Conlang Random Thread

[Hallow XIII]

I mean, the Romanian case system basically derives from exactly this construction. You can just drop the distinction between definite and indefinite nouns if you want universal morphological case marking.

[Otto Kretschmer]

Any good programs or website where one may apply sound changes to a given text?

[jal]

Any good programs or website where one may apply sound changes to a given text?

I assume you know of Zompist's SCA2?


JAL

[bradrn]

Any good programs or website where one may apply sound changes to a given text?

Exactly which of the hundreds and hundreds of sound change appliers do you wish to know about? Off the top of my head I can think of the original SCA, and SCA², and RSCA, and GSCA, and Phonix, and Lexurgy, and HaSC, and SCE, and IPA Zounds, and…

(I, of course, strongly recommend my own Brassica, also linked in my signature.)

[Pabappa]

Fafa žayas šifap tanaba.
"The wind combs the hair of the unkempt."

First full sentence I've written in any conlang for months .... I'm too out of practice to use the conlang fluency thread. The words for comb and unkempt are unrelated, so there is no redundancy here, although I've come up with another version of the sentence that has alliteration:

Fafa fafibas šifap tanaba.
"The wind combs the hair of the curly." Where the word for curly is derived from the word for ocean waves, and is thus not related to the word for wind, making this sentence qualify as a weak pun. Here, the word for curly hair implies a state of being, not a state of nature, meaning that the people's hair is curly because they don't use combs, and therefore the wind combs their hair into a different style every day. All of this refers to a conflict over hygiene standards in the early Play empire in which the majority party took pride in their relaxed hygiene standards and lack of use for combs in particular.

[Rounin Ryuuji]

I like the way I imagine the first sentence sounding.

[Otto Kretschmer]

What is the minimal possible number of consonants that a lanague might have? If one was to create a conlang that is a reverse of Ubykh, how many consonants would it have?

If we have 10 vowels with short, long, nasal and long nasal variatns, we end up with 40 vowels. If we have 12, then 48 in total, not counting all possible diphtongs. How might such an extremely high vowel inventory come about?

[bradrn]

What is the minimal possible number of consonants that a lanague might have? If one was to create a conlang that is a reverse of Ubykh, how many consonants would it have?

Rotokas, Iau and Obokuitai all have 6 consonants. Proto–Lakes Plains is reconstructed with only five, /p t k b d/.

If we have 10 vowels with short, long, nasal and long nasal variatns, we end up with 40 vowels. If we have 12, then 48 in total, not counting all possible diphtongs. How might such an extremely high vowel inventory come about?

Um… what’s wrong with the obvious method of starting with a 12-vowel system, then adding contrastive length and nasalisation?

[Pabappa]

if you consider nasal vowels separate vowels, why not go all the way and include registers and tones too? Consider the Taa language, whose Wikipedia article contains one of my all-time favorite sentences:

A long, glottalized, murmured, nasalized o with falling tone is written ⟨ôʼhõ⟩.

I didnt count, but even if you exlcude tones, the vowel inventory there is probably at least in the triple digits. I would argue that tones are just as much a property of a vowel as those other things, but its really about what feels right to you .... if having a language with eight tones just to really amp up the vowel inventory would feel like cheating, you could still do all the other things and neglect the tones.

One word of caution though .... if you want to be naturalistic, you should realize that these categories overlap and cant simply be multiplied on top of each other. for example, Taa has no nasalized short vowels, because like some other languages, the nasality appears on the second mora as a sort of off-glide ... similar, i think, to Polish, Portuguese, and Japanese. Of these, Japanese is typically not analyzed with nasal vowels at all, so it's a matter of how you look at it, too.

edit: actually, Taa does have short nasal vowels, but rather than just delete what i wrote i'd rather link the page, since it's quite complex: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taa_language

[Nortaneous]

If we have 10 vowels with short, long, nasal and long nasal variatns, we end up with 40 vowels. If we have 12, then 48 in total, not counting all possible diphtongs. How might such an extremely high vowel inventory come about?

If you count length, nasality, and phonation as producing separate vowel series, the largest vowel inventories in PHOIBLE are So (Vietic) and Elfdalian (Germanic), both with 50 - but the largest vowel inventory in Index Phonemica is Chong (Pearic), with 84 vowels.

[Darren]

What is the minimal possible number of consonants that a lanague might have? If one was to create a conlang that is a reverse of Ubykh, how many consonants would it have?

