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

[Creyeditor]

I think it's important to distinguish between phonological length and phonetic duration. If you have vowels with two different distinctive and contrastive phonetic durations, you have a phonological difference between long and short vowels. Phonologically, there is no half-long without long.
The actual phonetic duration differences vary drastically depending on the speech tempo, speaker, and extralinguistic and linguistic context (in natlangs at least). Nevertheless, if you average these out, natlangs still vary in the duration ratios between phonologicalky long and short vowels. Some are really 1:2, some are 1:1.5 and others are closer to 1:1.25.
tl;dr: Yes, it could be phonemic, but watch out for terminological pitfalls.

[Omzinesý]

One of my conlangs has a phonemic distinction between short and long vowels. The thing that is unusual about it is that the language doesn't have any true long vowels at all. Rather, the "long vowels" are realized closer to half-long.

Thus, while native speakers can tell short and long vowels apart easily, foreigners have a much harder time.

What are your thoughts on this? Would this be something that could be phonemic, or would a short vs half long be more allophonic?

Creyeditor said everything important!

I read a grammar of Hungarian in Finnish, and it said something like "Finnish long vowels are around 2,5 of the duration of short vowels, but Hungarian long vowels are just 1,5 of the short vowels, so Hungarian long vowels may sound short to Finnish speakers."
But to say this, you have to have a metalanguage to compare with.

[Arayaz]

If I'm doing diachronic sound changes for a conworld, how many sound changes might be expected in, say, a 150-year period? How much time would there be between them? If colonization of an island happened 300 years ago, how much will the island's language have diverged from the mainland?

[Salmoneus]

For the first two questions, there's no good answer, I'm afraid. For three reasons:

1. sound changes don't really 'happen' - as in, suddenly occur. Instead, they develop gradually, and often at different speeds in different places or social groups. Many sound changes are happening simultaneously; many of those will never actually come to fruition and will be reversed before they fully 'happen'. The 'rate' of change is often a reflection of changes in what constitutes the 'standard' language... but that's a primarily political issue. If a province rebels, its standard may change extremely rapidly in just a few weeks, but that doesn't really reflect changes in how people actually speak. [the problem here is that languages themselves - as in how people actually speak - don't really exist]

2. sound changes aren't really countable. There's two reasons for that: one is that because they're gradual processes occuring simultaneously, it's not possible to objectively say which specific changes are examples of the same 'sound change' and which are different. If /a/ becomes /e/ before /i/, /j/ or a fricative, is that one sound change, or two, or three? The other reason is that every phonemic change is a change of the entire phonemic system. Let's take an example. Your language has two allophonic rules: intervocalic consonants voice, and open syllable vowels lengthen - so /kota/ = [ko:da], but /kot/ still = [kot]. Now, final vowels are lost. So those words are /ko:d/ and /kot/. How many sound changes have happened? One, the loss of final vowels? Or three? The problem is, the allophonic voicing and lengthening may have been there for a thousand years before the loss of final vowels, so it feels misleading to say three changes have suddenly happened. And of course sometimes the allophonic rule remains, and is not phonemicised (i.e. /kot/ = [kot] because it's now a closed syllable) - shoul we say that only change has happened then, or three? And of course consonant voicing and vowel length are not unrelated, and in this scenario they're distributed in tandem, so maybe we should call it /ko:t/ or /kod/ and say that there's only been two changes, not three. And what if there's sometimes an epenthetic final vowel - eg before a consoannt? Has no sound change happened, then? And yet the speech may sound very different.

All we can really say is "at this time, the most elegant way to describe the phonemic system is THIS", and then "and this other time, the most elegant description is probably now THIS". The "sound changes" that link one system to the next are really just the analysts' most elegant way of moving from one system to the next; "it's AS THOUGH these precise changes have happened in this specific order". The reality is usually more complicated.


3. the variation is immense. There are languages that are still basically intelligible with forms from two thousand years earlier; there are languages that are barely intelligible with forms from 100 years earlier. Even if you take one language, the rate of change is highly variable, partly because there's no equivalency between changes (you can have a language undergo 100 changes of the kind "/u/ becomes /y/ following an alveolar when the following syllable contains a front vowel and the intervening consonant is not a labial" and less 'change' will have happened than with a single change of the kind "all unstressed vowels are deleted").

Take English. If you listened to someone from 1700, you'd have almost no difficulty understanding them (phonemically, that is; lexicon may be another matter). If you listen to someone using a 1600 asset, which you can do fairly easily (i.e. Shakespeare in the original language) it's a little tougher because of a few weird vowels here and there but you'll soon get the hang of it. But if you go back just a few centuries more, before the Great Vowel Shift, you'll be extremely confused. And somebody speaking English in 1000 (i.e. Old English) would have been completely bamboozled by someone speaking English from aroudn 1400 (i.e. Late Middle English), and vice versa - far, far, far more confused than you would be listening to Shakespeare. Because rather than a gradual drip of equally-important changes, English history is actually characterised by a small number of massive shifts (often with one change driving another).


