Conlang Random Thread

[Rounin Ryuuji]

...

I’m not entirely sure why you talk about auxiliaries here, given that there is very little similarity between converbs and auxiliaries. (Coverbs and auxiliaries, possibly. And some Turkic languages allow converbal forms as auxiliary complements. But they’re not particularly similar.) Though as always there are numerous competing definitions, my understanding is that a converb is a subordinate verb form specialised for adverbial modification or clause chaining, e.g.:

Ethan, knowing it was naughty, ate an extra cookie.
Jiro, breaking it, did not compensate for the window.
Kicking the door in and going inside, the police didn’t find anyone.

(The second example is a nearly-direct translation from a Japanese -te form; the only major difference is that the original was relativised. The last is a bit strained in English, but would work better in a language where converbs are genuinely used for clause-chaining.)

Because my brain missed the -n- and thought you'd written "coverb".

Once it went through semantic bleaching and became an auxiliary word, I don't think this would matter, and it would help with the perceived repetitiveness especially if it gets absorbed in all sorts of irregular ways, like a stem ending in -k becomes -ng-, but one ending in -s became -r (presumably by way of some sort of -z in-between), and one in -n had a stress change (assuming the original word was something like -an or -na).

Please stop reminding me how terrible I am at diachronics.

But I'm apparently bad at reading, so nyeh!

[Ahzoh]

I wonder if someone could demonstrate the difference between the timings (stress-timed, syllable-timed, and mora-timed) by saying a sentence in each of the timings. Although I know not what sentence or language would be suitable for such a task.

[masako]

Does the above make sense?

(previously posted in the wrong thread, oops.)

[Man in Space]

Does the above make sense?

Seems to.

[Rounin Ryuuji]

I don't seem to be able to view the image.

[Rounin Ryuuji]

Unrelatedly, I've realised that those two fantasy languages about which I've been sporadically posting — the Japonic (Ineshîmé, family name: Tinasan) and Oïl (Kokori) ones — as the fiction in which they're set develops, ought to be internally related to each-other, and there should be at least two other living families (Kidakuran and Noritsuné). This is both enjoyable, and a very tiny bit brain-melting to try and figure out.

[bradrn]

Does the above make sense?

To some extent, but honestly it leaves me with more questions than it resolves:

• If the choice of past and future marking ‘depends on discourse factors’, to what extent are ‘past’ and ‘future’ really appropriate names for these categories?
• What exactly are the roles of the augmentative and diminutive endings? A summary would be nice (just a sentence or two).
• What are the ‘recent and immediate markers’? Are they the same things as ‘augmentative and diminutive endings’, or something completely different? What are their phonological forms?

Unrelatedly, I've realised that those two fantasy languages about which I've been sporadically posting — the Japonic (Ineshîmé, family name: Tinasan) and Oïl (Kokori) ones — as the fiction in which they're set develops, ought to be internally related to each-other, and there should be at least two other living families (Kidakuran and Noritsuné). This is both enjoyable, and a very tiny bit brain-melting to try and figure out.

If you do manage to reconstruct the common ancestor of Oïl and Japonic (or derived languages thereof), exactly how worried should I get about the reliability of the comparative method?

[Rounin Ryuuji]

Unrelatedly, I've realised that those two fantasy languages about which I've been sporadically posting — the Japonic (Ineshîmé, family name: Tinasan) and Oïl (Kokori) ones — as the fiction in which they're set develops, ought to be internally related to each-other, and there should be at least two other living families (Kidakuran and Noritsuné). This is both enjoyable, and a very tiny bit brain-melting to try and figure out.

If you do manage to reconstruct the common ancestor of Oïl and Japonic (or derived languages thereof), exactly how worried should I get about the reliability of the comparative method?

