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Coalescing Morphosyntactic Gel

Posted: 14 Jun 2018 01:43
by Solarius
I've been trying to conlang in a way which is less formal and standard, and is instead more ad-hoc. This thread will be an attempt to make a language out of the muck, with scraps taken shamelessly from natlangs and my former projects, as well as glossolalia and reparsing random gibberish.

I'm in the habit of speaking to my pets in languages I'm learning. Unfortunately, because I'm kind of fickle, this often dissolves into a silly mix of phrases from BCS, French, and Turkish, often mixed up and used ungrammatically. I've noticed that I frequently use constructions with verbs ending in -[la], usually with stress on the preceding syllable:

[me.do.'ne.la]
"Give it to me."

[i.'t͡ʃi.la]
"Come here."

[ke.'ɾɪ.d͡ʒɪm man.'d͡ʒe.la]
"The cat ate (it)."

All of these seem to imply the presence of an object. Thus, -[la] can be analyzed as a marker of transitivity. This can be clearly seen in these utterances:

['ko.peim 'dan.se]
"the dog is dancing"

['ko.peim dan.'se.la]
"The dog is dancing (it). (in reference to a dog imitating a person's dance)."

I don't just want to do my feline-directed speech so I decided to derive more morphology by artificially generating some text and coming up with a short sentence for it to mean.


/adnipib nanti ankimʊj itge/
"Even a foolish mule can win."

So what does each word mean?

-/adnipib/ I think will mean mule. It's kind of long, so it could be a compound of /adni/ "horse" and /pib/ "donkey."
-/nanti/ would thusly seem to suggest "foolish." However, I figure it might be more fun if -ti were a derivational marker turning /nan/ "fool" into /nanti/, "foolishness." Thus /adnipib nanti/ would mean "foolish mule" or "foolishness's mule"; the two aren't distinguished.
-/ankimʊj/ could be several things. The genitive structure above suggests that an SVO word order (vs. SOV) is more likely, so lets say it means "can win." I kind of like the idea of anki- as an abilitative prefix, so lets say that /mʊj/ is "win." It's intransitive since there's no /la/.
-/itge/ seems like a discourse particle, meaning "even."

Now I have a bit of extra business. First, I've come up with a phoneme inventory for generating that text: a necessary evil.
Spoiler:
/p b t d t͡ʃ d͡ʒ k g s m n l j/<p b t d c j k g s m n l y>
/i ɪ e a o ʊ u ei eɪ ai aɪ etc./<ii i e a o u uu ey ei ay ai>
Secondly, I'm starting to maintain a dictionary and list of affixes, so I use everything well.

Now that I have some vocab, I'm going to start coming up with simple sentences. Here's one.

Kopeymjiim mimuyla pib
"The dog defeated the donkey."

But what is going on? That'll have to wait for next time.

I'll add more on later.