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Having said that, what does it mean in practical terms? Well, who knows, to be honest.

English and American English diverged something like 300 years ago and are barely different. But that was a time of little change in general, and the divergence wasn't immediate and complete (people always kept sailing from one to the other - a big part of why ports like Boston and New York sound more 'English' than the rest of the continent, as they continued to import the latest linguistic fashions).

On the other hand, if a group of Old English people had accidentally sailed to Patagonia in 900, perhaps by 1200 their language and that in England would have been completely mutually incomprehensible.

Look at how quickly some Austonesian languages have become incomprehensible to one another.

But in general I'd guess that a large population of people not intentionally being weird would, in 150 years, develop only a few significant changes, and that in 300 years there'd be enough divergence to be clearly recognisable but not enough to imperil mutual intelligibility. Then again, even a small change can make speech unintelligible if you're not familiar with the change - sometimes no change at all can do that! [two dialects can be phonemically identical, yet almost unintelligible thanks to unfamiliar phonetic values, particularly of vowels]. Most conlangers probably overestimate how many changes they need.

Sorry, I'm not being intentionally unhelpful.

I'd suggest looking at the sort of soudn changes that have happened in a language in a similar situation to the one you're thinking about, to get a feel for how quickly it seems to change.

[Arayaz]

Thank you! I knew there was a bit of variation, but it seems to be a lot more varied than I thought! So pretty much any rate of change would be justified?

[Salmoneus]

I think I'd say... technically, sort of yes, but in practice... probably no.

My impression is that within a context similar to, say, Europe, when you find a very high 'rate of change', you're either going to be looking at:

- something descibed as a lot of small changes but that's really a single bigger thing reflected in lots of different ways (i.e. a complicated thing is happening that is hard to describe without invoking lots of little rules). Something like, say, a process of conditioned umlaut can come out looking like a whole mess of changes, counter-changes, different conditioned changes, but is really just one thing going on. Likewise something like "a tendency toward intervocalic lenition" or "tending to make words have exactly three morae if possible" are in one sense just one thing, but in another sense may involve large numbers of little surface-level rules

- something that's really lots of changes happening over a period of time, but being made to look like they're happening really suddenly and all at once because some other change has happened. So to go back to an example I used but to relate to my own conlangs: at one point in the history of my germanic conlang, there's a rule "final unstressed low vowels are dropped". This can happen very quickly, in a generation even, because a number of allophonic developments have been going on that mean that those vowels have very low load by themselves. But when those vowels do finally drop, a whole load of those allophonic things become phonemic changes overnight. So there's vowel lengthening, fortition/lenition of consonants, and vowel attraction and breaking (because there were two low vowels and the back low vowel pulled vowels down and backward and broke long vowels into diphthongs). So if changes are written out in their 'correct', phonemic place, it looks as though a whole load of changes suddenly just happened in a decade or two, radically transforming the language. But actually all that happened on the ground was that a vestigial unstressed final vowel was finally dropped entirely.

- something relatively small and simple has happened that just has a disproportionate effect on comprehensibility in the language. The loss or reduction of unstressed syllables wrought havoc on Old English, for instance. The raising of long vowels (and breaking of the highest) totally changed the sound of Middle English (effectively making it Modern English).


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In general, I'd expect very little to actually happen in 300 years, let alone in 150 years. However, any given 150 years might happen to be the time when one of the above sorts of things happens to happen.


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You should also think about why rates may differ. Total isolation tends to produce much more change than only partial separation. Paradoxically, it's usually said to be high-population centres that have the fastest linguistic change... but isolated rural areas (mountains and islands) can stack those changes more effectively, creating faster divergence between related languages (because the changes don't all spread).

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And bear in mind non-phonological reasons for change. Lexical change is a huge issue, whether due to borrowing or due to some other factor (like taboo deformation, which has been a cataclysmically huge factor for some languages).

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However, I'm caveating all of this because I don't know enough about historical sound change in, for instance, Austronesian or Sino-Tibetan, where huge variety has been produced much more quickly than in a European setting. Is this just a case of similar rates of change producing more diversity due to isolation between varieties, or have rates of change actually been faster in some cases? I don't know. Maybe someone else here does?


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So I guess I'm saying: I can't rule out any rate of change, but I also don't want to be encouraging people to just apply faster and faster rates of change in their conlangs, because in general I think the rate of change is usually slower than conlangers would like it to be, and most of us could do with toning it down rather than speeding it up (myself definitely included).

