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

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

Post by Creyeditor »

I think I usually use a combination of randomly translating and looking at semantic fields. For Kobardon, the conlang I am working on right now (n.b.: no complete numbers yet), I started by translating example sentences and tried to come up with words that would fit the setting. If I failed, I later on tweaked some of these, e.g. 'cat' became 'catbird, cretan owl'. I was also lazy in extending the meaning of words rather than inventing a new word if the meaning were related, e.g. 'to see' and 'to look'. Lateron I looked at semantic fields that were relevant for the grammar like verbs of perception, verbs of movement, bodyparts, and common animals. I then looked for patterns that I could extend, e.g. 'finger, one' to 'fist, five' and gaps that needed to be filled either by inventing a new word, e.g. for head, or by extending an existing word. Of course, Kobardon's vocab is far from complete.
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Re: (Conlangs) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by LinguoFranco »

Does anyone have tips for designing a pitch accent language?

I decided that, for my conlang, like pitch-accent based prosody the best, and want to encode into the language, but I'm not quite sure how to do it.

For my earlier attempts, I would just say that one more in the word is marked with a high tone, and that the pitch of the word increases until it gets to the marked mora.

I have heard that they are essentially just word tone languages, though I have also heard that pitch accent langs are in between stress-based and tonal languages.

In particular, I want something that sounds somewhat like Japanese or Wu Chinese, though I also like how Ancient Greek sounds.

Am I overthinking tone?
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Re: (Conlangs) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by Knox Adjacent »

A question here being inflected adpositions: if the adposition marking resembles possessor marking, should it resemble the alienable or inalienable set?
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Re: (Conlangs) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by loglorn »

Knox Adjacent wrote: 27 Jan 2023 07:27 A question here being inflected adpositions: if the adposition marking resembles possessor marking, should it resemble the alienable or inalienable set?
Adpositions from relational nouns are extremely often derived from bodyparts so inalienable. You could make then alienable though, positing slightly different sources, or even making that lexically determined by specific adpositions, the set which each one uses being synchronically random (but presumably diachronically determined by the source nouns of each).
LinguoFranco wrote: 27 Jan 2023 06:06 Does anyone have tips for designing a pitch accent language?

I decided that, for my conlang, like pitch-accent based prosody the best, and want to encode into the language, but I'm not quite sure how to do it.

For my earlier attempts, I would just say that one more in the word is marked with a high tone, and that the pitch of the word increases until it gets to the marked mora.

I have heard that they are essentially just word tone languages, though I have also heard that pitch accent langs are in between stress-based and tonal languages.

In particular, I want something that sounds somewhat like Japanese or Wu Chinese, though I also like how Ancient Greek sounds.

Am I overthinking tone?
It's useful IMO to think of them as tone systems where the TBU(Tone Bearing Unit) is the word, and theyre often described as "between" because frankly it's all a continuum. Foe example some languages distinguish between low pitch and high pitch stressed syllables, is that a stress system? a tone system? pitch accent?

I wouldn't bother myself too much with labels but read descriptions and analyses of those languages you like and mix and match until you like the results.
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Re: (Conlangs) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by Salmoneus »

LinguoFranco wrote: 27 Jan 2023 06:06 Does anyone have tips for designing a pitch accent language?

I decided that, for my conlang, like pitch-accent based prosody the best, and want to encode into the language, but I'm not quite sure how to do it.

For my earlier attempts, I would just say that one more in the word is marked with a high tone, and that the pitch of the word increases until it gets to the marked mora.
Yep, that's a pitch accent all right. What problem did you have with that?
I have heard that they are essentially just word tone languages, though I have also heard that pitch accent langs are in between stress-based and tonal languages.
As loglorn says, don't worry about labels too much. "Pitch accent" is poorly defined. They're "between" stress and tonal systems in that it's often unclear whether it's best to describe them as one or as the other, but some limit the definition to more specific intermediate types, rather than using it as a catch all. It really doesn't matter.

I'd stick with thinking about "very simple tonal systems" or the like, and not worry about which phonologists would classify it as 'pitch accent' and which might just call it a 'minimal tonal system'.

Very simple tonal systems can be described with few data points - few possible 'values' for tone, and with very few possible values per word. [whether we say the tone is on the word or on a small number of syllables in the word is a distinction without a difference, though one may be simpler than the other depending on the details of the language]. Japanese (standard) pitch accent only requires two possible values (accent vs not accent) and only one value per word (any syllable can have the accent, or none, but no more than one).

