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

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

Post by Frogalicious »

Khemehekis wrote: 24 May 2020 07:15
Frogalicious wrote: 24 May 2020 07:10 What is a good lexical source for an obviative marker? Yønsen has a proximate/obviate system but I don't know how to derive it in the protolang.
How about a word for "other"?
That seems logical, thanks!
Khemehekis wrote: 24 May 2020 07:15 Welcome to the CBB, by the way!
Thanks! I've been on her for a few years with a different account, but ended up loosing both the password and the email it was attached to lol
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You're welcome!
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Frogalicious wrote: 24 May 2020 07:10 What is a good lexical source for an obviative marker? Yønsen has a proximate/obviate system but I don't know how to derive it in the protolang.
I would assume msot often a demonstrative, like 'that' or 'yon'. An interesting route would be from a possessive, as possession is often associated with deixis and definiteness ("so my man says" can = "so the man I mentioned says"; c.f. the use of "your" in Irish English, which I don't really understand the details of, but has something to do with deixis and definiteness.
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Post by CarsonDaConlanger »

How likely is a verbal system with just perfective and imperfective where some verbal roots are inherently perfective and need an affix to make them imperfective? (I know this existed in PIE but is it attested elsewhere?) Assuming the default unmarked aspect is imperfective. Likewise, would a system of suppletion along aspect be likely to arise between synonymous verbs where one is imperfective and another is perfective by root?

Ended up completely changing my verbal system in the space of an hour. [xP] Anyways, I now have a different question:

How likely is it for prefixed subject/object clitics to not interact with vowel harmony
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Post by Mándinrùh »

CarsonDaConlanger wrote: 26 May 2020 01:54 How likely is it for prefixed subject/object clitics to not interact with vowel harmony
Not very, I think, but certainly it's not unheard of to have affixes that ignore harmony. Hungarian has the suffix -kor, which ignores vowel harmony, thus:
  • egykor "at one"
  • kettőkor "at two"
  • háromkor "at three"
  • ötkor "at five"
  • hatkor "at six"
Other suffixes in Hungarian occur in up to five different forms, like the accusative case marker (egyet, kettőt, hármat, ötöt, hatot).
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Post by CarsonDaConlanger »

Mándinrùh wrote: 26 May 2020 04:48
CarsonDaConlanger wrote: 26 May 2020 01:54 How likely is it for prefixed subject/object clitics to not interact with vowel harmony
Not very, I think, but certainly it's not unheard of to have affixes that ignore harmony. Hungarian has the suffix -kor, which ignores vowel harmony, thus:
  • egykor "at one"
  • kettőkor "at two"
  • háromkor "at three"
  • ötkor "at five"
  • hatkor "at six"
Other suffixes in Hungarian occur in up to five different forms, like the accusative case marker (egyet, kettőt, hármat, ötöt, hatot).
Cool, honestly I wanted to have subject prefixes but didn't want them to change all of the vowels in the rest of the word.
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Post by DesEsseintes »

CarsonDaConlanger wrote: 26 May 2020 01:54How likely is it for prefixed subject/object clitics to not interact with vowel harmony
The scope of vowel harmony is extremely language specific. Harmony can be either progressive or regressive (or both) and may apply to some affixes but not to others. It is not necessary for you to “demote” your subject prefixes to clitics in order for them to ignore vowel harmony.
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Post by CarsonDaConlanger »

At this point I'm already attached to them being clitics (they get used similarly in other places as part of the increasing head marking-ness of the language as it evolves.)
DesEsseintes wrote: 26 May 2020 05:13 The scope of vowel harmony is extremely language specific. Harmony can be either progressive or regressive (or both) and may apply to some affixes but not to others. It is not necessary for you to “demote” your subject prefixes to clitics in order for them to ignore vowel harmony.
Are there any cross-linguistic trends that influence this? Like whether a morpheme becomes grammaticallized before or after the introduction of harmony, or something else?
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Post by Salmoneus »

It's certainly possible for a morpheme to be aggregated to a word afte a process has ceased to be fully productive, and thus create exceptions, yes. I'm sure you could probably find examples in English, for example, of derived words that lack trisyllabic laxing because the derivation happened too late (although TL is still partially active in English, in perceived classical loanwords).


I would suspect that stress and timing patterns may also be a factor. If you have a stressed prefix, or a syllable-timed word with relatively even stress, for example, it's presumably much more likely that that prefix will be able to mutate the rest of the word; whereas if you have a strongly stress-timed language in which unstressed syllables are prone to massive reduction, and your prefix is unstressed, it's harder to see it altering the rest of the word.