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Finally, I'd just say: it can be hard to judge the real rate of change by looking at rules, without actually looking at texts. You can write out pages of changes, and then actually apply them to a text and realise it's basically the same - your changes were minor, or only applied rarely. Contrariwise, you can find that applying one or two changes makes something look totally different. I find this particularly striking with future Englishes, where we can judge intelligibility more easily. Several times i've applied what I thought were quite drastic sound changes to English only to think... wait, that's just modern English with a slightly different accent! But contrariwise I've sometimes thrown in one or two more changes and then suddenly you can't even tell it's related to English anymore...


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Post-finally: I'd suggest finding languages like yours, in similar situations, and looking at what changes happened in them and how quickly.

[Creyeditor]

However, I'm caveating all of this because I don't know enough about historical sound change in, for instance, Austronesian or Sino-Tibetan, where huge variety has been produced much more quickly than in a European setting. Is this just a case of similar rates of change producing more diversity due to isolation between varieties, or have rates of change actually been faster in some cases? I don't know. Maybe someone else here does?

Isolation was usually given as the standard answer for Austronesian, especially Oceanic, in 'the olden days' but nowadays Vanuatu is usually given as a counterexample because languages diverged rapidly even though speaker communities were in constant contact and often on one and the same Island. The standard explanation is that language is the main feature of social identity in this setting which tends to overemphasize differences. IIRC, this has been called emblematic use of language. Alex François has worked on this a lot if anyone wants to read up on it.

[Salmoneus]

Thank you! That actually is a better answer!

This is kind of what I was hinting at when I mentioned "people not being intentionally weird" as a caveat - I kind of suspected that in some of these languages people must have been, as it were, intentionally fucking with people.

We can see this phenomenon in English in youth slang, and in its more developed form in historical subcultural languages/codes, such as Cant (a code language spoken by criminals and the underclass) and Polari (a code language spoken by gay people and actors, which takes some of its words from Cant). We could also include the slang used by the Victorian military (with heavy borrowing from Hindustani), and cockney rhyming slang (a language game).

I'm not suggest all divergent languages are actually such extreme and intentional language games. But I guess the point to remember is that a language shift is ultimately defined not by a change in time, but by a splitting in identity: a meaningful shift in a language separates those who use it from those who don't (and sometimes even from those who can't understand it). This can cause divisions within social groups, dividing people on the basis of age, or geography, or class, or occupation, or ethnicity, etc.

Generally language communities actively 'repair' their society by continually finding consensus that builds bridges of understanding between different parts of society. Sometimes it doesn't, or can't, and then languages split in two. But sometimes, and I suspect this is what we may be looking at in some parts of Austronesian, sometimes parts of the community actively try to break up the community by encouraging accelerated language change that more completely divides the in-group from the out-group.

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That said, the other thing that has to be remembered with Vanuatu is that we can assume that these languages all had a non-Austronesian substrate - and although we conventionally call this 'Papuan', Papuan itself is already insanely varied. It may be that the South Vanuatu languages arrived and were strongly influenced by 500 fully-differentiated native languages already present, and that this is at least of why these languages are so weird. On the other hand, maybe this trend toward "emblematic" language was itself something absorbed from the substrate, given the insane variety of Papuan and particular variety of Austronesian languages spoken in Papuan and near-Papuan areas...

[LinguistCat]

Isolation was usually given as the standard answer for Austronesian, especially Oceanic, in 'the olden days' but nowadays Vanuatu is usually given as a counterexample because languages diverged rapidly even though speaker communities were in constant contact and often on one and the same Island. The standard explanation is that language is the main feature of social identity in this setting which tends to overemphasize differences. IIRC, this has been called emblematic use of language. Alex François has worked on this a lot if anyone wants to read up on it.

While not part of the main conversation, this actually helps me a lot with a project I've been working on, so I'll look for papers by Alex François in the future.

[Creyeditor]

Feel free to PM me if you have any further questions or problems on the way

[LinguoFranco]

So, my current project has no grammatical tense. Time is marked via a combination of particles, mood, and aspect. However, despite having to tense marking, verbs are still conjugated for aspect and mood.

Is this too weird?

[Knox Adjacent]

No?

[DesEsseintes]

So, my current project has no grammatical tense. Time is marked via a combination of particles, mood, and aspect. However, despite having to tense marking, verbs are still conjugated for aspect and mood.

Is this too weird?

It is not at all weird. Many languages have more developed aspectual systems than tense systems. Your lang sounds somewhat similar to the Sinitic languages as well as those SEA languages I’m familiar with (Thai and Vietnamese). Mandarin for instance has fairly well-developed aspect marking but no grammaticalised tense marking.

No?

