(Conlangs) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here [2010-2020]

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

Post by Dormouse559 »

VaptuantaDoi wrote: 28 Dec 2019 23:03Does anyone know of any examples of Vulgar Latin /u/ in closed syllables other than frūctus?
Luctare "to fight" from Classical lūctor. The VL reflex of fūstis.
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Post by sangi39 »

ixals wrote: 28 Dec 2019 21:36 Is /θ/ > /ts/ possible?
Finnish had this, apparently, e.g. *meθän > metsän.
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Post by VaptuantaDoi »

Dormouse559 wrote: 29 Dec 2019 02:22
VaptuantaDoi wrote: 28 Dec 2019 23:03Does anyone know of any examples of Vulgar Latin /u/ in closed syllables other than frūctus?
Luctare "to fight" from Classical lūctor. The VL reflex of fūstis.
Thanks!

sangi39 wrote: 29 Dec 2019 02:24
ixals wrote: 28 Dec 2019 21:36 Is /θ/ > /ts/ possible?
Finnish had this, apparently, e.g. *meθän > metsän.
I found that on the Diachronica, but it looks like proto-Finnish *θ derives from earlier *ts (e.g. *meθän is from proto-Finic *meccä). There might be a good reason for having /θ/ in the middle, but it looks a bit suspicious.
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Post by Ælfwine »

Zekoslav wrote: 28 Dec 2019 17:59 Yea, Irish has had a Germanic-like initial stress (complete with reduction and loss of unstressed vowels) before, during and after the period it developed initial mutations.

All you need for initial mutations is for word-medial sound changes to apply to phrases instead of individual words. This probably means entire phrases behaving like one phonological word, as in French. In fact, French liaison, which synchronically prefixes a consonant (usually /z/ or /t/) to vowel-inital words in some grammatical contexts, is very similar to a type of Irish initial mutation.
I did not know that to be honest. Evidence of a Celtic substrate on French perhaps?
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Thats been proposed, but the timing doesnt quite match up ... Continental Celtic was pretty much gone by the time French acquired its distinctive character. (Note that Breton is not a survival, ... it was imported from Britain.) We'd have to explain that it was somehow Irish Gaelic that influenced French instead, which seems impossible.
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Just French being extra, as usual. [xD]
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Post by Vlürch »

Ser wrote: 26 Dec 2019 01:17Regarding linguistic bilabial trills, here is an interesting post from someone on the ZBB:
Xephyr wrote:I will say that I do not believe the reports of this-and-that South American language having /t̪ʙ̥/ as a phoneme. I'm not saying that as a joke, either: like "haha that is so outrageous, anadew amirite?". I am being serious: I literally do not believe it. Napoleon Chagnon in one of his books talks about an entire village making up fake and lewd-sounding names for each member of their tribe as a prank to pull on Chagnon, and sustaining that prank for months without anyone ever breaking character. Methinks the [t̪ʙ̥] business is another example of Amazonian tribal humor.
I don't know what merit there could be for this in Amazonian languages other than Pirahã where phonemic bilabial trills have been reported, but it'd plausibly explain why Daniel Everett reported hearing /ʙ/ in Pirahã only after several years had passed, about which he then said Pirahã people had hidden the sound from him out of embarrassment. Elsewhere, Everett mentions an anecdote where early on in his contact with the Pirahã, he overheard a meeting where some men where deciding what to do with him, a foreign implant, whether they'd shoo him away or kill him (he allegedly proceeded to hide their weapons away while they were talking). Surely he would've heard some /ʙ/ in there?
Interesting, but honestly I find it a bit of a stretch in any case. It's possible that the speakers of obscure languages pull pranks on linguists and generally small groups of people pull pranks on researchers, of course, and if that lewd name story is true, it really wouldn't be that weird in comparison... but I'm pretty sure the smaller the community of speakers, the more likely the language is to change, including in weird ways, and Pirahã has 250–380 speakers according to Wikipedia. It could be that the the weird affricate began as a speech impediment one person had or whatever, which others heard and liked, and BOOM! A new sound is born. Another possibility is that it always existed, but the reason Everett didn't hear it for so long wasn't that the speakers hid it from him out of embarrassment but rather because he wasn't seen as "trusted enough" yet, somewhat similar to Damin.

