Conlang template

[Qwynegold]

[several points]

Thanks for the input!

I know you addressed this to Ares Land, but the point above about the key features of a conlang addresses this. I have also found that - for me - having a specific sort of cultural aesthetic to the language helps maintain my interest through. On the old board, I got bogged down with my Devani language because it had the personality of wet cardboard. I had a lot more fun with Jin at that point, so my current work in my scratchpad follows that same path. Dwarven is now strongly Celtic flavored and Devani is very Indic. The other thing too is just having multiple conlang projects going at the same time allows me to move back & forth such that when I do run into a hurdle, I can just set it aside & work on something that I do have inspiration for at the moment. So multiple conlang projects are easier in some ways that focusing on 1. I can't answer the "completeness" question as of yet, but it's going well.

Yeah, I'm usually inspired by some natlang when I'm working with a conlang, and I always have the phonology more or less done when I work with grammar. One big problem for me is that I just start new projects when I get bored.

[Qwynegold]

Thanks for telling about your process! Do you have the problem that, before you've even realized, you have stopped working on a conlang because it's tedious or because there's some specific hurdle that you need to solve before you can move on? Do you reach a satisfying level of "completeness" in your conlangs?

Oh yes, sure. I think these issues are just a normal part of any artistic project. (I write short stories and novels too -- none of them readable, I'm afraid -- and the tediousness or hurdles are definitely there too).

That sucks.

My main problem, though, is lack of time. Real life tends to inferfere (I also make things harder for myself by pursuing way too many projects).

Ah. I have time, but lack motivation, interest, and above all, energy.

[Ares Land]

Ah. I have time, but lack motivation, interest, and above all, energy.

Just in case it may help anyone, here are a few tricks. Honestly, I don't claim any special knowledge or expertise, it's just stuff that works for me.

• Switch to conworlding. The more you know about your speakers, the better.
• Research is an excellent, guilt-free activity.
• Up the alienness ratio. This relates to the conworlding point above. Figuring out how to say 'Claudius is in the garden' is tedious. 'The criminal is in a sack with a dog, a cock, a viper, and an ape', not so much.
• Write up a difficult text and try to translate it. It doesn't matter if you haven't covered the required grammar, try to come up with something on the fly.
• Just go through vocabulary list and try and expand the lexicon.
• Did I mention the lexicon? Seriously, work on the lexicon!

It took me years to figure that one out: never neglect the lexicon. I guarantee you'll never abandon a language with a sizeable lexicon. Plus, you can work on it at any time. You don't need to have syntactic trees or huge paradigm tables to expand vocabulary.

Also: work out geographical terms. A huge list of river, mountain ranges, and so on. You'll need them. Figure out how names work, you'll need that too.

Also, it's a very good way to avoid the ever present temptation to tweak the language some more.
I guarantee, when you have a dozen town names and river names, and maps labelled with these (or genealogies, or stories, whatever floats your boat), you'll want to keep these. Which means if you work on the language, you'll move on to the good bits of grammar, and won't be tempted to redo the grammar ever again.

Again, that sounds very didactic, but I don't mean any of this in a patronizing way. I'm just sharing what worked for me.

[Moose-tache]

Research is an excellent, guilt-free activity.

My go-to activity when I'm too lazy to be productive but too guilt-ridden to watch 90 Day Fiance is to go to Academia.org and type in random keywords. If I stick with it long enough, I am guaranteed to find a paper that makes me say "Oooh! I should write a section about this!"

[Qwynegold]

I finally added a bunch of kinship terms to a conlang, but usually I find the lexicon tedious too. I'll try to remember the do research tip though. I don't have the problem of reworking grammar though. Usually even the bad parts of my grammars stick. ^^;

[Kuchigakatai]

Just in case it may help anyone, here are a few tricks. Honestly, I don't claim any special knowledge or expertise, it's just stuff that works for me.

• Switch to conworlding. The more you know about your speakers, the better.
• Research is an excellent, guilt-free activity.
• Up the alienness ratio. This relates to the conworlding point above. Figuring out how to say 'Claudius is in the garden' is tedious. 'The criminal is in a sack with a dog, a cock, a viper, and an ape', not so much.
• Write up a difficult text and try to translate it. It doesn't matter if you haven't covered the required grammar, try to come up with something on the fly.
• Just go through vocabulary list and try and expand the lexicon.
• Did I mention the lexicon? Seriously, work on the lexicon!

It took me years to figure that one out: never neglect the lexicon. I guarantee you'll never abandon a language with a sizeable lexicon. Plus, you can work on it at any time. You don't need to have syntactic trees or huge paradigm tables to expand vocabulary.