[it's easier to say that the Japanese accent is located on a syllable, rather than that it's a word tone, because that would require more values - as many as the number of syllables in the word, plus one].
In particular, I want something that sounds somewhat like Japanese or Wu Chinese, though I also like how Ancient Greek sounds.
Why not just do that, then?

Phonemically, Shanghainese (the pitch accent dialect of Wu) has an accenton one of the first two syllables.
Ancient Greek has an accent on one of the last three syllables (and it can be on either mora of a bimoraic syllable).
Japanese has an accent on any one syllable in the word, or on none.

Shanghainese primarily marks accent with a high tone, whereas Japanese marks it with a low tone (on the syllable after the one traditionally considered 'accented'). Obviously we don't know how Ancient Greek marked it, though musical evidence suggests the accent was high.

In terms of how phonemic accent interacts with prosodic pitch, Japanese (as you describe yourself) generally has rising pitch up to the accent. I don't know what Shanghainese does (other than an initial unaccented syllable is lowered after a voiced consonant), and obviously nobody knows what Ancient Greek did. These features aren't phonemic in any case.

Am I overthinking tone?

I don't know, to be honest, as you haven't told us anything about how you're thinking about tone! Just that you want pitch accent, and that you previously used pitch accent. I don't know what you think about pitch accent other than that you like it, so I don't know if you're overthinking it!

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


FWIW, my Rawàng Ata has pitch accent - essentially Japanese in character. One or zero syllables per word have an accent, primarily marked through downstep on the next syllable, with unaccented syllables primarily showing climbing pitch up to the accent.

Rawàng Ata has a couple of oddities on top of that - the vocative particle, for instance, has lost its overt phonemes and has become essentially a floating tone. Rawàng Ata also has stress - non-phonemic, but not always aligned with the accent. And it has a tendency for word-initial syllables to be higher in pitch than the second syllable, before the climb sets in, but that's not phonemic. And the downstep effect doesn't just spread onto a following minor particle, but even onto another word in the same phrase. But these are minor details.

Diachronically, accent in Rawàng Ata is a simplification of tone: after the creation of phonemic high and low tones, these simplified (in the standard dialect) into downsteps, and then only one downstep was allowed per word. The complicated bit synchronically is what happens when you add affixes, as multiple accents interact with one another and with the stress to detemine accent placement in the final word.
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Re: (Conlangs) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by LinguistCat »

There was a period in Japanese's early development where words could have more than one high tone, as long as they were not next to each other. However, since that point, one or the other of the high tones dropped in different dialects. So for example, a four syllable word could have HLHL as its original pattern, and in some dialects the first high tone is kept while in others the second was kept. Sometimes, these tones would be pushed left or right depending on various factors (and not all researchers even agree that we're reading the materials that the tone patterns are based on correctly). But eventually this ended up with a system where you have words differentiated by a single high tone either on the first mora, the last mora or where possible the penultimate mora.

So, in the earliest stages you could have 3 mora words with any of LLL, HLL, LHL, LLH, HLH, and four mora words with any of LLLL, HLLL, LHLL, LLHL, LLLH, HLHL, and LHLH. Maybe you could start with something like that, randomly assigning tone patterns to words, and then figure out if and how you'd want to simplify it.
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Re: (Conlangs) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

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LinguoFranco wrote: 27 Jan 2023 06:06 Does anyone have tips for designing a pitch accent language?

I decided that, for my conlang, like pitch-accent based prosody the best, and want to encode into the language, but I'm not quite sure how to do it.

For my earlier attempts, I would just say that one more in the word is marked with a high tone, and that the pitch of the word increases until it gets to the marked mora.

I have heard that they are essentially just word tone languages, though I have also heard that pitch accent langs are in between stress-based and tonal languages.

In particular, I want something that sounds somewhat like Japanese or Wu Chinese, though I also like how Ancient Greek sounds.

Am I overthinking tone?
I really like Larry Hyman's paper on how not to do typology: the case of pitch accent. Reading it really helped me to stop worrying snd love the pitch (accent) [:D]
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Re: (Conlangs) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by Sequor »

If anyone is interested in Hyman's paper, here's a link to the pre-publication draft.
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Re: (Conlangs) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by LinguoFranco »

Salmoneus wrote: 27 Jan 2023 20:14
LinguoFranco wrote: 27 Jan 2023 06:06 Does anyone have tips for designing a pitch accent language?

