What have you accomplished today?

[evmdbm]

I reworked the Simbri noun classes, and I finally ended up with a satisfying system:

classes.png

It's an impressive table, but not sure I understand it. What do the verbal and nominal agreement columns refer to? And how come beer and tax are uncountable? "I drank two beers". "The King imposed two new taxes."

I have finally found an entire book all about the partitive case, so I'm trying to work it into my new conlang. Going back to an old fantasy setting from when I was much younger and redoing the language I did them - but better. Not particularly motivated to change much of the mythology and the history of the world, mind, but the language definitely needs redoing. My teenage self knew nothing about phonology

[bradrn]

I have finally found an entire book all about the partitive case, so I'm trying to work it into my new conlang.

Sounds interesting. Which one?

[evmdbm]

I have finally found an entire book all about the partitive case, so I'm trying to work it into my new conlang.

Sounds interesting. Which one?

S Luraghi and H Tuomas (eds) Partitive cases and Related Categories (De Gruyter Boston 2014)

[Ares Land]

I reworked the Simbri noun classes, and I finally ended up with a satisfying system:

classes.png

It's an impressive table, but not sure I understand it. What do the verbal and nominal agreement columns refer to? And how come beer and tax are uncountable? "I drank two beers". "The King imposed two new taxes."

Yeah, the table is mostly intended for reference. Explaining the system takes a lot longer!
Basically, the verbal agreement suffix are used to mark the direct and indirect objects on the verb.
The nominal agreement suffix is used for attributive. Briefly: you can use any noun as an adjective by adding the correct agreement suffix.

What's countable or not depends a lot on language (French and English are pretty different in that respect). In Simbri, for 'two beers', you say me micces (class C) 'two taxes' is me dome (class H). (in other words, you change the noun class.)(Oh, and I went and changed the class names, I now use letters instead of numerals.)

Oh, and I finished the morphology section of the Simbri grammar. Whee!

[Raphael]

And how come beer and tax are uncountable? "I drank two beers". "The King imposed two new taxes."

My impression is they are uncountable under the way the term is usually used in linguistics, meaning something that might be able to be divided into units of measurement which can, then, be counted, but that can't be counted without such units of measurements.

[Jonlang]

Not much, but I successfully re-jiggered my L conlang's sound changes to allow Finnish consonant gradation of /p t k/ to occur. However, the Finnish change of /t/ > /d/ is changed to /t/ > /r/ (via /t/ > /d/ > /ð/ > /z/ > /r/) due to /d/ only occurring after /n l r/.

[Kuchigakatai]

And how come beer and tax are uncountable? "I drank two beers". "The King imposed two new taxes."

My impression is they are uncountable under the way the term is usually used in linguistics, meaning something that might be able to be divided into units of measurement which can, then, be counted, but that can't be counted without such units of measurements.

This is incidentally why I strongly prefer the alternative term "mass noun" over "uncountable noun".

[Travis B.]

And how come beer and tax are uncountable? "I drank two beers". "The King imposed two new taxes."

My impression is they are uncountable under the way the term is usually used in linguistics, meaning something that might be able to be divided into units of measurement which can, then, be counted, but that can't be counted without such units of measurements.

This is incidentally why I strongly prefer the alternative term "mass noun" over "uncountable noun".

I should be also remembered that, at least in English, one can pluralize a mass noun so as to refer to multiple types of that mass noun.

As for beers, I think that is different, though, because you can say I drank a beer, where beer is clearly functioning as a singular count noun rather than as a mass noun, i.e. beer can be both a mass noun and a count noun.

[Emily]

verbs.png

the verb conjugations for phase 1 are finally coming together, although there's still more work to be done on the reduplicating verbs

[Jonlang]

I've finally gotten the sound changes for my two main conlangs to a point where I think I can re-start building the lexicons. There'll probably be some tweaking to do but hopefully I'll be happy with the results.