Also: work out geographical terms. A huge list of river, mountain ranges, and so on. You'll need them. Figure out how names work, you'll need that too.

Also, it's a very good way to avoid the ever present temptation to tweak the language some more.
I guarantee, when you have a dozen town names and river names, and maps labelled with these (or genealogies, or stories, whatever floats your boat), you'll want to keep these. Which means if you work on the language, you'll move on to the good bits of grammar, and won't be tempted to redo the grammar ever again.

Again, that sounds very didactic, but I don't mean any of this in a patronizing way. I'm just sharing what worked for me.

Nah man, I think all that is excellent. I personally had to grudgingly admit at some point that it was impossible to get further in a conlang without doing a good deal of conworlding. You can't build sentences unless you have a culture for the sentences' context. Even something as silly as 'The girl grabbed her doll' implies the cultural development of the concept of a 'doll' as an object a girl plays with (see also the joke about 'dolls' vs. boys' 'action figures' and men's collector figurines).

Things are a bit easier if you stick to a dirt-level of civilization, because just about anyone should have a way to speak about fruit, stars, mouths, yelling, helping. But even here the definition of what 'fruit' or 'stars' are exactly is also prone to culture (see tomatoes and avocados as fruit, or the Sun and the planets as stars —the Greeks referred to planets as ἀστέρες πλάνητες astéres plánētes 'wanderer stars').

[Qwynegold]

I started working on the template, but don't have any high hopes that it'll ever get finished. I'm still on the first question, which is about morphological type. As I was writing about this, and checking Wikipedia, it occurred to me that morphological typology is really about two things: how words are built and how grammar is expressed.

Individual words carry a general meaning (root concept); nuances are expressed by other words.
[...]
Not all analytic languages are isolating; for example, Chinese and English possess many compound words, but contain few inflections for them.

↑This is all about words, and not about how grammar is expressed. Furthermore, when describing what an oligosynthetic language is, it's only about how words are constructed. But when you're describing synthesis or fusion, it's about grammar. And tri-consonantal roots are about the shape of the words, but when you're talking about the vowel patterns that are inserted into them, you're talking about grammar. Do you agree with these points, or am I totally wrong?

I also have some small, specific questions.

1. Does anyone remember the name of that one North American language that was supposed to be non-concatenative, like Semitic languages?
2. Are infixes (not ablaut or the Semitic vowel patterns, but the "typical" kind of infix) a concatenative or non-concatenative feature?
3. Are clitics an isolating feature or a synthetic feature?
4. Can compounding be defined as a feature of any morphological type? Is compounding only ever a derivational thing, or can it express grammar? (If that question makes sense.)
5. Has the polysynthesis for novices thread disappeared, or was it on the old forum?

EDIT: Added point 5.

[Ares Land]

I also have some small, specific questions.

1. Does anyone remember the name of that one North American language that was supposed to be non-concatenative, like Semitic languages?
2. Are infixes (not ablaut or the Semitic vowel patterns, but the "typical" kind of infix) a concatenative or non-concatenative feature?
3. Are clitics an isolating feature or a synthetic feature?
4. Can compounding be defined as a feature of any morphological type? Is compounding only ever a derivational thing, or can it express grammar? (If that question makes sense.)
5. Has the polysynthesis for novices thread disappeared, or was it on the old forum?

EDIT: Added point 5.

1) Yes, I believe you're thinking of the Muskogean languages. (Choctaw, for instance)
2) Non-concatenative.
3) No idea, sorry!
4) Not really, I think, though noun incorporation looks a lot like compounding.
5) It was on the old board.

[Richard W]

[*]Can compounding be defined as a feature of any morphological type? Is compounding only ever a derivational thing, or can it express grammar? (If that question makes sense.)

It's fairly 'grammatical' in 'man-eating', and it gets even more so in Indic languages, where X-case Y is frequently (nay, excessively) merged to X-Y.

[bradrn]

I started working on the template, but don't have any high hopes that it'll ever get finished. I'm still on the first question, which is about morphological type. As I was writing about this, and checking Wikipedia, it occurred to me that morphological typology is really about two things: how words are built and how grammar is expressed.

Individual words carry a general meaning (root concept); nuances are expressed by other words.
[...]
Not all analytic languages are isolating; for example, Chinese and English possess many compound words, but contain few inflections for them.

↑This is all about words, and not about how grammar is expressed. Furthermore, when describing what an oligosynthetic language is, it's only about how words are constructed. But when you're describing synthesis or fusion, it's about grammar. And tri-consonantal roots are about the shape of the words, but when you're talking about the vowel patterns that are inserted into them, you're talking about grammar. Do you agree with these points, or am I totally wrong?