As for why he didn't hear it when the men were talking about what to do with him, there could be several reasons. The simplest explanation I can think of is that if it's true they hid it from him for whatever reason, they knew he could be listening. Another possibility would be that he did hear it but it didn't register, maybe because presumably anyone would be thinking "wtf am I gonna do?" if they overheard people considering murder.
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Post by Zekoslav »

Ælfwine wrote: 29 Dec 2019 19:42
Zekoslav wrote: 28 Dec 2019 17:59 Yea, Irish has had a Germanic-like initial stress (complete with reduction and loss of unstressed vowels) before, during and after the period it developed initial mutations.

All you need for initial mutations is for word-medial sound changes to apply to phrases instead of individual words. This probably means entire phrases behaving like one phonological word, as in French. In fact, French liaison, which synchronically prefixes a consonant (usually /z/ or /t/) to vowel-inital words in some grammatical contexts, is very similar to a type of Irish initial mutation.
I did not know that to be honest. Evidence of a Celtic substrate on French perhaps?
As previous posters have said, this is just a parallel development. It happened during late Old French and Middle French when most word-final consonants were lost and is much younger than Celtic consonant mutations. Besides, French has nothing like the other, more frequent types of Celtic consonant mutations.

The development of French vowels is suspiciously similar to that of Welsh ones, however, and at least the change of /u/ > /y/ has been blamed on a Celtic substrate by serious researchers. The timing in Celtic is right for it to influence Latin, but the timing in Latin itself is unrecoverable so not everyone accepts this idea: other than Gaulish, Frankish can also be blamed for the change!
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Post by Salmoneus »

The same change occurs in Rhaeto-Romance; but that family also has had Germanic influence, and quite possibly Celtic as well, early on (do we know when Celtic died out in Noricum, etc?).
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Post by Ælfwine »

Salmoneus wrote: 30 Dec 2019 19:49 The same change occurs in Rhaeto-Romance; but that family also has had Germanic influence, and quite possibly Celtic as well, early on (do we know when Celtic died out in Noricum, etc?).
Legend has it Odoacer invited those Romans from Noricum to settle down in Friulia. If true, this would be late 5th century.

(This would also explain the apparent differences between it and Venetian, such as plurals in -s amongst other things. But this is speculation.)

Edit: disregard the above, thought you asked when the Roman's died out.
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Post by Omzinesý »

VaptuantaDoi wrote: 29 Dec 2019 03:08
sangi39 wrote: 29 Dec 2019 02:24
ixals wrote: 28 Dec 2019 21:36 Is /θ/ > /ts/ possible?
Finnish had this, apparently, e.g. *meθän > metsän.
I found that on the Diachronica, but it looks like proto-Finnish *θ derives from earlier *ts (e.g. *meθän is from proto-Finic *meccä). There might be a good reason for having /θ/ in the middle, but it looks a bit suspicious.
Dialectal representation of Standard Finnish ts is a mess.
*ts => θ: happened only in Western Dialects, which still have NOM mettä GEN mettän without consonant gradation.
Eastern dialects have metathesis metsä => mehtä. Im not sure if any traditional dialect has ts of Standard language, but my understanding is that it is the original pronunciation.
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Post by Salmoneus »

Ælfwine wrote: 30 Dec 2019 22:09
Salmoneus wrote: 30 Dec 2019 19:49 The same change occurs in Rhaeto-Romance; but that family also has had Germanic influence, and quite possibly Celtic as well, early on (do we know when Celtic died out in Noricum, etc?).
Legend has it Odoacer invited those Romans from Noricum to settle down in Friulia. If true, this would be late 5th century.

(This would also explain the apparent differences between it and Venetian, such as plurals in -s amongst other things. But this is speculation.)

Edit: disregard the above, thought you asked when the Roman's died out.
No, that is relevant!

If the theory is that Northern Romance (Gallo- and Rhaeto-Romance, whatever you call that group) is the result of Celtic influence, then the fact that Friulian is RR is a problem, because I don't know if that was ever Celtic. But if Friulian is a much later migration from a known Celtic stronghold (albeit one about which we have little direct evidence), then that problem goes away.

