Zompist Bboard Again

Ares Land wrote: ↑Mon Dec 14, 2020 3:15 pm I pretty much finished describing Simbri verbal morphology today.
(It's never finished, really, but at ~10,000 words it's complete enough).

A quick & dirty schematic of verbal structure I did mostly for my own reference:

Nice work, what did you use to create that table? It looks like wiki syntax.

I sometimes feel like conlangers don't have a "happy medium" between "this table is all the info you get on how verbs work" and "here's 10,000 words on how verbs work" Congratulations on finishing! Must be a good feeling.

So Haleza Grise wrote: ↑Mon Dec 14, 2020 5:05 pm Nice work, what did you use to create that table? It looks like wiki syntax.

I sometimes feel like conlangers don't have a "happy medium" between "this table is all the info you get on how verbs work" and "here's 10,000 words on how verbs work" Congratulations on finishing! Must be a good feeling.

Thanks and yes, it's MediaWiki. (My favorite tool so far for tables)

These 10,000 words will, I hope, be all helpful . (Simbri verb just, well, do a lot.)

I hope at some point you can show us more! Like you, I really like Launey's book on Classical Nahuatl and think it's an interesting model to follow. What I've seen of Simbri seems to have a good "feel" to it.

Thank you! I will indeed, have more consistent things to post about Simbri, soon-ish, hopefully.

I've been doing vocabulary gardening on my long-term/long-suffering "Insular Tungusic" conlang (Pseudo-Misihase, for lack of a better term at this point). Right now I've got the lexicon sorted by English glosses and am just going through looking for 1) consistency and 2) unwanted, unnecessary, or potentially improvable duplications.

I try and do a hundred entries or so a day; right now I'm up to 4472 out of 7132 glosses, but that's with skipping over all the botanical & zoological terms to do separately. Man, do I tend to go into the weeds on those.

And when I'm done with this, I'll likely just start over from the beginning, but sorted by lemmas(*), with an eye then to homophones, goofs in phonology or derivational morphology, etc. And I suppose after that comes working through the actual definition fields -- or cleaning up the usage/restriction, grammar note, picture links, semantic category, etc. fields... Why am I DOING this???

(* Lemmata, shlemmata, tammata.)

I do hope the format in which you keep your lexicon makes the process easier, rather than being another hindrance!

Vilike wrote: ↑Fri Dec 18, 2020 6:45 pm I do hope the format in which you keep your lexicon makes the process easier, rather than being another hindrance!

Oh, I think the problem is that the format makes it far, far too easy to minutely and finely filter and sort all these kinds of tags and fields. Without it, I'd probably be a lot less fussy and finicky and get "more progress" done instead.

Could you show us one of the revised entries?

Vilike wrote: ↑Sat Dec 19, 2020 4:14 am Could you show us one of the revised entries?

Sure! Here's one I fiddled with last night (non-relevant fields deleted for space):

\lx kaba
\ps n
\de vessel, basin, bowl, trough; kettle, pot
\ge vessel
\ge basin
\ge trough
\ge kettle
\ge pot
\ge bowl

As I was running down the lexicon sorted by the \ge field, I saw there were a lot of "pot" entries, some just "pot"; also there was already a generic term for "pots and pans, cooking vessels" that I liked for the role.

So, after checking in the \ge field for other "vessel", "basin", and "trough" entries, and also making sure that "bowl" was still adequately covered by something else, I decided to restrict the reference of kaba to a narrower range. Revised entry:

\lx kaba
\ps n
\de large basin or vessel, trough, vat
\ge vessel
\ge basin
\ge trough
\ge vat

(I'm using Toolbox, though the MDF markup language you see here is shared by a number of applications.)

fusijui wrote: ↑Fri Dec 18, 2020 5:56 pm I try and do a hundred entries or so a day;

That's very productive!

So Haleza Grise wrote: ↑Wed Dec 23, 2020 12:48 pm

fusijui wrote: ↑Fri Dec 18, 2020 5:56 pm I try and do a hundred entries or so a day;

That's very productive!

