Yay or Nay?

[zyma]

Can these sound changes realistically happen?

pl bl ml fl vl > t̼ d̼ n̼ ɬ̼ l̼~ɮ̼

You're probably already familiar with this note on the Wikipedia page for linguolabial consonants. Based on that, the relationship between [j] & [i], and the historical shift from [pl bl fl] > [pj bj fj] in (for example) Italian, maybe you could have something like [plV] > [pjV] > [pijV] > [t̼ijV] > [t̼V]?

A few days later but palatalized bilabials are crosslinguistically unstable (i have a paper about it somewhere in here if anyone wants it) and there's sound changes in a few different languages that would corroborate the pl > pj > t̼ pathway, like greek pj > pt (e.g. klepto < klep-ye-ti) and the portuguese pl > t͡ʃ > ʃ.

So yeah those changes could happen probably.

Something else that comes to mind is the shift from Proto-Northwest Caucasian *pʲ (etc.) to Ubykh /tʷ/ (etc.) and Proto-Circassian *t (etc.), according to this.

(And I'd appreciate it if you could share the paper you mentioned, loglorn!)

[loglorn]

You're probably already familiar with this note on the Wikipedia page for linguolabial consonants. Based on that, the relationship between [j] & [i], and the historical shift from [pl bl fl] > [pj bj fj] in (for example) Italian, maybe you could have something like [plV] > [pjV] > [pijV] > [t̼ijV] > [t̼V]?

A few days later but palatalized bilabials are crosslinguistically unstable (i have a paper about it somewhere in here if anyone wants it) and there's sound changes in a few different languages that would corroborate the pl > pj > t̼ pathway, like greek pj > pt (e.g. klepto < klep-ye-ti) and the portuguese pl > t͡ʃ > ʃ.

So yeah those changes could happen probably.

Something else that comes to mind is the shift from Proto-Northwest Caucasian *pʲ (etc.) to Ubykh /tʷ/ (etc.) and Proto-Circassian *t (etc.), according to this.

(And I'd appreciate it if you could share the paper you mentioned, loglorn!)

Here is the paper i was talking about. This one one of those links that immediately downloads a pdf though, just so you know.

[zyma]

Here is the paper i was talking about. This one one of those links that immediately downloads a pdf though, just so you know.

Thank you, both for the link itself and the heads-up about the automatic download.

[Ælfwine]

Yay or Nay: I should change all instances of non initial /k/ to /x/ in my reconstruction of Crimean Gothic.

Supposedly southern Crimean Tatar dialects, which my language is in contact with, change /k/ to /X/, which might explain oddities like CGo mycha (mēkeis) and ich.

However, as a sound change this seems rather strange in isolation to change /k/ to /x/ but not /p/ to /f/ (a la High German). (The situation with dental fricatives is unclear, one could imagine a /t/ > /þ/ in thurn, or /ts/ in goltz or rintsch 〔<*remdaz〕). But the language also has /d/ > /t/ (*tag*)and maybe /b/ > /p/ (evidenced only in *plut*). So I am wondering if something analogous to the HGCS also could happen here with /g/ > /k/ > /x/ chain shift.

Or this change might be a result of the informant's distortion and never actually took place in CGo. That's not to say I cannot imagine it not happening at all.

[loglorn]

I say do it. /g/ is less stable than the other voiced plosives so doing only g > k > x and none of the other PoA's feels entirely justified to me.

But also i'm biased, i don't like the vibes of the HGCS and only did k>x in my germlang lol.

[DesEsseintes]

Spoken Thai has widespread k → x without corresponding lenition of t p. This is easily justified:
- Thai has /f/ but no /x/ so the lenition of /k/ to [x] does not lead to a merger whereas lenition of p would (or a near-merger if it produced ɸ)
- /θ/ is considered a relatively unstable phoneme

[Ælfwine]

I say do it. /g/ is less stable than the other voiced plosives so doing only g > k > x and none of the other PoA's feels entirely justified to me.

But also i'm biased, i don't like the vibes of the HGCS and only did k>x in my germlang lol.

Haha, how could you not love -p- > -ff-

Spoken Thai has widespread k → x without corresponding lenition of t p. This is easily justified:
- Thai has /f/ but no /x/ so the lenition of /k/ to [x] does not lead to a merger whereas lenition of p would (or a near-merger if it produced ɸ)
- /θ/ is considered a relatively unstable phoneme

I suppose this language already has /f/ and /θ/, but no velar/glottal fricative sound -- in fact evidence points to an early loss of /h/ (ano, ieltsch from the corpus itself) leaving a hole here. So perhaps /k/ > /x/ would make sense here, if you imagine a series /f θ x/ for fricatives? Does this seem logical to anyone?