I decided that, for my conlang, like pitch-accent based prosody the best, and want to encode into the language, but I'm not quite sure how to do it.

For my earlier attempts, I would just say that one more in the word is marked with a high tone, and that the pitch of the word increases until it gets to the marked mora.
Yep, that's a pitch accent all right. What problem did you have with that?
I have heard that they are essentially just word tone languages, though I have also heard that pitch accent langs are in between stress-based and tonal languages.
As loglorn says, don't worry about labels too much. "Pitch accent" is poorly defined. They're "between" stress and tonal systems in that it's often unclear whether it's best to describe them as one or as the other, but some limit the definition to more specific intermediate types, rather than using it as a catch all. It really doesn't matter.

I'd stick with thinking about "very simple tonal systems" or the like, and not worry about which phonologists would classify it as 'pitch accent' and which might just call it a 'minimal tonal system'.

Very simple tonal systems can be described with few data points - few possible 'values' for tone, and with very few possible values per word. [whether we say the tone is on the word or on a small number of syllables in the word is a distinction without a difference, though one may be simpler than the other depending on the details of the language]. Japanese (standard) pitch accent only requires two possible values (accent vs not accent) and only one value per word (any syllable can have the accent, or none, but no more than one).

[it's easier to say that the Japanese accent is located on a syllable, rather than that it's a word tone, because that would require more values - as many as the number of syllables in the word, plus one].
In particular, I want something that sounds somewhat like Japanese or Wu Chinese, though I also like how Ancient Greek sounds.
Why not just do that, then?

Phonemically, Shanghainese (the pitch accent dialect of Wu) has an accenton one of the first two syllables.
Ancient Greek has an accent on one of the last three syllables (and it can be on either mora of a bimoraic syllable).
Japanese has an accent on any one syllable in the word, or on none.

Shanghainese primarily marks accent with a high tone, whereas Japanese marks it with a low tone (on the syllable after the one traditionally considered 'accented'). Obviously we don't know how Ancient Greek marked it, though musical evidence suggests the accent was high.

In terms of how phonemic accent interacts with prosodic pitch, Japanese (as you describe yourself) generally has rising pitch up to the accent. I don't know what Shanghainese does (other than an initial unaccented syllable is lowered after a voiced consonant), and obviously nobody knows what Ancient Greek did. These features aren't phonemic in any case.

Am I overthinking tone?

I don't know, to be honest, as you haven't told us anything about how you're thinking about tone! Just that you want pitch accent, and that you previously used pitch accent. I don't know what you think about pitch accent other than that you like it, so I don't know if you're overthinking it!

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


FWIW, my Rawàng Ata has pitch accent - essentially Japanese in character. One or zero syllables per word have an accent, primarily marked through downstep on the next syllable, with unaccented syllables primarily showing climbing pitch up to the accent.

Rawàng Ata has a couple of oddities on top of that - the vocative particle, for instance, has lost its overt phonemes and has become essentially a floating tone. Rawàng Ata also has stress - non-phonemic, but not always aligned with the accent. And it has a tendency for word-initial syllables to be higher in pitch than the second syllable, before the climb sets in, but that's not phonemic. And the downstep effect doesn't just spread onto a following minor particle, but even onto another word in the same phrase. But these are minor details.

Diachronically, accent in Rawàng Ata is a simplification of tone: after the creation of phonemic high and low tones, these simplified (in the standard dialect) into downsteps, and then only one downstep was allowed per word. The complicated bit synchronically is what happens when you add affixes, as multiple accents interact with one another and with the stress to detemine accent placement in the final word.
Well, I want to evolve the pitch accent naturally, and my first attempt at such a language had me just rip off Japanese's pitch accent rules.

