Conlang Random Thread

[Nortaneous]

Is it realistic to turn rhotacized vowel into creaky voiced vowel?

no

[Knit Tie]

Is it realistic to turn rhotacized vowel into creaky voiced vowel?

no

Really?

[missals]

Is it realistic to turn rhotacized vowel into creaky voiced vowel?

no

Really?

I mean, why would it be? What physiological motivation would there be?

[Xwtek]

no

Really?

I mean, why would it be? What physiological motivation would there be?

The same motivation as guttural r.

[Raholeun]

Is it realistic to turn rhotacized vowel into creaky voiced vowel?

no

Reversing the original question and asking "is it wildly unrealistic to blah blah" is more appropriate. Can you detect this sound change in your own speech, when you do not articulate rhotacized vowels properly? Yeah? Well, go ahead then.

[Zaarin]

no

Really?

I mean, why would it be? What physiological motivation would there be?

I could buy V˞ > Vˁ > V̰. It would be unusual, but (for me at least) it wouldn't stretch credulity.

[Pabappa]

i think it could happen. the Chemnitz dialect of German turned all of its vowel + r combinations into pharyngealized vowels and thus became nonrhotic. It was a different type of /r/ to begin with, and phar is not the same as creaky, but I think the concept is similar.

http://enwp.org/Chemnitz_dialect

[Salmoneus]

bradrn: thank you for the compliments.

I never actually posted this, come to think of it.

It's a translation of the Lord's Prayer into Old Wenthish, with explanatory notes, and a tentative suggestion of what it might be in Modern Wenthish. [I would post it directly here but having to manually reformat everything's a bugger]

Any comments, substantive or superficial, would be most welcome if anyone had any, here or there.

I don't much about either Old English or Irish, so I'm probably not in the best position to comment...

To be fair, neither do I...

In the Modern Wentish version, what does the repeated line 'an so lietch thi, Ab' mean?

As Zaarin (almost) says, it means "if it pleases you, Lord". Modern speakers are a bit more uncomfortable directing imperatives at God... (they're also somewhat watered-down imperatives, as you can probably guess). "Ab" is indeed from "abba", but only indirectly - it's from the Old Irish word for "abbot", and has come to have a general meaning of "Lord" due to the importance of the monasteries in the Old Wenthish period.

Also, does 'cystung' still mean something like 'tribulation' in the modern language? Wouldn't they have revised this to 'temptation'? (Though I'm by no means an expert, but I understood nobody objected to 'temptation' nowadays and that the debate is more about whether God leads us into it or allows us to fall into it)

Apparently there is still some dispute over the word's translation, in order to get out of the obvious theological errors that arise from translating it 'temptation'. I think I'll probably have 'cystung' meaning something ambiguous like 'trial'.

It'd be great to hear more about the distinction between the locative/existential copulas.

Nothing that interesting. There's an existential verb, and a copula for attaching predicates. However, there's also a dedicated verb for locations (from 'stand'), and this or another positional verb is often used for transient predicates of other kinds. To be honest, while I know how it ends up, I'm not 100% certain what the distinctions would have been at the Old Wenthish period, but I think this is probably accurate.

[the copula and the existential verb are both from the Germanic copulas, and mirror the two verbs in Old English - basically, you've got the "is" verb (existence) and the "be" verb (predication) - "I am", but "I be orange". Then there's a further verb for saying where things are - "it stands in the court" not "it is in the court" (unless being in the court is essential to it), and this can be used for some predicates ("it stands orange" but won't be for long), as can other positional verbs]

Oh, and I love the sound of the word 'midyarde'. It's recognizably Midgard, and yet it sounds just like something between a front yard and a backyard

Thank you!

[Ares Land]

Nothing that interesting. There's an existential verb, and a copula for attaching predicates. However, there's also a dedicated verb for locations (from 'stand'), and this or another positional verb is often used for transient predicates of other kinds. To be honest, while I know how it ends up, I'm not 100% certain what the distinctions would have been at the Old Wenthish period, but I think this is probably accurate.

