Zompist Bboard Again

Is that a language for electric eels?

Been playing with grammatical changes for a future English I’ve been thinking about. So far I’ve come up with:

- A case system descending from derivational endings

- An ezafe-inspired system of animacy/number agreement for adjectives (and probably prepositions too). I might see if I can finagle in case agreement too for adjectives.

- An agglutinating/fusional verb system with a number of different tenses, polypersonal agreement with transitive verbs, and reflexive/passive/reciprocal voice marking.

Herra Ratatoskr wrote: ↑Fri Oct 28, 2022 10:29 am - A case system descending from derivational endings

- An ezafe-inspired system of animacy/number agreement for adjectives (and probably prepositions too). I might see if I can finagle in case agreement too for adjectives.

Now how did those come about‽

Raholeun wrote: ↑Fri Oct 28, 2022 9:17 amIs that a language for electric eels?

No, for the safir, my species of four-armed blue-skinned psionic elvenoids.

Working on allophony for what is at present a numberlang (a model conlang focused entirely thus far on numbers)

...and I got the stress down - probably the first time in my history of conlanging - and I realized I don't know which direction stress moves things.

As an example, my current word for Zero: äŋ.ɲä.ɲä...which, uniformly applying stress to the first syllable of all numbers (as my original plan had been that the <ang> would use a sign denoting "this is a word" basically)

...gives us this: 'äŋ.ɲä.ɲä

If I try placing emphasis on the <ang>...then it comes out like æŋ.ɲä.ɲä...though it also comes out deeper and slightly creaky in tone...so I'm wary of trusting my ears or hunches in my first steps wading into the waters of stress and allophony.

Does the stressed vowel move towards the front of the mouth... be it ɶŋ.ɲä.ɲä or aŋ.ɲä.ɲä ?

Or does it go up to become a higher vowel... ɐŋ.ɲä.ɲä ?



Thank you.

keenir wrote: ↑Sun Nov 20, 2022 3:47 pm Does the stressed vowel move towards the front of the mouth... be it ɶŋ.ɲä.ɲä or aŋ.ɲä.ɲä ?

Or does it go up to become a higher vowel... ɐŋ.ɲä.ɲä ?

It can do either — although generally speaking, it’s the unstressed vowels which see the most change. I recall seeing a lovely article about how vowel reduction tends to centralise vowels in some languages (e.g. English) but make them more extreme in others (e.g. Russian), though I don’t have time to find it again just now.

I think I now know what happened with the stops in Proto-Hesperic. The PIE voiceless stops and the voiced aspirated stops develop in parallel, one voiceless and the other voiced, otherwise the same. The rule is:

T > [+aspirated] /{V,#}_{V,Y} (Y=semivowel)
T > [-aspirated] /elsewhere

(The idea is that the Early PIE voiceless stops were aspirated; see here.)

So these stops are aspirated in initial position before a vowel or semivowel, and in intervocalic position or between a vowel and a semivowel, otherwise not. The voiced unaspirated stops remain unaspirated in all positions, but lose their voicing when there is a voiceless stop or *s in the same morpheme (the PIE laryngeals apparently were voiced in Proto-Hesperic).

In Proto-Albic, the frequency of aspirated stops (voiceless or voiced) is reduced further by Grassmann's Law: if a word contains two aspirated consonants, the first loses its aspiration. */h/ counts as an aspirated consonant here; its deaspiration leads to zero. Old Albic then turns the aspirated stops to spirants, but */β/ and */ɣ/ are lost by merging them with /w/ and /h/, respectively, while /ð/ remains in Classical Old Albic but is shifted to /z/ in post-Classical times.

already worked on developing dual verb endings for my gothic project, now working hard to develop dual declensions in pronouns and adjectives (and—dare i risk it?—maybe even nouns). it's tricky and will take a lot of arguing to justify historically but by god i want dual endings and i will have dual endings

I decided how adjectives work in Sols Osve and have begun work on a dictionary thereof. I'm having way too much fun with it. It's supposed to look like bastardized Latin with a chipping French veneer and Celtic hardware under the hood. So far it is succeeding in its goals. Also, fogo vogox 'wall of walls' = 'fortress' is a fantastic-sounding phrase.

