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

[Imralu]

Th/e/nk.

I meant more widespread, something found in RP and GenAm. What dialect is that though? I've seen it given with /eɪ/ in the area around New York?

Australian. And with no other crossover between /e/ and /æ/ (actually there *is* one example in the opposite direction; h/æ/llo). Both are widespread here, I didn't even realise they were non-standard pronunciations until fairly recently.

I'm Australian too and I've never heard anyone say "thenk" as far as I'm aware, although I'd probably not notice it and just assume their accent was slightly more bogan than it is. (I'm sure the same thing, working the same way, turned Cairns into /kæːnz/ because some people probably just heard the /eə/ as a boganised /æː/ and deboganised it.)

The vowel in "hello" is funny. It's usually a schwa, I guess, but it can kind of drift around. I remember finding the spelling "hullo" more logical when I was a kid, because when I stress that vowel, it's often /ʌ/, although /e/ is also common and I can imagine /æ/ easily (especially from people with the celery-salary merger) ... but interjections don't necessarily follow the phonological rules strictly. (I have a colleague who always greets me with the Frank Walker "hellooooooo").

The default, when stress shifts, is for the vowel to remain the same

That's not an option in my dialect. The closest thing would be something like conson/ɜː/ntal . But to everything you (and Arayaz) said, fair enough. I think for me, adjectives like this are always learnèd words and the pronunciation is influenced by the spelling. Speaking spontaneously, without ever having read the words "consonantal" or "triconsonantal", I think I'd naturally just say "consonant" as an attributive adjective, and if I had to make an adjective meaning "consonant-like", I'd either just say that or, informally, playfully, "consonanty", and none of that shifts the stress. Of course, it's hard to imagine what I'd say if I'm trying to imagine a world where writing has no influence on my speech. In any case, "triconsonental" sounds as weird and unnatural to me as "substential" would.

[Imralu]

I'm trying to translate a piece of my writing into Ruykkarraber, and I'm stuck, but not because of any complicated constructions, no. I'm stuck on how to derive a word for "or." Like, where does it come from? What's a basic root that could turn into it? I feel like some of my Ruykkarraber roots are a bit too non-basic themselves already ("friend," "heart," "to keep," "stable," "indentation"). So how could I get a word for "or"?

A couple of possibilities: otherwise, alternatively, (something like "other" or "alternative" and possibly some kind of adverbial marking or whatever, e.g. Swedish eller is cognate to else and alias); or alternatively, it could come from if not.

[VaptuantaDoi]

Th/e/nk.

I meant more widespread, something found in RP and GenAm. What dialect is that though? I've seen it given with /eɪ/ in the area around New York?

Australian. And with no other crossover between /e/ and /æ/ (actually there *is* one example in the opposite direction; h/æ/llo). Both are widespread here, I didn't even realise they were non-standard pronunciations until fairly recently.

I'm Australian too and I've never heard anyone say "thenk" as far as I'm aware, although I'd probably not notice it and just assume their accent was slightly more bogan than it is. (I'm sure the same thing, working the same way, turned Cairns into /kæːnz/ because some people probably just heard the /eə/ as a boganised /æː/ and deboganised it.)

I will keep an ear out and see if it's just me who says thenk or everyone around here does.

The vowel in "hello" is funny. It's usually a schwa, I guess, but it can kind of drift around. I remember finding the spelling "hullo" more logical when I was a kid, because when I stress that vowel, it's often /ʌ/, although /e/ is also common and I can imagine /æ/ easily (especially from people with the celery-salary merger) ... but interjections don't necessarily follow the phonological rules strictly. (I have a colleague who always greets me with the Frank Walker "hellooooooo").

FWIW I don't have the elbow/Albo merger; I think that's most characteristic of people from Malbourne. As for interjections, I've noticed that "yeah" and "nah" don't gain intrusive-ɹ consistently; I'd happily say [jeː əɾ ˈɪz] but [lʊː ən ˈʊːɾə] just sounds weird. So it's certainly possible "hallo" and "thank" (which is almost exclusively uttered in the interjection "thanks" to the point that the verb "thank" is pretty much inconsequential in contrast) are just random æ~e switches in interjections. (I feel like we're getting a bit off topic here)

[Imralu]

