(Conlangs) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

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Re: (Conlangs) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

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teotlxixtli wrote: 18 Aug 2022 03:01 What kind of linguistic features always co-occur? Which ones are mutually exclusive? Although I’m sure it exists I can’t think of a language off the top of my head that has both tone and grammatical case (for example)
This is one of the main question of certain strands of linguistic typology. I don't think there is a definitive list of impossible and obligatory coocurrences. The closest is probably the Universals Archive, which lists 32 absolute, mutually implicational achronic universals here. Note that these are ultimately hypotheses to be falsified.

As for tone and case, this is really just a rough tendency. Some Nilotic languages, like Kalenjin and Turkana, even mark case through grammatical tone. The same can probably be said about a lot of Grassfields Bantu languages that mark at least some adnominal possessors tonally. Similarly, other languages of West Africa, like Kanuri, often have case as well as tone. I suspect that there are also some undocumented cases in the Amazonas area. Koasati is a counterexample in Non-South America but there are probably more, especially if you also consider complex pitch accent systems and the ongoing documentation going on for many tone languages in Mesoamerica. Kewa is an example from Papua and again there are probably more due to the sheer diversity and ongoing documentation.
Edit: Many Tibeto-Burman languages, like Burmese and Nubri have both case and complex tone. Nubri even marks genitive case with a high tone. Again, documentation is ongoing.
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Re: (Conlangs) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by Salmoneus »

As Nel Fie says, the list would be either extremely short - because almost nothing is truly universal* - or extremely long, because the number of possible tendencies (many of which may be coincidental) is so vast.


In general, I'd look for genuine strong tendencies (as opposed to mere random coincidences of rare things) in one of two areas: structural analogies, and implicational hierarchies.

By 'implicational hierarchy', I mean that there are situations where it is rare to have X without also having Y, because X is in some way a more complicated or less intuitive version of Y. Many of these hierarchies are intuitive - it's rare (unattested?) to have a trial number without also having a dual, for instance. Others require some research: it's very rare for a language to have a word for 'blue', for instance, unless it also has a word for 'red', but it's far less rare to have a word for 'red' without having one for 'blue'.


By 'structural analogy', I mean that a lot of things in languages are in some way kind of like other things, and people tend to treat them the same way. For instance, adpositions are kind of like verbs - they can have one or more nouns 'governed' by them in some way; indeed, in many languages they either ARE verbs, or probably WERE verbs historically. So it should be no surprise that languages that tend to have the verb follow the object tend to have the adposition follow the governed noun as well. And aspositions are kind of like case marking, so likewise with case marking location.

And then you can sometimes run those analogies up against general tendencies. For instance, languages tend to prefer suffixes to prefixes. And since OV languages are going to 'want' to have case suffixes, but VO languages are going to 'want' to have case prefixes, we can anticipate that VO languages are going to be less keen on having cases at all, because it results in a conflict between 'prefer suffixes' and 'having affix location match verb location'. And indeed, WALS tells us that among languages with no morphological case, VO outnumbers OV by 74-20, but among languages with 2 cases OV outnumbers VO 13-9, and then when you get up to languages with 8-9 cases OV outnumbers VO 18-1. This is a big part of why SOV languages tend to be more 'nouny' than SVO languages.

['avoid prefixes' is more important than 'match locations', fwiw. WALS has three times as many VO languages with case suffixes as with case prefixes. But it has about SEVENTY times as many OV languages with suffixes as with prefixes].



But where you're NOT likely to get genuine universals is when you're comparing two unrelated things - two areas of language entirely. So, for instance, you shouldn't expect to find any strong relationship between case marking and tone, because one is morphosyntax and one is phonology.




*Lists of 'universals' should be tempered by things like the old document called 'The Cabinet of Rarities', which collects counterexamples to claimed universals. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to find the pdf version of that for years now, and the database-y online version I did find doesn't work for me.
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Re: (Conlangs) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by teotlxixtli »

These are all very good responses! I was frustrated how lots of my conlangs had combinations of features found in the real world and I wanted to have something a bit more diverse. What I didn’t want to do was stretch credulity past the breaking point
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Re: (Conlangs) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

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teotlxixtli wrote: 19 Aug 2022 04:18 These are all very good responses! I was frustrated how lots of my conlangs had combinations of features found in the real world and I wanted to have something a bit more diverse. What I didn’t want to do was stretch credulity past the breaking point
Besides what everyone else has said, it’s helpful to remember that a given trait or combination of traits doesn’t have to be attested in order to be naturalistic. The selection of traits that are attested is largely an accident of history — which languages happen to be spoken now or have decipherable writings that survived to the modern day — and it represents just a fraction of the things human languages are capable of. So you don’t necessarily have to worry if you can’t find a natlang example of what you want to do with a naturalistic conlang.
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Post by Omzinesý »

I have been thinking about modifiers of nouns.
It seems that in European languages adjectival modifiers are more integrated with their heads than genitive modifiers. I mean the NP forms a clearer semantic entity.

"Imperial era" instead of "the era of the empire" etc.

Languages like Russian that basically lack combounds (juxtaposition) prefer those adjectives, especially.

