Zompist Bboard Again

Hey guys, I decided to play around with scratchpads here to see if they could be helpful.

Mizlřvat is my third attempt at creating this language. I had previously called it Mizalcan, but this time decided to go with an in-language name, which means 'language of the Mountain' (the word mizal refers to a specific mountain with major cultural significance to the Mizlnèn, though at one point it was just a generic word for mountain).

Mizlřvat is spoken in Mizalc'à (Mountain-land), a land of high mountains and fertile valleys with a climate probably similar to California's, and has been written for at least 3,000 years. Its history is divided into three main periods: Old, Middle, and New Mizlřvat, and the general trend over this time has been for the language to move from heavily isolating to heavily agglutinating. I plan to focus on New Mizlřvat, but to reference older forms of the language in order to explain the form that the modern language takes.

I also tend to take little bits of lots of different languages and mash them together into what I hope is a cohesive whole when I'm conlanging, so while I have taken some initial inspiration from the Salishan languages, Mizlřvat will probably not be super heavily influenced by them, and I will likely combine that influence with all sorts of other stuff as well.

Phonology

Consonants
Vowels
All vowels have long and short versions. Also, I'm not sure about including /æ/ or merging it with /a/, but it's in there for now.

Romanization

Consonants
Vowels
Mizlgřvat makes heavy use of epenthetic schwa, which is often not written in the orthography. <à â> typically refer to schwas that are part of the basic structure of a root or affix.

Well, there's some basics. I will probably talk about stress and how it interacts with roots and suffixes next.

wow, pretty big, i like big phonologies.
lot of plosives though. personally i’d add a /ts/ and maybe cut down on the uvular contrasts.

i like your vowel system, but im curious as to why you went all-out with the diacritics instead of just writing the vowel twice (not that that’s a bad thing).

looking forward to seeing your stress rules and suffixes

bbbosborne wrote: ↑Mon Sep 24, 2018 4:32 pm wow, pretty big, i like big phonologies.
lot of plosives though. personally i’d add a /ts/ and maybe cut down on the uvular contrasts.

Those uvular constrasts would be right at home in the PNW (though the contrast would be more likely to be aspirated vs. unaspirated, but on the other hand Tsimshian). Of course, most PNW languages don't have that many vowels, but then again, Tsimshian. :p

I'd quickly comment on the orthography that your symbols for schwa don't really lead me to think "schwa." I'd find switching your choices for writing /æ ə/ more intuitive, personally.

I'd do the romanisation like this:
p' p b t' t d k' k g k'v kv gv q' q gq q'v qv gqv
tš' tš dž
s z š ž x r xv rv h rh hv rhv
m n
l rr j w
i ì u ù e è ê o ò a à
ii ìì uu ùù ee èè êê oo òò aa àà

So, I made some changes to the romanization.

i like your vowel system, but im curious as to why you went all-out with the diacritics instead of just writing the vowel twice (not that that’s a bad thing).

I went with diacritics mostly because of aesthetic reasons; to me ee and oo just look really ugly. It's the same reason I went with c instead of k.

Those uvular constrasts would be right at home in the PNW (though the contrast would be more likely to be aspirated vs. unaspirated, but on the other hand Tsimshian).

For most of its history, the only contrast in consonants in Mizlřvat was ejective vs. non-ejective. The voiced sounds arose fairly late as allophones of non-ejective sounds in between vowels, but many of those vowels were lost later on. They would still be allophones if they didn't show up in roots like mèŕ us, or hêž war.

I'd quickly comment on the orthography that your symbols for schwa don't really lead me to think "schwa." I'd find switching your choices for writing /æ ə/ more intuitive, personally.

The reason I went for à for schwa is because historically in Mizlřvat schwa comes from /a/ with low tone, otherwise I probably would have written it ë.

I was under the impression that, phonetically speaking, voiced uvular plosives aren't really a thing---they crowd into back velar territory, or get realised as fricatives. There's not much room for either of those options here.

(UPSID shows only one language that contrasts a voiced uvular plosive with a voiced uvular fricative, namely Ahtna (Na-Dené, Alaska); the Wikipedia version of Ahtna phonology doesn't show any voiced plosives---it's got plain and aspirated and ejective series---and has back velars rather than uvulars. I'm in no position to evaluate these sources, though.)

I'm counting 40 consonants? That's a pretty large inventory given that the mean is about 22. Not sure I can decipher your table, but they'd need to be spread around the phonological space. Are they all supposed to be pulmonic or are some glottalic consonants - you mentioned ejective consonants in Mizlgqhuat's history. Are they still present?