FWIW I don't have the elbow/Albo merger; I think that's most characteristic of people from Malbourne. As for interjections, I've noticed that "yeah" and "nah" don't gain intrusive-ɹ consistently; I'd happily say [jeː əɾ ˈɪz] but [lʊː ən ˈʊːɾə] just sounds weird. So it's certainly possible "hallo" and "thank" (which is almost exclusively uttered in the interjection "thanks" to the point that the verb "thank" is pretty much inconsequential in contrast) are just random æ~e switches in interjections. (I feel like we're getting a bit off topic here)

Yeah, I've noticed the same with "yeah" and "nah", as well as "ya" (unstressed "you"). I sometimes use a text to speech reader and it inserts /r/ after "nah" and it's really jarring. Hiatus occurs after these words, where it's otherwise pretty much not allowed. My mum, who's in her 70s, uses /r/ after "yeah" though and, in writing, I've seen her spell it "yair" at times too.

I guess we could also call it the cell'd/salad merger. (E.g. This cell'd be where we'd keep the salad. Such a ubiquitous sentence.)

I think going a bit off topic is permissible in this thread.

[VaptuantaDoi]

I guess we could also call it the cell'd/salad merger. (E.g. This cell'd be where we'd keep the salad. Such a ubiquitous sentence.)

Even better, the Kelly four near/California merger ("Is that Kelly number three in northern Mexico? No, that's Kelly four near California.")

[Arayaz]

Let's say a language has, among other things, breathy voiced / murmured stops. In addition, it has plain tenuis stops, voiceless aspirated stops, and what I've called "extra-aspirated," or, say, /kʰh/, with extra aspiration or an /h/ following it.

If the murmured stops apply breathy voice to a following vowel, but the plain aspirated stops don't, would it be reasonable to say that the extra-aspirated stops apply breathy voice, or would that be unnaturalistic somehow?

Also, is tenseness in onsets (e.g. geminates) associated with higher tone? If so, what would happen with a tense voiced onset?

[Imralu]

Even better, the Kelly four near/California merger ("Is that Kelly number three in northern Mexico? No, that's Kelly four near California.")

Nah, too many other phonemes differ too, as well as the stress pattern.
/ˌkeliˈfɔːˌnɪə/
/ˌkæləˈfɔːnjə/

[VaptuantaDoi]

Even better, the Kelly four near/California merger ("Is that Kelly number three in northern Mexico? No, that's Kelly four near California.")

Nah, too many other phonemes differ too, as well as the stress pattern.
/ˌkeliˈfɔːˌnɪə/
/ˌkæləˈfɔːnjə/

Minor quibbles. (To be fair I also have an extra syllable in California, but who's counting anyway?)

[lurker]

What sounds more "natural"?

Commonthroat verbs can be turned into nouns simply by affixing a nominal deictic suffix. What I'm struggling with is what the resulting noun means. I want to get as much utility out of the feature as possible, to have as many doors open for compact, laconic expression as possible.

For example <lPr> means "climb". I can turn it into a noun by adding a deictic suffix, the lemma for nouns is the 3rd person indefinite form in <-g>.

So would <lPrg> mean an act of climbing or would it make more sense for it to mean a climber?

I already have a feature that lets one quickly identify something simply by stating an inflected noun. <sgHqg> is "grass", and you can say "that is grass" by simply inflecting it in the 3rd person distal form <sgHqp>. If nominalizing the verb turns it into an agent noun, then one could say <lPrp> "That is a climber", or even <lPrg> "There is a climber". Making it refer to an instance of the action or state, or the action or state generally, might not yield the same quick means of expression I'm looking for. <lPrg> "a climb".

Thoughts?

[Imralu]

Minor quibbles. (To be fair I also have an extra syllable in California, but who's counting anyway?)

The whole point of naming mergers is that you name two words that actually merge, if possible, like "caught/cot". Sometimes it's not, like "father/bother" (I guess "khan/con" would work, but it's a bit niche), but there's already a perfect one with celery/salary.

[Imralu]

So would <lPrg> mean an act of climbing or would it make more sense for it to mean a climber?

It's very typical among natlangs (on Earth anyway ) for the most basic nominal derivation from a verb to be either a gerund (the general name of the action) or a noun indicating an event of the action.

Personally, however, I like it when verbs are also their own agent nouns and nouns are all agent nouns of an identical verb and there's no difference. The way virtually all of my recent conlangs work is that there is no lexical distinction between classes of nouns and verbs. Every content word is both a verb and it's agent noun. Another way that can be expressed is that every content word is both a noun and its "be + [noun]" phrase. Looking at it either way, this is the same relationship and can be applied across the whole lexicon, making it impossible to identify different lexical categories corresponding to noun and verb (although the syntactic categories of predicates and arguments are clearly defined).

