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

[Keenir]

I'm researching Vulcan, partially as inspiration and partially to make sure I don't unintentionally rip off another conlang. It's probably the only media based conlang I like aesthetically.


I noticed that Vulcan uses lots of apostrophes in its words, and I am trying to figure out what they are for? Are they glottal stops or ejectives? Or just there to make it look more alien?

If Vulcan is anything like Narn, with names like G'kar, I assume they are either glottal stops or what I call breaths/pauses. [? . ]

[LinguistCat]

I want to round ɑ in this inventory personally...

Yeah that's a fair point. More even.

[Ælfwine]

I want to round ɑ in this inventory personally...

Yeah that's a fair point. More even.

That and you could also analyze the 3 sets of vowels, front, probably front central and then back on a sliding scale of rounded-ness, with the front vowels being unrounded, front central being slightly rounded, and back being completely rounded.

[Quetzalcoatl]

Hey people, quick question:

How did you create intonation patterns for your conlang? The thing is... I even don't know how intonation works in my native language although I have a Master degree in linguistics... Maybe I was sick during the lecture when this was explained... However, I don't want to just "transfer" my native intonation to my conlang, I want my conlang to have a unique intonation (and no, it is not a tonal language, but I could imagine adding a pitch accent or something like that...)

[Visions1]

In other words, like the classic "I did not kill her" vs. "I did not kill her" vs. "I did not kill her" vs. "I did not kill her" vs. "I did not kill her"?

[Creyeditor]

Hey people, quick question:

How did you create intonation patterns for your conlang? The thing is... I even don't know how intonation works in my native language although I have a Master degree in linguistics... Maybe I was sick during the lecture when this was explained... However, I don't want to just "transfer" my native intonation to my conlang, I want my conlang to have a unique intonation (and no, it is not a tonal language, but I could imagine adding a pitch accent or something like that...)

I always thought that the ToBI system was a pretty good starting point. It helps to understand English intonation and to start asking questions about what other languages do with intonation, e.g. prosodic focus etc.

[Visions1]

If there's anything I'd say, it'd be to listen to recordings of other languages being spoken, with a translation at the ready. Hearing how something sounds would be my inspiration.

As well, different languages do different things with intonation. English uses it for focus; Japanese hardly uses it; Yuchi goes down for declaring something, goes up for questions, and is level for simple statements; and so on.

[Creyeditor]

Japanese hardly uses it;

Not true! The paper on Japanese (and English) intonation by Janet Pierrehumbert and Mary Beckmann single-handedly kickstarted the autosegmental analysis of intonation. Intonation is not just question marking by pitch going up, it's also effects on pitch that indicate several levels of prosodic phrase boundaries.

[lsd]

3SdeductiveLanguage(1Sense=1Sign=1Sound) is selfsegregative...
the advantage is there is no constraint on prosody...

[Visions1]

Japanese hardly uses it;

Not true! The paper on Japanese (and English) intonation by Janet Pierrehumbert and Mary Beckmann single-handedly kickstarted the autosegmental analysis of intonation. Intonation is not just question marking by pitch going up, it's also effects on pitch that indicate several levels of prosodic phrase boundaries.

I'm not referring to pitch accent. I'm referring to less phonetic forms of pitch in speech (I'm thinking English here). And from that perspective... well, this is what I was told by my relatives who speak Japanese.

[Creyeditor]

I was not talking about word-level pitch accent either.

[Visions1]

Ah ok. I misunderstood.
Still, this is what they told me. They said that in order to speak Japanese (at least their dialect), you have to speak flatly. Though what you're saying makes sense.

[Creyeditor]

They are probably right in some way. Btw, speaking flatly is also a kind of prosody or intonation. Take for example pitch compression. This can mean that the initial word-level pitch accent is 'normal' but all following word-level pitch accents are compressed, i.e. the pitch doesn't go up that much or - in extreme cases - doesn't go up at all. My native variety of German does something similar and it is usually described as 'flat' compared to other varieties.

[Visions1]

I thought Plattdeutsch simply meant dialectal German? But I digress.

What you're saying then kind of goes back to what I said.

[Creyeditor]

I got the joke. Btw, interestingly, the varieties if German influenced by Plattdeutsch proper are also the varieties of German with more prosodic flattening processes.

[Knox Adjacent]

Relatedly, anybody have any favorite books at all to do with tone ... besides "Tone" by Moira Yip?

[Visions1]

Well, this isn't my area, but there's this interesting guide to describing tonal languages on the ground.
I think some good will come from there, especially since if one approaches their "conlang in my head" (headlang?) like a linguist describing an undiscovered tongue, this may come in handy.

https://linguistics.berkeley.edu/phonla ... nguage.pdf

[Creyeditor]

Relatedly, anybody have any favorite books at all to do with tone ... besides "Tone" by Moira Yip?

I found Keith Snider's Tone Analysis for Field Linguists has a less heavy focus on theory, compared to Yip. It stil has a heavy focus on African tone languages though. Oh, and Larry Hyman's work of course, as mentioned by Visions.

[Knox Adjacent]

We're in the ballpark and this helps, thanks guys.

"It is hard to imagine not writing tone in an Iau orthography."

This sends me.

[Prime]

Please I need some help with something.

I intend making an Arabic script for my conlang, Zomítla but I'm stuck on the vowels. Please what are the most plausible ways to write the vowels /a~ɑ/, /e~ɛ/, /i/, /o/ and /u/ in the Arabic script?
Thanks.

Edit: Seems like I forgot to ask about diphthongs as well!
/au/, /ai/, /eu/ and /oi/.