Conlang Random Thread

[Raphael]

So the sentence "She XANG in 1976" could mean either "she had a child in 1976" or "she was born in 1976"? That seems... kind of an important distinction to make?

Ok, good point.

[Salmoneus]

There is an example in English of a verb that does this in many dialects: 'to learn' (equivalent to either 'teach' or 'learn' in standard english). But I think that the former is obligatorily bivalent? That is, you'd say "I learnt [s.o.]", and "I learnt" by itself would almost always mean you learned, not that you taught. [for instance, I don't think these dialects would say "I learnt in a school for five years" to mean you were a teacher for five years, though you might perhaps say "I learnt kids in a school for five years"]


Worth noting in passing, however: both 'be born' and 'give birth' are semantically intransitive, and if a language has a univalent/bivalent pair for these, either one could be the bivalent. Bivalent verbs for being born may take the mother as an object (our 'born to'), or perhaps could take some description of kind as an object? (our 'born as' or 'born' with a complement - he was born an Englishman, she was born a girl, etc...).

[Xwtek]

Is there any language with tone that work like this:

Code: Select all

mǫą́st (cow) > mǫąstókh (cows)
daík (fly) > daikókh (flies)
sur (well) > surokh (wells)
táód (frog) > táódókh
chêék (pant) > chéekókh (pants)

So, each word is assigned 5 tone group. H, L, HL, LH, and HLH. However, if the word contains more than one root. (This language is compound heavy). It can contain more than two tone groups. For example: it's possible to have a word with H-LH tone, and it's different from HLH.

I eat fish: sap

séptoapték (H-LH)(not *séptóapték (HLH))

sép-to.apt-ék
---- -----------
H LH

The rule is,

1. Only root carries tone. Suffix do not carry tone. However, a language may contain more than one root.
2. Every mora in the root belongs to the same tone group.
3. The mora is assigned to a tone group of its adjacent tone group. The priority is the tone to the right is prioritized if it's adjacent and it's not adjacent to root in the left. Otherwise, tone to the right takes precedence.

Example:

(Note that even if written separately, it is still one phonological word.)

this beautiful word: ftábó į́į kǫn

Code: Select all

ftá bó į́   į kǫn
---------   ------
H             L

The word of this, /įį/ is considered grammatical word, so it don't contain root, so it don't carry tone.

(That is marked phrase. the more natural word order is either į́į́ ftábó kǫn or įį kǫn ftebas)

[akam chinjir]

There is an example in English of a verb that does this in many dialects: 'to learn' (equivalent to either 'teach' or 'learn' in standard english). But I think that the former is obligatorily bivalent? That is, you'd say "I learnt [s.o.]", and "I learnt" by itself would almost always mean you learned, not that you taught. [for instance, I don't think these dialects would say "I learnt in a school for five years" to mean you were a teacher for five years, though you might perhaps say "I learnt kids in a school for five years"]

There are plenty of English examples: "open," "break," "cook," "move"...

Worth noting in passing, however: both 'be born' and 'give birth' are semantically intransitive, and if a language has a univalent/bivalent pair for these, either one could be the bivalent. Bivalent verbs for being born may take the mother as an object (our 'born to'),

Semantically you could take "give birth" to be a causative, which would imply a causee.

or perhaps could take some description of kind as an object? (our 'born as' or 'born' with a complement - he was born an Englishman, she was born a girl, etc...).

That looks more like secondary predication to me ("he sat down an Englishman and stood up a girl"---these constructions don't make "sit" and "stand up" transitive).

[Raphael]

In sound changes, are names of things or entities considered sacred more resistant to sound change than other words, or is there no difference? Are there sometimes "irregular" sound changes that are really just unusual sound change rules for names of things or entities considered sacred?

[Raphael]

When did human beings first figure out that among spiders, the larger and stronger ones tend to be the females? Was that known since prehistory, or did it take advanced biological research to discover?



(Edit: it's amazing what kind of questions you might run into when all you want are some plausible names for your conhistory.)

[Xwtek]

In sound changes, are names of things or entities considered sacred more resistant to sound change than other words, or is there no difference? Are there sometimes "irregular" sound changes that are really just unusual sound change rules for names of things or entities considered sacred?

Nope. It may be reborrowed. But it will never treated specially. It is possible for a language to borrow from its own ancestor. Or the other possibility is the formal register, that is more resistant to changes.