Is this just a European phenomenon? Could NPs with adjectival modifiers be semantically less integrated than NPs with genitive modifiers, in some languages?
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I'm not sure your concepts of "semantic integration" and "clearer semantic entity" are very clear, at least without some explanation.
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Post by Omzinesý »

Salmoneus wrote: 22 Aug 2022 17:29 I'm not sure your concepts of "semantic integration" and "clearer semantic entity" are very clear, at least without some explanation.
I mean that it's one concept.

Фвбианская улица (Fabianian steet) is the name of the street, while (I assume) the street where Fabian lives is улица Фабиана (Fabian's steet).
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Again, I don't think your concept of "it's one concept" is clear. How do you count how many concepts are present?


Your specific example (however it relates to the 'one concept' concept) is odd to me, because street names DO frequently use genitive constructions. St James's Street is the name of a street, not the street where St James lives. Avenue de la Grande Armée is not an avenue where the Grande Armée is (or ever was) to be found, it's just the name of the street.

Of course, in English and French (and German), the usual street name method is neither a genitive nor an adjective, but just direct apposition of nouns. In Irish, though, appositive names are usually translated with genitives, and apparently genitives are likewise the norm in Greek?
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Post by aliensdrinktea »

In English and Spanish, it’s possible for the present participle form of a verb to act as an adverb in certain contexts, such as he took off running or se fue corriendo. Is it possible to implement something similar in a language without participles?

Some detail on my verbal system: Verbs consist of a stem plus a suffix. The suffix marks the verb as either past tense, present tense, future tense, or non-finite. The progressive aspect is marked by reduplication of the stem; such forms still require tense-marking unless non-finite.

Going with the non-finite form seems like the “obvious” solution, but I feel that would create too much ambiguity with certain verbs that double as auxiliaries.
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aliensdrinktea wrote: 23 Aug 2022 01:09 In English and Spanish, it’s possible for the present participle form of a verb to act as an adverb in certain contexts, such as he took off running or se fue corriendo. Is it possible to implement something similar in a language without participles?
Is it possible to have the participle act as an adverb if you don't have a participle? No, by definition it is not!

It's also not what's happening in that English sentence syntactically or semantically (I can't speak for the Spanish). The participle there is simply an adjective acting as a subject complement: that is, it modifies "he", not "took". 'Running' is effectively a whole extra predicate unrelated to the verb. You could consider it an elision of "he took off; he was (then) running". It also works with non-participle adjectives, or prepositional phrases: "he fought angry", "he flew low", "he took off at a rate of knots".

[it's probably possible to construct a good example of the non-adverbialness of the construction by using a participle of a mental verb and a scenario where the mental event is hidden - something like "he smiled, inwardly fuming", where it's clear he's not smiling "fumingly" - but I can't off-hand think of an example where it's unambiguously OK to remove that comma, because English is a bit haphazard in when it allows your construction and when it doesn't. Although common sense should suggest that even in simple examples like "he stood thinking", we're probably not really saying that the standing itself is being done in a specifically 'thinkingly' manner, just that HE is thinking WHILE standing...]

If you want to background a clause, or even incorporate it into the main clause, it is indeed common to use a non-finite form of the verb, like a participle or a verbal noun ["he stood in thought"] Alternatively, you can use a dedicated syntactic construction of some kind ["he stood as he thought"]
Going with the non-finite form seems like the “obvious” solution, but I feel that would create too much ambiguity with certain verbs that double as auxiliaries.
How would that ambiguity arise in practice, and why would it matter?
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Post by Omzinesý »

aliensdrinktea wrote: 23 Aug 2022 01:09 In English and Spanish, it’s possible for the present participle form of a verb to act as an adverb in certain contexts, such as he took off running or se fue corriendo. Is it possible to implement something similar in a language without participles?

Some detail on my verbal system: Verbs consist of a stem plus a suffix. The suffix marks the verb as either past tense, present tense, future tense, or non-finite. The progressive aspect is marked by reduplication of the stem; such forms still require tense-marking unless non-finite.

Going with the non-finite form seems like the “obvious” solution, but I feel that would create too much ambiguity with certain verbs that double as auxiliaries.
Nonfinite relative clauses are called participles
The sleeping man is hungry. (Sleeping modifies its head the man.

Nonfinite adverbial clauses are called converbs.
The man is hungry after sleeping. (Some theories see that all adverbs modify the verb, but probably it's better say that the adverbial clause is just part of the matrix clause.)

In English and Spanish participles and converbs are identical. In Spanish the two merged because of sound changes and are distinct historically.

I don't know what you mean with them being something similar but not participles. Could you create a Pseudo-English example?
If you mean finite subordinate clauses, I see no problem with the relativizer of the language and one of subordinating conjunctions being alike.
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Well, I think the obvious alternative to non-finite verb forms that modify clauses is to use finite verb forms. This might be a serial verb construction then.
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Re: (Conlangs) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

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Omzinesý wrote: 23 Aug 2022 13:52In English and Spanish participles and converbs are identical. In Spanish the two merged because of sound changes and are distinct historically.
I think you meant to say that in English they were distinct but then merged (Old English -ende ~ -inde versus -ung ~ -ing). In Spanish it's just the Latin gerund in the ablative (-ndō) all the way back. The Latin present participle (ending in -antem), just, died, although you can find -ante in borrowings.