Yes, I do see what you’re saying here. Though I’d say that morphological typology is only about how grammar is expressed, and compounding is really a separate thing entirely.

I also have some small, specific questions.

1. Does anyone remember the name of that one North American language that was supposed to be non-concatenative, like Semitic languages?
2. Are infixes (not ablaut or the Semitic vowel patterns, but the "typical" kind of infix) a concatenative or non-concatenative feature?
3. Are clitics an isolating feature or a synthetic feature?
4. Can compounding be defined as a feature of any morphological type? Is compounding only ever a derivational thing, or can it express grammar? (If that question makes sense.)
5. Has the polysynthesis for novices thread disappeared, or was it on the old forum?

To add to the previous replies:

1. I vaguely remember that Yuman does this. (Aymara and Jaqaru have pretty interesting morphophonology as well, but they’re South American, and I don’t remember them being actually non-concatenative.)
   
   EDIT: Actually, I think it was Chumashan rather than Yuman which does this, though I can’t remember precisely.
2. Non-concatenative
3. As far as I’m aware, clitics are found equally often irrespective of typological classification… they’re defined by being sort of like words but also sort of like affixes, so they fit well in most languages.
4. Hard to say… I suppose it might depend on how productive and widespread the compounding is. As Ares Land said, noun incorporation can look a lot like compounding; so can serial verb and light verb constructions. I vaguely remember reading that in Chalcatongo Mixtec, certain types of possession can be productively expressed through compounding; is that grammar or derivation? Is English N+V compounding a type of noun incorporation or a type of compounding? (I’d say the latter, because the word ends up as an adjective rather than a verb.) In general I’d say that this is one of the (many) areas where the line between the two categories is blurred.
   
   (Though, if I had to make a connection between the two things, I’d say that isolating languages tend to have more compounding and agglutinating languages tend to have less, but I could be totally wrong on that.)
5. Yep, it was on the old forum, but here’s an archive.org link: https://web.archive.org/web/20160408040 ... p?p=955527

[Moose-tache]

Clitics: Clitics are syntactic words that are not phonologically full words. So when we're talking about morpho-syntax, they are most certainly not a type of morphology. If we're talking about phonology, then they are essentially affixes.

Nonconcatenative Morphology: Muskogean languages make varying use of root grades, which may involve infixing or lengthening a root vowel, etc. This is largely incidental (e.g. I'm not aware of any grammatical processes achieved solely through root grade in Choctaw or Creek), but it may have been more productive in Proto-Muskogean, where it probably had some impact on aspect. Overall I would say that Muskogean root grades are no more significant than, say, n-infixation in PIE. I have heard of the Iroquoian languages described as non-concatenative syntactically, because of their relatively free word order.

[Qwynegold]

Hmm, everyone's disagreeing about which North American language was supposed to be non-concatenative. I think I'll scrap that thought. I just thought I read once something about some language in NA functioning like Semitic languages.

Are infixes (not ablaut or the Semitic vowel patterns, but the "typical" kind of infix) a concatenative or non-concatenative feature?

2) Non-concatenative.

Why is that?

[Qwynegold]

Though I’d say that morphological typology is only about how grammar is expressed,

Hmm. Would you then say that the oligosynthetic and non-concatenative types don't really fit into the group of morphological types?

Yep, it was on the old forum, but here’s an archive.org link: https://web.archive.org/web/20160408040 ... p?p=955527

Oh, thanks! For some reason I didn't think it was that old.

[Qwynegold]

Thanks for the replies. I'm modifying my text based on them.

[Ares Land]

Hmm, everyone's disagreeing about which North American language was supposed to be non-concatenative. I think I'll scrap that thought. I just thought I read once something about some language in NA functioning like Semitic languages.

Hmm, I tried googling that and I did find a fairly amusing paper where some Mormons try and find regular correspondances between Hebrew and Uto-Aztecan

On Muskogean languages, a few Choctaw examples:

pisali tok 'I looked at it'
pínsali tok 'I was looking at it'
píhsa tok 'I glanced at it'
piesali tok, 'I gazed at it'

So, non concatenative, but it's nothing like Semitic. Oh, like Moose-tache said, it's relatively 'minor': the bulk of Choctaw morphology is concatenative...

Are infixes (not ablaut or the Semitic vowel patterns, but the "typical" kind of infix) a concatenative or non-concatenative feature?

2) Non-concatenative.

Why is that?
[/quote]
Well, it's certainly not concatenative -- rather it inserts a morpheme within the root morpheme. Or, in other words, it changes the root by splitting it in two.
Two papers that explain it better than I can
https://blogg.uit.no/psv000/files/2018/ ... 160111.pdf
https://linguistics.indiana.edu/faculty ... ra2014.pdf

Though it looks like there are interesting edge cases, such as Tagalog, for instance, which has either prefixes or infixes depending on whether the root is monosyllabic or not.

