Conlang Random Thread

[Frislander]

That doesn't discount the Athabskan evidence though. That polysynthesis had to come from somewhere, and the virtual absence of suffixes, and especially person-marking suffixes, points to a historic SOV word order which was later grammaticalised into this massive verb complex. There's nothing about polysynthesis that says you have to lose your original word order when you become polysynthetic, so what's the issue?

[Raphael]

I've skimmed the Sound Change Quickie Thread, and now I wonder: Are there any good introductory resources on what kind of sound changes tend to happen? The LCK and ALC mainly seem to explain that sound changes are usually regular, and provide a few examples, but that's about it. If you're completely new to creating sound changes, as I am, well, where do you start?

[quinterbeck]

Bryatesle is miekko's. qatama... is that masako's?

It's been so long I don't even know if most of the people are still here... but I do remember the name miekko. []

fwiw Miekko still posts here: http://miniatureconlangs.blogspot.com/

I assume it's the same Miekko

[quinterbeck]

𝕺𝕽𝕴𝕲𝕴𝕹𝕾 𝕺𝕱 𝕻𝕽𝕰𝕹𝕬𝕾𝕬𝕷𝕴𝖅𝕰𝕯 𝕮𝕺𝕹𝕾𝕺𝕹𝕬𝕹𝕿𝕾 𝕴𝕹 𝖄𝕰 𝕷𝕬𝕹𝕲𝖀𝕬𝕲𝕰𝕾 𝕺𝕱 𝖄𝕰 𝕬𝕷𝕷𝕺𝕾𝕻𝕳𝕰𝕽𝕰

What is that???

[Xwtek]

That doesn't discount the Athabskan evidence though. That polysynthesis had to come from somewhere, and the virtual absence of suffixes, and especially person-marking suffixes, points to a historic SOV word order which was later grammaticalised into this massive verb complex. There's nothing about polysynthesis that says you have to lose your original word order when you become polysynthetic, so what's the issue?

Of course, you can switch from SOV nonpolysynthetic to VOS polysynthetic, then SOV polysynthetic. But that grammar change is too long to be realized quickly.

Is this grammar change good?

Andrew Sarah see > Sarah Andrew 3SG.PROX.NOM 3SG.OBV.ACC see > Sarah Andrew 3SG.PROX.NOM-3SG.OBV.ACC-see

[Nortaneous]

𝕺𝕽𝕴𝕲𝕴𝕹𝕾 𝕺𝕱 𝕻𝕽𝕰𝕹𝕬𝕾𝕬𝕷𝕴𝖅𝕰𝕯 𝕮𝕺𝕹𝕾𝕺𝕹𝕬𝕹𝕿𝕾 𝕴𝕹 𝖄𝕰 𝕷𝕬𝕹𝕲𝖀𝕬𝕲𝕰𝕾 𝕺𝕱 𝖄𝕰 𝕬𝕷𝕷𝕺𝕾𝕻𝕳𝕰𝕽𝕰

What is that???

𝖈𝖔𝖓𝖙𝖊𝖓𝖙 𝖙𝖔𝖔 𝖕𝖔𝖜𝖊𝖗𝖔𝖚𝖘 𝖋𝖔𝖗 𝖞𝖔𝖚, 𝖘𝖔𝖓

[Frislander]

That doesn't discount the Athabskan evidence though. That polysynthesis had to come from somewhere, and the virtual absence of suffixes, and especially person-marking suffixes, points to a historic SOV word order which was later grammaticalised into this massive verb complex. There's nothing about polysynthesis that says you have to lose your original word order when you become polysynthetic, so what's the issue?

Of course, you can switch from SOV nonpolysynthetic to VOS polysynthetic, then SOV polysynthetic. But that grammar change is too long to be realized quickly.

I said, you don't have to have a word-order shift to verb-initial word order when you become polysynthetic, you can go straight to polysynthetic without a change in word order. There is no problem here, what are you so worried about?

[Xwtek]

How does any language acquired applicatives?

[akam chinjir]

You can incorporate a preposition into the verb. (Couldn't tell you under what circumstances that's likely to happen, though.)

[Whimemsz]

I prefer post-nasalised stops to pre-. /bmaɪ/, /dnai/, /gŋaɪ/. Even before I knew what they were called.

Why not both? You might like the Hup language from the Nadahup family. They really go bonkers: "In oral environments, voiced stops are pre-nasalized in morpheme-initial position, post-nasalized in morpheme-final position, and may be medially nasalized at morpheme boundaries". That's how words like /bɨg/ 'long time' get realized as [ᵐbɨgᵑ] and /tog-ot/ 'daughter-OBL' as [togᵑ.ᵑgot]. It also does a similar thing with palatals, which I think was cute.