In my language Balog, the syntactic position can only be either of (1) predicate (unmarked) or (2) subject (marked by a subject marking clitic and positioned following its predicate). (There are no objects. Multiple clauses are needed to express transitivity.) The subject marker I'm going to use in my examples is aii= (in most cases, it causes a following consonant to geminate, shortening the vowel, unless gemination is blocked), which indicates that the subject is an unknown (and thus unrankable) entity that is not regarded as sentient.

No matter the semantics of the word, whether "nouny" or "verby", you always get a self-evident sentence if you use the same contentive phrase in the subject and the predicate.

For example, the content word miyan in Balog means "ascend" or "one who/that which ascends".

Miyan aimmiyan. "A thing that ascends ascends."

To express an act of ascending, the derivational infix -iŋ- is added. Miŋiyan thus both means "be an act of ascending" and just "an act of ascending".

Miŋiyan aimmiŋiyan. "An act of ascending is an act of ascending."

A more gerund-like meaning (naming the entire action/state generically rather than indicating an instance of it) is achieved by preceding the content word with le.

Le miyan aille miyan. "Ascending is ascending." / "To ascend is to ascend."

Other example sentences.

Man aimman. "A thing that's high is high."
Le man aille man. "Being high is being high." / "To be high is to be high."
Ban aibban. "A house is a house."
Lu ban aillu ban. "Something that is at a house is at a house."
Le liyu ban aille liyu ban. "Arriving at a house is arriving at a house."
Žuwel aižžuwel. "A teacher is a teacher." / "One who teaches teaches."
Žihuwel aižžihuwel. "A teacher is a teacher." (-ih- in this instance indicates that it is their customary role, thus explicitly indicating profession)

In Balog, none of the derivational processes (e.g. INCEP -iy-; EVENT -iŋ-; GER le; LOC lu; CUSTOMARY.ACTION/STATE -ih-) change part of speech. (There are no other contentive parts of speech that it could possibly change anything into). The possible distribution of each root and any words derived from it is the same*. The derivational processes only change the semantics, but regardless of these each contentive phrase can function as a verb and its agent noun / a noun and the same noun plus "be", depending on whether it appears in a subject or a predicate.

So if you went down the road that starts by making <lPrg> mean "a climber"), your -g suffix could essentially be a non-predicative marker (possibly one of a big set), applied to mark arguments and removed for predicates. Personally, I like this kind of thing, but it's not really a popular strategy used by natlangs, which tend to keep discrete classes of nouns and verbs and require different strategies for each to make the kind of self-evident sentences as above.

*There are a few exceptions among very short, pronouny content words such as ž, where the consonant-only form is generally only used preceded by a subject marking clitic and, when it appears in the predicate, it requires number marking to "beef it up" a bit. E.g. "I am me" could be Žan oož, but the symmetrical Ž'oož (with the predicate consisting of only the first ž is unnatural) and žan ožžan, with singular marking in subject and predicate emphasises the singularity, more like "I alone am me". There are also some other single-consonant content words that are generally only used in predicates, such as g "cause", so among these very short roots, there is a distinction in distribution a lot of the time and this could be seen as a part of speech. To me though, it only feels about as dramatic as the distinctions between the small number of adjectives that are only predicative or only attributive.

I'm very tired, so I've possibly expressed this very poorly.

[Khemehekis]

It is extremely creepy to make us stalk people from somewhere else who don't know us, and whom we don't know.

To call it "stalking" is a form of auxesis, at the very least. We're not putting webcams into their rooms, we're not looking them up on the Net and no one's doxxing them, we're just reading things they wrote on another forum.

Did you ask them before taking their words and reposting them elsewhere on the internet without any context?

Unfortunately, I was not able to attain their permission, as neither the male nor the female poster has signed into that forum for many years. That forum is dying, and has been moribund for a good number of years. They and so many others have basically abandoned it, so I've lost any touch with them.

It's disturbing thinking you may be doing the same thing to us.

I've never copy-and-pasted something from the CBB elsewhere, although I have shared a link in my family emails to the conversation in the spam thread wherein I discussed getting my fillings out, and to the thread wherein we celebrated Kankonian's twentieth and twenty-fifth birthdays back when Kankonian turned 25. You don't have a problem with that, do you?