[but, fun idea: prefixes trigger vowel harmony and THEN get reduced to schwa as the language becomes more stress-timed. The result? Seemingly unconditioned ablaut. /ke-takok/ yields /k@t{k2k/, while /ku-takok/ yields /k@tAtkok/...]
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Post by CarsonDaConlanger »

Thanks!
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Post by Sequor »

Salmoneus wrote: 24 May 2020 13:40
Frogalicious wrote: 24 May 2020 07:10What is a good lexical source for an obviative marker? Yønsen has a proximate/obviate system but I don't know how to derive it in the protolang.
I would assume msot often a demonstrative, like 'that' or 'yon'. An interesting route would be from a possessive, as possession is often associated with deixis and definiteness ("so my man says" can = "so the man I mentioned says"; c.f. the use of "your" in Irish English, which I don't really understand the details of, but has something to do with deixis and definiteness.
Would you say some European languages developed such a distinction in demonstratives? Especially in written language. I'm thinking of the use of Latin hic 'this' for 'the one I just mentioned' versus is or ille for the one I mentioned before (or that I'll mention soon). Written French uses ceci and celà much in the same way. English has basically the same thing but not from demonstratives: "the former" and "the latter".
Mándinrùh wrote: 26 May 2020 04:48
CarsonDaConlanger wrote: 26 May 2020 01:54 How likely is it for prefixed subject/object clitics to not interact with vowel harmony
Not very, I think, but certainly it's not unheard of to have affixes that ignore harmony.
Hilariously, I know of one example of the opposite, where clitic pronouns are the only ones that have vowel harmony. In Standard Arabic, inflectional affixes (like na-, -na, -u, -tu, -tum, -tunna, -aani) and derivational affixes (like mu-, mi-, ta-, -iiya) do not undergo vowel harmony, but a few of the clitic object/possessive pronouns do. -hu '3SG.MASC', -humaa '3DU', -hum '3PL.MASC' and -hunna '3PL.FEM' become -hi, -himaa, -him and -hinna if they attach to a word ending in /i/, /i:/ or /j/, e.g.:

katabta=hum ("wrote.2SG.MASC=3PL.MASC")
'You (man) wrote them.'

katabti=him ("wrote.2SG.FEM=3PL.MASC")
'You (woman) wrote them.'

li=kitaabai=hi ("for=books.DU.GEN=3SG.MASC")
'for his two books'

Note that the phonologically similar clitic pronouns -kumaa '2DU', -kum '2PL.MASC' and -kunna '2PL.FEM' do not have this vowel harmony.
Salmoneus wrote: 26 May 2020 13:49It's certainly possible for a morpheme to be aggregated to a word afte a process has ceased to be fully productive, and thus create exceptions, yes. I'm sure you could probably find examples in English, for example, of derived words that lack trisyllabic laxing because the derivation happened too late (although TL is still partially active in English, in perceived classical loanwords).
I wonder whether some of such words have actually had the tense ("long") vowel restored in recent times due to the influence of a related word. "Diplomacy" seems to retain /oʊ/ (SSBE /əʊ/) thanks to "diploma", and while "prosody" usually has /ɑ/ (SSBE /ɒ/), also varyingly with /s/ or /z/, it is sometimes pronounced with /oʊ/ probably due to (recent?) contamination of "prose".

As an opposite example, older dictionaries seem to generally list "amenities" with /i/ (SSBE /i:/), but in more recent ones, and nearly 100% of the time in my personal experience, this word has /ɛ/. Of course, it helps it's a pretty uncommon word you don't get to hear much, so the larger pattern can be applied on it.
Last edited by Sequor on 26 May 2020 17:49, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by CarsonDaConlanger »

Ser wrote: 26 May 2020 17:15
Hilariously, I know of one example of the opposite, where clitic pronouns are the only ones that have vowel harmony. In Standard Arabic, inflectional affixes (like na-, -na, -u, -tu, -tum, -tunna, -aani) and derivational affixes (like mu-, mi-, ta-, -iiya) do not undergo vowel harmony, but a few of the clitic object/possessive pronouns do. -hu '3SG.MASC', -humaa '3DU', -hum '3PL.MASC' and -hunna '3PL.FEM' become -hi, -himaa, -him and -hinna if they attach to a word ending in /i/, /i:/ or /j/, e.g.:

katabta=hum ("wrote.2SG.MASC=3PL.MASC")
'You (man) wrote them.'

katabti=him ("wrote.2SG.FEM=3PL.MASC")
'You (woman) wrote them.'

li=kitaabai=hi ("for=books.GEN=3SG.MASC")
'for his two books'

Note that the phonologically similar clitic pronouns -kumaa '2DU', -kum '2PL.MASC' and -kunna '2PL.FEM' do not have this vowel harmony.
I think I've settled on a solution I like:
Yönsen vowels harmonize to the stressed vowel, meaning that harmony can be both progressive and regressive. Clitics are never stressed, so they always harmonize to whatever pattern the stem was already in.

