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

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

Post by Creyeditor »

One way to go is introducing basic terminology and explaining how English (or whatever language you write in) works and then showing how Vrkhazhian is different before going into details on how it works.
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Re: (Conlangs) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by LinguoFranco »

So I read that French stresses the last syllable with a full vowel at the end of a phrase, instead of just having word final stress.

Is this correct, and are there any other languages that do something like this?

I suppose this question would be better suited for natlangs, but I kinda want to implement this into a conlang.
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Re: (Conlangs) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by Creyeditor »

Some Austronesian languages have been claimed to work like this. Here is a decent overview.
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Re: (Conlangs) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by Salmoneus »

I can't swear to the details of anything in French. However, it's certainly possible for a language to have intonation patterns, which can include elements (in timing, pitch, amplitude) we might associate with stress. And it's possible for a language to have no phonemic stress, and, in the absence of phonemic stress, to have little discernable use of stress on the word level. So I would see French - if this description is accurate - not as shifting the stress to the ends of phrases, but as allowing intonational stress to be more visible in the absence of strong word-level stress.

That said, there are also many who believe that many 'phrases' in French are best considered words, due to patterns of syncope. I don't know whether these phrases line up with those that act as stress-regulating units. And I also don't know whether the dissolution of word boundaries and development of polysynthesis should be considered the cause, or the result, of priviliging phrase-level intonational stress over word-level stress.
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Re: (Conlangs) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

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This paper also mentions Tamazight, Bengali, Bella Coola, and Gokana as being stressless on the word level.
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Re: (Conlangs) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by Salmoneus »

Interesting that Tamazight and Bella Coola are two of the most famously phonotactically nightmarish languages, suggesting (I don't know their actual diachronics) that they've probably undergone exteme syncope in the past. I wonder whether the lack of word stress is just a result of all the unstressed syllables having been deleted, leaving no remaining stress contour?
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I think this is similar to what Hyman argues. Languages with a defective metrical structure allow stressless words. But stress is by definition obligatory for a word and thus these languages do not have stress proper.
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Re: (Conlangs) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by Dormouse559 »

LinguoFranco wrote: 26 Nov 2021 09:11 So I read that French stresses the last syllable with a full vowel at the end of a phrase, instead of just having word final stress.
This is correct. It's easy to misinterpret French stress as word final because, when a French word is cited in isolation, it counts as a "phrase" (or "utterance" as I like to say) and gets final stress. But in normal speech, the word generally gets stress only if it comes before a natural pause.
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Post by Omzinesý »

Ahzoh wrote: 23 Nov 2021 02:16 How can I better describe how the accusative and instrumental case work in my language with respect to secundative languages, at the level of someone who is not familiar with linguistics?

So far I have it as this:
  • The accusative (ACC) case indicates the primary object of a verb, which may be the recipient of the action or an end goal ("Henry sees Sam", "Henry gave Sam a pencil", "John wrote to Mary"). It can also indicate the object of certain adpositions ("under the table").
  • The instrumental (INS) case indicates the secondary object of a verb, which may be the object or attribute given to something or the instrument or means by which the action is accomplished. ("Henry gave Sam a pencil", "She showers him with love", "They named their dog Frank").
Different verbs in languages use different syntax constructions. I think some syntax book I read in the beginning of my studies said that in secundative construction verb 'to give' works like verb 'to provide'.
"We aim to provide the local community with more green spaces."
Being a non-native user of English, I then had to check how "to provide" works in syntax :D
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Re: (Conlangs) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by Ahzoh »

Omzinesý wrote: 28 Nov 2021 11:19 Different verbs in languages use different syntax constructions. I think some syntax book I read in the beginning of my studies said that in secundative construction verb 'to give' works like verb 'to provide'.
"We aim to provide the local community with more green spaces."
Being a non-native user of English, I then had to check how "to provide" works in syntax :D
That's because "provide" and "give" are both considered "verbs of caused possession" and "take" is a "verb of caused dispossession". I remember reading an article about classifying verbs like "give" or "take" in this way. So I guess one can think of "give" as the causative of "have" and "take" as the causative of "lack"

That does make me wonder how indirect object languages handle prototypical causative, or perhaps such causatives are identical syntactically between indirect and secundative languages.