That said, sound change is not the only way to mutate word. If your god name collides with a common noun because of sound changes, just compound it with the word for god. Or use its (shortened) title + word for god.

[Raphael]

Thank you!

[Salmoneus]

There is an example in English of a verb that does this in many dialects: 'to learn' (equivalent to either 'teach' or 'learn' in standard english). But I think that the former is obligatorily bivalent? That is, you'd say "I learnt [s.o.]", and "I learnt" by itself would almost always mean you learned, not that you taught. [for instance, I don't think these dialects would say "I learnt in a school for five years" to mean you were a teacher for five years, though you might perhaps say "I learnt kids in a school for five years"]

There are plenty of English examples: "open," "break," "cook," "move"...

Those words exist as transitivity pairs in standard English as well, so aren't that interesting.
Although "cook" is an unusual one now you mention it, because it's the only one where both words in the pair are frequently univalent (you can say "I cooked", to mean you cooked something). [making it the opposite of dialect 'learn', where both the transitive and the intransive verbs are bivalent] I guess this is allowed because the transitive/intransitive split is so deeply connected to animacy for this verb?

Semantically you could take "give birth" to be a causative, which would imply a causee.

I disagree. "Give birth to" or "birth" is semantically transitive, though I'm not sure I'd call it a true causative (because I'm not sure being born is a true action). But "give birth" itself is intransitive, as the emphasis is on the process the individual undergoes. If a doctor asks a woman "have you ever given birth?", he's probably not asking to find out whether she has children, but to find out whether she has undergone labour. Of course, almost any intransitive COULD be seen as causative in your sense - "die" could be seen as "make s.o. bereaved", "break" could be "make shards be formed", etc.

or perhaps could take some description of kind as an object? (our 'born as' or 'born' with a complement - he was born an Englishman, she was born a girl, etc...).

That looks more like secondary predication to me ("he sat down an Englishman and stood up a girl"---these constructions don't make "sit" and "stand up" transitive).
[/quote]

In English, these are syntactically expressed with complements, as I said. But other languages could easily express these things with core arguments.

[Salmoneus]

In sound changes, are names of things or entities considered sacred more resistant to sound change than other words, or is there no difference?

Short answer: there's no difference.
Longer answer: sometimes names can undergo MORE sound change, because they're used so commonly - placenames in particular can undergo some unpredictable contractions. They are also susceptible to being pronounced by people who don't know them well (newcomers to an area, or for personal names inhabitants of an area a person has moved to), which can produce unusual changes, often spelling pronunciations. And names can also reflect local sound changes, including former local soundchanges that have since been undone. Take, for example, Bristol which was originally Brycgstow, basically bridge+stowe - the simplification /tSst/ > /st/ is the sort of thing that can happen quicker in a commonly-used name than in the language as a whole. The 'l' is because the Bristol dialect used to have /l/ > /w/; people who heard Bristolians say 'Bristow' thought they were 'mispronouncing' 'Bristol', so spelled it with an -l, and subsequently people, including newcomers to Bristol, didn't realise there was an /l/ > /w/ shift, so the /l/ stuck (although apparently it's still sometimes /w/ for locals). The older pronunciation is preserved in the surname "Bristow", for people who moved from Bristol to areas where people didn't know about the Bristolian /l/ > /w/ shift, so didn't make the same error. The UK is filled with placenames that, due to a combination of spelling pronunciations, irregular contractions, and localised sound shifts, are pronounced not quite how you'd assume. [The most widespread example is that the /h/ in -ham and the /w/ in -wick are almost always lost, sometimes extremely early (eg 'Bosham' indicates that the the loss of /h/ must have preceded the voicing of intervocalic fricatives in the area), even when they remain in non-onomastic morphemes).

Are there sometimes "irregular" sound changes that are really just unusual sound change rules for names of things or entities considered sacred?

Not in the sense of sound changes across generations due to orginary processes. There can, however, be intentional sound changes. AIRC some languages have shown vowel lengthening to indicate respect in the names of gods and rulers? And there are also processes of 'taboo deformation' where words are mutated for some ritual purpose. It would be more likely to mutate a common word to avoid clashing with a sacred name than vice versa, but I could imagine it. An example of the opposite in English is the use of /oU/ in the word "coney" - a spelling pronunciation, but also a taboo deformation to avoid the original homophony with "cunny". One process that might be relevant to sacred names is the phenomenon of secret languages, where initiates use a deformed vocabulary for certain purposes - it's certainly believable that, for example, initiates to a sacred cult might be taught a deformed version of the deity's name (theire 'true name' or 'secret name') that could then leak out and become the default name. Iirc, people think the opposite may have happened with Biblical records of non-Judaic deities, where their names have intentionally been distorted for insulting purposes?