Of course, the German hypothesis is still geographically viable. Basically we're looking at a transalpine band from Noricum up into northern Gaul, in which there would have been both a Celtic substrate and (later) a Germanic superstrate.

So does either Celtic or Germanic have /u/ > /y/ and, ideally, also fronting of /a/ (the other indicator of French+RR)? Germanic doesn't, does it?


-----

Just to throw this in as well: the lenition in western (i.e. northern) Romance has also been blamed on Celtic. It's too vague and common a change to be assigned definitively to a substrate, but it's certainly suspicious...
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Post by Ælfwine »

Salmoneus wrote: 31 Dec 2019 00:42
No, that is relevant!

If the theory is that Northern Romance (Gallo- and Rhaeto-Romance, whatever you call that group) is the result of Celtic influence, then the fact that Friulian is RR is a problem, because I don't know if that was ever Celtic. But if Friulian is a much later migration from a known Celtic stronghold (albeit one about which we have little direct evidence), then that problem goes away.
I would call it all "Gallo-Romance," since the Gauls covered territory well outside, well, Gaul. Rhaeto-Romance doesn't really work for say, Noricum (Norico-Romance perhaps?)
Of course, the German hypothesis is still geographically viable. Basically we're looking at a transalpine band from Noricum up into northern Gaul, in which there would have been both a Celtic substrate and (later) a Germanic superstrate.
Also in Pannonia, where there were Celts and Germanics (and "Illyrians").
So does either Celtic or Germanic have /u/ > /y/ and, ideally, also fronting of /a/ (the other indicator of French+RR)? Germanic doesn't, does it?
Fronting of /a/ is attested in Pannonian inscriptions. It seems to run west to east, but not as far north as northern France nor into Hispania. While /u/ > /y/ is lacking in Friulian.
Just to throw this in as well: the lenition in western (i.e. northern) Romance has also been blamed on Celtic. It's too vague and common a change to be assigned definitively to a substrate, but it's certainly suspicious...
And it seems to cover most areas in the Roman Empire that the Celts inhabited. Of course, this might be a coincidence.
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Post by Zekoslav »

If only we had more inscriptions of Gaulish (especially from a late period)... the problem with Celtic substrate theories is that they usually compare Romance with Welsh. Brittonic was supposedly very similar to Gaulish so its used as a proxy, and it does share many sound changes with Gallo-Romance in particular (however, /a/ is rounded rather than fronted as in Gallo-Romance).
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Substratum theories are now pretty much out of fashion in Romance and Celtic linguistics. The dialectal divisions within Romance do not match the linguistic divisions in pre-Roman Western Europe well, and the phenomena the substratum theories sought to explain are in most instances simply not old enough. Also, ideas such as a Semitic substratum in the British Isles were so far-fetched that the whole enterprise got a bad name.
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Post by yangfiretiger121 »

Galactic Standard's rules on tone and reduplication are below. Are they morphological or phonotactical?

Without reduplication, word may only contain vowels adjacent in tone, such as a high-tone vowel and a mid-tone vowel, or vowels sharing a tone, such as two high-tone vowels.
Reduplication only affects vowels with a high or low tone and creates the opposite tone in the reduplicated syllable, resulting in an upstep or a downstep. However, the tone change doesn’t affect stress.
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Post by Trailsend »

yangfiretiger121 wrote: 04 Jan 2020 14:59 Galactic Standard's rules on tone and reduplication are below. Are they morphological or phonotactical?

Without reduplication, word may only contain vowels adjacent in tone, such as a high-tone vowel and a mid-tone vowel, or vowels sharing a tone, such as two high-tone vowels.
Reduplication only affects vowels with a high or low tone and creates the opposite tone in the reduplicated syllable, resulting in an upstep or a downstep. However, the tone change doesn’t affect stress.
I would probably plant them in "morphophonology", since they describe an interaction between a morphological process (reduplication) and a phonological process (tone sandhi).
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Post by Salmoneus »

