Old Kyzym

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sketch
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Old Kyzym

Post by sketch »

Just remembered the CBB exists, so I may as well post this here.
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Old Kyzym is, in a sentence, the based and Tsezpilled language of ancient dragon-circassians.
It is the ancestor of modern Kyzym and its four relatives. It was spoken in Kyzym, a small, mountainous kingdom designed for a D&D campaign which has an economy and culture largely built around the collection and sale of the shed hides of dragons that live in the area. It is primarily inspired by Caucasian and 'Altaic' languages (i.e, Turkic, Mongolic and Tungusic languages). Old Kyzym is being constructed entirely synchronically and a priori, once it's fully fleshed out, work on the modern language and its handful of relatives will begin.
Old Kyzym includes:
  • An odd phonology with a palatal vowel/consonant thing
  • Some slight vowel harmony of some sort (TBD)
  • Heavily agglutinative morphology
  • A really unnecessary number of locative cases
  • Georgian-inspired split ergativity based on verb class
  • Masculine, feminine and neuter genders
  • Needlessly complicated verbal paradigm
  • Mostly free but primarily VOS word order
  • Awesome calligraphy
  • Dragons
Here's the language on CWS: https://conworkshop.com/view_language.php?l=KYZYM
Last edited by sketch on 16 Dec 2023 20:49, edited 1 time in total.
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The 35 locative cases of Kyzym

Post by sketch »

So, I've been messing around with locative affixes, as seen in a lot of Northeast Caucasian languages:
Image
Here are Kyzym's thirty-five locative affixes. Kyzym distinguishes static (essive) and dynamic (ablative and lative) locations, positions under, in, above beside or generally near to the location, with two degrees of distance for dynamic cases and three degrees for the static essive case.
It should be noted that the degrees of proximity for the inessive, inablative and inlative cases have slightly altered meanings. While the proximal inessive k’any denotes being inside something (and likewise -sany and -zany denoting movement out of and into the interior of a thing, respectively), the medial inessive -zany denotes a position inside a hollow thing; while the distal inessive -zanig, inablative -sanik and inlative -janig denote a position among or in the midst of a location rather than inside it; compare amvop’ky’ani "in an avalanche" with vozanig "among us (inclusive)". And yes, they are suffixed onto nouns.
As you can likely imagine, the locatives are used for way more grammatical functions than literal location alone, which I will figure out in more detail later; though possession, indirect objects, genitives and adjectives will likely be formed from locatives.

Edit: fwiw I have no clue as to whether or not I've done this correctly, so any input is appreciated
Last edited by sketch on 16 Dec 2023 20:48, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Old Kyzym

Post by sketch »

Almost forgot, I gave Janko the numbers this morning (first time I've been Janko'd, yippee!); so I figure I'll post them here as well:
1. koi /kʰoi/
2. yok’i /jokʼi/
3. lapy’i /ɬapʼʲi/
4. ask’i /askʼi/
5. qái /qʰaːi/
6. vöbyai /vøbʲai/
7. colnoi /t͡sʰoɬnoi/
8. shöshi /ʃøʃi/
9. áti /aːtʰi/
10. zhap’sup’ /ʒapʼsupʼ/
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Re: Old Kyzym

Post by WeepingElf »

I can't say your locative suffixes were wrong (there is not much than can be wrong in conlangs, especially a priori ones), but in the Northeast Caucasian locative paradigms I have seen (I haven't seen all of them, only some), the suffixes are rather transparent compounds of a location suffix followed by a direction suffix, and your suffixes are not very transparent. But I don't know your diachronic development, and perhaps your suffixes are the results of sound changes obfuscating a formerly transparent paradigm, so you are fine with that. Similar paradigms, though with fewer items, are also found in some Uralic languages, and are not very transparent there, either.
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sketch
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Re: Old Kyzym

Post by sketch »

WeepingElf wrote: 16 Dec 2023 21:53 ...in the Northeast Caucasian locative paradigms I have seen (I haven't seen all of them, only some), the suffixes are rather transparent compounds of a location suffix followed by a direction suffix, and your suffixes are not very transparent. But I don't know your diachronic development...
I see. Old Kyzym is being developed almost entirely synchronically (as it's going to be the ancestor of a few modern languages) and so I admittedly just... made those up to look like they followed a pattern.
I probably could make the affixes more transparent; it'd fit the agglutinative nature of the language.
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