Well, that's allophonic (and also a fairly common process in Amazonia).

I've skimmed the Sound Change Quickie Thread, and now I wonder: Are there any good introductory resources on what kind of sound changes tend to happen? The LCK and ALC mainly seem to explain that sound changes are usually regular, and provide a few examples, but that's about it. If you're completely new to creating sound changes, as I am, well, where do you start?

It's not exactly for beginner beginners, but Hock's Principles of Historical Linguistics has a good amount on various kinds of sound changes and which are common. I'd also recommend just ... reading up on the historical phonology of a number of languages, generally-speaking the more recent publications the better. You can use the Index Diachronica for this but caveat lector because there's a number of errors and quoting of unreliable sources in there (e.g., the Afroasiatic changes, "Elamo-Dravidian," "Je-Tupi-Carib," the Chatino changes, etc.).

[Hallow XIII]

𝕿𝕽𝕰𝕬𝕿𝕸𝕰𝕹𝕿 𝕺𝕱 𝕹𝕬𝕾𝕬𝕷-𝕾𝕿𝕺𝕻 𝕮𝕷𝖀𝕾𝕿𝕰𝕽𝕾 𝕴𝕹 𝕺𝕿𝕳𝕰𝕽 𝕷𝕬𝕹𝕲𝖀𝕬𝕲𝕰𝕾 𝕺𝕱 𝖄𝕰 𝕬𝕷𝕷𝕺𝕾𝕻𝕳𝕰𝕽𝕰
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The languages of Tsalaysia and the Kho Plateau do not in general have prenasalized stops, although they are adjacent to languages that do, such as those of the Zhjumna Range; the simple reason for this being that like earlier stages of the languages that did develop such consonants, they have initial clusters of nasals followed by stops (or other consonants), but did not, in general, collapse these into a prenasalized series. Nonetheless, some of them do do strange things to their clusters.

Ubghuu is the most boring and conservative language; it gained clusters of nasal + consonant through syncope and hasn't, in general, done anything to them. *ɴʁ- becomes ɴɢ-, but in except for very elderly speakers, these two consonants merge in all positions anyway.

Kangshi is more interesting; all of its nasals can be syllabic, although for historical reasons, n- rarely occurs at the beginning of long clusters, where m- and ŋ- usually do become syllabic. The latter tends to resolve into nasalization either when surrounded by uvulars or preceded by a vowel: qŋxsɯ̂ [qɑ̃χsɯ̂], iŋbdǽi [jɪ̃βdæ̌j]. The initial clusters nʁ- and ŋʁ- are usually realized as [ɴː] and [ɴɢ], respectively.

Eahswa, a distant relative of Kangshi, eliminated all initial clusters. Ancestral nasal-stop clusters result in a tenuis stop and a breathy-series tone. Proto-Kangshuic *^Bmbɯŋ gives Kangshi mbɯ̀a, but Eahswa ⁸pă.

[Raphael]

I've skimmed the Sound Change Quickie Thread, and now I wonder: Are there any good introductory resources on what kind of sound changes tend to happen? The LCK and ALC mainly seem to explain that sound changes are usually regular, and provide a few examples, but that's about it. If you're completely new to creating sound changes, as I am, well, where do you start?

It's not exactly for beginner beginners, but Hock's Principles of Historical Linguistics has a good amount on various kinds of sound changes and which are common. I'd also recommend just ... reading up on the historical phonology of a number of languages, generally-speaking the more recent publications the better. You can use the Index Diachronica for this but caveat lector because there's a number of errors and quoting of unreliable sources in there (e.g., the Afroasiatic changes, "Elamo-Dravidian," "Je-Tupi-Carib," the Chatino changes, etc.).

Thank you!

[missals]

Occasionally I've thought about making a conlang whose history took it directly from largely analytic to largely internally-modifying, without passing through an agglutinative or fusional stage. There's precedent in various kinds of diachronic and synchronic changes in different languages around the world, e.g.

• The apparently purely sound-symbolically-motivated plural forms for certain animate nouns in Polynesian languages, like Hawaiian kanaka 'person' / kānaka 'people'
• Basque palatal consonant apophony for diminutive terms, ex. tanta 'drop' / ttantta 'droplet'
• Front vowel apophony for diminutives in a variety of languages
• Straying slightly further away from the apophonic ideal, reduplication and the kinds of apophony it can diachronically induce, e.g. in some Oceanic languages of Vanuatu you get things like tapa > tapatapa > tatapa > ttapa > t'apa or θapa
• And then there's suppletion, though diachronically that isn't really stem-modification at all even if it looks like an extreme version of it synchronically

The unlikely thing, I suppose, would be packing all of these into a language without having any significant agglutination

[Xwtek]

Occasionally I've thought about making a conlang whose history took it directly from largely analytic to largely internally-modifying, without passing through an agglutinative or fusional stage. There's precedent in various kinds of diachronic and synchronic changes in different languages around the world, e.g.

