Absolutely. You can romanise anything however you want. People will probably shout at you if you use something completely unprecedented but you can ignore them (after all, half the time "precedent" is just what some linguist made the fuck up sixty years ago when trying to write Qiangic on a typewriter)conlangernoob wrote: ↑Sun Mar 10, 2024 5:43 pmI'm new here but I'm interested in getting to interact this community more. I have an open question about conlangs but romanization in particular. Can less practical approaches to romanization such as <gn> instead of <ñ> or <ɲ> be justified if they contribute to phonaesthetics?
There's usually a diachronic or historical reason for a certain way of spelling. <ñ> exists to represent /ɲ/ because it used to be two <n> together which ended up being pronounced /ɲ(:)/, i.e. Latin /an.num/ "year" > Spanish /a.ɲo/, but Latin /a.nus/ "anus" > Spanish /a.no/. Same thing with <gn>, but it went something like Latin /mag.nus/ "great" > /maŋ.nus/ (assimilation of nasality) > French /ma.ɲə/ or Italian /maɲ.ɲo/.conlangernoob wrote: ↑Sun Mar 10, 2024 5:43 pm Hi all,
I'm new here but I'm interested in getting to interact this community more. I have an open question about conlangs but romanization in particular. Can less practical approaches to romanization such as <gn> instead of <ñ> or <ɲ> be justified if they contribute to phonaesthetics?
Thx,
conlangernoob
Yea, I came up with the letter <n̮> (n with breve below) to represent /ŋ/ by analogy of <ḫ> /x/, and <n̮> is an unprecedented grapheme.Darren wrote: ↑Sun Mar 10, 2024 5:59 pm Absolutely. You can romanise anything however you want. People will probably shout at you if you use something completely unprecedented but you can ignore them (after all, half the time "precedent" is just what some linguist made the fuck up sixty years ago when trying to write Qiangic on a typewriter)
Following up on Darren and Ahzoh’s (correct) comments, I’d encourage you to skim through the Romanization Challenge Thread a bit, to see the huge diversity of approaches which people take to romanisation. There’s really no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ answers here.conlangernoob wrote: ↑Sun Mar 10, 2024 5:43 pm I'm new here but I'm interested in getting to interact this community more. I have an open question about conlangs but romanization in particular. Can less practical approaches to romanization such as <gn> instead of <ñ> or <ɲ> be justified if they contribute to phonaesthetics?
One thing to remember is that it is very hard to posit firm universals when it comes to languages, because it seems that as soon as you posit one you will come across a counterexample.conlangernoob wrote: ↑Wed Mar 13, 2024 4:40 pm Read this about inflectional categories and thought it was interesting. The authors seem to think it is exhaustive list.
(https://wals.info/chapter/22)
“The prime candidates for this are categories like agreement, tense/aspect/mood, evidentials/miratives, status (realis, irrealis, etc.), polarity (negation), illocution (interrogative, declarative, imperative), and voice (including Austronesian-style verb orientation).”
“Apart from the better-known and common inflectional categories, the following categories proved to have verbal inflectional reflexes in at least one language: nominalizers, connectives or switch-reference markers (as in Belhare, Kiowa, Fijian, Daga, Maricopa), inverse marking (as in Cree, Mapudungun or Chukchi) or Kartvelian-style “version”, honorificity (as in Japanese or Korean), pluractionals and other quantificational categories (multiple argument or multiple action, as in Wichita and Koasati, or repetition marking, as in Karok), verb focus or emphasis (as in Maricopa, Pirahã or Imonda), transitivity markers (as in Fijian, Cree, Krongo, or Hakha Lai), reciprocal affixes (triggered by agreement with free reciprocal pronouns, as in Chamorro), construct marking (indicating the presence of a dependent NP, as in Hausa, Lango, and Supyire), object classifiers (inflectional if interacting with agreement, as in Imonda), nonspecific reference-marking (in Koasati), scope (delimiting the scope of other categories, as in Mezquital Otomí), deixis (judged inflectional in, e.g., Lango because it interacts with agreement paradigm rules) and motion (judged inflectional in Yagua and Imbabura Quechua).
