(Conlangs) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here [2010-2020]

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Ashtăr Balynestjăr
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Post by Ashtăr Balynestjăr »

Lambuzhao wrote:In :fra: there is also dîme > Old :fra: dixme which also means 'tithe', and is the source for the :eng: word 'dime', versus the reformed dixième or the cultism décime. In Provençal, it's desme.

I am not sure how much consensus there is that such an Italic superlative termination was actually one-in-the-same as the similarly-quacking ordinal termination, but , well, there it is. It's up to you how much steam-punking you'd want to invest.
[;)]
I’m pretty sure that the :fra: suffix -ième is actually a regular reflex of :lat: -esimus. Maybe it was generalized from centesimus > centième?

Edit: Wait, no, it can’t be: :lat: -ēsimus starts with a long vowel, which wouldn’t yield [jɛ] in French.
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Post by Ahzoh »

I wonder if it's possible to have it so cardinal numbers behave like adjectives, and as such come after nouns and agree with them, while ordinals behave like determiners, and as such come before nouns and do not decline at all?

Although the opposite is probably more likely.
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Post by Dormouse559 »

Ashtâr Balînestyâr wrote:I’m pretty sure that the :fra: suffix -ième is actually a regular reflex of :lat: -esimus. Maybe it was generalized from centesimus > centième?

Edit: Wait, no, it can’t be: :lat: -ēsimus starts with a long vowel, which wouldn’t yield [jɛ] in French.
CNRTL says -ième is a hybrid based on centesimus, millesimus and decimus. That last one, with its short /e/, in particular seems to be where the /j/ comes from; the first syllable would have been /djej/ at one point. At that same time, the stressed vowel of the reflexes of centesimus and millesimus would have just been /e/, if I'm not mistaken.
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Post by eldin raigmore »

Ahzoh wrote:I wonder if it's possible to have it so cardinal numbers behave like adjectives, and as such come after nouns and agree with them, while ordinals behave like determiners, and as such come before nouns and do not decline at all?
Although the opposite is probably more likely.
IM(NS)HO ordinal numbers are definitely (no pun intended) semantically similar to determiners.
Cardinal numbers OTOH are quantifiers. (If I understand correctly; I'm pretty sure I understand that correctly, but .... )

If an adjective is anything that modifies nouns and noun-phrases, then I'd think both determiners and quantifiers would count as kinds of adjectives.

If the language has gender, one would expect anything that modifies a noun, would concord with that noun's gender.

Not sure how you'd consistently get either ordinal or cardinal numbers to concord with the noun's grammatical number; nor how you'd get any kind of quantifier to concord with the noun's grammatical number.

To go by the examples of Romance languages and German, determiners do (in fact) decline to concord with the noun's case, even when they come before the noun.

Is that any help? Did I miss something?
Last edited by eldin raigmore on 28 Jul 2017 01:53, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Lambuzhao »

Eldin wrote: Is that any help? Did I miss something?
All helpful, but that, pretty much all (the older) Semitic languages do this incredibly interesting shifty-shufty with the genders of the cardinal numbers vis-a-vis the gender of the nouns they modify, which see:

Morphological Gender Polarity Semitic (a.k.a. Chiastic Concord, Reverse Agreement) :

http://www.academia.edu/532957/THE_MORP ... C_NUMERALS
https://www.reddit.com/r/linguistics/co ... c_numbers/
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/do ... 1&type=pdf

¿cardinals/ordinals to precede/follow noun?
Though there are some universalish tendancies to ADJ Order Restrictions, it is not absolute, and varies from language to language as to which kinds of words have which kinds of orbitals around the noun-phrase nucleus. The universals are the tendancies for proximity or remotness of certain classes of ADJ from the nucleus, regardless of whether they stack before or after the noun (thus, my somewhat obscure reference to 'orbitals'). And in some languages (Romlangs, I summon you!) ADJS can appear on either side of the main noun, with some typs (BAGS ADJs) changing meaning subtly depending on which side they appear.


We did a thread on this a few years back, which see:
viewtopic.php?f=9&t=2728&p=158657&hilit ... 2A#p158657

[;)]
Last edited by Lambuzhao on 22 Jul 2017 20:07, edited 2 times in total.
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Post by Lambuzhao »

Dormouse559 wrote:
Ashtâr Balînestyâr wrote:I’m pretty sure that the :fra: suffix -ième is actually a regular reflex of :lat: -esimus. Maybe it was generalized from centesimus > centième?