This is incidentally why, in the terminology used by the Real Academia Española, the -ndo form is simply called "el gerundio" (not a type of participle), while the -ado/-ido form is simply "el participio" (since it's the only Latin participle that survived).
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Sequor wrote: 24 Aug 2022 15:56
Omzinesý wrote: 23 Aug 2022 13:52In English and Spanish participles and converbs are identical. In Spanish the two merged because of sound changes and are distinct historically.
I think you meant to say that in English they were distinct but then merged (Old English -ende ~ -inde versus -ung ~ -ing). In Spanish it's just the Latin gerund in the ablative (-ndō) all the way back. The Latin present participle (ending in -antem), just, died, although you can find -ante in borrowings.

This is incidentally why, in the terminology used by the Real Academia Española, the -ndo form is simply called "el gerundio" (not a type of participle), while the -ado/-ido form is simply "el participio" (since it's the only Latin participle that survived).
No I didn't mean that.

My understanding is that -ndo is the phonological descendant of both Latin converb -ndo (which still was part of the paradigm of the verbal noun called gerund, at least morphologically) and Latin participle -nte. Correct me if -ndo was spread to adnominal functions long after the old participle was lost.
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Omzinesý wrote: 24 Aug 2022 16:41No I didn't mean that.

My understanding is that -ndo is the phonological descendant of both Latin converb -ndo (which still was part of the paradigm of the verbal noun called gerund, at least morphologically) and Latin participle -nte. Correct me if -ndo was spread to adnominal functions long after the old participle was lost.
I don't know when the Latin present participle -ntem was lost, but Spanish -ndo can't phonologically descend from it. -nt- doesn't voice to -nd- (Lat. cantāre > Sp. cantar), and -e should be retained (Lat. (ego) cantem, (is) cantet > Sp. cante).

I just realized you're probably thinking of French -ant, which is conceivably a phonological descendant of both Latin -andō and -ante(m).
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Re: (Conlangs) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by Omzinesý »

Sequor wrote: 24 Aug 2022 17:17
Omzinesý wrote: 24 Aug 2022 16:41No I didn't mean that.

My understanding is that -ndo is the phonological descendant of both Latin converb -ndo (which still was part of the paradigm of the verbal noun called gerund, at least morphologically) and Latin participle -nte. Correct me if -ndo was spread to adnominal functions long after the old participle was lost.
I don't know when the Latin present participle -ntem was lost, but Spanish -ndo can't phonologically descend from it. -nt- doesn't voice to -nd- (Lat. cantāre > Sp. cantar), and -e should be retained (Lat. (ego) cantem, (is) cantet > Sp. cante).

I just realized you're probably thinking of French -ant, which is conceivably a phonological descendant of both Latin -andō and -ante(m).
e -> o could well be explained by regulazing the adjectival paradigm. But if t -> d does not happen after nasals (as it seems) it apparently cannot derive from the particle.

I have a deja vu that I have discussed t -> before, but it seems learned nothing.

Maybe it was about French. I cannot remember where I read it.

I would assume a change from a participle to a converb rather than the other way around cos participle is a(n adjectival) nominalization and converb is not.
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Probably irrelevant to the discussion at hand, but given that ablative forms were lost for the most part in the Romance languages, isn't it much simpler to derive the gerund from the accusative form -andum rather than the dative/ablative form?
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qwed117 wrote: 24 Aug 2022 22:27 Probably irrelevant to the discussion at hand, but given that ablative forms were lost for the most part in the Romance languages, isn't it much simpler to derive the gerund from the accusative form -andum rather than the dative/ablative form?
I don't see why Latin couldn't retain the -ndō ending, even after the loss of the ablative, by considering it just another verb form rather than a word in the ablative. Considering Sardinian generally retains a distinction of word-final -u (from nominal -um) vs. -o (from 1SG -o), what does it have? Doesn't it have -ndo as well? (Assuming the form hasn't been lost...)
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Post by Omzinesý »

Deriving a participle from an action nominalization, which Latin Gerund is, sounds actually diachronically more plausible than from a converb. But they still were forms of the same paradigm, so it can be hard to say if the development to the participle went through the converb or not.
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Sequor wrote: 25 Aug 2022 09:07
qwed117 wrote: 24 Aug 2022 22:27 Probably irrelevant to the discussion at hand, but given that ablative forms were lost for the most part in the Romance languages, isn't it much simpler to derive the gerund from the accusative form -andum rather than the dative/ablative form?
I don't see why Latin couldn't retain the -ndō ending, even after the loss of the ablative, by considering it just another verb form rather than a word in the ablative. Considering Sardinian generally retains a distinction of word-final -u (from nominal -um) vs. -o (from 1SG -o), what does it have? Doesn't it have -ndo as well? (Assuming the form hasn't been lost...)
Yeah about that 😬.


Sardinian only has -ende, so yeah the form is lost, both here and also in Romanian
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