In addition, causatives were judged inflectional in some languages, where these categories are regular responses to specific contexts (e.g. a response to specific types of switch-reference patterns as in Ingush) or where they are worked into the same paradigms as regular voice values (e.g. in Chamorro, Fijian or Malagasy).”
In addition to what Travis said, another thing to remember is that in general there’s very little difference between ‘inflection’ and ‘derivation’. There’s some papers on polysynthetic languages which carefully try to tease them apart, but that just reveals how baseless the whole distinction is. When I see someone saying ‘these specific categories are inflectional’, I get nervous.conlangernoob wrote: ↑Wed Mar 13, 2024 4:40 pm Read this about inflectional categories and thought it was interesting. The authors seem to think it is exhaustive list.
Take for example how Semitic languages deal with grammatical voice on verbs and how they act more like derived-but-independent stems in their own right rather than inflectional categories.bradrn wrote: ↑Wed Mar 13, 2024 6:19 pmIn addition to what Travis said, another thing to remember is that in general there’s very little difference between ‘inflection’ and ‘derivation’. There’s some papers on polysynthetic languages which carefully try to tease them apart, but that just reveals how baseless the whole distinction is. When I see someone saying ‘these specific categories are inflectional’, I get nervous.conlangernoob wrote: ↑Wed Mar 13, 2024 4:40 pm Read this about inflectional categories and thought it was interesting. The authors seem to think it is exhaustive list.
But, luckily, WALS defines precisely what they mean: ‘By inflectional category we understand any grammatical category whose presence or shape is (at least in part) a regular response to the grammatical environment’. It’s worded a bit ambiguously, but this seems to be a rather wide definition, which would include basically anything marked on the verb. So, as usual with WALS, be careful not to interpret this too definitively.
In any case, to me that list does not read as exhaustive by any means: ‘the following categories proved to have verbal inflectional reflexes in at least one language’. That is, in the WALS sample, these are just the categories which happened to be marked on the verb in some capacity. They make no claim that others cannot.
Code: Select all
NOM / OBL / long OBL
1SGE: ni / ni / ni-ɣV
1SGI: ti / ti / ti-ɣV
2SG: ma / mi / mi-ɣV
3SG: ča / ki / ki-ɣV
1PLE: nin / nin / ni-ɣV-n
1PLI: tin / tin / ti-ɣV-n
2PL: man / min / mi-ɣV-n
3PL: čan / kin / ki-ɣV-n Code: Select all
SG / PL
FEM: -u / -un
MASC: -i / -in
NEUT: -ar / -an
INAN: -aš / -anSo don't distinguish all genders directly on the verb with agreement markers, but rather distinguish animate from inanimate with alignment via split-ergativity or direct-inverse marking then!Ahzoh wrote: ↑Thu Mar 14, 2024 4:16 pm Since Vrkhazhian now has four genders, I am struggling immensely to come up with subject-verb agreement suffixes for all the genders. Alternatively, the problem is solved by not distinguishing gender on the verb, but then there is pretty much no concord-based justification for the existence of the noun class system since the only things that would agree with noun in gender would be demonstratives and only demonstratives. Which is boring.
