Hi from a complete newbie - Tiit Language idea

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setvir
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Hi from a complete newbie - Tiit Language idea

Post by setvir »

I've been working on a concept for a constructed language, and I'm interested in getting feedback and suggestions from those with more experience. Please note that I am not a linguist and my background is in web development. I am fluent in two languages, but I am still learning about the complexities of creating a conlang. I hardly know enough to be dangerous.

So far, I've put together the basic structure and rules of the language, but I am aware that there may be mistakes and inconsistencies. I would appreciate any constructive criticism and advice as I continue to develop this language.

Tiit Language:

Animacy:
Tiit uses animacy, which means a word is ether "alive" or "dead". All physical living things that can move by them self or verbs that cause movement of physical living things over a distance are "alive". All other words are "dead".
For example:
"He" is alive, "cat" is alive, "walk" is alive, "table" is dead, "dream" is dead, "wash" is dead, "tree" is dead, "flower" is dead. Metaphysical words like "spirit", "ghost" etc are dead. "Car" is dead (not a living physical thing), "drive" a car is alive (causes movement of physical living thing).

Sound representation:
Tiit uses a phonemic alphabet.

Vowels:
a - /a/ (Thanks Khemehekis)
e - e as in "pet"
i - i as in "be"
o - RP of "O" in "got"
u - u as in "rule"


Consonants:
b - b as in "big"
d - d as in "dog"
l - l as in "love"
m - m as in "man"
n - n as in "name"
p - p as in "pet"
r - r as in "red"
s - s as in "sun"
f - f as in "fan"
v - v as in "vice"

Special characters:
Tiit has three special characters:
These can not to be used in when forming root words.
One special personal pronoun character
t - ts as in "tsar"

In Tiit personal pronouns are always preceded by "t" and it can not be used in any other word, except for the temporal marker "now" which is represented by "it".

Tiit uses 2 affixes to indicate object and subject
x - ch as in "loch" indicates the subject in a sentence (see also modality below)
g - g as in "go" indicates the object in a sentence (it also has another function, see Verb infliction below).

Dependant on the Animacy of the word they are post-fixed for all "living" words and prefixed for all "dead" words.

Temporal markers:
Tiit has five different letter combinations that are used to indicate when something happens:
av - before today / long ago
ef - earlier/ just past
it - now/at present
os - little later/soon
us - after today and later

"it" is used to emphasise that the action is happening right now at this moment and is omitted for normal present tense.

Word creation:
All dead words begin with a vowel.
All live words end with a vowel.
Words never indicate tense. See "Temporal Markers".
"t" always proceed a personal pronoun and can not be used in any other words except for the temporal marker "it".
No words can exist that are the same as the temporal markers "av", "ev", "it", "os", "us".
"x" and "g" can never be used when creating root words.

Word order:
Tiit does not follow a strict subject-verb-object word order, which allows for more flexibility in sentence construction, these mean exactly the same:
it tix gara = gara it tix = tix it gara

Words that are closely related and indicate a transfer of possession or action should be joined together by a hyphen. The order in which the words are joined together represents the order in which the objects are passed on. When words are joined together by a hyphen, they function as a single unit in the sentence.
itx smaba gire-urog - i give a bone to the dog
(smaba -give, uro -dog, ire -bone)
Note:
itx smaba ire-urog - i give the "bone-dog"
itx smaba gire-ire-urog - I give the bone to the "bone-dog"

Modality:
Modality is the grammatical feature that expresses the speaker's attitude or degree of certainty towards the action or state described in a sentence. It can indicate whether the action is certain, probable, possible, or impossible, as well as the speaker's attitude towards the action, such as whether it is a command, an advice, a suggestion, or a possibility.

In Tiit modality is used to indicate the modality of the subject. If "x" is omitted it is used to express advice, a command or a potential.

Verb infliction:
g - g as in "go"
Tiit uses affixes "g" to the verb to indicate that it is ongoing (like the English -ing). See "Animacy" for rules how "g" should be pre- or postfixed to the verb.