• The apparently purely sound-symbolically-motivated plural forms for certain animate nouns in Polynesian languages, like Hawaiian kanaka 'person' / kānaka 'people'
• Basque palatal consonant apophony for diminutive terms, ex. tanta 'drop' / ttantta 'droplet'
• Front vowel apophony for diminutives in a variety of languages
• Straying slightly further away from the apophonic ideal, reduplication and the kinds of apophony it can diachronically induce, e.g. in some Oceanic languages of Vanuatu you get things like tapa > tapatapa > tatapa > ttapa > t'apa or θapa
• And then there's suppletion, though diachronically that isn't really stem-modification at all even if it looks like an extreme version of it synchronically

The unlikely thing, I suppose, would be packing all of these into a language without having any significant agglutination

Uh, how do you get suppletion if you don't have inflection in first place?

[Raholeun]

Suppletion is a process in which one word counts as the inflected form of another word, but in fact they are not cognate. So you have two unrelated words A and B and let's say B becomes associated with A to the point where B only occurs as an inflected form of A.

[Pabappa]

Anyone ever done a conlang with portmanteaus? In Old Andanese, portmanteaus were a grammatical process .... the language only had 75 syllables, so it was easy to find words that fit each other ... and Late Andanese has only 30 syllables, so it's even easier. e.g. /kina/ "nose" + /alu/ "laugh" ---> /kinalu/ "to laugh" (originally narrow sense gets broadened and replaces /alu/). but i dont really actively use this anymore.

[Xwtek]

Suppletion is a process in which one word counts as the inflected form of another word, but in fact they are not cognate. So you have two unrelated words A and B and let's say B becomes associated with A to the point where B only occurs as an inflected form of A.

My point is the absence of other way to form inflection, nothing can distiguish suppletion with being a different root. You could say "come" as suppletive venitive conjugation of "go". But it's not how English works.

[missals]

My point is the absence of other way to form inflection, nothing can distiguish suppletion with being a different root. You could say "come" as suppletive venitive conjugation of "go". But it's not how English works.

Yeah, sorry, I should've been more clear - not true suppletion, since that requires inflectional paradigms to exist to begin with, but some kind of suppletion-like effect resulting from synonymous terms becoming restricted to complementary environments - compare English "handsome" and "beautiful", which, when used of human beings, most typically mean the same exact thing - "physically attractive" - but "handsome" is used with men, and "beautiful" with women.

I could imagine, say, a language with no singular-plural distinction developing in such a way where two terms with similar meanings - perhaps a word meaning "bird", and a word meaning "winged one" - come to be used in such a way where one is only used in semantically singular contexts, and the other in semantically plural contexts.

Like if you see one bird you might say "saw-1s bird", but if you saw two you would say "saw-1s two winged-one". And thus a kind of singular-plural distinction develops, at least among a certain subset of nouns.

[akam chinjir]

Maybe you could also have widespread vocabulary shifts in different politeness registers, and then have polite verbs reinterpreted as second person forms, and humble ones as first person.

[Yalensky]

Are there terms for the degrees of comparison meaning "less" and "least"? I've seen elsewhere in the online conlangosphere that the terms "contrastive" and "sublative" have been coined on the model of "comparative" and "superlative" (by David J Peterson IIRC), but I doubt there's any attestation of those words in academic linguistic literature, unless it's of "sublative" as a noun case. Are there broadly accepted terms within linguistics for these degrees of comparison?

Yeah, sorry, I should've been more clear - not true suppletion, since that requires inflectional paradigms to exist to begin with, but some kind of suppletion-like effect resulting from synonymous terms becoming restricted to complementary environments - compare English "handsome" and "beautiful", which, when used of human beings, most typically mean the same exact thing - "physically attractive" - but "handsome" is used with men, and "beautiful" with women.

I could imagine, say, a language with no singular-plural distinction developing in such a way where two terms with similar meanings - perhaps a word meaning "bird", and a word meaning "winged one" - come to be used in such a way where one is only used in semantically singular contexts, and the other in semantically plural contexts.

Like if you see one bird you might say "saw-1s bird", but if you saw two you would say "saw-1s two winged-one". And thus a kind of singular-plural distinction develops, at least among a certain subset of nouns.

I wonder if non-inflectional suppletion could also be determined by syntactic environments, e.g. we use a special root when the word is the object of a preposition.