Compounding the problem is choosing between having the verb-subject markers be prefixal or suffixal. Prefixal is common and would help solve the issue, but given that my language also employs a triconsonantal root system, the verbs end up resembling Semitic verbs. Besides, my language is supposed to be strongly head-initial and that also includes order of affixes (thus being predominately suffixal)
Anyways, here is an ancient pre-Vrkhazhian pronoun system as well as the old noun class system:I = Inclusive = includes the adressee(s)Code: Select all
NOM / OBL / long OBL 1SGE: ni / ni / ni-ɣV 1SGI: ti / ti / ti-ɣV 2SG: ma / mi / mi-ɣV 3SG: ča / ki / ki-ɣV 1PLE: nin / nin / ni-ɣV-n 1PLI: tin / tin / ti-ɣV-n 2PL: man / min / mi-ɣV-n 3PL: čan / kin / ki-ɣV-n
E = Exclusive = excludes the adressee(s)
So somehow I have to come up with a way to combine these with the above pronouns, both in independent pronouns and in pronominal suffixes.Code: Select all
SG / PL FEM: -u / -un MASC: -i / -in NEUT: -ar / -an INAN: -aš / -an
I already have split-erg in case-marking, but that doesn't justify having neuter animate versus masculine (animate) and feminine (animate), only justifies having animate/inanimate.
You could do something like distinguish masculine versus feminine versus a merged neuter/inanimate on the verb, and distinguish masculine/feminine/neuter from inanimate via split-ergativity. And there is no reason to not have an animate neuter; take German Mädchen for instance.
Take the case of StG, for instance. While there is a degree of nominal marking of gender (e.g. all -chen nouns are neuter, and accusative marking of masculine weak nouns), gender is much more strongly marked on pronouns, determiners, demonstratives, and adjectives.Ahzoh wrote: ↑Thu Mar 14, 2024 4:43 pm The masculine and feminine exist because of explicitly marking nouns as such, so if they felt it was important to do it on nouns, they should feel that it's important that agreement follows suit. I wish it was as easy as doing consonant plus gender vowel, but then it leads to a lot of crowding such that you end up with a lot of -Cu/-Ci/-Ca trinaries, which doesn't feel right in this particular case.
Well yes, the idea was to have masc vs fem vs neuter on the verb, but as I said, that ends up resulting in a rather "phonemically crowded" -Cu/-Ci/-Ca trinary. Now my language is supposed to place a fair bit of cognitive load on vowels (lots of ablaut) but I'm not sure if it's appropriate in this case.Travis B. wrote: ↑Thu Mar 14, 2024 4:47 pm You could do something like distinguish masculine versus feminine versus a merged neuter/inanimate on the verb, and distinguish masculine/feminine/neuter from inanimate via split-ergativity. And there is no reason to not have an animate neuter; take German Mädchen for instance.
In this case it would be nouns making more distinctions than pronouns/affixes, which is the issue.Take the case of StG, for instance. While there is a degree of nominal marking of gender (e.g. all -chen nouns are neuter, and accusative marking of masculine weak nouns), gender is much more strongly marked on pronouns, determiners, demonstratives, and adjectives.
sorry I'm late; maybe have one gender which doesn't have subject-verb agreement if the other three have it. (or, if none of the three have it, maybe just one gender does)
There's no reason why you could not have a four-way distinction between common versus neuter on the verb and animate versus inanimate via alignment (i.e. common animate, neuter animate, common inanimate, and neuter inanimate). That way you can still have four genders, yet only have two distinctions on the verb itself.Ahzoh wrote: ↑Thu Mar 14, 2024 4:53 pmWell yes, the idea was to have masc vs fem vs neuter on the verb, but as I said, that ends up resulting in a rather "phonemically crowded" -Cu/-Ci/-Ca trinary. Now my language is supposed to place a fair bit of cognitive load on vowels (lots of ablaut) but I'm not sure if it's appropriate in this case.Travis B. wrote: ↑Thu Mar 14, 2024 4:47 pm You could do something like distinguish masculine versus feminine versus a merged neuter/inanimate on the verb, and distinguish masculine/feminine/neuter from inanimate via split-ergativity. And there is no reason to not have an animate neuter; take German Mädchen for instance.
Another issue is that <č> is reflexed as <t> in Vrkhazhian, so there is potential for one of the 3rd person affixes conflating with the 1st person plural affixes, which I don't want.
Alternatively I have thought common/human/adult vs neuter/non-human/child, but then I have to figure out where to source the common gender morpheme/vowel. Though this option would be less preferred than maximal distinction.