[Moose-tache]

On Muskogean languages, a few Choctaw examples:

pisali tok 'I looked at it'
pínsali tok 'I was looking at it'
píhsa tok 'I glanced at it'
piesali tok, 'I gazed at it'

So, non concatenative, but it's nothing like Semitic. Oh, like Moose-tache said, it's relatively 'minor': the bulk of Choctaw morphology is concatenative...

The aspectual descriptions that you see for these grades (including on Wikipedia) are, I suspect, based on reconstructions and wishful thinking. The fact is that Choctaw speakers do not use any of these forms as productive grammar on their own. For example, almost everywhere that it appears the n-grade is simply the default grade for experiential verbs like pinsa, with the non n-grade showing up mostly in derivations like holisso apisa (a school, i.e. place to look at books). Forms like "pihsa" and "piyisa" are probably almost never attested. Presenting the grades as a handy little chart where each grade represents a regular change in aspect is a bit like presenting i-umlaut as a "verbalizing grade" in a grammar of modern English. Sure, you may get some forms like food/feed and blood/bleed, but no native speakers would think to treat this as a regular process.

But apparently Alabama, another Muskogean language, has a much more regular and productive infixation process involving the negative marker -ki- or -ik-, at least according to Montler and Hardy (The Phonology of Negation in Alabama, 1991).

[Ares Land]

Ah, thanks, I didn't know that! (I got these from The Elements of Choctaw on the Language PIle, but I did find the section a little vague...).

[bradrn]

Are infixes (not ablaut or the Semitic vowel patterns, but the "typical" kind of infix) a concatenative or non-concatenative feature?

2) Non-concatenative.

Why is that?

Concatenative markers are ones which are concatenated onto the word — that is, prefixes and suffixes. Infixes definitely aren’t concatenated to the word — they go in the middle of a word and break it up — so they can’t be concatenative.

Though I’d say that morphological typology is only about how grammar is expressed,

Hmm. Would you then say that the oligosynthetic and non-concatenative types don't really fit into the group of morphological types?

Possibly… that’s a difficult question to answer, and it mostly depends on exactly what details you consider important for morphological typology.

I think at this point it’s useful to make a distinction between different types of morphological typology. I quite like WALS’s scheme, so I’ll use that. WALS distinguishes four main areas within morphological typology:

• Synthesis — the number of morphemes in a word. Isolating is low synthesis, agglutination is high synthesis, polysynthesis is very high synthesis.
• Exponence — the number of categories expressed by a single morpheme. IE languages tend to have high exponence, but this isn’t too common elsewhere.
• Fusion (a bad name, I prefer ‘integration’) — the extent to which grammatical markers are integrated with the main word. Isolating morphemes are not fused, concatenative morphemes are fused, and non-concatenative markers are highly fused with the host word.
• Flexivity — the number of allomorphs or inflectional classes which a morpheme has. (WALS doesn’t go into much detail about this category, apart from mentioning it.)

Now, regardless of whether you agree with this exact classification or not, it is clear that non-concatenativity is very different to, say, isolatingness or agglutinativity: the latter two are about how many morphemes are in a word, whereas the former is about how those morphemes are expressed. (Hebrew, say, is actually fairly isolating, in that a word generally only has one or two morphemes, but those morphemes are highly fused with the host and have high exponence.) On the other hand, oligosynthesis is clearly quite similar to those more traditional types, as it is also primarily a matter of how many morphemes a word contains.

[Ares Land]

i think one issue you'll have wiht placing oligosynthesis is that there's really no such thing in real life. (As far as I know of course. It's very possible I'm missing something )

[bradrn]

i think one issue you'll have wiht placing oligosynthesis is that there's really no such thing in real life. (As far as I know of course. It's very possible I'm missing something )

Caddoan is very close to it (see this discussion), and I believe Nahuatl is too. Another example (which I actually discovered just a couple of days ago) is the Papuan language Kalam, which has sentences like these:

yp

me

wik

rub

d

get

ap

come

tan

ascend

d

get

ap

come

yap

descend

g-s<a>p

do-PRES.PROG-SG

He is massaging me.

(What’s happening here is that Kalam has a closed set of about 120 verbs, most of which are horrifically vague; e.g. d is ‘control, get, touch, handle, cease, complete…’, while tk- is ‘sever, ford, give birth, pack (for travel), cut a tattoo…’. Due to this, Kalam sentences tend to contain lots of long serial verb constructions to give context and clarification for any action that may happen.)