Examples:
pronouns:
"ti" - I/Me

temporal marker:
"it" - now

root words
"ara" - live
"made" - think
"evu" - press
"amai" - boy
"asis" - sit


i am living - tix gara
i am living now - it tix gara
i am alive - tix ara
i should be living - ti gara
i was living - ef tix gara
i was alive - ef tix ara
I lived long - av tix gara
he is thinking - tox gmade
he should be thinking - to gmade

av tig xara evu - (before today life pressed me) i have had a hard life
ef tig xara evu - (earlier today life pressed me) I have had a hard day

amaix asis gavra - the boy sits on the chair -
amaig asis xavra - the chair sits on the boy
amai asis gavra - boy sit on the chair (an order for the boy to sit on the chair)

A wise Tiit saying:
Smabag gire-urog - giving the bone to the dog - cheating your way to a solution!
Last edited by setvir on 13 Jan 2023 02:51, edited 9 times in total.
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Nel Fie
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Re: Hi from a complete newbie - Tiit Language idea

Post by Nel Fie »

Hello! And welcome to the CBB, as well as to the broader community and world of conlanging!

Your project already looks like you've got a solid start! Something that would help others in regards to providing feedback and suggestions would be to know what goals you have for your conlang. As with many other crafts, changes and improvements can only be made in the intention of achieving a certain goal - though of course an advice-adverse goal like "I just want to add to it as inspiration strikes" is perfectly valid as well.

If you're not sure yourself what possible goals and directions you want to set for yourself, a first one would be provided by answering the question: do you want the language to be naturalistic*, in part or in whole?

* If you're not sure what that means - a "naturalistic" conlang tries to mimic linguistic patterns found in the thousands of languages that developed on their own in the world - be it in phonology, grammar, lexical patterns, etc... Something not found among them could be deemed "non-naturalistic", though there's still plenty of room for plausibility. It depends on how one narrow wants the term to be.
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setvir
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Re: Hi from a complete newbie - Tiit Language idea

Post by setvir »

Hello Nel,

Thank you for your kind words of encouragement. My goal with this language project is not to make it naturalistic, but rather to keep it simple and easy to learn. I understand that it may not turn out to be unique or practical, but I am enjoying the process of creating it.

I view this language project as a fun hobby, and I am excited to share it with others and hear their feedback.

Please let me know if you have any suggestions or ideas, I am open to constructive criticism and feedback.
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Re: Hi from a complete newbie - Tiit Language idea

Post by setvir »

Hello fellow conlangers,
I have hit a snag in my conlang project and I could use some ideas and input. My language is meant to be simple, but I've run into a problem with word order not indicating the subject-object relationship.

For example, in the sentence "tix smaba kurog gire", which means "I give the dog a bone", it is not clear whether I am giving the bone to the dog or the dog to the bone.
________________________
ti (I) becomes tix
smaba (give)
uro (dog) becomes urog
ire (bone) becomes gire
-------------------------------------

I have considered using double "g" on the object noun "uro" to indicate that it is "further down the line" object of the sentence, like this "tix smaba urogg gire", or giving the object noun "ire" an "x" and "g" to indicate that it is the subject towards the dog, like this "tix smaba urog gxire".

Sorry I may be completely misusing terms and mangling explanations.

I am not satisfied with these options and I am open to suggestions from more experienced conlangers.

How would you handle this problem in your conlang?

Thank you in advance for your input and ideas.
Last edited by setvir on 13 Jan 2023 15:41, edited 3 times in total.
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Re: Hi from a complete newbie - Tiit Language idea

Post by setvir »

okay I decided to just cheat....
itx smaba gire-urog - i give a bone to the dog

This allows me to still do this:
itx smaba gire-urog = gire-urog itx smaba = smaba gire-urog itx

Note:
itx smaba ire-urog - i give the "bone-dog"
itx smaba gire-ire-urog - I give the bone to the "bone-dog"

Keeps the language from turning Chinese.

my language got its first saying!
smabag gire-urog - giving the bone to the dog - cheating your way to a solution!
Last edited by setvir on 13 Jan 2023 01:42, edited 1 time in total.
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eldin raigmore
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Re: Hi from a complete newbie - Tiit Language idea

Post by eldin raigmore »

I endorse what Nel Fie told you!
Welcome!
I think your conlang so far is very interesting, and I intend to follow it!
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Re: Hi from a complete newbie - Tiit Language idea

Post by Khemehekis »

Welcome, Setvir! Who cares about naturalism when the "alive" and "dead" idea is such a great idea? Have you learned about the concept of animacy yet? Your dead-and-alive concept is somewhat similar, although you extend it to verbs and not just nouns and pronouns.