It doesn't have to be pitch accent specifically, I just want a simple tone system.
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Post by Creyeditor »

If you are looking for a way to get a simple tone system, there are many possibilities:
  • Start with a stress system and then add tonal distinction to the stressed syllable. This happened in Franconian dialects where deletion of final vowels influenced tone.
  • You could also do this by restricting some distinction (aspiration, voicing, coda consonants) that later yields tone to the stressed syllable first and then transphonologizing it.
  • You could start with a slightly more complex tone system and make it simpler by moving tones to a certain position or by deleting all but the first (or last) high tone. This happened in some Bantu languages.
  • You could start with a length contrast that is restricted in some way (e.g. to a certain position) and a mora-based stress system. When vowels shorten, the former stress+length can be reinterpreted as tonal accent. Long vowels accented on the second mora become rising, long vowels accented on the first mora become falling and short stressef vowels become high. I think this happened in several IE languages.
  • Alternatively, you could start with simple stress and delete some intervocalic consonants and solve hiatus by resyllabification. Then you go the same route as the previous option. This probably happens somewhere in Scandinavis, but I might be mistaken.
These are just a few options, there are probably many more.
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Re: (Conlangs) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by Salmoneus »

I'd split out your first method there into two options:

- maintain the pitch contour of a word even when the word shape changes (eg by loss of syllables), making tonal contour phonemic

- just directly turn stress into pitch. I don't know for sure that this is possible, but I don't see why it wouldn't be (pitch can certainly change into stress - see IE, repeatedly!).


More generally, to create tone, look for syllabic nuclei that are allophonically higher or lower in tone. This may be due to an adjacent consonant, stress, position in a word, vowel length or phonation, or even the quality of the vowel (eg in the ancestor of my conlang, schwa was inherently lower in tone, for some phonation reason I've never specified). Then neutralise or delete the thing that caused the tone, while keeping the tone.

To make a simple tonal system, either have it be caused by something that means it only occurs once (or a small number of times) in a word, or let it occur as much as you want and then simplify it by eliminating some tonal contrasts.

The latter can easily be done by saying "tone is only distinguished on stressed syllables". Alternatively, tones tend to drift forward and backward, and can run over one another - so a MHLMHLM word might easily turn into HHHHHLL simply by saying "all tones before a high tone become high" and then "all mid tone after a low tone become low". Although of course it could be more complicated than that - maybe primary stress location or word edges play a role, or maybe the distance between accents is significant. [eg HHL > HLL (the downstep overides an adjecent accent), but HLHL > HHHL (surviving accents can subsequently eliminate downsteps through ancitipatory rise)].

But I wouldn't get too clever with it.
LinguoFranco wrote:my first attempt at such a language had me just rip off Japanese's pitch accent rules.
Well... yeah. That'll happen.

The problem with trying to make a cool and unique pitch accent system is that you can't - if you do, it won't be a simple pitch accent system anymore. Simplicity is definitional to pitch accent (/simple tonal system, whatever). There's only so many options. One of the first two syllables, one of the last three syllables, first syllable or one of the last two, possibility of words with "no" accent, possibility of local factors overriding allophonic pitch distinctions... some dialects of Japanese get a bit more complicated by have an independent value for unaccented initial syllables (effectively doubling the number of word contours), but then you're getting dangerously close to a full tonal system.

I suspect that any reasonable simple tonal system you could go for will be 'ripping off' multiple real-life languages. Likewise, if you want a simple vowel system you're inevitably going to be ripping off a real language's vowel system (probably Arabic's). Simplicity entails non-uniqueness!
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Re: (Conlangs) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by Hugh_Capet »

This question ties into the languages of Tolkien—specifically that of Danian, or the language of the Green-elves of Ossiriand and the Greenwood in an earlier version of his legendarium. It's my desire to expand it a bit while endeavoring to maintain its Anglo-Saxon inspiration. Part of the trouble with maintaining this inspiration is that the Green-elves are said in the later legendarium to be part of the Teleri and therefore related to the Sindar. The language of the Sindar is largely inspired by the Celtic languages, which makes maintaining the Germanic elements of Danian/Nandorin difficult.

I especially wonder about how the labiovelar kw- might be handled, at least in initial position. Material concerning the Danian stage of the language has initial [kw] either de-velarizing into [c] or remaining as-is in [cw]. Yet the Telerin languages have [kw] become [p] initially. Thus, I'm left to wonder how I might be able to change initial [p] from [kw] back into [kw], or if I should leave [p] unchanged.

Any advice would be most helpful.
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Post by Omzinesý »

I have read about an applicative that just moves the preposition on a noun to the beginning of the verb.

I live in the house
->
I inlive the house.