The vowel inventory seems overkill for me. Not even the monster of vowel inventory, the Germanic languages, have that fine of height/length contrasts. A language with this many vowel usually have front rounded vowel or nasalization, or modality contrasts. I suggest you to shift the height contrast to partially based on modality. Or make the long vowel a diphthong or collapse some vowel. There are very few language that contrasts /ɪ i iː/ and it looks like most of them is Germanic, let alone with additional /ɪ:/

I was under the impression that, phonetically speaking, voiced uvular plosives aren't really a thing---they crowd into back velar territory, or get realised as fricatives. There's not much room for either of those options here.

I'm actually not sure if they are or not, only that most languages with uvular stops seem to have /q'/ and /q/ at most. I guess it is possible to have /ɢ/ and /ɢʷ/ merge with /ʁ/ and /ʁʷ/, just to give a little asymmetry.

you mentioned ejective consonants in Mizlgqhuat's history. Are they still present?

Yes. There are /p'/, /t'/, /k'/, kʷ'/, /q'/, /qʷ'/, and /tʃ'/.

The vowel inventory seems overkill for me. Not even the monster of vowel inventory, the Germanic languages, have that fine of height/length contrasts. A language with this many vowel usually have front rounded vowel or nasalization, or modality contrasts. I suggest you to shift the height contrast to partially based on modality. Or make the long vowel a diphthong or collapse some vowel. There are very few language that contrasts /ɪ i iː/ and it looks like most of them is Germanic, let alone with additional /ɪ:/

I may get rid of /æ/, and it's likely that in older forms of the language, /ɪ/, /ɛ/, /ə/, /ʊ/, and /ɔ/ also involved breathy voice, since they always had low tone. It's possible that the breathy voicing may still be present.

A lot of Mizlřvat is still up in the air, but I'm not too concerned with sticking to what's "normal," since there are always exceptions. The languages of Mizalc'à and the western and northern regions of the continent of Malossa in general also tend to be characterized by large phonologies.

Voiced uvular plosives are definitely a thing IRL, they just tend to be very unstable.

Voiced uvular consonants are definitely a thing IRL, they just tend to be very unstable.

But phonetic voiced uvular plosives?

I'm actually not sure if they are or not, only that most languages with uvular stops seem to have /q'/ and /q/ at most.

I'm pretty sure /qʷ/ is also reasonably common in languages that also have /kʷ/.

I may get rid of /æ/, and it's likely that in older forms of the language, /ɪ/, /ɛ/, /ə/, /ʊ/, and /ɔ/ also involved breathy voice, since they always had low tone.

Without /æ/ your vowel inventory is pretty common in languages with ATR harmony, for what it's worth. (Though if you're thinking of things that way, you'd expect it to be /a/ rather than /ə/ with the -ATR vowels.)

I meant specifically plosives, wrote consonants in general by mistake

Oh, cool. (At some point I read someone doubting whether any of the reported cases could be genuine, but I don't have enough of a background in phonetics to assess such things.)

akamchinjir wrote: ↑Wed Sep 26, 2018 9:36 am Oh, cool. (At some point I read someone doubting whether any of the reported cases could be genuine, but I don't have enough of a background in phonetics to assess such things.)

Tehrani Farsi <q> /ɢ/ is [ɢ] word-initially and [ɣ] elsewhere, though some conservative dialects still distinguish /q/ and /ɣ/ as separate phonemes. /ɢ/ is unstable and frequently lenited after vowels even in languages where lenition is not normal, but it definitely can exist as its own phoneme and be phonetically realized as [ɢ].

ok i don't know if this will be helpful since i'm having trouble following this conversation, but according to wikipedia, monogolian has a single uvular consonant /ɢ/

bbbosborne wrote: ↑Wed Sep 26, 2018 4:27 pm ok i don't know if this will be helpful since i'm having trouble following this conversation, but according to wikipedia, monogolian has a single uvular consonant /ɢ/

In addition to no /q/, Wikipedia also lists it as having no /k/, which despite what the chart says makes me wonder if /g gʲ ɢ/ might actually be [k kʲ q]. On the other hand, no /k/ is an areal feature of the PNW sprachbund, where it has a strong tendency towards palatalizing; perhaps /tʃ tʃʰ/ < /k kʰ/, which leaves /ɢ/ an open question. (For another parallel, /ɢ/ is Farsi's only uvular as I pointed out above, but /ɢ/ occurs only in loanwords in Farsi. /ɢ/ is the normal realization of Standard Arabic /q/ in some dialects of Arabic, too.)

ETA: This is all speculation on my part because I know nothing of Mongolic philology.