I guess there is no pithy descriptive way of describing the accusative and instrumental in a secundative language (without making examples do the heavy lifting). At least for a typical indirect language you just describe the accusative as "the receiver of the action" or "the object directly affected by the verb" and the dative as "the recipient of the object" or "the object indirectly affected by the verb" and it's generally understood by those unfamiliar with linguistics.

Secundative apparently makes no distinction between indirect and direct object but only cares for which object is most primary, although given the description that primary object is the recipient, maybe the primary is simply the endpointmost object of the action, unlike other objects which are more like stoppoints along the way (which would also explain why they're marked in the instrumental).
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Re: (Conlangs) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by Khemehekis »

Salmoneus wrote: 20 Sep 2021 14:44
Khemehekis wrote: 20 Sep 2021 01:30
Salmoneus wrote: 19 Sep 2021 13:20 No - nobody knows that a rotated 'e' indicates a schwa, and if they did they wouldn't know what a schwa was.
Nobody? Most of the English dictionaries my classmates and I used in school, including the children's dictionaries, used the schwa for /ə/... the letter ə will be recognized by a good portion of Anglophone readers.
Nobody I have ever met has ever voluntarily spent their free time reading dictionaries*, particularly young people. Those that do generally do not pay attention to the pronunciation guides - I use a dictionary about a thousand times more often than most people, and even I had to go and check just now that my dictionary did use the schwa symbol.
Well, I don't spend my free time reading dictionaries either. Most of the dictionaries I have in my house are foreign language dictionaries that I bought for the express purpose of researching the Landau Core Vocabulary. (I don't even own a monolingual English dictionary -- of the type that defines English words in English.) But we kids did have instruction on phonics and using pronunciation keys, complete with breves and macrons and slashes through silent E's, in elementary school. (One amusing incident I recall was a boy in my class taking the word "car" on the chalkboard, slashing out the A, and writing a macron over the R to show that "the A is silent and the R says its own name!") Perhaps that sort of phonic study is not common in the U.K.
[And the dictionary most people are most likely to use these days is probably dictionary.com, which doesn't use it.]
Hmmmm . . . I usually use Wiktionary if I need to look a word up, particularly if it's a contemporary word like "dro".

And if the schwa were really that obscure, they wouldn't use it on sites like this one I came across the other day: https://www.astrotheme.com/astrology/Avicii
(September 8 is my birthday, so I wanted to look up and see if the other September 8 babies were born later or earlier than I was, starting with Pink, who it turns out is a few hours older than I am.) This page says "known professionally as Avicii (pronounced ə-VEE-chee)". Note that it uses the "ad hoc" EE for the "long E" sound instead of using /i/ or even a macron, but it still swears by the schwa.
Similarly, o-umlaut will not be read as schwa, it'll be read as 'o' with a completely ornamental pair of dots above it. As witness how people pronounce the names of rock and metal musical acts. People know the dots look German, but they don't know how to pronounce them.
Well, the Blue Öyster Cult and Mötley Crue are purely ornamental . . . "oyster" and "motley" are English words, so that's to be expected. And "Häagen-Dazs" is just made op.

I'd like to refine your statement, though: O-umlaut will be read as "'o' with a completely ornamental pair of dots above it" by most English-speaking readers, except those who took German in high school. (My high school in Moraga, CA offered German.) Those readers who took German but have English as their L1 will probably read it as /ʊ/, because that's an English phoneme that their German teacher's pronunciation sounded like to them. Consider the way most American students are taught that the J in Spanish "sounds like an H".
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What else do you call someone who wears turtlenecks, long hair, a beard, and sunglasses; likes alcohol, caffeine, marijuana and inhalants; rages against social conventions; writes songs like "Vague Resonations"; wrote the poem "A Million Lock-step Lemmings" about Bushlickers; conlangs through a synaesthetic style; has a whole collection of Bob Dylan songs squirreled up on his iTunes account (I know I also have Taylor Swift and Avril Lavigne and Xymox and Bastille and Michelle Branch and Nirvana, but still); owns a copy of The Dharma Bums; chose to forgo heterosexual marriage, childbirth, and the white picket fence; and punches his skull and abdomen frequently in fits of rage (for a different sense of "beat")?
You're also not a teddy boy, a flapper or a cavalier. There are no beatniks anymore;
I'd hate to think that the subculture choices of people in 2021 are confined to such offerings as emo, e-boy or e-girl, sadboi, seapunk, neckbeard, VSCO girl, chav, hip-hopper, raver, and the like.
there probably were never any beatniks;
Sure; I've heard that the "red-and-white-striped-shirt with beret and goatee, playing the bongo drums thing" is made up and about as real as the term "lamestain". But there were real beat writers, of whom many photographs with turtlenecks and goatees exist, a few of whom are still alive today.
one defining feature of being a beatnik was refusing to claim to be a beatnik, and ideally even publically condemning beatnikism (being a beatnik requires being super-cool
Are we saying here that beatnikism is like hipsterism (i.e. the saying goes that people who call themselves hipsters aren't, and once someone gets labeled a hipster by someone else, s/he no longer is one)?
and anyone who claims to be cool isn't)
I present to you: Alpha Pups. https://www.nytimes.com/2001/08/05/maga ... -pups.html
and beatniks do not spend their time going "well actually the dictionaries I played with as a child DID use elements of the international phonetic alphabet!" on online conlanging forums.
"Played with?"