I remembered that it appeared in Mayan languages but it apparently does not.
Does anybody know what language it is? I would like to check what semantic implications using that applicative has.
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Post by Salmoneus »

Omzinesý wrote: 28 Feb 2023 16:13 I have read about an applicative that just moves the preposition on a noun to the beginning of the verb.

I live in the house
->
I inlive the house.

I remembered that it appeared in Mayan languages but it apparently does not.
Does anybody know what language it is? I would like to check what semantic implications using that applicative has.
This is common in European languages:

in domo habito
->
domum inhabito

This was fairly common even in Old English. In Middle English, the prepositional prefixes tended to be replaced by phrasal verbs, and many of those that remained deviated semantically or became archaic [the English version of this sentence would be "I dwell by the house" > "I bedwell the house", but 'by' has lost its 'in' sense, and 'bedwell' is archaic; German still has intransitive 'wohnen' and transitive 'bewohnen', although I don't think 'bei' is used for 'in' when standing alone].

That said, English does still sometimes do it:
I flew over the town
->
I overflew the town

The river cut under the wall
->
The river undercut the wall
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Post by Omzinesý »

Salmoneus wrote: 01 Mar 2023 00:27
Omzinesý wrote: 28 Feb 2023 16:13 I have read about an applicative that just moves the preposition on a noun to the beginning of the verb.

I live in the house
->
I inlive the house.

I remembered that it appeared in Mayan languages but it apparently does not.
Does anybody know what language it is? I would like to check what semantic implications using that applicative has.
This is common in European languages:

in domo habito
->
domum inhabito

This was fairly common even in Old English. In Middle English, the prepositional prefixes tended to be replaced by phrasal verbs, and many of those that remained deviated semantically or became archaic [the English version of this sentence would be "I dwell by the house" > "I bedwell the house", but 'by' has lost its 'in' sense, and 'bedwell' is archaic; German still has intransitive 'wohnen' and transitive 'bewohnen', although I don't think 'bei' is used for 'in' when standing alone].

That said, English does still sometimes do it:
I flew over the town
->
I overflew the town

The river cut under the wall
->
The river undercut the wall
Do you know what is the difference between those constructions? What it codes?
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Post by Salmoneus »

Originally, it's an applicative: it increases the valency of the verb and moves the noun from an oblique to a direct object. So you could use it whenever you needed a direct object rather than an oblique. I'd imagine it also increased the semantic connotation of transitivity, though I don't know.

Over time in most (all?) IE languages, the prepositionally-prefixed verbs tended to develop other more specific meanings, either verb-by-verb ('advise' vs 'devise') or prefix-by-prefix (eg in Germanic and Celtic the preposition for 'with' became a perfect aspect marker).
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Re: (Conlangs) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by Ælfwine »

Simple question. Is a sound change θ > t͡s possible?

I'm aware of examples of the reverse happening (i.e. Spanish) but not this.
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Post by Knox Adjacent »

Like maybe not in one step, but yeah...
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Post by Creyeditor »

Ælfwine wrote: 13 Mar 2023 07:06 Simple question. Is a sound change θ > t͡s possible?

I'm aware of examples of the reverse happening (i.e. Spanish) but not this.
Yes, the Index Diachronica has examples from Finnish and Gros Ventre. Also, I think it makes more sense in one step if it is unconditional. So θ > t͡s, but neither θ > t > t͡s nor θ > s > t͡s. Okay, maybe θ > tθ > t͡s is also fine.
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Re: (Conlangs) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by Ælfwine »

Creyeditor wrote: 13 Mar 2023 08:49
Ælfwine wrote: 13 Mar 2023 07:06 Simple question. Is a sound change θ > t͡s possible?

I'm aware of examples of the reverse happening (i.e. Spanish) but not this.
Yes, the Index Diachronica has examples from Finnish and Gros Ventre. Also, I think it makes more sense in one step if it is unconditional. So θ > t͡s, but neither θ > t > t͡s nor θ > s > t͡s. Okay, maybe θ > tθ > t͡s is also fine.
Thanks Crey. And yes the second makes sense to me.

I'm justifying the <tz> in crimean gothic as [t͡s] initially from /θ/. And this seems like a good way to go. gulθɑ̃ > golθɑ > golθ > goltθ > golt͡s <goltz> or something similar.
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