As for the definite article (I cut out the obviation because it didn't really mesh all that well with the other things in the lang), it's derived from the 2nd person possessive pronoun.
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Re: (Conlangs) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by Salmoneus »

Ser wrote: 26 May 2020 17:15
Salmoneus wrote: 24 May 2020 13:40
Frogalicious wrote: 24 May 2020 07:10What is a good lexical source for an obviative marker? Yønsen has a proximate/obviate system but I don't know how to derive it in the protolang.
I would assume msot often a demonstrative, like 'that' or 'yon'. An interesting route would be from a possessive, as possession is often associated with deixis and definiteness ("so my man says" can = "so the man I mentioned says"; c.f. the use of "your" in Irish English, which I don't really understand the details of, but has something to do with deixis and definiteness.
Would you say some European languages developed such a distinction in demonstratives? Especially in written language. I'm thinking of the use of Latin hic 'this' for 'the one I just mentioned' versus is or ille for the one I mentioned before (or that I'll mention soon). Written French uses ceci and celà much in the same way.
It's extremely common - probably in the majority of languages? - for spatial deictic terms (this and that) to be extended for use in contrastive deixis in this way.
English has basically the same thing but not from demonstratives: "the former" and "the latter".
I don't follow you here. English uses plain 'this' and 'that' for contrastive deixis usually (although we can also use, for instance, 'my' and 'your', and extended forms like 'that other'). 'Former' and 'latter' are a bit different - they're a form of textual rather than contrastive deixis (that is: used contrastively, 'this' is in some way conceptually primary and 'that' is secondary, but are not necessarily introduced in that order ("I admit that that idea was terrible, but listen to this one!"), whereas 'former' and 'latter' are defined strictly by order in the text). They're also very restricted in use, both in register and in scope (they're overwhelmingly used in single references immediately after the joint introduction, and while they can be used more widely than that (eg introducing contrasting topics), they are very rarely used repeatedly throughout a passage with constant reference, as 'this' and 'that' can be). (although admittedly the contrastive use of 'this' and 'that' isn't totally natural either, at least in modern speech, and often has to be reinforced in some way with extensions or substitutions if it continues too long).
Salmoneus wrote: 26 May 2020 13:49It's certainly possible for a morpheme to be aggregated to a word afte a process has ceased to be fully productive, and thus create exceptions, yes. I'm sure you could probably find examples in English, for example, of derived words that lack trisyllabic laxing because the derivation happened too late (although TL is still partially active in English, in perceived classical loanwords).
I wonder whether some of such words have actually had the tense ("long") vowel restored in recent times due to the influence of a related word. "Diplomacy" seems to retain /oʊ/ (SSBE /əʊ/) thanks to "diploma", and while "prosody" usually has /ɑ/ (SSBE /ɒ/), also varyingly with /s/ or /z/, it is sometimes pronounced with /oʊ/ probably due to (recent?) contamination of "prose".
I've never hear the latter pronounciation of 'prosody', and it had never occured to me to link 'diploma' and 'diplomacy', as there's no semantic connexion; but yes, certainly analogical restoration of short (from trisyllabic and precluster laxing) and long (from open syllable lengthening) vowels was widespread, and is still ongoing.

As an opposite example, older dictionaries seem to generally list "amenities" with /i/ (SSBE /i:/), but in more recent ones, and nearly 100% of the time in my personal experience, this word has /ɛ/. Of course, it helps it's a pretty uncommon word you don't get to hear much, so the larger pattern can be applied on it.
This is a shibboleth - I've never heard this word with /E/ in the UK, except as a mockery of Americans and Americophiles (Ameriphiles? really should be a proper word for that...). [c.f. "defence" with /i:/]

[Here's a comedic example of the UK pronunciation]
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Post by Sequor »

Salmoneus wrote: 28 May 2020 23:48(although admittedly the contrastive use of 'this' and 'that' isn't totally natural either, at least in modern speech, and often has to be reinforced in some way with extensions or substitutions if it continues too long).
Yes, and this is precisely what made me doubt about "this" vs. "that" not being that common. Although your example there ("I admit that that idea...") sounds natural to me, and so does its translation into Spanish, I feel contrastive "this" vs. "that" pretty unnatural overall. I definitely don't see it in English or Spanish as often as I see it in formal written French or ancient Latin. In formal written English, I'm more likely to encounter "the former" and "the latter" playing a similar role some of the time instead (and I also notice the restrictions you mention).
This is a shibboleth - I've never heard this word with /E/ in the UK, except as a mockery of Americans and Americophiles (Ameriphiles? really should be a proper word for that...). [c.f. "defence" with /i:/]
I find it interesting that "amenities" does seem to be subject to diatopic variation... I can't deny I wish there were better, easy-to-consult resources on English pronunciation.

