˦˨/ in front of them, but that doesn't work with the 3 perfective markers. One of them feels like an adverb (usual translation is 'already'), but the other two are the normal words for 'come' and 'go'. The adverby one can be also used with either of the others. Most of the other TAM markers are also normal verbs.

I suppose you might get a clue if prepositions were conjugated.

[jal]

Natural languages are not afraid of ambiguities, what about your conlangs...

Sajiwan is a posteriori, more or less, and has many homophones and words with many meanings, so yeah, it's not afraid of ambiguities :).

If a language has unconjugated modal verbs, how do you know that they are verbs and not adverbs or prepositions or particles or something?

I think you are approaching this the wrong way. Whether a word with a modal meaning is a "verb" or an "adverb" or a "particle" or something else is a matter of language analysis - does the word behave like a verb syntactically or like an adverb? What are its diachronics? If there's no distinction between these two (e.g. because both auxiliary verbs and adverbs have the same syntactic position), does it really matter syncronically whether it's one or the other?


JAL

[bradrn]

If a language has unconjugated modal verbs, how do you know that they are verbs and not adverbs or prepositions or particles or something?

I think you are approaching this the wrong way. Whether a word with a modal meaning is a "verb" or an "adverb" or a "particle" or something else is a matter of language analysis - does the word behave like a verb syntactically or like an adverb? What are its diachronics? If there's no distinction between these two (e.g. because both auxiliary verbs and adverbs have the same syntactic position), does it really matter syncronically whether it's one or the other?

My absolute favourite article along these lines: http://alex.francois.online.fr/data/Ale ... -in-Lg.pdf. I think every conlanger should read it. (I’ve already linked it a handful of times here.)

[Qwynegold]

I suppose you might get a clue if prepositions were conjugated.

>_<

If a language has unconjugated modal verbs, how do you know that they are verbs and not adverbs or prepositions or particles or something?

I think you are approaching this the wrong way. Whether a word with a modal meaning is a "verb" or an "adverb" or a "particle" or something else is a matter of language analysis - does the word behave like a verb syntactically or like an adverb? What are its diachronics? If there's no distinction between these two (e.g. because both auxiliary verbs and adverbs have the same syntactic position), does it really matter syncronically whether it's one or the other?

I need to know so that I'll know what to mark it as in the dictionary. The long story is this:

For my IAL I created a word with the meaning "should" (strong recommendation, coming either from oneself or someone else, to do smth). So it has no diachronics other than that I borrowed it from Tagalog, where it's an adverb. So far there's not been much that distinguishes TAM markers from either verbs or adverbs. TAM markers always occur before a verb, where adverbs may also occur. But one could also analyze them as auxiliary verbs that obligatorily take VPs as their arguments. Some of the other TAMs I have so far are these:
pan - PFV marker; classified as a verb because it can also be used as a normal verb meaning "finish"
corena - cessative marker; classified as a verb because it can also be used as a normal verb meaning "quit"
tama - another cessative marker; classified as a verb because it can also be used as a normal verb meaning "stop"
tela - PRF marker; classified as an adverb because it also means "already"
ti - PASS marker; classified as a verb because it can also be used as a copula meaning "become"

I thought hard about whether "should" should have some other sense beyond it's modality use, but decided against that. Maybe there isn't such a strong argument for why tela should be classified as an adverb, though it doesn't have any verb senses. I just chose adverb because all the four languages that I know well have a word meaning "already", and they're all classified as adverbs.

My absolute favourite article along these lines: http://alex.francois.online.fr/data/Ale ... -in-Lg.pdf. I think every conlanger should read it. (I’ve already linked it a handful of times here.)

I read the beginning of that, but couldn't muster finishing it. I think I accidentally saved it on my phone, so I'll finish reading it sometime when I'm out somewhere with my phone and without anything else to do.