Conlang Random Thread

[bradrn]

You can't really approximate sound changes onto different language families to much. How would you approximate processes like umlaut. You can't start with a mostly monosyllabic language and end up with Torres-Banks style metaphony or approximate englishes process of final syllable reduction with an already monosyllabic language.

Old Chinese wasn’t monosyllabic, though.

[keenir]

You can't really approximate sound changes onto different language families to much.

You can if you're making a bogolang...I think one of the more famous examples of this is Wenydyk(sp).

How would you approximate processes like umlaut.

i thought Old/Middle English had umlauts.

[jal]

i thought Old/Middle English had umlauts.

Yes, but Old Chinese hadn't. I think the point is that the phonological processes that caused it in English can't happen in Old Chinese for lack of suitable environments.


JAL

[keenir]

i thought Old/Middle English had umlauts.

Yes, but Old Chinese hadn't. I think the point is that the phonological processes that caused it in English can't happen in Old Chinese for lack of suitable environments.

ah, okay. thanks for clarifying that.


I think bogolangs go more with the line from Tremors: "We must do what we can, with what we have."...which means allowing for areas where exact 1:1 correspondances can't happen.

[Travis B.]

You can't really approximate sound changes onto different language families to much. How would you approximate processes like umlaut. You can't start with a mostly monosyllabic language and end up with Torres-Banks style metaphony or approximate englishes process of final syllable reduction with an already monosyllabic language.

Old Chinese wasn’t monosyllabic, though.

Yes, but IIRC OC had only a limited number of multisyllabic words that were not sesquisyllables.

[jal]

I think bogolangs go more with the line from Tremors: "We must do what we can, with what we have."...which means allowing for areas where exact 1:1 correspondances can't happen.

Sure, for bogolangs you can do whatever you want, which can be quite fun. At least I had fun designing Fake Germanic and Fake Latinic, as they needn't follow any rules, if you don't want to.

Facinda linguam latinam fictem deliciare fuit.
Creating a fake latinic language was fun.


JAL

[linguistcat]

Yeah I was meaning like a bogolang. Since I knew OC did have at least some non-monosyllabic words, maybe instead of umlaut I could have some other change there that was similar.

I forgot last night but I have a related question. It's my understanding that where OC had second syllables, they were more constrained than the first/primary syllable. Are there other languages where this occurs? What are common constraints if so? Am I confused about how that worked in OC itself?

[Travis B.]

I forgot last night but I have a related question. It's my understanding that where OC had second syllables, they were more constrained than the first/primary syllable. Are there other languages where this occurs? What are common constraints if so? Am I confused about how that worked in OC itself?

Most multisyllabic words in OC were sesquisyllables consisting of two syllables, an initial unstressed syllable with a reduced vowel, and a second stressed syllable with a full vowel.

[linguistcat]

I forgot last night but I have a related question. It's my understanding that where OC had second syllables, they were more constrained than the first/primary syllable. Are there other languages where this occurs? What are common constraints if so? Am I confused about how that worked in OC itself?

Most multisyllabic words in OC were sesquisyllables consisting of two syllables, an initial unstressed syllable with a reduced vowel, and a second stressed syllable with a full vowel.

Ok so I got the order reversed more or less. Thanks for the correction ^^

[Travis B.]

It's hard to have umlaut in a sesquisyllable where not only is the stressed syllable final, but also the first syllable can only have a schwa for a vowel.

[Skookum]

Could do something like some Australian languages, where the initial consonant colours a following vowel then deletes. So maybe labials cause the stressed vowel to become rounded, while palatals cause them to front, before the entire unstressed syllable is dropped. So:

*pəkat > pəkot > kot
*šəkat > šəket > ket

Or it could colour the following schwa and trigger some kind of vowel harmony in the word:

*pəkat > pukat > pukot > ukot
*šəkat > šikat > šiket > iket

But both get pretty far from English-style sound change system...

[Travis B.]

Could do something like some Australian languages, where the initial consonant colours a following vowel then deletes. So maybe labials cause the stressed vowel to become rounded, while palatals cause them to front, before the entire unstressed syllable is dropped. So:

*pəkat > pəkot > kot
*šəkat > šəket > ket

Or it could colour the following schwa and trigger some kind of vowel harmony in the word:

*pəkat > pukat > pukot > ukot
*šəkat > šikat > šiket > iket

But both get pretty far from English-style sound change system...

At this point it wouldn't be English sound changes applied to OC, but entirely different sound changes applied to OC...

[keenir]

But both get pretty far from English-style sound change system...

At this point it wouldn't be English sound changes applied to OC, but entirely different sound changes applied to OC...

My first thought is "okay..." and my second thought is "then how do bogolangs handle when the base language and the language being emulated (in its sound changes) don't match up well or much at all?"

[Travis B.]

But both get pretty far from English-style sound change system...

At this point it wouldn't be English sound changes applied to OC, but entirely different sound changes applied to OC...

My first thought is "okay..." and my second thought is "then how do bogolangs handle when the base language and the language being emulated (in its sound changes) don't match up well or much at all?"

By playing very loose and fast with the sound changes from the language being emulated?

[malloc]

While researching tone, I came across an article that says that:

Languages which are poly-agglutinative, like canonical Bantu, don’t develop true M tones; a /H/ vs. /M/ vs. /L/ system would be highly paradigmatic, at odds with the syntagmaticity of the language. To appreciate this, consider a word with six agglutinated monosyllabic morphemes, each contrasting /H, M, L/. This would produce 729 (36) tone combinations. Such a system thus has to be syntagmatic, i. e. with severe restrictions on where the tones can contrast.