The easiest correspondence was matching Ineshîmé 朕、朕れ/朕佬 (ime, imere) with Kokori moi, me, m', the Ineshîmé form descending from Archaic Tinasan imĕre, Proto-Tinasan *ime₂-, from *i "this, here" followed by *me₂, *mo₂i (the original derivation is actually *i "this, here" followed by *me₂ne₂ "person, one who is", an apophonic form of *mo₂no₂ "thing" that doesn't appear in real-world Japonic; the form also had an archaic variant 朕身 (imĕnĕ, which is the expected form, but which is only sparsely attested, leaving no living descendants), also spelled 俺 (which character later just gets used as a variant of 朕, then as its tonic form imĕŏ > imyo; the shift of ĕ > e in the "base" form is conditioned by the surrounding vowels), and sometimes treated as a pronominal stem, e.g. 俺佬 imĕnĕre...

The -me₂ part would be EASILY recognisable as somehow connected with Archaic Kokori moi, me, m' (which are graphically, but not phonetically, identical to their modern counterparts).

Getting 吾、吾れ/吾佬 (wo-, wore) out of a French word was a bit harder, but I did it well enough from a connection to li gars, li gar (some convenient accidental semantic drift made this word come out meaning "youth, young person" more frequently than "boy"; just reconstruct the protoform as *gwar-əs, and the *r-əs > *r-əj > -re even gives us the Japonic pronominaliser!), and throw in two other languages having it, the close-ish to Tinasan Kidakuran reflexes are *(g)warəj > *wajr~wēr > *jōr : attested 吾 (iór — "I, me"), and the not that close to other branches of the family Noritsuné *ɣwarj- > *hweu~*hyue : 吾 hüe [çɥɛ́ː] "person", to make the semantic relationship appear more plausible (also three of them use the same orthography, while Kokori goes off and innovates a weird idea called an "alphabet" much earlier).

Also, have some anime fantasy Celtic and Sinitic but they're the result of trying to reconcile Japonic and French?

You should probably not be worried, because you couldn't reconcile real-world Celtic and Sinitic to them in this way (probably; I hope) either. Probably not.

Probably...

Probably...

[Pabappa]

I havent read the posts upthread but i would say that one of my greatest achievements was linking Andanese and Pabappa together historically, despite their having been part of two separate projects originally and sharing nothing in common whatsoever as they were first drawn up (since it wouldve been a logical contradiction if they had). i forget about that sometimes. Admittedly, I had to essentially dump out the entire lexicon of Andanese (and most of Pabappa), but I was able to reconcile the two completely different grammars into descending from a common ancestor only about 4500 years prior.

my solution was to say that Andanese was conservative, mostly preserving the original structure of the most recent common ancestor , while Pabappa had gone through a "blink" stage where one change set into motion a lot of others, and then even though change slowed down afterwards, it no longer resembled the most recent common ancestor.

it is fun to see the very few visible links between the two languages, but it was a lot of work. i could have simply retained the two as isolated families but i wanted the cultures to have a most recent common ancestor of their own, and therefore a shared language made a lot more sense than having two unrelated languages side by side for a long period of time (and even then, i'd have had to put in loanwords).

i wish you the best.

[Nachtswalbe]

decon_redscript_sample.png

Here is one sample of my attempt to implement featural writing. Every element expresses some phonological feature with the arrangement of these elements in the block also having featural significance. The sheer level of discontinuity bugs me since it renders pretty much every line free-floating (although the script Masako posted somehow manages to make discontinuous glyphs look nice). Handwriting the script legibly is also difficult since it requires lifting the pen so much, distinguishing straight lines from those with cornered ends, and so forth.

The previous script that I posted is also theoretically featural, but the handling of features is considerably more abstract and opaque. Thus two characters may differ only in the sonorance of their onsets but look considerably different because the elements are rearranged and warped in complicated ways.

As much as it aesthetically looks strange, it would be ideal for printing since square blocks were the basis of wood-printing and the straight lines and dots are easier to carve/drill into the block substrate than curves.

[Ahzoh]

I think this is the case system I am sticking with, and it has some interesting irregularities. Altohugh I still can't think of a good case ending for the adpositional case.

One may think: why is there an instrumental case but no dative? And that is primarily because the language is secundative and thus the instrumental is basically equivalent to a dative in an indirective language. Alternatively, I thought to call it a "thematic case" to emphasize that it primarily marks the theme of a ditransitive.