Edit: Wait, no, it can’t be: :lat: -ēsimus starts with a long vowel, which wouldn’t yield [jɛ] in French.
CNRTL says -ième is a hybrid based on centesimus, millesimus and decimus. That last one, with its short /e/, in particular seems to be where the /j/ comes from; the first syllable would have been /djej/ at one point. At that same time, the stressed vowel of the reflexes of centesimus and millesimus would have just been /e/, if I'm not mistaken.

Either way, still utterly fascinating to consider that COMPAR/SUPER what-if, among other options we've discussed.
:mrgreen:
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Post by Omzinesý »

Not sure how you'd consistently get either ordinal or cardinal numbers to concord with the noun's grammatical number; nor how you'd get any kind of quantifier to concord with the noun's grammatical number.
Finnish pluralia tantum noun, which appear only in the plural, have also the quantifiers agree in plural.

Ryhmä-ssä on yhteensä kymmenen kät-tä ja viide-t aivo-t.
group-IN is altogether ten hand-PART and five-PL.NOM brain-PL.NOM
'There are ten hands and five brains in the group altogether.'

käsi 'hand' being a "normal" noun appears in the singular partitive
aivot 'brain' being a pluralia tantum noun appears in the plural nominative

I just see the case also changes.
My meta-thread: viewtopic.php?f=6&t=5760
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Post by Frislander »

Solarius wrote:I'm working on a relatively analytic company whose only verbal markers are the passive and antipassive. The suffixes are -i and -u/o depending on environment. The question is: which suffix should go with which?
Well I suppose I'd personally favour -i ANTI and -u/o PASS but at the end of the day you have to remember that phonological forms are in most cases completely arbitrary and have no relation to the thing being denoted. So in the end it doesn't matter one bit. Take my suggestion, or not if you prefer; flip a coin if you feel like it, because at the end of the day when it comes to choosing affix shapes, especially for highly abstract concepts like voice there's basically nothing to be said.
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Post by Dormouse559 »

Lambuzhao wrote:Either way, still utterly fascinating to consider that COMPAR/SUPER what-if, among other options we've discussed.
:mrgreen:
Definitely, there's at least a tendency in IE languages to make "first" a superlative.
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Post by Jackk »

I'm having a bit of trouble with word order in my newest language Dubarne. To translate "I'm still awake at 3 a.m.", I've decided to say:

otrac mir se po né culoh.
[ˈɔʔ.ɾagˌmes.sə ˌpo ne ˈku.lɔx]
be.awake MIR DUR after two bell
I'm still awake at 3 a.m.

Except, I can't work out where to put the subject do "I". Dubarne is VSO, so it needs really to be somewhere between otrac and po, but I can't decide between putting it immediately after the main verb, after the mirative mood particle, or even after the durative aspect article.

I expect Dubarne is somewhat pro-drop, and I guess you could front do to topicalise it, but I still want a standard subject position. I'd be grateful if y'all could give advice, even just aesthetic judgements. [:D]

(hmmm maybe considering longer subjects like pietta dop "my child" might help?)
Last edited by Jackk on 05 Aug 2017 23:18, edited 1 time in total.
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eldin raigmore
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Post by eldin raigmore »

Lambuzhao wrote:... pretty much all (the older) Semitic languages do this incredibly interesting shifty-shufty with the genders of the cardinal numbers vis-a-vis the gender of the nouns they modify, which see:
Morphological Gender Polarity Semitic (a.k.a. Chiastic Concord, Reverse Agreement) :
http://www.academia.edu/532957/THE_MORP ... C_NUMERALS
https://www.reddit.com/r/linguistics/co ... c_numbers/
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/do ... 1&type=pdf
I thought of that; but wasn't sure I should mention it. I couldn't tell how relevant it would be; the "read the whole thread before posting" advice was tough to follow this time, so I just asked if I'd missed something.
Thanks for those references; and also ...
Lambuzhao wrote:Though there are some universalish tendencies to ADJ Order Restrictions, it is not absolute, and varies from language to language as to which kinds of words have which kinds of orbitals around the noun-phrase nucleus. The universals are the tendencies for proximity or remotness of certain classes of ADJ from the nucleus, regardless of whether they stack before or after the noun (thus, my somewhat obscure reference to 'orbitals'). And in some languages (Romlangs, I summon you!) ADJS can appear on either side of the main noun, with some types (BAGS ADJs) changing meaning subtly depending on which side they appear.
We did a thread on this a few years back, which see:
viewtopic.php?f=9&t=2728&p=158657&hilit ... 2A#p158657
Thanks for those references as well.