You might want to clarify your A and O sounds better. The A in "father" is /ɑ/, the same vowel heard in words like "mark", "party", and "palm". Yet in my dialect (I'm from the Bay Area), "got" has the exact same vowel as "father!" Are you British? In most British dialects of English, "got" is pronounced with /ɒ/, found in words like "pot", "stop", and "Bob". Since "got" has a different vowel from "father" for you, I figure you mean /ɒ/. You might want to say "the RP [that stands for Received Pronunciation, the dialect of British English reflected in most foreign-language dictionaries] pronunciation of "O" in "got".

It's also worth pointing out that the vowel sound /a/ is actually a lot more common than the /ɑ/ of "father" across languages. /a/ is a vowel halfway between the A of "cat" and the A of "father". I pronounce words like "half", "dance", "math", and "pass" with this vowel. That's traditionally how the A in words like these is pronounced in Philadelphia. Imagine the French song "Alouette", which begins with a protracted /a/ vowel sound. A lot of language guides that say "A as in father" are actually telling you wrong, because the /a/ in Spanish, Italian, Japanese . . . is actually /a/, not /ɑ/. You don't actually mean the "Alouette" vowel, do you?


EDIT: Also, is the double i in "Tiit" a long vowel, or do you say the /i/ vowel twice in a row, like in "we eat"?
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Re: Hi from a complete newbie - Tiit Language idea

Post by setvir »

Thanks for the help Khemehekis,
The language needed a quirk, did not want the affixes stuck to the same side of the words... Saw a conlang video years ago and they were talking about gender etc and that came up. I thought it as interesting and the idea stuck.

I added your suggestion for O and you are right I want the /a/ sound. This is turning out to be a interesting learning experience, and I am always up for that!
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Re: Hi from a complete newbie - Tiit Language idea

Post by eldin raigmore »

Khemehekis wrote: 13 Jan 2023 01:36 Welcome, Setvir! Who cares about naturalism when the "alive" and "dead" idea is such a great idea? Have you learned about the concept of animacy yet? Your dead-and-alive concept is somewhat similar, although you extend it to verbs and not just nouns and pronouns.
I wholeheartedly second this motion!
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Re: Hi from a complete newbie - Tiit Language idea

Post by Nel Fie »

Something that might help you with the sounds would be to describe them based on the International Phonetic Alphabet (or IPA). You don't have to learn the whole thing or even use it to describe the sounds of your conlang, but the audio samples provided by some of the charts out there might help you compare different sounds and find which ones you want - sort of like a reference library of sounds. Here are some charts with good audio samples:
Wikipedia IPA Chart - Pulmonic Consonants
Wikipedia IPA Chart - Non-Pulmonic Consonants
Wikipedia IPA Chart - Vowels
J.B.Dowse's IPA Chart with Audio
UVic's IPALab Chart (has samples for tones and other things not represented in the above four charts)

As for suggestions regarding the grammar of your language, it would help if you gave some word-for-word or part-for-part descriptions of what the components in your example sentences mean, aside from the literal translations you're already providing. Since people likely don't know your conlang as well as you, they'd have to look up the definition of each word otherwise.
Such a description is generally referred to as a "gloss", also works as a verb "to gloss"(i.e. "I've glossed every sentence"). Academic linguistics have a common system of conventions for this called the "Leipzig Glossing Rules" (or LGR), which is often used by conlangers as well. A description can be found here: Max Planck Institute - Leipzig Glossing Rules. That said, same as with the IPA, you don't have to follow it, in specific or in broad; but the core idea might help get your ideas across to others, or even for yourself, once your language grows enough that you don't remember every detail - you might come across a sentence you wrote down long ago but don't understand how or why it works anymore. Some kind of gloss might help prevent that, as well.

To give an example, here's my attempt at what a gloss for one of your sentences could look like (correct me on anything I got wrong, of course):

itx smaba gire-urog
it-x smaba g-ire=uro-g
now-SBJ give go-bone=dog-OBJ
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setvir
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Re: Hi from a complete newbie - Tiit Language idea

Post by setvir »

Hi thanks Nel,
Great resources thanks, will definitely have a look.
Can already see the advantage of LGR. :-)
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Re: Hi from a complete newbie - Tiit Language idea

Post by Nel Fie »

Happy to help if it does!
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Re: Hi from a complete newbie - Tiit Language idea

Post by Salmoneus »

Hello.