Man in Space wrote: ↑Wed Dec 21, 2022 11:52 pm I decided how adjectives work in Sols Osve and have begun work on a dictionary thereof.

So how do they work? Don’t keep us in suspense…

bradrn wrote: ↑Thu Dec 22, 2022 12:31 am

Man in Space wrote: ↑Wed Dec 21, 2022 11:52 pmI decided how adjectives work in Sols Osve and have begun work on a dictionary thereof.

So how do they work? Don’t keep us in suspense…

Sols Osve has nine declension classes for nouns: Masculine (ending in -o, -eus, -i, and -x), feminine (ending in -a or -C), and neuter (ending in -e, -Rs¹, or -en). This is, quite honestly, ridiculous, so I decided to rip Latin off even more than I already was and made two classes of adjectives, thematic and athematic. The former end in a vowel (-a, -o, or -e) and the latter end in either -Rs or -x. Thematic adjectives change the ending depending on the declension class of the noun, athematic adjectives do not. (For instance, see the name of the language itself. The word sols 'language' is an Rs-stem, so is neuter; the adjective osva is thematic, so the adjective ending here is -e: i Sols Osve 'the old tongue'.)

[1] There are other consonants that can stand in the second position but it's a limited set and the abbreviation I initially used was "-Rs", so I'm chalking it up to in-universe convention.

I think I mentioned a while back that I'd gotten asked to do a commission for banknote designs (that would actually be printed). Took quite a while (lots of research involved, since this is for a real-life micronation in a defined geographic area) but recently finished it and am quite happy with the result!

Those look lovely! That's a fun commission to get.

alynnidalar wrote: ↑Thu Dec 22, 2022 1:19 pm Those look lovely! That's a fun commission to get.

Seconded!

Travis B. wrote: ↑Thu Dec 22, 2022 1:42 pm

alynnidalar wrote: ↑Thu Dec 22, 2022 1:19 pm Those look lovely! That's a fun commission to get.

Seconded!

Thirded!

I hope this micronation is not one of the fraudulent kind. Some crooks set up micronations for nefarious purposes, as a platform for illegal activitites.

Thanks, all!

WeepingElf wrote: ↑Thu Dec 22, 2022 3:06 pm I hope this micronation is not one of the fraudulent kind. Some crooks set up micronations for nefarious purposes, as a platform for illegal activitites.

At least in doing a check, it seems not to be the fraudulent kind (more the political statement kind of micronation rather than the front for illicit activities kind). Either way, was great to work on a commission like this... my first in about eight or nine years?

Emily wrote: ↑Wed Dec 21, 2022 11:48 pm already worked on developing dual verb endings for my gothic project, now working hard to develop dual declensions in pronouns and adjectives (and—dare i risk it?—maybe even nouns). it's tricky and will take a lot of arguing to justify historically but by god i want dual endings and i will have dual endings

working more on this. doing some stuff i hadn't worked out, and redoing other stuff that i got wrong or changed my mind about. trying to get everything ready in time for the translation relay!

Simplified again the Vrkhazhian case system wherein there is only a Nominative-Oblique distinction in animate nouns and a Direct-Oblique distinction in inanimate nouns.

I still don't know what to do about my pronoun morphology though I think I like the look of the first person pronouns:

Emily wrote: ↑Wed Dec 21, 2022 11:48 pm already worked on developing dual verb endings for my gothic project, now working hard to develop dual declensions in pronouns and adjectives (and—dare i risk it?—maybe even nouns). it's tricky and will take a lot of arguing to justify historically but by god i want dual endings and i will have dual endings

dual endings in pronouns and (in a different stage) adjectives came from suffixing "two". 3rd person dual endings in verbs came from "both" (and the plural correspondingly got the suffix "all"). trying out a set of dual endings for nouns that come from, essentially, "a pair of [x]" (gen pl ending combined with "pair"). not sure if i like it yet, and it requires the genitive to precede the noun which is not the typical order. idk, decisions decisions