I said that as grade school kids we were instructed in dictionary use in elementary school and junior high, including use of a pronunciation key. Of course, among those of us who passed reading and spelling classes (which was most of my classmates), not all of them will retain it into adulthood, but it's hardly something like quantum physics wherefor only a sliver of the English-speaking popolation is educated in it during any portion of their life.
[and beatnikism was intimately connected to SF, including some SF that could probably equally be considered horror/fantasy]
Well, of course, the beatniks of the fifties did write a lot of speculative fiction (where would Bukowski be without Hot Water Music?), but I just can't picture a Ferlinghetti or a Gary Snyder penning a story that has wizards putting spells on elves, dwarves, and orcs, you know?
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Re: (Conlangs) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by Khemehekis »

Vlürch wrote: 20 Sep 2021 17:41 Nah, it's mostly Americans, and some of them aren't always the sharpest Americans in America either since they think stuff like colour and realise are misspellings... [:'(] But also other Anglophones, I'm sure, it's just not as obvious since obviously they're not going to complain about (or edit to "correct") those "misspellings".
Gah! Your American readership sounds . . . to put it bluntly, dumb. Could it be that a lot of your readers are . . . "neckbeards", or "basement-dwellers", or "fedoras", or whatever your term of choice is for people who eat Cheetos in their parents' basement playing World of Warcraft?
Also, at least most Finns don't have a single clue about IPA. AFAIK it's practically never used in Finnish dictionaries for any language (at least not the ones I have), but instead always use approximations, sometimes without even explaining the differences, just eg. the ER in English "her" is like Finnish ÖÖ and that's it.
Interesting. Well, you know what they say about Finnish being a perfectly phonetic language. If a book written for Americans gave an ad hoc pronunciation like "'rabaz' is pronounced RA-bahz", for instance, how would a reader be expected to know whether that first A is an /æ/ or an /ei/?
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Post by eldin raigmore »

Khemehekis wrote: 03 Dec 2021 04:55 Well, I don't spend my free time reading dictionaries either.
When I was young, I did.
I liked the encyclopedia more, but I also liked the dictionary.
(Sometimes I’d read the Interpreters’ Bible, but it was a distant third.)
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Post by Omzinesý »

I'm thinking about an Altaic-inspired lang in Mongolia or Russian Siberia. Its vowel inventory is the one below. What Cyrillic letters should be used for the vowels? /ɘ/ and /ɒ/ are probably the hard ones.

Code: Select all

i y ɨ u
e ø ɘ o
ɛ (œ) ɑ ɒ[code]
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Post by Vlürch »

Omzinesý wrote: 15 Dec 2021 15:58 I'm thinking about an Altaic-inspired lang in Mongolia or Russian Siberia. Its vowel inventory is the one below. What Cyrillic letters should be used for the vowels? /ɘ/ and /ɒ/ are probably the hard ones.