It's harder to offer concrete thoughts on an intentionally non-naturalistic language - since, without the intent to imitate a real language, there's little to constrain the maker. "Best" becomes entirely "whatever you want", so that the critic can't really... criticise. Despite this, a few thoughts came to mind reading your post, that might raise issues you may want to consider...

I'm not trying to criticise here - it's all up to you what you do! - just trying to raise some ideas.
Tiit uses animacy, which means a word is ether "alive" or "dead". All physical living things that can move by them self or verbs that cause movement of physical living things over a distance are "alive". All other words are "dead".
Does it use animacy? In what way?
All I can see is that you can tell the animacy from the shape of the word, which isn't usually what's meant by 'using' animacy, and I don't really see, if that's all there is to it, what the benefit of it is. It also seems very subjective. Why are "wash" (which usually causes movement of living things - usually the thing washed, and certainly the things living in the water) and "tree" (a living thing that moves by itself (by growing)) considered 'dead', while "driving" (which has no relation to living things - if I drive a remote-controlled car, or if a robot drives a car, nothing living is moved) are considered alive?
Vowels:
a - /a/ (Thanks Khemehekis)
e - e as in "pet"
i - i as in "be"
o - RP of "O" in "got"
u - u as in "rule"


Consonants:
b - b as in "big"
d - d as in "dog"
l - l as in "love"
m - m as in "man"
n - n as in "name"
p - p as in "pet"
r - r as in "red"
s - s as in "sun"
f - f as in "fan"
v - v as in "vice"
The vowels are a little unusual (the Spanish 'e' sound is more common than the English, and if there's one 'o' sound it's more likely to be between the 'got' and 'rule' vowels somewhere, like Spanish 'o' or English 'caught'), but not objectionable even in naturalistic terms. Five vowels is a reasonable number to have.

The consonants, though... I don't see the logic. Presumably, if you're not trying to imitate a natural language, you're following some other sort of logic? I don't see it here, these look like random choices.

You don't have to be naturalistic... but if you want a language that's "simple" and "easy to learn", you probably want to be at least a little like the languages your learners speak. And the thing that really strikes me here is the paucity of voiceless consonants (the most basic, 'default' sounds in human languages). You've only got three, and only one of those ('p') is a voiceless stop (by contrast, I think all human languages have at least two, and virtually all have at least three). It's also a counterintuitive choice, because if you have a voicing contrast in stops they tend to come in pairs, and if one sound is missing from those pairs it's most like to be 'p'. That is, the most common inventory (assuming any voicing contrast at all) includes /p b t d k g/, and the next most common is /b t d k g/ (followed by /p b t k/). So it seems counterintuitive to have /p/ as the only voiceless stop you do have! Although, since /p/ is very common nonetheless, it's not an inherently large problem.
Likewise, you only have one voiced fricative, /v/. This isn't THAT unnatural (/v/ can develop from /w/ in a system that otherwise lacks voiced fricatives), but seems a bit odd. If you're making use of a voicing contrast like f/v, why not also have s/z? And, indeed, t/d? (with a real /t/, which wouldn't affect your desire to keep /ts/ for a special purpose).

[sidenote: do you understand about /slashes/, [square brackets] and <angle brackets> in talking about languages? It's a helpful convention to learn, if you haven't already. Phones, phonemes, allophones, etc?]

Oh, and if you're going to talk about your language with speakers of different languages, you may need to be more specific about "r". Lots of different languages have lots of different r-like sounds, and different dialects of English have very different sounds in "red", many of them vey different from the sounds other languages have. Most Americans have a bizarre "bunched" approximant that some have claimed only occurs in English, out of all the languages on earth. Whereas I, like many (though maybe not most?) young southern British people, have an only slightly less bizarre "pharyngealised labiodental approximant" (with partial rounding and possibly sulcalisation), which means that the front of my tongue does very little and instead the main body of the sound is more like a really open 'v'...