[Jonlang]

I've spent this morning trying to incorporate (naturalistically) a Finnish style consonant gradation system into my L conlang, but I've only incorporated the Finnish qualitative gradation, not the quantitative gradation. The environment for gradation is the same as Finnish, i.e. onsets in secondary stressed closed syllables receive gradation.

The Finnish grades are:

Strong grade /p/ > weak grade /ʋ/ – e.g. läpi ~ lävet
Strong /t/ > weak /d/ – e.g. katu ~ kadut
Strong /k/ > weak /ʋ/ in /uku, yky/ > /uʋu, yʋy/ – e.g. puku ~ puvut; weak /j/ when preceded by /h l r/ and followed by /e/ – e.g. jälki ~ jäljet; weak ∅ elsewhere – e.g. pako ~ paot
Strong /mp/ > weak /mm/ – e.g. kampi ~ kammet
Strong /nt/ > weak /nn/ – e.g. lento ~ lennot
Strong /lt/ > weak /ll/ – e.g. kielto ~ kiellot
Strong /rt/ > weak /rr/ – e.g. parta ~ parrat
Strong /ŋk/ > weak /ŋŋ/ – e.g. kenkä ~ kengät

I've basically copied this with the following exceptions:

Strong /p/ > weak /v/
Strong /t/ > weak /r/ (via > /d/ > /ð/ > /z/ > /r/)
Strong /k/ in the sequences /uku, yky/ > weak /uvu, yvy/

This then becomes grammaticalised and generalised throughout the language.

[Rounin Ryuuji]

Interesting system (I didn't know this about Finnish, incidentally); if you want /k/ to remain distinct, /k/ > /g/ > /x~h~ç/ (and possibly loss under certain conditions) under these circumstances would also be naturalistic, I think.

[Man in Space]

Way early this morning I wrote up sound change rules for an SCA for some of the Caber languages. It is SO nice not to have to do them by hand.

[Jonlang]

Interesting system (I didn't know this about Finnish, incidentally); if you want /k/ to remain distinct, /k/ > /g/ > /x~h~ç/ (and possibly loss under certain conditions) under these circumstances would also be naturalistic, I think.

The Finnish change of /k/ > /ʋ/ is one of the things that drew me to the system.

Way early this morning I wrote up sound change rules for an SCA for some of the Caber languages. It is SO nice not to have to do them by hand.

I've never gotten to grips with the SCA, I always do my sound changes by hand.

[Emily]

Interesting system (I didn't know this about Finnish, incidentally); if you want /k/ to remain distinct, /k/ > /g/ > /x~h~ç/ (and possibly loss under certain conditions) under these circumstances would also be naturalistic, I think.

The Finnish change of /k/ > /ʋ/ is one of the things that drew me to the system.

Way early this morning I wrote up sound change rules for an SCA for some of the Caber languages. It is SO nice not to have to do them by hand.

I've never gotten to grips with the SCA, I always do my sound changes by hand.

every time i try to do my sound changes by hand i always miss stuff. that being said i need to get a handle on rewrite rules, it seems like it would be a pretty powerful tool but i've never really tried to figure out how they work or how to incorporate them in my stuff

[bradrn]

every time i try to do my sound changes by hand i always miss stuff. that being said i need to get a handle on rewrite rules, it seems like it would be a pretty powerful tool but i've never really tried to figure out how they work or how to incorporate them in my stuff

Rewrite rules in SCA² are just a mechanism to compensate for the lack of multigraphs. The idea is that you can use them to rewrite multigraphs to single characterS, then do the sound changes, then automatically reverse the conversion to get back nice output with multigraphs again. There’s really nothing you can do with rewrite rules that you can’t do with normal sound changes. Personally, I prefer to use a SCA with proper native multigraph support, like my own Brassica.

[Man in Space]

I use Lexurgy.

[Emily]

slowly...
progress on the verbs.........

[Man in Space]

Dusted off Kgáweq’ with significance for the first time in like six years or so…

[Raphael]

slowly...
progress on the verbs.........

Good luck!