[jal]

And that is primarily because the language is secundative and thus the instrumental is basically equivalent to a dative in an indirective language.

Nope, you are mixing it up: the indirect object in the dative in an indirective language is a direct object in a secundative language, and the direct object in an indirective language is an oblique object in a secundative language (like your instrumental).

	indirective	secundative
recipient	indirect object	direct object
patient	direct object	oblique object

JAL

[Ahzoh]

And that is primarily because the language is secundative and thus the instrumental is basically equivalent to a dative in an indirective language.

Nope

You misread. I am merely saying that the instrumental case is to a secundative alignment what a dative case is to an indirective alignment. That is, its function is to mark the other object of a ditransitive that isn't marked with the accusative case, which is different between the alignments. I perfectly understand the difference between a secundative (D=A, R=P, third case for T) and an indirective (D=A, T=P, third case for R) alignment.

[jal]

You misread.

I don't think I did, but I understand the confusion. You said "basically equivalent", which I took to mean "the same grammatical function", while you meant it in a more meta way.


JAL

[Ahzoh]

You misread.

I don't think I did, but I understand the confusion. You said "basically equivalent", which I took to mean "the same grammatical function", while you meant it in a more meta way.

Ye, less "same grammatical function" more "same grammatical niche"

[foxcatdog]

I've heard of bound pronouns (like french je and tu) and bound morphemes (like in inuit languages which can't appear without a free morpheme) but how about bound verbs? As in verbs which can't appear outside of a noun phrase?

So for example say your language had the following sentence transformations.

SVO
1.sg play game-ACC
"I played the game"

OSV
game-ACC 1.sg play
"As for the game, i played it"

VSO
play 1.sg game-ACC
"played the game have i"

Could you for example have something like...

1.sg do+game-ACC
"I played the game"

which could optionally transform into...

1.sg game-ACC+do
"I game played"

but couldn't undergo normal syntactic transformations since it was treated as part of the objects phrase. The class would obviously consist of a small number of basic verbs.

[bradrn]

Arguably, adjectives are ‘bound verbs’. But really the definition makes no sense to me: verbs as a word class are defined in most languages by the ability to act as the head of a clause, so your ‘bound verbs’ would by definition not actually be verbs.

That being said, constructions like ‘do game’ where the non-verbal element is bound are well-known, especially from Australian and Papuan languages. They have a bunch of names, but I prefer to call the verbal element a ‘light verb’ or ‘auxiliary’, with its complement being a ‘coverb’. The more extreme languages have a closed class of light verbs, along with an open coverb class with distinct morphosyntactic properties from ordinary nouns.

[foxcatdog]

The language has noun incorporation so you could easily treat the verb as requiring an incorporate rather then being bound to the object. Also the tranformation from verb + sentence type marker + noun with an optional applicative or instrumental to noun + verb + sentence type marker with an optional applicative or instrumental is seen in the language. Is this naturalistic? (i'll probably include it anyways since it's for some other conworld where i'm including things found in no real language).

Also the language treats adjectives very much like it treats verbs.

[bradrn]

Also the tranformation from verb + sentence type marker + noun with an optional applicative or instrumental to noun + verb + sentence type marker with an optional applicative or instrumental is seen in the language. Is this naturalistic? (i'll probably include it anyways since it's for some other conworld where i'm including things found in no real language).

What exactly do you mean by ‘sentence type marker’ here?

[foxcatdog]

Also the tranformation from verb + sentence type marker + noun with an optional applicative or instrumental to noun + verb + sentence type marker with an optional applicative or instrumental is seen in the language. Is this naturalistic? (i'll probably include it anyways since it's for some other conworld where i'm including things found in no real language).

What exactly do you mean by ‘sentence type marker’ here?

It's just a person and number marker for the whole sentence (which i probably should have called it). So instead of saying hit-1.sg-2.sg you say hit-1/2+2.sg. It can also mark for gender in the third person as in animate on inanimate and such (through the language mostly lacks other means of gender agreement so i wouldn't call it a gendered language).