Conlang Random Thread

[WeepingElf]

These don’t make any sense to me, for various reasons. If they’re IPA, /ph th kh/ are just a different way of transcribing /pʰ tʰ kʰ/, while /tʃ/→/ch~cʰ/ and /ʃ/→/sh~sʰ/ would make no phonetic sense. Meanwhile, if they’re not IPA, these are just describing different romanisations rather than any linguistic change.

Right, in the high register, h after a consonant makes it ejective. I didn't want to type a backslash to escape the single quote and forgot to fix it afterwards. I don't like the look of a quotation mark inside a word anyway, so maybe I should keep it.

Aspirated stops are AFAIK not likely to become ejectives. Rather, the unaspirated stops become ejectives, and the aspiration of the aspirated stops loses its phonemic relevance, i.e. /t tʰ/ > /t' t/. This is, for instance, what happened in the one Armenian dialect with ejectives which the glottalists like to cite as evidence for ejectives in Proto-Indo-European.

PS. Ejective because of this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ejective_ ... Hypothesis

Which I do not consider very plausible, but you can of course do what you want in your conlang.

[Ares Land]

PS. Ejective because of this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ejective_ ... Hypothesis

Which I do not consider very plausible, but you can of course do what you want in your conlang.

I was amused to see the mountain hypothesis with an 'Everett (2013)' cite, and a little disappointed it turned out to be an other Everett.

EDIT: and amused again to see that Caleb Everett (of the mountain hypothesis) is the son of Daniel Everett! (of Pirahã fame)

[WeepingElf]

PS. Ejective because of this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ejective_ ... Hypothesis

Which I do not consider very plausible, but you can of course do what you want in your conlang.

I was amused to see the mountain hypothesis with an 'Everett (2013)' cite, and a little disappointed it turned out to be an other Everett.

EDIT: and amused again to see that Caleb Everett (of the mountain hypothesis) is the son of Daniel Everett! (of Pirahã fame)

Sometimes crackpottery runs in the family

[Lērisama]

Which I do not consider very plausible, but you can of course do what you want in your conlang.

I was amused to see the mountain hypothesis with an 'Everett (2013)' cite, and a little disappointed it turned out to be an other Everett.

EDIT: and amused again to see that Caleb Everett (of the mountain hypothesis) is the son of Daniel Everett! (of Pirahã fame)

Sometimes crackpottery runs in the family

I wouldn't call (Daniel) Everett a crackpot, just unchomskian¹.

¹ Not intended as a non-compliment

[rotting bones]

Aspirated stops are AFAIK not likely to become ejectives. Rather, the unaspirated stops become ejectives, and the aspiration of the aspirated stops loses its phonemic relevance, i.e. /t tʰ/ > /t' t/. This is, for instance, what happened in the one Armenian dialect with ejectives which the glottalists like to cite as evidence for ejectives in Proto-Indo-European.

Didn't the ejectives emerge out of voiceless aspirated stops in Georgian? If I'm wrong about that, it could be worth changing it.

Which I do not consider very plausible, but you can of course do what you want in your conlang.

It's more of a trope than a naturalistic citation.

[WeepingElf]

Aspirated stops are AFAIK not likely to become ejectives. Rather, the unaspirated stops become ejectives, and the aspiration of the aspirated stops loses its phonemic relevance, i.e. /t tʰ/ > /t' t/. This is, for instance, what happened in the one Armenian dialect with ejectives which the glottalists like to cite as evidence for ejectives in Proto-Indo-European.

Didn't the ejectives emerge out of voiceless aspirated stops in Georgian? If I'm wrong about that, it could be worth changing it.

Where did you read THAT?! Because it's nonsense. The Georgian ejectives are inherited as such from Proto-Kartvelian, which has not been shown so far to be related to anything else, so we can't say where its ejectives came from. (And even the Nostraticists, who are probably off the track, assume that the Proto-Kartvelian ejectives already were ejectives in Proto-Nostratic.) One language where we know where its ejectives come from is Itelmen, a Chukotko-Kamchatkan language, whose ejectives evolved from various consonant clusters resulting from the loss of unstressed vowels.

[Travis B.]

Aspirated stops are AFAIK not likely to become ejectives. Rather, the unaspirated stops become ejectives, and the aspiration of the aspirated stops loses its phonemic relevance, i.e. /t tʰ/ > /t' t/. This is, for instance, what happened in the one Armenian dialect with ejectives which the glottalists like to cite as evidence for ejectives in Proto-Indo-European.

Didn't the ejectives emerge out of voiceless aspirated stops in Georgian? If I'm wrong about that, it could be worth changing it.

Georgian contrasts voiced, voiceless aspirated, and ejective stops and affricates, except it lacks voiced and voiceless aspirated uvular stops.

A common pattern actually is that a voiced, voiceless, ejective inventory will have aspiration on the voiceless stops and affricates, and it is not uncommon for aspiration of the voiceless stops and affricates to develop from unaspirated stops and affricates in languages with affricates. This happened in Akkadian, for instance.

[Travis B.]

One language where we know where its ejectives come from is Itelmen, a Chukotko-Kamchatkan language, whose ejectives evolved from various consonant clusters resulting from the loss of unstressed vowels.

Other language varieties where we know where their ejectives come from is some English varieties, where preglottalized coda, especially final, plosives are often realized as ejectives.