BTW:
Concerning Beauty/Age/Goodness/Size adjectives; isn't Number usually also included? Giving the acronym BANGS?
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Post by Sumelic »

eldin raigmore wrote: BTW:
Concerning Beauty/Age/Goodness/Size adjectives; isn't Number usually also included? Giving the acronym BANGS?
BANGS looks vaguely familiar, but "Beauty/Age/Goodness/Size" seems the more common list to me, at least in the context of French (the second language that I have studied the most).

I think of numerals in French as falling into the same general class as possessive words and demonstratives: what some people would call determiners/determinatives (in French classes, as in English classes, the term "possessive adjectives" is often used, but I've never seen "possessives" or "demonstratives" included in the acronym/list of types of preposed adjectives). I guess, as in English, they are stackable with the definite article in a way that demonstratives and possessives aren't: "Les Trois Mousquetaires" is grammatical but "Les mes Mousquetaires" or "Les ces Mousquetaires" would not be. So that is one way that they are more similar in behavior to adjectives than some other determiners/determinatives.
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Post by Trebor »

Frislander wrote:[A]t the end of the day you have to remember that phonological forms are in most cases completely arbitrary and have no relation to the thing being denoted. So in the end it doesn't matter one bit. Take my suggestion, or not if you prefer; flip a coin if you feel like it, because at the end of the day when it comes to choosing affix shapes, especially for highly abstract concepts like voice there's basically nothing to be said.
I second what you say here. I would only add that I would make the two suffixes more distinct. One could be -V and the other -CV, or one could be -CV and the other -VC. What happens, Solarius, when a verb root or stem ends in a vowel and is to be made passive or antipassive?
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Jackk wrote:I'm having a bit of trouble with word order in my newest language Dubarne. To translate "I'm still awake at 3 a.m.", I've decided to say:

otrac mir se po né culoch.
[ˈɔʔ.ɾagˌmes.sə ˌpo ne ˈku.lɔʃ]
be.awake MIR DUR after two bell
I'm still awake at 3 a.m.

Except, I can't work out where to put the subject do "I". Dubarne is VSO, so it needs really to be somewhere between otrac and po, but I can't decide between putting it immediately after the main verb, after the mirative mood particle, or even after the durative aspect article.

I expect Dubarne is somewhat pro-drop, and I guess you could front do to topicalise it, but I still want a standard subject position. I'd be grateful if y'all could give advice, even just aesthetic judgements. [:D]

(hmmm maybe considering longer subjects like pietta dop "my child" might help?)
You can do both. Here is an advice however. Particles that always immediately follow the verb are hard to distinguish from suffixes, whereas particles that follow the subject, but relate to the meaning of the verb are more easily distinguished from verbal suffixes. This would be an argument for putting the subject before the particles.
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Post by Ahzoh »

eldin raigmore wrote:IM(NS)HO ordinal numbers are definitely (no pun intended) semantically similar to determiners.
Cardinal numbers OTOH are quantifiers. (If I understand correctly; I'm pretty sure I understand that correctly, but .... )

If an adjective is anything that modifies nouns and noun-phrases, then I'd think both determiners and quantifiers would count as kinds of adjectives.

If the language has gender, one would expect anything that modifies a noun, would concord with that noun's gender.

Not sure how you'd consistently get either ordinal or cardinal numbers to concord with the noun's grammatical number; nor how you'd get any kind of quantifier to concord with the noun's grammatical number.

To go by the examples of Romance languages and German determiners do, in fact, decline to concord with the noun's case, even when they come before the noun.

Is that any help? Did I miss something?
As far as Vrkhazhian goes, adjectives are modifiers of nouns and noun-phrases whose definiteness is not inherent and as such can take the definite affix while determiners are inherently definite, such as all, any, most, some, this. So cardinal numerals would be adjective-like as they're not inherently definite whereas ordinals would be determiner-like since they are inherently definite.
Furthermore, adjectives come after nouns but determiners come before nouns and while adjectives agree with nouns by gender and number in their endings, determiners have no endings.

With the above in mind, I wonder how ordinal adjectives become ordinal determiners.
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Post by Solarius »

Trebor wrote:
Frislander wrote:[A]t the end of the day you have to remember that phonological forms are in most cases completely arbitrary and have no relation to the thing being denoted. So in the end it doesn't matter one bit. Take my suggestion, or not if you prefer; flip a coin if you feel like it, because at the end of the day when it comes to choosing affix shapes, especially for highly abstract concepts like voice there's basically nothing to be said.
I second what you say here. I would only add that I would make the two suffixes more distinct. One could be -V and the other -CV, or one could be -CV and the other -VC. What happens, Solarius, when a verb root or stem ends in a vowel and is to be made passive or antipassive?
It becomes a semivowel; [ka]-->[kaj], [kaw]. I kinda like that the two forms are similar but different in this way.
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Post by Trebor »

^ Understood. That is neat how diphthongs arise, actually. And Slavic languages don't seem to be against using single vowels to mark different cases. Not to mention that if you create a daughter language where the diphthongs turn into, say, long vowels, you can end up with apophony distinguishing grammatical voices.

