Sentinel - Evolution of a Conlanger

[Micamo]

It turns out the conlanger bug bit me sooner than I had thought: Today I happened to stumble upon some papers I wrote up a long time ago on a conlang I tried to invent, long before I understood linguistics. The documentation (for what it is, lots of examples, few explanations) is fairly extensive, but unfortunately I don't remember making this thing at all so I've little clue as to what my intentions were. So, for a bit of fun, I'm going to try to analyze my own work and try to make some sort of sense out of it. Hopefully I can learn from some of my past mistakes, at least.

"Naif norrosfa syanba, dian chikino dorrof katyako."

The translation I provided for this was "Fate destroys the weak, while he dreams his terrible destiny."

The language itself seems to be called Sentinel. I have no idea why it's called this. It's clearly not a word from the language itself (as my phonology section will demonstrate in a little bit), so this is one mystery I'll have to solve later. For today my goal is to try to get something of a working phonology of it.

Helpfully I gave myself a list of "letters" used. I probably didn't know IPA at the time which lends toward the ambiguity with the sounds. The "letter list" is as follows, in the order given:

"a, e, i, o, u, y, k, s, n, ng, g, ch, l, r, rr, t, d, j, b, h, f"

I don't think y was meant to be a vowel here but is instead the palatal approximant. The order given does not seem to have any significance. Perhaps an intended alphabetical order?

There seems to be 2 contrasting rhotics (The minimal pair <rot/rrot>). For now, I'll assume <r rr> are /ɹ r/.

Phonotactics seems to be (C)(y)V(t,f,s,n,ng). Vowels can occur in hiatus, and all of the words I've found follow this pattern with a few exceptions. The ones that don't are "sahok", "tast", "ningad", and "rratosk". Perhaps these are simply mistakes of me not applying my own rules correctly, or did I have a more complicated phonotactic structure in mind? Note however the semivowel "y" only comes after a consonant before the vowel "a". Again I can't help but wonder if this is a coincidence or if this was an intended phonological restraint (Though I favor the former as back then I didn't know what a phonological restraint WAS.)

It also lacks p and m. Why? This is a relatively common pattern but as I said I knew little of linguistics back then. Another coincidence?

[Tanni]

Hello Micamo!

It turns out the conlanger bug bit me sooner than I had thought: Today I happened to stumble upon some papers I wrote up a long time ago on a conlang I tried to invent, long before I understood linguistics. The documentation (for what it is, lots of examples, few explanations) is fairly extensive, but unfortunately I don't remember making this thing at all so I've little clue as to what my intentions were. So, for a bit of fun, I'm going to try to analyze my own work and try to make some sort of sense out of it. Hopefully I can learn from some of my past mistakes, at least.

Almost the same with me! I started to make a Conlang long ago, I didn't even know that it's called a conlang. I just remembered a few words, and I also had no linguistic knowledge or did care about syllable structure and that like. The language not even had a name. Some year ago or so, I found the notes I had written on A5 paper and decided to make a digital document from it using LaTeX. I did some LaTeX markup to count the words and yeh, I've made more than 400 words back then. If you want my LaTeX commands, let me know.

It also lacks p and m. Why? This is a relatively common pattern but as I said I knew little of linguistics back then. Another coincidence?

Checked it, my language had p and m. But nowadays, the languages I try to invent will definitly lack p, b and most likely m. (I don't like bilabial plosives, and the lacking of the m would be because my conbeings will have something like a snout, so it would probably be very difficult for them to pronunce that. My problem is, that I like to have front rounded vowels for their languages.

[Curlyjimsam]

This is better than my first conlang ...

[Micamo]

A refining note on the phonology: It looks like I made a syllabary! Overall it's not very good and steals most of its characters from Japanese but it does give some more info:

The vowel rows indeed has "ya," and there is no y in the consonant columns. So it looks like /j/ really is only allowed before /a/.

My analysis of the phonotactics was correct in terms of the coda. Much like how Japanese has the single mora "n" my syllabary also has single moras for expressing all the possible codas (t,f,s,n,ng). So those "weird words" were just mistakes on my part.

I'll try to get my syllabary scanned in for you all but more likely I'll have to re-draw it in digital form. (It's not very well labeled, had to spend about 3 hours picking through it and some writing examples to decipher the whole thing).

EDIT: Just threw up something real quick-like while I work on the full chart.

Naif norrosfa syanba, dian chikino dorrof katyako. (Image linked to prevent horizontal scrolling)

Overall it's a pretty bad script. Plosives can be followed by any vowel (including "ya") but fricatives and sonorants have restrictions on what vowels they can be paired with. I'd like to think I was being creative with the phonological restraints here but honestly? I think when I was trying to make the script I was too lazy to make a symbol for all of them so I disallowed some syllables so I wouldn't have to come up with characters for them.

[Micamo]

Took me a couple of hours of messing around with inkscape to get everything right but here's sentinel's conscript chart:



To explain: Putting a line beneath the syllable makes the syllable voiced (or, in the case of B, makes the consonant "h"). As it only distinguishes voice among the plosives this only is productive for B/T/K but given I used the line trick on B to avoid having to come up with more symbols for H, why didn't I do this with the other ones too to lighten the load? Notice also all of the N syllables are just S ones with a short line somewhere through them. The "N" row are the single-consonant moras. The clause marker separates clauses (just independent/dependent clauses, other types are mixed in as I didn't know they even existed).

Hopefully this table will make it easier to make translations, as most of the stuff I provided translations for is pretty cryptic (lakof deyanino nohurrot aif naosfa "The winds of death call our names.")

[Przemysław]

Took me a couple of hours of messing around with inkscape to get everything right but here's sentinel's conscript chart:

1. Why didn’t you use the Inkscape’s calligraphic tool?
2. ⟨CHe⟩ and ⟨RRo⟩ look the same.
3. How do the Sentinelese write foreign words, let’s say containing a [pa] or a word-final [k]?
4. Did you crash test your script?

[Micamo]

Took me a couple of hours of messing around with inkscape to get everything right but here's sentinel's conscript chart:

1. Why didn’t you use the Inkscape’s calligraphic tool?
2. ⟨CHe⟩ and ⟨RRo⟩ look the same.
3. How do the Sentinelese write foreign words, let’s say containing a [pa] or a word-final [k]?
4. Did you crash test your script?

1. I did. I just suck <.<
2. CHE is like an upside down capital Y with the angles, where RRO is supposed to be a semicircle. They aren't even the only overly-similar pairs, just look at E and KYA or SA and BU. I'm not gonna change them to be more different though. (Nor do I have any plans to change this conlang to improve it)
3. Beats me. I don't think Past!Micamo thought of that. Probably use the same method as Japanese and just force the most similar-sounding symbols in (Dainingu Rumu!).
4. Yes (If crash test means what I think it means). See here though I just threw that one together compared to the work I put into the chart (Sad, I know ;-;).

For some reason I put in a ton of original stuff in my script but gave romanizations scarcely and translations moreso. Now that I can read it phonetically I can hopefully start deciphering grammar. For now I've figured out the word order is VSO, the definite article prefixes ne/no (Dunno the difference between the two but they're definitely both definite articles), and the genitive suffix -ino.

[Pirka]

Hmm... deciphering old notes, huh? I had a same experience with a language of mine I made in the 6th-7th grades; what Past-Pirka had intended to be a Celto-clone, due to poor linguistic understanding, became something like an awful mix of Korean and Mongolian with some typical Japanese in the mix. I had the toughest time reorganizing it. It's cool to see how one's self has evolved as a conlanger in this way, isn't it?