There is also a contentious idea that oral recitation can preserve phonology in ritual contexts even when sound changes occur in the language as a whole - this supposedly happened with Sanskrit. This could particularly apply to the names of deities - we can imagine a cult that emphasises perfectly repeating the true name of their god, might be able to preserve that name more effectively than the man on the street. This won't halt time, because you can only object to changes you can actually spot, so small changes are likely to accrue over time, but it could perhaps in very specific contexts work to 'hold back' sound change. [you might find in this case that the priests and the common people end up with different names for their god, but a religious reform could then insist on 'rectifying' the name to match the priestly usage].


But in general, no, sacred names will change the same way as anything else.

[Raphael]

Thank you!

[Vijay]

Of course, in various cultures, there are also liturgical languages and/or special languages or registers used for ritual ceremonies, like Maroon Spirit Language or Damin. I don't think any of these are what you had in mind, though.

In Romani, there are a number of riddles involving a character named [ˈʋajo] (from Vayu, the god of the wind in Hinduism). The implied question in these riddles is "who is [ˈʋajo]?" and the answer is always the wind. This name doesn't seem to have been any more resistant to sound change than other words of Indian origin in Romani, though.

[Zaarin]

In sound changes, are names of things or entities considered sacred more resistant to sound change than other words, or is there no difference? Are there sometimes "irregular" sound changes that are really just unusual sound change rules for names of things or entities considered sacred?

A few English examples of just how far sacred things can drift from their original form:
/ˈʤizəs/ < /jəˈʃuəʕ/
/ʤəˈɹusələm/ < /jeruʃaˈlajiːm/
/ˈpɹist/ < /prezbýteros/

[mèþru]

You sure about that /ʃ/ in pre-modern Hebrew? Or are you using Aramaic even for Yerushalayim?

[Ares Land]

So I've been thinking about what could make a good auxlang.

I never really was into auxlangs, I've checked out esperanto and lojban, and that's about it but I realized recently that an auxlang would actually fit quite well in the setting in the novel I'm writing(*). So, well, although I'm a little skeptical of the concept, it looks like I'm going to try to sketch one myself.

I guess my question is, what features would you use for an auxlang? The main criteria being, in that setting, that it should be relatively easy to pick and as viable as possible an alternative to English for technical discussion.
Myself, I'd go for isolating grammar, and fairly minimalistic phonology.

An interesting question is what to do with the lexicon.
- Using roots inspired by Romance language is not a bad solution, all things considered, but too Eurocentric for my purposes, a little boring and not distinctive enough.
- Random generation is tempting, but the lack of familiarity would make the language a bit too difficult.
- I'm tempted to make use of scientific vocabulary for root creation, which could give the language a remotely Greek feel. Not too bad.

(*) Oh, of course, I'm overdoing things. There's really no reason for the conlang to make an appearance besides maybe one or two short sentences, and even that would probably be too much.

[mèþru]

You could go the lojban root and use phonological patterns of several source language. I did something similar for my Volapuk inspired althist auxlang Melik sed (which has its own thread here). Alternatively, you could borrow real worlds from many languages, try to generalise morphophonemic patterns from the lexicon and then rewrite the words to fit the patterns.

I think all morphology should be agglutinating. Zompist also proposed the idea of different dialects for different linguistic regions, which is intriguing but never has been done in actual auxlangs. As I don't think auxlangs work, I would care more about the biases and goals of the characters who make the auxlang than my own ideas anyway.

[Zaarin]

You sure about that /ʃ/ in pre-modern Hebrew? Or are you using Aramaic even for Yerushalayim?

The Amarna letters suggest /ʃ/, and Rabbinic literature consistently connected the name with שָׁלוֹם. *shrug* Though this does raise an interesting question of my own. Is the -ayim a modern reconstruction? Because the dual ending seems to be consistently -ê(m) in Phoenician/Punic, and I was under the impression that the same vowel collapse happened in Hebrew...

[mèþru]

No, it is definitely in Biblical Hebrew. Or at least in Hebrew by the time niqqud started to appear.

[Salmoneus]

So I've been thinking about what could make a good auxlang.