Code: Select all

i y ɨ u
e ø ɘ o
ɛ (œ) ɑ ɒ
Chuvash uses <ӑ> for /ɒ/ and <ӗ> for /ɘ/, and Uzbek uses <ў> for /o/ that (sometimes) corresponds to /ø/ in other Turkic languages (and I'd swear it's sometimes pronounced like that even in Uzbek, or at least [ɵ] or whatever, but I've practically only heard Uzbek in like a dozen songs and there definitely are also many where it's always [o] or something, so I don't exactly have scientific proof lol), so you could do something like this:

/i y ɨ u/ <и ү ы у>
/e ø ɘ o/ <э~е ө ӗ о>
/ɛ (œ) ɑ ɒ/ <ә ў а ӑ>

or

/i y ɨ u/ <и ӱ ы у>
/e ø ɘ o/ <э~е ӧ ӗ о>
/ɛ (œ) ɑ ɒ/ <ӓ ў а ӑ>

If /œ/ is an allophone of /ø/ or something, then of course just one letter for both would make sense, or if /ø/ is just more common, then using whichever letter you use for it being one you like more than the one for /œ/.🤔

But personally I'd probably do something like this, but that's mainly because if I was making a conlang with this vowel inventory, I'd make /e/ palatalise preceding consonants while making /ɛ/ not palatalise them:

/i y ɨ u/ <і ү и у>
/e ø ɘ o/ <е ө ы о>
/ɛ (œ) ɑ ɒ/ <э ў а ӑ>

Of course, there's no wrong way to do it. You could even do something like this, although it'd arguably look more like a language spoken in the Caucasus or something:

/i y ɨ u/ <и уь ы у>
/e ø ɘ o/ <э оь эъ о>
/ɛ (œ) ɑ ɒ/ <аь оь а аъ>
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Re: (Conlangs) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by Omzinesý »

Vlürch wrote: 18 Dec 2021 05:48
Omzinesý wrote: 15 Dec 2021 15:58 I'm thinking about an Altaic-inspired lang in Mongolia or Russian Siberia. Its vowel inventory is the one below. What Cyrillic letters should be used for the vowels? /ɘ/ and /ɒ/ are probably the hard ones.

Code: Select all

i y ɨ u
e ø ɘ o
ɛ (œ) ɑ ɒ
Chuvash uses <ӑ> for /ɒ/ and <ӗ> for /ɘ/, and Uzbek uses <ў> for /o/ that (sometimes) corresponds to /ø/ in other Turkic languages (and I'd swear it's sometimes pronounced like that even in Uzbek, or at least [ɵ] or whatever, but I've practically only heard Uzbek in like a dozen songs and there definitely are also many where it's always [o] or something, so I don't exactly have scientific proof lol), so you could do something like this:

/i y ɨ u/ <и ү ы у>
/e ø ɘ o/ <э~е ө ӗ о>
/ɛ (œ) ɑ ɒ/ <ә ў а ӑ>

or

/i y ɨ u/ <и ӱ ы у>
/e ø ɘ o/ <э~е ӧ ӗ о>
/ɛ (œ) ɑ ɒ/ <ӓ ў а ӑ>

If /œ/ is an allophone of /ø/ or something, then of course just one letter for both would make sense, or if /ø/ is just more common, then using whichever letter you use for it being one you like more than the one for /œ/.🤔

But personally I'd probably do something like this, but that's mainly because if I was making a conlang with this vowel inventory, I'd make /e/ palatalise preceding consonants while making /ɛ/ not palatalise them:

/i y ɨ u/ <і ү и у>
/e ø ɘ o/ <е ө ы о>
/ɛ (œ) ɑ ɒ/ <э ў а ӑ>

Of course, there's no wrong way to do it. You could even do something like this, although it'd arguably look more like a language spoken in the Caucasus or something:

/i y ɨ u/ <и уь ы у>
/e ø ɘ o/ <э оь эъ о>
/ɛ (œ) ɑ ɒ/ <аь оь а аъ>
Kiitos

I thought the diachritic ў (whatever its name is) is only used for semiviwels.
This idea is a Altaic but not Tungisic, Turkish or Mongolic language. It has a back-front and partially rounding harmony. œ does not appear in roots and thus trigger any harmonic value. It only appears in suffixes and is thus a kindof allophone of /ɒ/.
Palatalization will play a role, that's why front rounded vowels are no problem, but I'm not sure how vowels and palatalization interact.
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Post by Ahzoh »

So I have a synchronic/diachronic sound change where consonants like /ʔ w j h/ (category L) elide in various ways. Namely:
L > 0 /V(:)_V(:)
L > : / V(:)_C
L: > :L / V(:)_V(:)
V[+stress] > V:[+stress] (sometimes)
There's also vowel coalescence/contraction as a result of these elisions.