For what it's worth, I consulted Wells's Longman Pronunciation Dictionary to see what it had, and it lists both /iː/ and /ɛ/ for both the UK and the US. He also marks /iː/ in "defence" and many other de- words as educated non-RP (a mark he usually uses for prestigious northern English pronunciation, like "one" /wɒn/ and "bath" /bæθ/, but maybe in this case maybe it just means an innovation of SSBE?). He lists "prosody" with /ɒs/, with the minor variant /ɒz/ and the even more minor variant /əʊz/. This is not to look down on it, as otherwise that dictionary contains some interesting commentary not found anywhere else in English lexicography. On the same page column that "amenity" is found, there's also the following (my quoting is accurate except for original e -> ɛ):

amen ˌɑː ˈmɛn ˌeɪ- —Although ˌɑː is the usual form among Protestants in Britain, ˌeɪ- is preferred by Roman Catholics and also in non-religious contexts, as in ˌAmen ˈCorner. In AmE, ˌeɪ- predominates in speech, but ˌɑː- is preferred in singing. ~s z

amentcatkinˈæm ənt ˈeɪm- ~s z
amentmentally deficient personˈeɪ mɛnt -mənt; æ ˈmɛnt ~s s

Amherst (i) ˈæm əst || -ərst , (ii) -hɜːst || -hɜ˞ːst(i) is the traditional form in both BrE and AmE, and hence appropriate for Baron A~, the 18th century general, and for the place in MA.

(Blue stands for the main data, ◄ for an allowed stress shift.)

I sometimes wonder to what extent all this pronunciation variation exists due to the depth of the English writing system... In Spanish, more often than not, people agree that whatever would be the spelling pronunciation is the correct pronunciation...
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Post by Parlox »

Hey it's been a while since I've been on.. And I have a quick question.

So a conlang I've been working on has no adverbs or adjectives, instead it uses nouns for both of these categories. My question is: What might be a good way to handle pro-adverbs like where/how/therefore/etc?

I was thinking of just using nouns like typical, but "the reason you did it?" or "He did it in a unknown location." for "Why did you do it?" and "He did it somewhere." just doesn't sound right to me.
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Post by Omzinesý »

Parlox wrote: 31 May 2020 18:55 Hey it's been a while since I've been on.. And I have a quick question.

So a conlang I've been working on has no adverbs or adjectives, instead it uses nouns for both of these categories. My question is: What might be a good way to handle pro-adverbs like where/how/therefore/etc?

I was thinking of just using nouns like typical, but "the reason you did it?" or "He did it in a unknown location." for "Why did you do it?" and "He did it somewhere." just doesn't sound right to me.
I don't think there are any languages without any adverbs.
You can easily replace productive adverbs like 'easily', 'happily' etc. but the grammatical ones are tricky.

If they are affixes or clitics, can you say there are no adverbs?
Some languages have question verbs. 'Some reason' words grammaticalize very easily to adverbs anyways.
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Post by Parlox »

Omzinesý wrote: 31 May 2020 20:41 I don't think there are any languages without any adverbs.
You can easily replace productive adverbs like 'easily', 'happily' etc. but the grammatical ones are tricky.

If they are affixes or clitics, can you say there are no adverbs?
Some languages have question verbs. 'Some reason' words grammaticalize very easily to adverbs anyways.
I've just been using nouns with modifying particles and agreement with the "adverbs" verb to express adverbial stuff . Like the noun "speed" with an intensifier to indicate something that is quick, stuff like that. Here's an example:

Rös at dhän-syl pys-syl.
[3RD.MASC.ABS.SING INTENS speed-PAST.ACT cry-PAST.ACT]
He cried quickly. (Lit. He "very" speed cried.)

I thought this was relatively intuitive, if a bit cumbersome. But I can't find any examples of languages without adverbs. I know that Gondolan's (the conlang) descendants develop adverbs and adjectives by amalgamating these noun phrases.