[Travis B.]

And speaking of aspirated and ejective consonants, a common pattern in languages with both voiceless aspirated and ejective consonants is for the ejective consonants to be relatively weak, and in some languages this has gone further and the historical ejective consonants have become tenuis. This is found in Georgian, whose rather weak ejectives are actually used to transcribe tenuis consonants in foreign names, and in the Turoyo Neo-Aramaic language, where originally ejective "emphatic" consonants have become tenuis, contrasting with both voiced and aspirated voiceless consonants.

[rotting bones]

I seem to remember that in Polivanov's diachronic reconstruction, ejectives might have emerged as strengthened versions of voiceless aspirated stops. Since I'm wrong about that, I will change the pattern and try again. Thanks.

[AwfullyAmateur]

Proud of the word labánoma, petal. Made it from laban (flower) and omi (feather).

[Zju]

Plain stops can turn into ejectives spontaneously, conditionally or unconditionally if surrounding languages have them, but the language in question does not.

[Travis B.]

Plain stops can turn into ejectives spontaneously, conditionally or unconditionally if surrounding languages have them, but the language in question does not.

A common pattern is that if there is more than one series of voiceless stop/affricate, the surface realizations of these series can be shuffled around without the series merging. For instance, if one series is aspirated, a tenuis series may become ejective or an ejective series can become tenuis or dorsalized ("emphatic"). Conversely, if one series is ejective, a tenuis series may become aspirated (I have not heard of good examples of the opposite, where a historical contrast between ejective and aspirated stops/affricates becomes a contrast between ejective and tenuis stops/affricates respectively).

[Ahzoh]

*Me, taking notes of this conversation*

I was never certain about the origins of ejectives which made me quite uncertain about how frequent ejectives should be and whether there could be multiple non-geminate ejectives in close proximity to each other (either directly adjacent, or a syllable or two away) within a single root/stem/morpheme.

I am reminded of Geers's Law, which is an Akkadian sound law similar to Grassman's law and Dahl's law, but governing ejectives:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geers%27s_law

---

Unrelatedly, I think I will make the 1st prson plural verb suffix be -nin rather than -ti

Subject affixes are currently this:
-ni / -ti
-ma / -man
-ta / -tan
There is an /i/-/a-/a/ vocalization pattern along the person axis, and a 1st plural is a unique morpheme while the non-1st plurals simply have a -n plural suffix.

I'm not satisfied with the vocalization pattern, I'd rather every affix be something like -Ci, but that would result in 1pl being the same as 3sg, which I don't want (it also makes my grammar table look stupid).

I thought about changing the consonants, but it's hard since /t/ is the most "stable" and distinct when adjacent to other consonants. It feels more "stable" and distinct when next to any nasal, stop, or fricative, whereas other consonants like /p k b d g/ and fricatives feel less "stable" and distinct.

For example, /paraxki/ feels less noticeable than /paraxti/. Like, /paraxki/ makes me want to turn it into /paraxxi/ or /parakki/, which I don't want. And /paraxsi/ and /parafsi/ feel similarly weak.
Conversely, /parasti/ feels just as distinct as /paraski/ even though it's homo-organic. It doesn't make me want to turn it into /parassi/ or /paratti/.
Likely this entire issue has to do with sibilance. /f x/ are not sibilant, while /s/ is, and that may be an important factor in this impression.


Thus, I thought about -nin as an affix since it allows me to have all affixes be of the /i/ vocalization and /n/ is decently stable and distinct near most consonants. It also patterns with the other plural affixes.

[Skookum]

*Me, taking notes of this conversation*

I was never certain about the origins of ejectives which made me quite uncertain about how frequent ejectives should be and whether there could be multiple non-geminate ejectives in close proximity to each other (either directly adjacent, or a syllable or two away) within a single root/stem/morpheme.

I am reminded of Geers's Law, which is an Akkadian sound law similar to Grassman's law and Dahl's law, but governing ejectives:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geers%27s_law

I wasn’t aware of Geer’s Law, but its interesting in light of a similar dissimilation process of ejectives in Secwepemctsín (Salish), where the first ejective in a root/word that becomes plain if the root/word contains multiple ejectives: *C̓VC̓ > CVC̓. But other Salish languages (except possibly Tillamook, but I forget the details there) allow two, three or more ejectives in a word, even in clusters.

[bradrn]

sorry, have been very busy with life stuff, am not likely to complete this assignment, apologies (what darren gave me is difficult but that isn't why i didn't complete it, and i would encourage someone else to try to solve it instead, it would be a shame if darren got discouraged and went with something simpler when solving the puzzle he created would be much more rewarding for the person who replaces me in line)

Cross-posting this here in case anyone else wants to take on the challenge of finishing this conlang relay!

[Lērisama]

If it's still unfinished in mid June, I'd be happy to have a go, but I'm too busy up until then.

Edit: To be clear, yes, that is June, and I know it's a lokg time away. I'm thinking of me in this scenario more a last resort¹ than a proper offer.

¹ I will almost certainly have the time to translate to my heart's content then, so I hope not a terrible one

Edit edit: I've gone through the relay thread and it seems I've misunderstood: Foxcatdog would be doing the final translation to English rather than Emily, so if it gets that late I'd assume you'd just skip Emily and Foxcatdog would translate Darren's text into English? Given when this one started, a quicker wrapping up would probably be better.