However this will produce undesirable results for my pronouns where the singulars will end up being mīm/mūm and kīm/kūm; mīs/mūs and kīs/kūs; mīk/mūk and kīk/kūk while the plurals stay mīnam/mūnam and kīnam/kūnam; mīnas/mūnas and kīnas/kūnas; mīnak/mūnak and kīnak/kūnak.

I don't like this but I don't know what to do. I can't just say the pronouns don't change this way because pronouns are said to be even more likely to adhere to a sound change than not. The self-similar consonants ones like mīm/mūm and kīk/kūk are especially undesirable
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Post by sangi39 »

Ahzoh wrote: 20 Dec 2021 17:22 So I have a synchronic/diachronic sound change where consonants like /ʔ w j h/ (category L) elide in various ways. Namely:
L > 0 /V(:)_V(:)
L > : / V(:)_C
L: > :L / V(:)_V(:)
V[+stress] > V:[+stress] (sometimes)
There's also vowel coalescence/contraction as a result of these elisions.

However this will produce undesirable results for my pronouns where the singulars will end up being mīm/mūm and kīm/kūm; mīs/mūs and kīs/kūs; mīk/mūk and kīk/kūk while the plurals stay mīnam/mūnam and kīnam/kūnam; mīnas/mūnas and kīnas/kūnas; mīnak/mūnak and kīnak/kūnak.

I don't like this but I don't know what to do. I can't just say the pronouns don't change this way because pronouns are said to be even more likely to adhere to a sound change than not. The self-similar consonants ones like mīm/mūm and kīk/kūk are especially undesirable
I suppose you could have a sort of "stressed"/"emphatic"/long form of the singular pronouns that forms through analogy with the plural forms, so you keep the short forms alongside the long, and then that gives you the short forms as a sort of handy thing for forming clitics or verbal/possessive endings later?
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Re: (Conlangs) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by qwed117 »

Ahzoh wrote: 20 Dec 2021 17:22 So I have a synchronic/diachronic sound change where consonants like /ʔ w j h/ (category L) elide in various ways. Namely:
L > 0 /V(:)_V(:)
L > : / V(:)_C
L: > :L / V(:)_V(:)
V[+stress] > V:[+stress] (sometimes)
There's also vowel coalescence/contraction as a result of these elisions.

However this will produce undesirable results for my pronouns where the singulars will end up being mīm/mūm and kīm/kūm; mīs/mūs and kīs/kūs; mīk/mūk and kīk/kūk while the plurals stay mīnam/mūnam and kīnam/kūnam; mīnas/mūnas and kīnas/kūnas; mīnak/mūnak and kīnak/kūnak.

I don't like this but I don't know what to do. I can't just say the pronouns don't change this way because pronouns are said to be even more likely to adhere to a sound change than not. The self-similar consonants ones like mīm/mūm and kīk/kūk are especially undesirable
I presume the proto-form is something like miLm, so why couldn't you just change the proto-form of the pronouns exclusively? They're the most likely to be weird anyways.
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Post by Ahzoh »

sangi39 wrote: 20 Dec 2021 22:23 I suppose you could have a sort of "stressed"/"emphatic"/long form of the singular pronouns that forms through analogy with the plural forms, so you keep the short forms alongside the long, and then that gives you the short forms as a sort of handy thing for forming clitics or verbal/possessive endings later?
This could work, as I already am supposed to have possessive suffixes, which are identical to these forms (minus the case endings)
qwed117 wrote: 21 Dec 2021 03:46 I presume the proto-form is something like miLm, so why couldn't you just change the proto-form of the pronouns exclusively? They're the most likely to be weird anyways.
The proto forms were

Code: Select all

SG   / PL
muw- / muw-nə-
miy- / miy-nə-
kuw- / kuw-nə-
kiy- / kiy-nə-
and the case endings are -m -s and -k

I can't change the proto-forms, for one I am ensuring that the pronouns follow the "N-M pronouns, paradigmatic" trait
Image Śād Warḫallun (Vrkhazhian) [ WIKI | CWS ]
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