Is this meant to be sarcastic, or are you not sure of what you’re saying?

[Knox Adjacent]

I wouldn't read too much into question marks, myself.

[LinguoFranco]

So, my current project has no grammatical tense. Time is marked via a combination of particles, mood, and aspect. However, despite having to tense marking, verbs are still conjugated for aspect and mood.

Is this too weird?

It is not at all weird. Many languages have more developed aspectual systems than tense systems. Your lang sounds somewhat similar to the Sinitic languages as well as those SEA languages I’m familiar with (Thai and Vietnamese). Mandarin for instance has fairly well-developed aspect marking but no grammaticalised tense marking.

No?

Is this meant to be sarcastic, or are you not sure of what you’re saying?

Well, the conlang, while aspect prominent, marks them on the verb via conjugation rather than as particles. So verbs still conjugate for aspect, just not for tense.

[Knox Adjacent]

Still the case a system is fine just because the morphological boundaries have changed?

[Salmoneus]

Since I was looking this up anyway, here's the WALS stats, where 'aspect' means a morphological perfective/imperfective distinction:


Languages with tense and aspect: 76
(of which, 28 have a past but no future, 19 have a future but no past, and 29 have both a past and a future)
(and of which, 40 have some form of perfect, while 36 do not)

Languages with tense but no aspect, but some form of perfect: 40
(of which, 15 have p but not f, 12 have f but no p, and 13 have both)

Languages with tense, no aspect, and no form of perfect: 48
(of which, 15 have p but no f, 14 have f but no p, and 19 have both)

Languages with aspect but no tense: 22
(of which 18 have no perfect and 4 do)

Langauges with no aspect, no tense, and no form of perfect: 12

Note that these "perfect" constructions will mostly be periphrastic. There may also be some double marking (some morphological perfects may also be counted as past tenses and/or perfective aspects).

Clearly possession of perfect constructions is strongly linked to having a morphological past tense.
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A few geographical observations:

The rare languages with no tense, no aspect, and no perfect are semi-randomly scattered - 3 in north america, 3 in south america, 2 in africa, 4 in east and southeast asia.

However, the languages with no tense, no morphological aspect, but some form of perfect construction are very tightly clustered in southeast asia; this is clearly a regional fashion (it appears in austrasiatic, austronesian and sinotibetan). And the only two outliers are also nearby - one in taiwan and one in new guinea.

Languages with tense but no aspect seem to be less (less conclusively) clustered in northern europe, india and east africa (where they have perfects), and austronesia and south america (where they don't), but there are also other scattered around (quite a few of both types in north america).

Languages with aspect but no tense are present in Sinitic and Austronesian, and in small clusters in the Pacific Northwest and Central America. But there's also a number of them scattered through Africa, in every language family. [the small subset that do have a perfect construction seem to be randomly distributed among this class]

Languages with both tense and aspect are found everywhere else, and are particularly dominant in a band from Portugal to the border of China - what you could call the Romano-Persian belt. Within these, the distribution of languages with perfects seems mostly fairly random, but there are a few clear clusters: a lack of perfects in India and central asia, in west africa and in south africa, compared to a predominance of perfects in the americas.

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So, long story short: having morphological aspect but not tense is unusual, and geographically somewhat constricted on Earth, but isn't rare, and is dispersed enough that it's not JUST a single regional or genealogical effect (unlike languages with neither tense nor aspect). Such languages probably won't have any perfect construction either.

[Creyeditor]

Only tangentially related but a recent semantic-typological-fieldwork paper claims that many languages that have been described as having a past tense or perfective aspect actually have a past perfective tense/aspect combined and that many languages actually have a resultative or experiental marker instead of a perfect (tense/aspect/?).
https://www.mdpi.com/2226-471X/7/2/148. YMMV.

[Omzinesý]

This is one of the easy how to romanize question.

This is my newest consonant inventory. It has both ɾ and ɹ. How to romanize them? My first idea was <r> for ɾ and <đ> for ɹ, but adding a diachritic for glottalization above <đ> is not very elegant. The diachritic could be <^> I think.

consonants:
p t k ʔ
b d g
ɾ ɟ
s h
ɹ j w
ɹ̰ j̰ w̰

[zyma]

This is one of the easy how to romanize question.

This is my newest consonant inventory. It has both ɾ and ɹ. How to romanize them? My first idea was <r> for ɾ and <đ> for ɹ, but adding a diachritic for glottalization above <đ> is not very elegant. The diachritic could be <^> I think.

consonants:
p t k ʔ
b d g
ɾ ɟ
s h
ɹ j w
ɹ̰ j̰ w̰

I'd probably use <z> for /ɹ/ and <ẑ> for /ɹ̰/, personally. <l> could be another option.