If we have 10 vowels with short, long, nasal and long nasal variatns, we end up with 40 vowels. If we have 12, then 48 in total, not counting all possible diphtongs. How might such an extremely high vowel inventory come about?

The reverse of Ubykh is basically Iau; it has 6 consonants, and 8 vowels (also 11 diphthongs and 2 triphthongs) with 8 tones and 11 tone clusters that can occur on single vowels. If I got my maths right, that's 399 possible syllable nuclei (I doubt all of them occur though)
How did this come about? The small consonant inventory is just typical of Lakes Plains languages, the vowel system arises from loss of coda consonants and from loss of other syllables (Iau has a tendency towards monosyllabicity) which then added their tone to the remaining syllables.

[Nortaneous]

The closest documented relative of Rotokas, Rapoisi, has 9 consonants (/p t k ʔ β ɾ ɣ s h/), which is pretty small, but mostly because it doesn't have nasals, other than [m n] as postpausal allophones of /β ɾ/. Aita Rotokas also has nine, but they're different - the six of Rotokas plus a full set of nasals. So historical studies could eventually determine how the consonant inventory of Rotokas developed, but unfortunately there's been a war in Bougainville for the last few decades, and before that, the documentation on Ramopa, another related language, was lost when the mission house burned down.

Askopan, which is apparently closest to Rotokas, is almost completely undocumented, and Rapoisi is too far from it (and too poorly documented) to be of much use.

[doctor shark]

Random: I like money. And thanks to the board's own Man in Space for helping out with this latest contribution.

More: show

[Man in Space]

Random: I like money. And thanks to the board's own Man in Space for helping out with this latest contribution.

More: show

Look, ma, I’m famous!

Thanks for having me as a subject!

[Pabappa]

Tapilula tʷòho pə̀gi > twoʔho pəʔgi > twokopokki > tʰwokopʰokki > hwokofokki > hwokofoki > hwokohoki > wokōki > wokōči > wokōsi > okōsi

but

Tapilula tʷòho pə̀i > tʷòho pè > tʷohoʔpe > tʷohoʔpo > twōppo > twōpo > kwōpo > kʷōpa > pōpa

so okōsi turns into pōpa because of the deletion of /g/ in the original word. These are two forms of the same word in the same language, because in Tapilula /g/ was a grammaticalized insertion to break up vowel sequences, and could be retained or dropped sporadically depending on whether a compound was transparent or not.

[Ahzoh]

Random: I like money. And thanks to the board's own Man in Space for helping out with this latest contribution.

More: show

Do you make coins?

[bradrn]

Tapilula tʷòho pə̀gi > twoʔho pəʔgi > twokopokki > tʰwokopʰokki > hwokofokki > hwokofoki > hwokohoki > wokōki > wokōči > wokōsi > okōsi

but

Tapilula tʷòho pə̀i > tʷòho pè > tʷohoʔpe > tʷohoʔpo > twōppo > twōpo > kwōpo > kʷōpa > pōpa

so okōsi turns into pōpa because of the deletion of /g/ in the original word. These are two forms of the same word in the same language, because in Tapilula /g/ was a grammaticalized insertion to break up vowel sequences, and could be retained or dropped sporadically depending on whether a compound was transparent or not.

To me the main difference seems to be whether Tapilula /tʷ/ turns into /tʰw/→/w/→/∅/ or /tʷ/→/kw/→/p/. Unless that somehow depends on the presence of /ɡ/?

[doctor shark]

Random: I like money. And thanks to the board's own Man in Space for helping out with this latest contribution.

More: show

Do you make coins?

Sometimes (though haven't made any for a while, but I'm working on some new designs). Behold:

Look, ma, I’m famous!

Thanks for having me as a subject!

Thanks for contributing! Really happy with how it turned out.

[Ahzoh]

Sometimes (though haven't made any for a while, but I'm working on some new designs). Behold:

Do you make those kinda coins you'd find in ancient times? like Babylonian, etc.?

[doctor shark]

Sometimes (though haven't made any for a while, but I'm working on some new designs). Behold:

Do you make those kinda coins you'd find in ancient times? like Babylonian, etc.?

Haven't given them a go (yet), though that's probably because, as a collector, my focus is more on post-WWII stuff with a particular focus on currently-used currencies (and most of my conhistories are set in a modern era). You could say I make coins and banknotes that I'd be interested in collecting.