Of course, one possibility in a non-natural language without a narrative context (by which I mean: not part of a story or constructed setting) is that you needn't actually specify how anything "is" pronounced, since nobody actually speaks it... (leave it for future speakers to figure out the details!)
Tiit uses 2 affixes to indicate object and subject
x - ch as in "loch" indicates the subject in a sentence (see also modality below)
g - g as in "go" indicates the object in a sentence (it also has another function, see Verb infliction below).
I'm not sure it makes sense to have two such vital affixes be so very similar (as /g/ and /x/ are formed at the same part of the mouth, and in many languages one tends to turn into the other...), when you have the whole mouth to choose from!

But aside from that, although this is very unnatural, I quite like the idea of dedicated phonemes purely for one important affix each. [the idea of a phoneme to mark 'all personal pronouns and also one of the five temporal adverbs' makes less intuitive sense to me]
Tiit has five different letter combinations that are used to indicate when something happens:
"Letter combinations" that stand by themselves are usually just called "words"!
Also, where do these words go in a sentence?
Word order:
Tiit does not follow a strict subject-verb-object word order, which allows for more flexibility in sentence construction, these mean exactly the same:
it tix gara = gara it tix = tix it gara
If they all mean the same thing, how do you decide which order to use in a particular sentence?
Words that are closely related and indicate a transfer of possession or action should be joined together by a hyphen. The order in which the words are joined together represents the order in which the objects are passed on. When words are joined together by a hyphen, they function as a single unit in the sentence.
itx smaba gire-urog - i give a bone to the dog
(smaba -give, uro -dog, ire -bone)
Note:
itx smaba ire-urog - i give the "bone-dog"
itx smaba gire-ire-urog - I give the bone to the "bone-dog"
I don't understand this. For one thing, hyphens aren't real - they're just spelling, you can't actually hear them.
In Tiit modality is used to indicate the modality of the subject. If "x" is omitted it is used to express advice, a command or a potential.
A quick correction: the sentence or event has modality; if you had to pin it to a single word, it's the verb. Nominal modality would be something else entirely (it would mean transforming "cat" into "thing might be a cat" and the like).
Verb infliction:
g - g as in "go"
Tiit uses affixes "g" to the verb to indicate that it is ongoing (like the English -ing).
This is an "aspect". You may want to be more specific, since that's not really what the English -ing marks exactly ("I've been eating here every week for the last ten years!" does not mean that the eating is ongoing at the time of the sentence being uttered), but it's a fair enough first approximation.

But this is a contradiction to when you earlier said that g- was only used to mark objects.

My language is meant to be simple, but I've run into a problem with word order not indicating the subject-object relationship.

For example, in the sentence "tix smaba kurog gire", which means "I give the dog a bone", it is not clear whether I am giving the bone to the dog or the dog to the bone.
So, the subject appears clear. Your problem is that this is a ditransitive verb, with three arguments, and you're trying to mark two of them as objects.

That's not actually a problem - lots of languages do it. Others only mark the recipient as the object, or only mark the gift as the object. Marking can include word order as well - and there's no reason a language with generally free word order couldn't have a fixed word order in a certain construction.

Alternatively, many languages simply don't have ditransitive verbs. Alternatives include using multiple verbs (essentially "I take bone give dog") or topicalisation (essentially "[as for] the dog, I give the bone").


[the language I'm most working on at the moment is a Germanic language, and is very boring in this regard: it just puts the recipient in the dative]
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Re: Hi from a complete newbie - Tiit Language idea

Post by setvir »

Thanks Salmoneus,
A lot of valuable information thanks, yes there are things that i am going to change as this is still back of the napkin and thinking about ideas. That is why I posted here, ppl with lot more knowledge than me. [:)]
But I am learning a lot and enjoying the process.
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Re: Hi from a complete newbie - Tiit Language idea

Post by Omzinesý »

setvir wrote: 12 Jan 2023 21:32 For example, in the sentence "tix smaba kurog gire", which means "I give the dog a bone", it is not clear whether I am giving the bone to the dog or the dog to the bone.
Actually, the interpretation 'I give the dog to the bone.' is very strange, I mean you mean a very specific context to say that. The thing given is nearly always inanimate while the one given to is nearly always animate. In the strange context, you can say something 'I gave the dog away. The bone got it.'
My meta-thread: viewtopic.php?f=6&t=5760
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