The only "problem" is now I lack /k/ (except perhaps in clusters and initially). /g/ did not exist in Proto-Germanic so no easy devoicing route here. Of course this does not necessarily have to be a problem to be solved.

[Creyeditor]

The only "problem" is now I lack /k/ (except perhaps in clusters and initially). /g/ did not exist in Proto-Germanic so no easy devoicing route here. Of course this does not necessarily have to be a problem to be solved.

Simplify some medial clusters then

[Arayaz]

The only "problem" is now I lack /k/ (except perhaps in clusters and initially). /g/ did not exist in Proto-Germanic so no easy devoicing route here. Of course this does not necessarily have to be a problem to be solved.

Perhaps you could do Italian-style gemination (C¹C² > C²C²). Then you'd keep /k/ (*aka > /axa/, *atka > /akːa/), but only as a geminate, which is fun in and of itself.

[Omzinesý]

In my auxlang Afa-mutu

the basic meaning of la is something like 'to feel (something positive)'.
Mi la. Means abaut 'I am happy.'

It can take two kinds of complements.

1) One is the emotion
la + lafa 'to (feel) love' (lafa being the noun 'love')

2) The other is the stimulus of the emotion.
la + futi 'to like fruits' (futi being the noun 'fruit')

They can also be combined.
la + lafa + futi 'to love fruits'

So, the question: both complements cannot be direct objects because one has to be able to distinguish them.

Alternative A)
The emotion is the direct object and the stimulus is marked with a preposition, say, a 'to'.
Mi la lafa. 'I feel love.'
Mi la a futi. 'I like fruits.'
Mi la lafa a futi. 'I love fruits.'

Alternative B)
The stimulus is the direct object and the emotion is marked with a preposition, say, i 'at'.
Mi la i lafa. 'I feel love.'
Mi la futi. 'I like fruits.'
Mi la i lafa futi. 'I love fruits.'

C) If you see an out-of-the-box solution that I don't, feel free to share it. "Change the verb" is not allowed.

This is an old idea from my many analytical attempts. But I have never really decided the syntax thing.

[Creyeditor]

C) make it depend on the kind of emotion involved. This is similar to German (or Spanish for that matter), where 'gefallen' (to like) takes the stimulus as its subject, whereas 'mögen' (to like) takes the stimulus as its object. Usually the context will distinguish between single complements in a clause.

Mi la lafa.
Mi la futi.

If you have two kinds of complements in a single clause, you can get the 'a' (to) pattern with emotions like 'lafa' (love).

Mi la lafa a futi.

But if you had the fictional emotion 'padi' (pride), you get the 'i' (at) pattern.

Mi la i padi futi.

Does that make sense?

[Omzinesý]

C) make it depend on the kind of emotion involved. This is similar to German (or Spanish for that matter), where 'gefallen' (to like) takes the stimulus as its subject, whereas 'mögen' (to like) takes the stimulus as its object.

Afa-mutu is an auxlang, so I think the same basic constructions should be used as often as possible.
How is "gefallen" similar to this construction?

Usually the context will distinguish between single complements in a clause.

Mi la lafa.
Mi la futi.

So your idea is to let context take care of the distinction? I don't know how much ambiguity it would generate.
'I like love.' and 'I feel like a fruit.' are manageable.
In an auxlang, I would like to make things less context-depended, because ambiguity is kind of difficult too.

The construction with two objects is actually less problematic because word order can distinguish them.
The stimulus could even be interpreted as a modifier of the emotion. 'I feel love of fruits.'

But if you had the fictional emotion 'padi' (pride), you get the 'i' (at) pattern.

I think 'pride' will be a compound word, but you got the pattern of borrowing in Afa-mutu right.

[Salmoneus]

So, the question: both complements cannot be direct objects because one has to be able to distinguish them.

Why?

Having a verb be able to take arguments from two different classes with two different semantic implications is commonplace in real languages. In English, for example, I can hear a bang [i.e. my ears are impacted by a noise (the object) of some unstated cause] or I can hear a dog [I deduce the presence of a dog (a cause) via the experience of some unstated noise]. The propositional content structure of hearing a bang and hearing a dog are completely and utterly different, but English treats them as syntactically equivalent so pervasively that many speakers won't even realise the weird things going on with alignment and verbal semantics between these two sentences. Why should your auxlang be modeled on English assumptions rather than those of the speakers of other languages?