So I guess my question here is (because I figured out how to represent pro-adverbs), should I just remove this system and use adverbs (even if with limitation)?


ps. I didn't know there were no languages without adverbs when I began making this language, I had jsut decided that I didn't want adjectives and kind of did the same with adverbs.
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Post by yangfiretiger121 »

As you may know, I have a language that's, essentially, a fantasy version of Irish. Over the past few days, I've adapted it to be my Runepath setting's Elvish language through massive simplification, such as elimination of diphthongs. Currently, the vowel system is /ɑ e ɛ i ɪ ɔ œ ʊ ʏ/, all of which nasalize in conjunction with syllable final [mˠ, mʲ, ŋ, ɲ] and reduce to [ə] when outside the first syllable. Is either /œ, ʏ → ø, y/ without /ɔ, ʊ → o, u/ or the first syllable to retaining its full vowel after the loss of stress weird? The latter will happen anyways, while I'm unsure about the former.

Example word
Caensailiu: /ˈkɛŋ.ʂə.ʎʊ → ˈkɛ̃.ʂə.ʎʊ → kɛ̃.ʂə.ʎə/
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Parlox wrote: 31 May 2020 18:55 Hey it's been a while since I've been on.. And I have a quick question.

So a conlang I've been working on has no adverbs or adjectives, instead it uses nouns for both of these categories. My question is: What might be a good way to handle pro-adverbs like where/how/therefore/etc?

I was thinking of just using nouns like typical, but "the reason you did it?" or "He did it in a unknown location." for "Why did you do it?" and "He did it somewhere." just doesn't sound right to me.
In my main conlang, "Why (did you do it)?" would be Vulpis?, formed by attaching the open-ended question particle pis to the 2nd person past tense verb vul "you saw". Thus it is an idiom, similar to asking "what did you see?" (The literal "what did you see?" translation would be similar but the tense marker would be on the outside.)

This setup might seem awfully strange, but it works for me, and I think its more naturalistic to build the word for "why?" from an atomic root rather than using a noun that by itself already means "reason" and is unlikely to be atomic unless the language has many such nouns with complex meanings. Of course, you dont need to use the word for "to see", ... I just picked it because it is a single-consonant root in this language.

Arguably pis could be translated as "unknown", and therefore my translation for the second construction would be exactly identical to the one you're not interested in: Fulpis?, which could be translated as "He was in what"? This is formed from f- "to be inside", just as the previous sentence was formed from v- "to see".

Yes, its just one letter off from the previous translation, but this language has initial stress, so that one change is acoustically prominent. Again, that has no bearing on my advice .... you may want to use roots more than a single consonant long if you end up doing anything like what Im doing .... and I suspect your language is quite different grammatically from mine and would not be able to precisely use the same type of structure that Im using anyway.
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Post by Parlox »

Pabappa wrote: 31 May 2020 21:19 In my main conlang, "Why (did you do it)?" would be Vulpis?, formed by attaching the open-ended question particle pis to the 2nd person past tense verb vul "you saw". Thus it is an idiom, similar to asking "what did you see?" (The literal "what did you see?" translation would be similar but the tense marker would be on the outside.)

This setup might seem awfully strange, but it works for me, and I think its more naturalistic to build the word for "why?" from an atomic root rather than using a noun that by itself already means "reason" and is unlikely to be atomic unless the language has many such nouns with complex meanings. Of course, you dont need to use the word for "to see", ... I just picked it because it is a single-consonant root in this language.

Arguably pis could be translated as "unknown", and therefore my translation for the second construction would be exactly identical to the one you're not interested in: Fulpis?, which could be translated as "He was in what"? This is formed from f- "to be inside", just as the previous sentence was formed from v- "to see".

Yes, its just one letter off from the previous translation, but this language has initial stress, so that one change is acoustically prominent. Again, that has no bearing on my advice .... you may want to use roots more than a single consonant long if you end up doing anything like what Im doing .... and I suspect your language is quite different grammatically from mine and would not be able to precisely use the same type of structure that Im using anyway.
Hey thanks for the reply!

I've decided that Gondolan will have a (very) small series of adverbs derived from nouns, mostly pro-adverbs and some things representing qualities (like fast, smart, etc). Otherwise nouns will be co-opted to express information typically expressed by pure adverbs.
:con: Gândölansch (Gondolan)Feongkrwe (Feongrkean)Tamhanddön (Tamanthon)Θανηλοξαμαψⱶ (Thanelotic)Yônjcerth (Yaponese)Ba̧supan (Basupan)Mùthoķán (Mothaucian) :con:
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