Now a completely off-topic issue. How much or how little pied-piping to give a conlang? Are there any guidelines to be taken into account about what types, if any, are more or less likely in natlangs with certain basic word orders, morphosyntactic alignments, areal influences, etc.?
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Post by qwed117 »

Trebor wrote:^ Understood. That is neat how diphthongs arise, actually. And Slavic languages don't seem to be against using single vowels to mark different cases. Not to mention that if you create a daughter language where the diphthongs turn into, say, long vowels, you can end up with apophony distinguishing grammatical voices.

Now a completely off-topic issue. How much or how little pied-piping to give a conlang? Are there any guidelines to be taken into account about what types, if any, are more or less likely in natlangs with certain basic word orders, morphosyntactic alignments, areal influences, etc.?
The Wikipedia article has some basic "suggestions" if you will. Stricter word order appears to be associated with greater pied-piping. I don't know if there's any further documentation beyond that though.
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Post by cedh »

Creyeditor wrote:
Jackk wrote:I'm having a bit of trouble with word order in my newest language Dubarne. To translate "I'm still awake at 3 a.m.", I've decided to say:

otrac mir se po né culoch.
[ˈɔʔ.ɾagˌmes.sə ˌpo ne ˈku.lɔʃ]
be.awake MIR DUR after two bell
I'm still awake at 3 a.m.

Except, I can't work out where to put the subject do "I". Dubarne is VSO, so it needs really to be somewhere between otrac and po, but I can't decide between putting it immediately after the main verb, after the mirative mood particle, or even after the durative aspect article.

I expect Dubarne is somewhat pro-drop, and I guess you could front do to topicalise it, but I still want a standard subject position. I'd be grateful if y'all could give advice, even just aesthetic judgements. [:D]

(hmmm maybe considering longer subjects like pietta dop "my child" might help?)
You can do both. Here is an advice however. Particles that always immediately follow the verb are hard to distinguish from suffixes, whereas particles that follow the subject, but relate to the meaning of the verb are more easily distinguished from verbal suffixes. This would be an argument for putting the subject before the particles.
Expanding on what Crey said, you could also have pronominal subjects and full noun phrase subjects appear in different positions. For instance, pronouns might appear right after the verb, but full NPs might appear after the particles.
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Post by ixals »

I am working on an a posteriori Slavic conlang at the moment and while I want it to not be very unique and outstanding, I thought about is merging the nominative and accusative cases into one, as male and neuter nouns are already the same in those cases (save animate nouns) and the adjectives also take the same suffixes in both cases a lot.

The thing is, that the accusative is different from the nominative in feminine hard a-stems (plural form are the same in every stem (and gender)), which are the majority of feminine nouns. Instead, the accusative shares the same suffix with the genitive (just like animate male nouns). But on the other hand, two other female declensions have the nominative and the accusative with the same suffix. The female r-stems (only two nouns, meaning "mother" and "daughter") have a distinct nominative, accusative and genitive, but the genitive and accusative are very similar so they could merge. Here is a table with every major declension:
Spoiler:
Image
I also have one with the adjective declension for reference:
Spoiler:
Image
The masculine and feminine plural accusative are the same concerning the adjectives but I can see masc. acc. -ʲa merging with the nominative to avoid confusion with the feminine and anological to every other plural declension in which nominative and accusative are the same. On the other hand, it feels unnatural as the accusative is the most often used case? But then, the neighbouring language is Romanian with its Nom-Acc/Dat-Gen distinction so it could be influenced by that?

So I have two questions now:

1. Do you think it would be likely/natural for the language to merge those two cases?
2. The feminine hard a-stems and r-stems distinguish nominative and accusative-genitive, the soft a-stem is a mess so far and the feminine u-stems and i-stems distinguish nominative-accusative and genitive. This resembles the Slavic inanimate/animate distinction in male nouns. With the two very common r-stems ("mother" and "daughter") being animate nouns, do you think it would be likely/natural for this language to develop an inanimate/animate distinction in female nouns as well?

It's a lot but I would be very thankful if someone could help me with this! [:D]
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