More dramatically, I can also taste not only both sweet and sour and both lemons and peaches, but also both success and defeat!

Many languages don't even have two different cases when ditransitives have two simultaneous objects - let alone for different types of transitive object!

But also, it seems incredibly Englishy to even think that we're dealing with two different meanings in your example anyway. In what way, in real terms, does la-ing an emotion differ from la-ing a fruit?

There's no ambiguity here. You mention "I like love", presumably vs "I feel love" ("I experience love", "I know love", "I am gripped by love", "I resemble love" etc) - but how is there an ambiguity here? There is in English, sure, because English happens to use the word 'feel' with emotions, rather than 'like', but there's no reason why that has to be the case - the choice of 'feel' is entirely arbitrary, and 'like' is no less accurate. A language coudl just have 'like' and 'feel' as the same word - in which case, no ambiguity. You might have in mind a thought like "I have enjoyed the times in my life when I have been in love" - but there's no reason that would have to be expressed as "I like love", which is kind of an arbitrary idiom for that. Or maybe you're thinking of a thought like "I am happy about being in love", but that gets into philosophical depths - can one really separate an emotion from a simultaneous emotion about the emotion? There's no reason this couldn't just be considered a different emotion (happy love vs guilty love is a perfectly valid semantic distinction). It's just a coincidence that English encourages you to express this thought in this precise way.

Likewise, you mention "I feel like a fruit", presumably vs "I like fruit". But the main use of the former is simply a modal paraphrase of the latter ('I would like fruit right now"), and there's no reason why you would need to encode that precise English idiom literally. There is a rarer (insane or poetic) sense, "I have the apprehension that I might be a fruit", but this meaning has nothing to do with the core semantics of "feeling" something. For example, rephrase 'feel' with (in this emotional context) a synonym: "I experience love" or "I am undergoing love" or "I possess love" or "I know love". None of these can be substituted into the 'fruit' sentence: I experience fruit, I am undergoing fruit, I possess fruit, I know fruit... none of these normally mean "I think I might be a fruit". This demonstrates that the use of "feel" in "I feel like a fruit" is an entirely different semantic use from the use of "feel" in "I feel love" - it may as well be an entirely different verb. It just happens not to be in English. So there's no reason why these verbs would be the same in your conlang either, so again there is no reason why speakers of your language would observe and ambiguity in these examples, given that one of the meanings of the English translation is essentially a pun in English.


You're clearly very keen on having your auxlang be 'logical'. Rather contradictorily so in my opinion, as I've said - auxlangs designed to be 'easy' or 'intuitive' will almost by definition not be 'logical'. But the bigger point is that one has to be careful not to assume that "what English (or other contemporary European languages) does" and "what is logical" are the same. Otherwise you'll encounter a pun in English and feel that it's an absolute feature of logic itself.


A big help here is not to think of everything in terms of literal English translations (which import all the multiple meanings of English words), but rather to think in terms of the functions of words - particularly when dealing with highly 'grammatical' and/or 'abstract' words in which idiomatic use and relation to concrete words varies dramatically between languages.

In this case, you're talking about a word in your conlang with two functions:

A: linking an abstract noun referring to a non-intentional (rather than unintentional) mental state to the possessor/undergoer of that state.
B: expressing a specific intentional (in the philosophical sense) and attitudinal mental state in an observer directed toward a concrete object

There can be no semantic ambiguity between these two functions, because they relate to entirely different classes: the first requires an abstract noun, whereas the second requires a concrete noun.

You then raise the spectre of two futher potential functions:

C: expressing the same intentional mental state linking an observer to the same non-intentional mental state
D: posits that the speaker is a certain concrete object

We can dismiss the possibility of a difficult ambiguity between B and D out of hand immediately. The rest of the semantics are so unrelated that there is no reason why B and D would use the same verb in a real language, unless you chose to do so in order to mimic English idioms [B expresses an attitudinal state (a feeling about) toward a concrete object; D involves a non-attitudinal state (a hypothesis) directed toward an abstract state of affairs (the speaker being that thing); note that "I feel like a lemon" is only a special case of "I feel like he is a lemon" that English happens to license the elision of a duplicated argument in].

As for C, we can't really say that an ambiguity exists between A and C either. On the one hand, it's not clear that it's possible to have an independent intentional state toward an unintentional state, or that a language would have to acknowledge the possibility - so a language might not regard C as a logically possible option. On the other hand, the overt structure of C (as an apparent parallel to B, and hence having a dyadic state of affairs as its object (the speaker experiencing love), and as having the speaker as the expressor of an attitudinal state) is so different from that of A (having a unitary state as its object (love), and having the speaker as the expressor of a non-attitudinal state) that there is no reason to think that a language that DID regard these as two valid and distinct propositions would use the same verb for both!