[the copula and the existential verb are both from the Germanic copulas, and mirror the two verbs in Old English - basically, you've got the "is" verb (existence) and the "be" verb (predication) - "I am", but "I be orange". Then there's a further verb for saying where things are - "it stands in the court" not "it is in the court" (unless being in the court is essential to it), and this can be used for some predicates ("it stands orange" but won't be for long), as can other positional verbs]

That looked very Romance -- I had no idea there was a Germanic equivalent!

[Knit Tie]

So I've finished the interaction between the consonants of my language and the various sandhi/mutations that they are subject to!

The sandhi are palatalisation (basically yod-coalescence), N-fortition (after a nasal, said nasal may have been eliminated by vowel devoicing fuckery) and lenition (before a plosive or a nasal in a cluster). The palatalisation and the N-fortition are transitioning from sandhi into proper consonant mutations as of currently, the lenition is so far strictly non-grammatical.

What do you think?

https://imgur.com/a/Tgo2jwu

To add, the language also makes the consonants in a cluster match in voicing, which further complicates surface realisation.

[Salmoneus]

Nothing that interesting. There's an existential verb, and a copula for attaching predicates. However, there's also a dedicated verb for locations (from 'stand'), and this or another positional verb is often used for transient predicates of other kinds. To be honest, while I know how it ends up, I'm not 100% certain what the distinctions would have been at the Old Wenthish period, but I think this is probably accurate.

[the copula and the existential verb are both from the Germanic copulas, and mirror the two verbs in Old English - basically, you've got the "is" verb (existence) and the "be" verb (predication) - "I am", but "I be orange". Then there's a further verb for saying where things are - "it stands in the court" not "it is in the court" (unless being in the court is essential to it), and this can be used for some predicates ("it stands orange" but won't be for long), as can other positional verbs]

That looked very Romance -- I had no idea there was a Germanic equivalent!

The Germanic copula is formed from three different verbs - hence "be", "is" and "was". Old English had preserved at least two in the present tense - 'be' apparently for gnomic purposes and 'is/was' for other purposes. Wiktionary suggests there was also a third verb, but I think that's a dialect thing rather than a meaning thing. In addition, Germanic languages often use positional verbs both for existentials and for aspectual purposes, and also as additional copulas ("I stand corrected", "the situation as it stands" and the like), though English does this probably less than it used to.

Meanwhile, Irish distinguishes between the be-verb as a copula, and the stand-verb (or what used to mean 'stand', I don't think it still does) as an existential and locative, although this is confused for non-Irish speakers by the fact that a lot of what uses a copula in other languages uses stand+preposition in Irish.

[Ares Land]

i have one of those questions that probably has no answer -- what in your opinion makes a language pretty (or rather, euphonious?)
There's probably no single answer, but I'm interested in subjective opinions. So what, in your opinion, makes a language aesthetically satisfying? Which languages do you like and why?

As for me... Well, a few things I've noted:

• I'm often not very satisfied with a priori word generation. I've noted this with my own attempts with Passol. What I borrowed from real-life language sound good (even the weird Greek-Chinese compounds!); I'm not satisfied with the a priori parts.
• I've played a fair bit with future languages; and for some reason, applying a long list of sound changes to say, English or French, produces words that are a lot more satisfying, to me, than anything machine-generated.
• Like most people, I believe, I really love the sound of Sindarin. But maybe it's just familiarity? On the other hand, it's not unlike Breton, which I find particularly ugly. (That's purely subjective. My apologies to Bretons or Celtic enthusiasts.)
• Come to think of it, I dislike the sound of Modern French. I think it's a fairly common sentiment, so there might be something about the language that's not very aesthetic? On the other hand, I find Old French beautiful.
• I generally like the sound of Hebrew; really, I love all Semitic languages, but Hebrew sounds best in my opinion. Funnily enough, the way the word sounds have a way of fitting perfectly with their meaning. For instance, qlippot sounds awfully nasty, as it should. Though come to think of it, maybe the Kabbalists picked that word specifically because it sounds ugly?