WeepingElf wrote: 31 Dec 2019 17:11 Substratum theories are now pretty much out of fashion in Romance and Celtic linguistics. The dialectal divisions within Romance do not match the linguistic divisions in pre-Roman Western Europe well, and the phenomena the substratum theories sought to explain are in most instances simply not old enough. Also, ideas such as a Semitic substratum in the British Isles were so far-fetched that the whole enterprise got a bad name.
I think "it's out of fashion" and "a completely unrelated crackpot theory is nonsense" are bad reasons to neglect the possibility of a Celtic substratum influence. There's nothing magical about Latin that should render it immune to ordinary linguistic processes.
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Post by Xonen »

Omzinesý wrote: 30 Dec 2019 23:25
VaptuantaDoi wrote: 29 Dec 2019 03:08
sangi39 wrote: 29 Dec 2019 02:24
ixals wrote: 28 Dec 2019 21:36 Is /θ/ > /ts/ possible?
Finnish had this, apparently, e.g. *meθän > metsän.
I found that on the Diachronica, but it looks like proto-Finnish *θ derives from earlier *ts (e.g. *meθän is from proto-Finic *meccä). There might be a good reason for having /θ/ in the middle, but it looks a bit suspicious.
Dialectal representation of Standard Finnish ts is a mess.
*ts => θ: happened only in Western Dialects, which still have NOM mettä GEN mettän without consonant gradation.
Eastern dialects have metathesis metsä => mehtä. Im not sure if any traditional dialect has ts of Standard language, but my understanding is that it is the original pronunciation.
Traditional dialect map (from here):
Spoiler:
Image
So yes, /ts/ occurs (or occurred) in the far southeastern dialects.

The original pronunciation is a long affricate, represented in UPA by cc; phonetically it would be somewhere in the neighborhood of [ts:] or [tʃ:] (the latter of which still occurs in Karelian). In any case, there's no evidence, as far as I'm aware, for the opposite change from /θ:/ to /ts/ - except in the sense that the /θ:/ pronunciation has died out, and may have been partially replaced by /ts/, due to influence from the standard.
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Post by Nloki »

I recently came up with a conlanging idea I don't really know how to continue developing. Basically, either nouns and verbs have an unaltered form, and undertake reduction into a contracted form when inflected (though it has already other uses, not just any sort of inflections).
In verbs, this may result into a perfective vs imperfective dual root system appliable to almost every way.

There is a big problem though. The language's phonoaesthetics look like the eroded result of a whole loot of vowel loss, consonant gradation, metathesis, stress and vowel alterations, etc. Which results on the conlang's phonotactics to look halfway between Georgian and Biblaridion's Edun (https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=y9K1gegu-vg). Here's an example on two words which had a common incorporated element in the proto-language:
Kethjaanu (lit. "High-place" (mountains, highlands)) and kethaana (lit. "person of the heights" (highlander)).
Then dental continuants turned into alveolar sibilants before palatals and remained the same everywhere else; Ksaanu, kthaana.
Sibilants metathesized, and later became postalveolars when preceding velar stops;
Shkanu, kthana.
And finally, vowel loss in unstressed syllables;
Shkan, kthan.

By the way the second word is the endonym for the speakers of this language, which I'm naming Ketanian for now. And since their endonym and their word for "mountain" are etymologically related, it's logical for me to think that my fictional speakers will inhabit highlands or mountains.

Returning to the original topic, the most reliable explanation to why do most inflected words in the language take a contracted root might be stress; a strict stress patern may cause stress in a word to shift when an affix is added, perhaps in reduplication as well (although that wouldn't mean much for non-monosyllabic words), so that, in later stages of the evolution towards the modern lang, vowel loss in unestressed syllables might cause the vowel in the root to disappear. For example:

Shkan "mountain.ABS, shkŋt/shkŋut (I don't know which one is easier for me to pronounce, since the first one might involve a syllabic velar nasal and the second one contains its preglottalized voiceless equivalent) "mountain.ERG".

As for verbs, roots like dak "to hit" get reduced to -thk-, which is already so difficult to pronounce that it might metathesize into kth- if there's an absence of a preffix... It's really confusing, I don't know what's easier to pronounce for me, so discerning among different options resulted from evolution is a nightmare. And I don't even know if any natural language features an even slightly similar system, so that I can't figure out whether these features can pass as naturalistic or not. Phonotactics and the phonoasthetic look of the mothern language become a real problem regarding the fact that I even want postpositions to get incorporated to inflected nouns, so what do you think?
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