Oh, I wish it were... it's really just skimming down the sorted list, stopping when I spot homonyms, and briefly deciding whether "I meant to do that!" or to delete or modify something. It's maybe fifteen minutes, tops

Housekeeping!

I edited the first post in my scratchpad to be a ToC for the content in the thread.

That also is the 1st time I've really looked through that thread in a while. I might have some time to do actual conlanging during the holidays.

after conmathematical and conlogical tests,
I definitively gave up minus oneth for last
in favor of one hundredth per cent...

Maybe I can post this here, because I'm on my phone and don't have any notepad app. (So I've been doing all my conlanging in my head.) I was inspired by Man in Space a couple of days ago, and have been thinking about a phoneme inventory for a triconsonental root language.

/m n/ <m n>
/t d k/ <t d k>
/ts tS dZ/ <c ch j>
/s z S x/ <s z sh kh>
/l w R\/ <l w r>
/i u e o @ V ä/ <i u e o ë â a>

[?] is inserted between any two successive vowels. /ts tS dZ/ have the allophones [s S j] in V_. In sequences of consonants of different voicing, they all get the same voicing as the first consonant. Specifically, the changes are like this:
m > m_0
n > n_0
t > d
d > t
k > g
ts > dz (after m n z l), z (after other consonants)
tS > dZ
dZ > tS
s > z
z > s
S > j
x > G
l > l_0
w > w_0
R\ > X

I don't know if I can get away with the plosives row. I was thinking that if there was a /p/, it became /b/, and then /b/ became /w/. If there was a /g/ it became either /k/ or /R\/. There was a /dz/, but it became /z/.

The language is going to allow quite odd consonant clusters, but sometimes a weak @ is inserted between consonants.

Maybe there's also a pitch accent system, or something. Low tone is found on the first syllable of a root, on any prefixes, and on every other syllable after the root initial syllable. Mid tone is found on the other syllables. Mid tone also replaces low tone on the last syllable of a word, unless that's a monosyllabic root.

I'm thinking of maybe adding one more consonant. I want something that's quite uncommon, but which is found in North America. But I don't want any lateral fricatives/affricates and nothing reminiscent of Arabic. Does anyone have any suggestions?

Qwynegold wrote: ↑Sat Dec 26, 2020 5:13 am I don't know if I can get away with the plosives row. I was thinking that if there was a /p/, it became /b/, and then /b/ became /w/. If there was a /g/ it became either /k/ or /R\/. There was a /dz/, but it became /z/.

I’d say it’s fine. (Precedents: Seneca has /t d k ɡ ʔ/, and Ket has /b t d k q/, both of which are pretty close. You may want to think about adding /b/ or /ʔ/ though.)

I'm thinking of maybe adding one more consonant. I want something that's quite uncommon, but which is found in North America. But I don't want any lateral fricatives/affricates and nothing reminiscent of Arabic. Does anyone have any suggestions?

There aren’t too many individual consonants which are rare outside North America, other than /ɬ tɬ/. But there are some combinations of phonemes which have that property: given that you already have /χ/, I suggest /x/, given that a distinction between them is only really common in North America.

Not just Seneca, but all Iroquoian languages except Cherokee lack labials altogether, so if your only remaining labials are /w/ and /m/, it shouldn't be too hard to explain

bradrn wrote: ↑Sat Dec 26, 2020 5:51 am I’d say it’s fine. (Precedents: Seneca has /t d k ɡ ʔ/, and Ket has /b t d k q/, both of which are pretty close. You may want to think about adding /b/ or /ʔ/ though.)

Both of those are fine precisely because they have plosives in three POAs.

bradrn wrote: ↑Sat Dec 26, 2020 5:51 amThere aren’t too many individual consonants which are rare outside North America, other than /ɬ tɬ/. But there are some combinations of phonemes which have that property: given that you already have /χ/, I suggest /x/, given that a distinction between them is only really common in North America.

Ah, I have /x/, but [X] only allophonically.

Maybe I should add /?/ after all. But only if I can come up with something fun to do with it.

For an extra consonant, how about /kw/? Or /c/, for symmetry?

Acoustically, I like /c/.