Is it even legal, given that their posts are copyright

When I was on the Fourth Turning board, all the posts were legally the property of the authors, Neil Howe and the late William Strauss, not copyright of their respective authors. How do you know this other forum states that all posts are the copyright of their respective authors?

and you're not really commenting on them or using them educationally (what's your free use exception here?) and there is no public interest exemption here

I left the post posted before I was finished, but I've left my commentary now. Seeing as the post was submitted at 2:41 p.m. Pacific Coast Time (DST), I think I know why. That was around the time I was called to lunch. Later that evening, I worked on an unrelated project and didn't finish until 1:40 a.m. the next day. All the eleventh I was extremely tired. Then on Tuesday, I rode with Stan Man, went shopping at TJ Maxx with Christina, got migraine aura, had to come home early, recovered, ate dinner, and had an early shower. I finally discovered your reaction (which reminded me that I hadn't completed my post) when I signed into the CBB, but when I was planning to finish, my computer (which is an old one) got very slow, and then with God as my witness the screen turned all black1 I turned off my computer until it got better. Anyway, I have a lot of thoughts on it posted now. (Unfortunately, my post is on the previous page of the Conlangs Q&A Thread, so most of you have likely missed it. Now's a good time as any to check it out.)

I also don't really understand the motivation, since we don't know these people, so using them as illustrations to demonstrate an already well-known point (that could have been illustrated with more well-known examples, if really necessary) seems weird to me, no offence.

Question: What are some other "more well-known examples"? I don't know of any (it's never happened to me myself), aside from one girl who wrote on Prodigy High back in the nineties when Prodigy was a thing. She said her character Kelly often "acts in ways I can't control". I know it happens often, since it's discussed in the Complete Idiot's Guide, but in any event, it doesn't seem weird to me when these (amateur) writers are the best examples I know of offhand.

[Omzinesý]

How do you develop consonant clusters? I have always found it problematic.

Do you just table all three consonant combinations possible with the consonant inventory and decide which ones you like?
Do you just have some kind of intuition?
Do you read a grammar of some native American language and copy its clusters?

[Arayaz]

How do you develop consonant clusters? I have always found it problematic.

Vowel loss? I don't know what you're asking.

[Omzinesý]

How do you develop consonant clusters? I have always found it problematic.

Vowel loss? I don't know what you're asking.

Was it really that badly formulated!
You make a conlang, how do you make the clusters?

[Salmoneus]

As Arayaz says, the obvious answer is vowel loss. /dakata/ > /dakta/, etc.

A rarer option is fortition of glides, which can originate in vowels or through excrescence: /daita/ > /dakta/, or /dat_ja/ > /dakta/

It's also possible to have direct decomposition - a labial-velar stop could become a cluster of a labial and a velar.

Alternatively, you could just ignore the question and say that the clusters predate the oldest stratum that you intend to bother with.

[Omzinesý]

How do you develop consonant clusters? I have always found it problematic.

Do you just table all three consonant combinations possible with the consonant inventory and decide which ones you like?
Do you just have some kind of intuition?
Do you read a grammar of some native American language and copy its clusters?

Apparently I just cannot formulate it.

How do you, as a conlanger, come up with the consonant clusters in your lang? This is not a linguistic question. I'm just asking the methodology of your conlanging.

The clusters in my langs are eithet very SAE or they don't exist.

[Reyzadren]

^List clusters that are not SAE. Then, compare and decide whether they are suitable for your lang.

My conlang's consonant clusters seem SAE, but I can pronounce them and I don't care even if anyone laughs at me/them.

[LinguistCat]

When I make conlangs that have clusters, I just kinda go with what sounds good or derive them from a proto-lang using the tips above so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ but I've mostly been focusing on my Japanlang for cats, so I'm not sure how much help that is.

[Creyeditor]

How do you develop consonant clusters? I have always found it problematic.

Do you just table all three consonant combinations possible with the consonant inventory and decide which ones you like?
Do you just have some kind of intuition?
Do you read a grammar of some native American language and copy its clusters?

Apparently I just cannot formulate it.

How do you, as a conlanger, come up with the consonant clusters in your lang? This is not a linguistic question. I'm just asking the methodology of your conlanging.

The clusters in my langs are eithet very SAE or they don't exist.

For general tendencies you can look at the Sonority Sequencing Principle and the Syllable Contact Law. Of course exceptions to these make a conlang more 'interesting' in a way.
I usually think of onset clusters and coda clusters first, the combination of which give me my medial clusters. Then I exclude some of the medial clusters I don't like.