[Pabappa]

i have one of those questions that probably has no answer -- what in your opinion makes a language pretty (or rather, euphonious?)

Tastes differ, yes. Not too many people would say Poswa and Pabappa sound pretty, but I've heard a few people say that they sound cute. My tastes are way off the map, really, and very specific. If someone made a Pabappa-like language but it had only /b d/ instead of /p b t d/, I would have no interest in it. Similarly I like Hawaiian much more than Māori and both much more than Japanese. And the scarcity of /l/ ruins Sanskrit for me, even though it otherwise follows my aesthetics fairly well.

I'm with you on not being happy with word-gen output, .... although my conlangs are ultimately descended from a word-generated list of CVCV roots, Ive intervened so much that I may as well have coined everything from scratch.

[Knit Tie]

~words~

Damn, son, that's something I've been trying to do myself for awhile, mostly by screwing around with English. So far, I've realised the following:

• Semitic-style VCC comsonant clusters, as well as consonant clusters with no agreement on voicing, sound off to me.
• Uvulars are probably not a good idea for euphony either.
• Even though I freaking love my native Russian, I'm not sure if palatalisation if euphonous for me, as opposed to the other phonetic stuff is has.
• /ɾ/ is the best rhotic.
• a e i u o are the best vowels.

[malloc]

Another sample of my script, this time handwritten (albeit cleaned up on the computer significantly). It is a translation of the universal declaration of human rights into my personal conlang, not connected with any conworld.

redspeech_sample_new.png (16.23 KiB) Viewed 10014 times

[k1234567890y]

Another sample of my script, this time handwritten (albeit cleaned up on the computer significantly). It is a translation of the universal declaration of human rights into my personal conlang, not connected with any conworld.

redspeech_sample_new.png

really nice (:

[bradrn]

Another sample of my script, this time handwritten (albeit cleaned up on the computer significantly). It is a translation of the universal declaration of human rights into my personal conlang, not connected with any conworld.

redspeech_sample_new.png

I like it! I presume this is the same script as in viewtopic.php?f=3&t=43&p=13446#p13445.

Question: what do the small dashes mean on some of the letters? Are they an integral part of the letter, or just a diacritic of some sort?

Also, if this is the same conscript as before, I remember that I asked last time about distinguishing straight/curved corners (here's the post). It looks like that issue's fixed now, so I'd be interested to know how you resolved this.

[malloc]

Question: what do the small dashes mean on some of the letters? Are they an integral part of the letter, or just a diacritic of some sort?

The script is featural (although some featural distinctions are rather abstract) so they represent phonological features.

Also, if this is the same conscript as before, I remember that I asked last time about distinguishing straight/curved corners (here's the post). It looks like that issue's fixed now, so I'd be interested to know how you resolved this.

I drew the previous sample on the computer and found it difficult to draw curves neatly so I just copied and pasted the same small curve (I figured out later that the program does have better ways of handling curves but haven't gotten the hang of them yet). This time, I wrote it on paper so I could avoid that problem.

[bradrn]

Question: what do the small dashes mean on some of the letters? Are they an integral part of the letter, or just a diacritic of some sort?

The script is featural (although some featural distinctions are rather abstract) so they represent phonological features.

Thanks!

Also, if this is the same conscript as before, I remember that I asked last time about distinguishing straight/curved corners (here's the post). It looks like that issue's fixed now, so I'd be interested to know how you resolved this.

I drew the previous sample on the computer and found it difficult to draw curves neatly so I just copied and pasted the same small curve (I figured out later that the program does have better ways of handling curves but haven't gotten the hang of them yet). This time, I wrote it on paper so I could avoid that problem.

So you’re saying that the square/curved distinction was really just an accident caused by the way you constructed the letters? I had assumed that you created that distinction on purpose, but that explanation makes sense.

[Qwynegold]

Another sample of my script, this time handwritten (albeit cleaned up on the computer significantly). It is a translation of the universal declaration of human rights into my personal conlang, not connected with any conworld.

redspeech_sample_new.png

That looks pretty good. It looks like it has been carved into a wall.