However, it does not seem obvious to me that why multiple tonal levels would present problems for an agglutinative language. After all plenty of languages distinguish dozens of consonants and most have far more than three vowels yet the explosion in possible consonant or vowel combinations causes no problems for agglutinative languages.

[bradrn]

At this point it wouldn't be English sound changes applied to OC, but entirely different sound changes applied to OC...

My first thought is "okay..." and my second thought is "then how do bogolangs handle when the base language and the language being emulated (in its sound changes) don't match up well or much at all?"

By playing very loose and fast with the sound changes from the language being emulated?

I thought that the point of bogolangs was to replicate the output, not the sound changes themselves.

Languages which are poly-agglutinative, like canonical Bantu, don’t develop true M tones; a /H/ vs. /M/ vs. /L/ system would be highly paradigmatic, at odds with the syntagmaticity of the language. To appreciate this, consider a word with six agglutinated monosyllabic morphemes, each contrasting /H, M, L/. This would produce 729 (36) tone combinations. Such a system thus has to be syntagmatic, i. e. with severe restrictions on where the tones can contrast.

However, it does not seem obvious to me that why multiple tonal levels would present problems for an agglutinative language. After all plenty of languages distinguish dozens of consonants and most have far more than three vowels yet the explosion in possible consonant or vowel combinations causes no problems for agglutinative languages.

This sounds like rubbish to me. Citation please?

[malloc]

Languages which are poly-agglutinative, like canonical Bantu, don’t develop true M tones; a /H/ vs. /M/ vs. /L/ system would be highly paradigmatic, at odds with the syntagmaticity of the language. To appreciate this, consider a word with six agglutinated monosyllabic morphemes, each contrasting /H, M, L/. This would produce 729 (36) tone combinations. Such a system thus has to be syntagmatic, i. e. with severe restrictions on where the tones can contrast.

However, it does not seem obvious to me that why multiple tonal levels would present problems for an agglutinative language. After all plenty of languages distinguish dozens of consonants and most have far more than three vowels yet the explosion in possible consonant or vowel combinations causes no problems for agglutinative languages.

This sounds like rubbish to me. Citation please?

This paper on page 9.

[bradrn]

However, it does not seem obvious to me that why multiple tonal levels would present problems for an agglutinative language. After all plenty of languages distinguish dozens of consonants and most have far more than three vowels yet the explosion in possible consonant or vowel combinations causes no problems for agglutinative languages.

This sounds like rubbish to me. Citation please?

This paper on page 9.

Now this is surprising — Hyman is usually such a good analyst. I’ll have to read this properly.

[bradrn]

Ah, I see. With context it becomes clearer, though it’s still a subtle argument:

• Firstly, he labels this claim as a suspected correlation: that is, he has reason to believe these things usually go together, but he can’t be sure. Also as a ‘correlation’ it should be possible to find counterexamples, albeit not many.
• The important word ‘paradigmatic’ isn’t properly defined, but immediately before he defines ‘syntagmatic’ as referring to a tone system in which tones are placed or determined based on morphology or syntax, e.g. one where downstep occurs on all following tones within a syntactic span. So presumably ‘paradigmatic’ refers to the opposite: one in which many tones can directly contrast with each other on a single syllable, to form a coherent tonal paradigm.
• Alongside this he gives another suspected correlation: the more syntagmatic a tone system is, the more likely it is to be privative, contrasting an underlying /H/ tone with /∅/ (or /L/ with /∅/).
• Thus, I think his argument is as follows. If every syllable of a highly agglutinative language could contrast a three-way tonal paradigm of /H M L/, or even a two-way paradigm of /H L/, then there would be ‘too many’ possibilities: most of the tonal combinations would go unused. So, due to the lack of available contrasts, the tonal system must be more syntagmatic, in that the tonal possibilities are heavily restricted. But such a syntagmatic tone system is very likely to have privative tone, which eliminates the possibility of a phonemic mid tone.

I don’t find this argument nearly as convincing as Hyman does: in particular, I think he neglects evidence from the Americas, where cases like Cherokee show that polysynthesis can go together with as many as four contrastive tones (though the underlying situation is complex). That said, it’s not the ‘rubbish’ I originally dismissed it as.

[Ahzoh]

Today I've been thinking about the "areal linguistics" of the region (unnamed) my primary conlang Vrkhazhian is found in. For instance, I would say that the languages of the area have this sort of phonological inventory:

/m n ŋ/
/p b t d k g/ or /p pʰ t tʰ k kʰ/ or /p pʰ t tʰ k kʰ q qʰ/
/f s x/ or /f s ʃ x/
/l r/

Essentially, the languages all have a velar nasal, at minimum a binary distinction in plosives (voicing or aspiration) and the presence of at least /f s x/. Beyond that, the languages often have more than just these consonants and even voiced fricatives.

Morphologically, most are agglutinating and usually have either three or more genders or no genders at all. Regarding case, they either have medium to large case systems or no case at all (i.e. no 2-case or 3-case systems). Of the languages with case, the vocative and equative (to express likeness or equivalence) are common.


Mostly I was thinking about the syllable structure of Vrkhazhian and how the language handles certain homo-organic clusters. I have many words with nasal+stop clusters in the root, such as lumb-, zand- and man̮k- and this poses a problem: the constructed state is indicated by the removal of the gender and case endings, resulting in word-final clusters, which are illegal. This is typically solved by inserting echo vowels between the members of the offending cluster. But the result feels wrong with nasal+stop clusters: lumub, zanad, man̮ak in much the same way it feels to break up a geminate cluster this way.

Instead, I decided they will just keep their gender vowel (i.e. lumb-u, zand-i, man̮k-a) so as to not break the cluster and I needed a justification for this so I decided that these words with nasal+stop clusters come from a substrate language that allowed these clusters word-finally. Thus the behavior is an indication of the words' foreign origins.