In other words: many humans would not regard A and C as potentially ambiguous, because they'd regard C as synonymous with A, or as logically incoherent; and many of the humans who WOULD regard A and C as potentially ambiguous would avoid that ambiguity simply by using entirely different constructions for the two.

Likewise, the idea that C and B were so similar semantically that a verb having interpretation B must also have interpretation C seems hugely arbitrary, given how different C and B really are (one is talking about a concrete object, one about an abstract object).


In English, coincidentally, B and C are treated the same way. And therefore, in inventing a verb that you want to do both A and B, you assume that the same verb must also do C, because English treats B and C the same way so your conlang must do likewise. And yet because English does NOT treat A and C the same way, you assume that there is a meaningful semantic difference between them that must be unambiguously respected.

In reality, however, a language could easily have a verb that does A and B but not C. Or it could do A, B and C, but regard A and C as synonymous. Or it could consider A and C as potentially ambiguous but just not care because, let's face it, it's not actually a troubling confusion in real conversations.



------------


Which is a long-winded post, I know, but hopefully explains my thoughts to some degree. I guess the one sentence take-away would be: don't confuse English idioms with the logical structure of propostions!

[Omzinesý]

I wrote a long answer but still cannot phrase it.

You have points.
I don't quite buy your argument that I'm biased by English constructions.
Rather I would not like to let semantics of the object be the (only) marker of its semantic role.

Maybe I will give the longer answer later.
I don't regard formal syntax theories very high, but some education of formal(ish) semantics could be useful for me.

[Solarius]

My conlang Hayakan has a "participle" suffix -nur, which is used for lexical verbs in auxiliary verb constructions and as a deranked verb form in some subordinate and relative clauses.

I osamu-nur buku n-o.
NEG write-PART book 1p.EXCL.SG-DEF.ACC
“I didn’t write the book.”

Lomom dem adeng he mangeu-nur.
eat 1p.MIN.EXCL orange REL be.sweet-PART
“I ate a sweet orange.” (Lit. “I ate an orange that is sweet.”)

However, I've come to feel that -nur is a bit "heavy," especially since it appears pretty often, in a language which tends to be light on inflection and very light on suffixes. I've come to dislike it as it seems to really stand out. However, I'm not sure if I want to get rid of it or not.

Potential options are:

1) Keep it as is -- has the advantage of minimizing work, as I have a 30 page draft of a grammar which uses this -nur form exclusively.

2a) Keep it only in auxiliary verb constructions or 2b) Keep in only in subordinate and relative clauses -- this has the advantage of reducing the frequency, but both forms are fairly common so not by that much.

3) Jettison it

4) Replace it with a shorter suffix -- I've been considering -ir or just -r. This could also be combined with 2a or 2b.

What do y'all think?

[Knox Adjacent]

The only qualm for me is it's a suffix, but that's insufficiently strange to go nay. A mere one CVC syllable isn't exactly heavy.

[Omzinesý]

What do y'all think?

I recognize the problem. My langs rarely have adjectives and the participle whatever is often the most frequent form of some static verbs and thus should be short as frequent forms usually are.

If I understood your question correctly, you like -nur syntactically but not phonet/micly.
What about just introducing allomorphy. Some verbs have it as -r, some maybe lengthen the preceding vowel, some retain -nur?

I think participles are usually glossed PTCP.

[Man in Space]

Do I scrap everything I have for the Patchwork States and place over them the Vyeic languages, or do I retain what I’ve done so far and let the Vye be their own thing?

[Khemehekis]

Do I scrap everything I have for the Patchwork States and place over them the Vyeic languages, or do I retain what I’ve done so far and let the Vye be their own thing?

Retain what you've done so far. The remapper thing is so tragic (such a loss!)

[Creyeditor]

I was thinking about how to deal with topic and focus and foreground and background in Omlueuet. Right now the word order is OVS. I thought maybe the object is backgrounded or topicalized in these constructions and there is a focus on the subject. I was then thinking, that I could topicalize the subject by fronting and leave behind a resumptive pronoun, yielding a SOV[S:resumptive pronoun] order for topicalized subjects or focused objects. I feel like this fits the vibe of Omlueuet but I also really like rigid OVS. Maybe the topicalized subject could get an oblique case? What do you guys think?