Scratchpad (non-Sego)
Posted: Fri Feb 14, 2025 9:45 am
‘The Language of Choice’
A language which permits aggressively pro-drop behaviour and high ambiguity resolved through context, but which presents a variety of typological options to mark syntactic relationships.
Why this redundancy? Natural languages have redundancy, so this language will be naturalistic in that (and likely only that!) sense. The options make for a potential breadth of strategies of expression as a potentially interesting mode of translinguistic communication, as well as, probably, quite a silly mess. Finally, there is philosophical play to be had: how else might we express ourselves, if we are permitted more of the tools in the box?
This language could be seen as an analogical counterpart for typology to the International Phonetic Alphabet. Just as the IPA allows speakers of various languages to understand phonemically and to pronounce each other's speech, so this language might allow speakers of different languages insights into each other's syntactic structures. (Not going to bring any insights to this crowd; but it might be interesting for people just starting out exploring typology.)
I’m not trying to make an IAL here. It’s just a casual engelang experiment that has filled this afternoon, and possibly only this afternoon: how ‘make-your-own’ can a language’s morphosyntax be before it breaks completely? (It’s probably broken out of the box.)
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Phonology and Orthography
Consonants
| Labial | Coronal | Palatal | Velar | Glottal | |
| Nasal Obstruent | m | n | |||
| Fortis Obstruent | p | t | k | ||
| Lenis Obstruent | b | d | g | ||
| Affricate | c | q | |||
| Fricative | f | s | x | h | |
| Lenis Sibilant | z | j | |||
| Lateral | l | ||||
| Rhotic | r | ||||
| Approximant | w | y |
Vowels
| i | u | |
| e | o | |
| a |
⟨v⟩ can be used to denote unambiguously a ‘copy vowel’, e.g. domoh ‘house’ may be written domvh.
An apostrophe may be used to show unambiguously in writing a deleted medial consonant (common in compounds), e.g. muk’sdom’h is an orthographic variant of musdoh ‘barn’ (animal-house).
Precise values can vary by speaker. ⟨z j⟩ may be affricates or fricatives, and either voiced or unaspirated, depending on the speaker’s preferred fortis/lenis distinction.
The orthography thus uses all 26 English letters, with no diacritics, for no particular reason.
Syllable structure is (C)V(C). Any consonant may appear in the onset and coda. Any allophony in clusters is not indicated in writing. Words beginning with vowels are lightly glottalised.
‘Strong’ roots take the form CVCvC, as in, the second vowel is a copy of the first. There are thus 20x5x20x20=40,000 separate strong roots available. ‘Weak’ roots (borrowings) may take any other syllabic structure, e.g. radio. (Many weak roots have derived alternatives, e.g. kimguq ‘prong/antennae sound’, from kicim gubuq.)
Stress falls on the first syllable of a word. As there are so many morphosyntactic strategies available, stress may appear, acoustically, to be free. For instance, xoaigubuq and xo ai gubuq (both likely meaning ‘I spoke/made a sound’) will differ in terms of stress. It is assumed that hypothetical speakers may begin to use these distinctions to various pragmatic effects.
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Morphosyntax
Verbs and nouns may both appear without any explicit person marking. Unmarked verbs are ambiguous as to their arguments, though context may serve to disambiguate; unmarked nouns are ambiguous as to whether or not they are possessed and by whom.
The following options (TBC) are present for grammatical marking of various cross-linguistically commonly marked features. They may be present as prefixes, suffixes, or free morphemes collocated either before or after roots, hence there is no or little obligatory order of morphemes (TBC) except in certain cases:
Person
- i marks first person
- u marks second person
- a marks third person
- a- prefix may be applied to indicate animate marking
- -n- may be applied to mark collocation, or -n by itself to imply plurality (see below*)
- -s- may be applied to mark reflexivity
- -li- feminine
- -mo- masculine
- -hu- neuter
- -(a)t(a)- may be applied to mark direct object
- -(a)k(a)- may be applied to mark subject
- -al / la- may be applied to mark indirect object
- -ar / ra- may be applied to mark possessor
Relatively complex pronouns, or affixes, may be constructed:
aal - inanimate 3rd person indirect object
ainu - animate, 1st and 2nd person (inclusive 'we')
uus - 2nd person reflexive
aumo - 2nd person masculine
There is plenty of built in ambiguity to this system. For instance, does uus neglect to include an animacy marker because its referent is inanimate? (Perhaps the speaker is addressing an object anthropomorphically.) Or is it simply assumed that the referent is probably animate? And in the absence of explicit case markings, many forms may be taken as having any or multiple potential syntactic role(s); the case markings may, of course, be applied according to various alignments.
Applying these to roots in various ways gives a panoply of potential modes of expression. And confusion.
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Compounding
This is a derivational rule I’m chucking in dogmatically for fun. Compounds of strong roots can be created by removing the middle consonant and copy vowel of both parts. There are (probably rather unfortunately) no rules for which part of the compound is to be considered the head. Compounds may imply collocation rather than modification/possession, e.g. guqpik ‘language’ [speak+write].
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A bit of testing
sutul - harp
garah - antelope
filguq - telephone
gubuq - to speak, to sound
fitil - wire, cord; to wind
noroh - to run
pilik - to write
kicim - prong/antenna
mukus - animal
guqpik - language, communication, to communicate
samas - to choose; choice
i sutul gubuq - my harp sounds, I play the harp
sutulai gubuqa - my harp sounds, it plays my harp
noroh garah - the antelope runs
garahna, aannoroh - the antelopes run
gubuqikalit filguq - I speak to her on the phone
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Temporality
The following morphemes may be affixed to or collocated with any root, nominal or verbal.
- xo - past
- wa - present
- zi - future
garah xo - the former antelope
zigubuqius - we will speak to each other
gubuq - we will speak to each other (aggressively pro-drop and context-driven, remember)
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Word classes
I think the lexicon would do well to specify potential verbal and nominal meanings of roots. I don’t know, given the flexible vibes here, whether I can impose more meaningful boundaries than that.