I never really was into auxlangs, I've checked out esperanto and lojban, and that's about it but I realized recently that an auxlang would actually fit quite well in the setting in the novel I'm writing(*). So, well, although I'm a little skeptical of the concept, it looks like I'm going to try to sketch one myself.

I guess my question is, what features would you use for an auxlang?

I think you have to look at who is inventing this auxlang, and why, and who is adopting the auxlang, and why. A lot of auxlang design is fundamentally ideological - the idea, for instance, of adopting words through random sampling of a large range of languages offers nothing in practical terms to the learnability of the language, but it meets an ideological need of its creators - and, perhaps, of prospective learners.

The language should probably be relatively "simple" - it shouldn't go out of its way to baffle, probably. But that doesn't necessarily equate to isolating, agglutinating or fusional necessarily (a simple umlaut, for instance, would be easy enough to remember).

The primary issue will probably not be 'learnability', but coolness: people have to actively WANT to learn this language. It's hard to say what people will find cool. Even pointless difficulty can be cool (it shows how smart you are to learn it).

-------

So maybe we can think about different routes to (localised) auxlang adoption? I'd suggest that learning an auxlang is effectively the same as joining a cult. So what sorts of cults might succeed sufficiently, and have a use for a language? Some suggestions...

a) HPM-related business seminar egoism
HPM groups preach that maximising your personal potential leads to material success; they provide the aura of success by tying their religion (sorry, "not a religion, just some useful ideas") to the corporate world - they often run "business" and "management" seminars. These can lead to cultlike networks - you meet the same people seminar after seminar, and the fact that you know each other means you give each other corporate and social favours. The development of in-group-identifying 'secret handshake' languages doesn't seem implausible, particularly when tied to claims about maximising your brain potential and letting you understand the worldviews of different business cultures, and when aiding communication with businessmen from other parts of the world.

What would such a language look like? "Efficient" - mostly analytic. In order to utilise all three sides of your brain and both forms of culture, it'll draw heavily from English and Chinese, probably with some Spanish and Arabic (heavily castrated phonologically!) for added wisdom. Esperanto might be an influence, or even Lojban, and perhaps a dash of Latin, because everyone knows Latin is more wisdomy than English. But much of its vocabulary may be derived opaquely from the sort of folk-etymology wordgames and specialised jargon such groups often employ.

b) mystics
Some bloke comes along and reveals that his magic language lets you directly touch the mind of god. What might this language be like? Naive, but it might be based on any language. It might, for example, have an entirely sui generis vocabulary with simple phonotactics, but underlyingly the phonetic inventory and some grammatical assumptions of Hindi.

c) neutralist pacifists
People who promote intersectarian and international peace might well promote a new, 'neutral' language. It might be drawn from a range of languages, or created de novo. It should be 'easy to learn' and 'universal'. Bonus points if it eliminates hatred.

d) geeks
Learning pointless stuff and proving you're part of an in-group is common behaviour among geeks. A geek-language could develop out of a media project - indeed, this is where most succesful conlangs come from. Knowing such a language could provide economic advantages as well, providing an international network. Such a language is more likely to try to be 'interesting'.

[Curlyjimsam]

Those words exist as transitivity pairs in standard English as well, so aren't that interesting.
Although "cook" is an unusual one now you mention it, because it's the only one where both words in the pair are frequently univalent (you can say "I cooked", to mean you cooked something). [making it the opposite of dialect 'learn', where both the transitive and the intransive verbs are bivalent] I guess this is allowed because the transitive/intransitive split is so deeply connected to animacy for this verb?

In English we've got various transitive<>intransitive alternations, including the causative alternation (which adds/removes an agent) and indefinite object deletion" (which adds/removes a patient).

The causative alternation affects verbs like melt, freeze, burn, open, break, move etc. These generally express some sort of change (usually a change of state, sometimes a change of location in cases like move, sink). But not all transitive change verbs allow it, which is possibly to do with the nature of the "subject" argument (whether the subject has to be agentive or not, in the active voice).

Indefinite object deletion affects a fairly small number verbs which seem to have "typical" objects, like eat (food), drink (a drink), teach (a class / students / a student ...), and so these objects can be omitted as it's easy to work out what they are. Or something along those lines.

A few indefinite object deletion verbs also qualify for the conditions that mean they qualify for the causative alternation, and end up allowing both alternations: cook is one of them, but also bake (Lucy bakes the cake, Lucy bakes, The cake bakes), nurse (The dog is nursing her puppies, The puppies are nursing, The dog is nursing).