Conlang Year [a bit late]

[Arayaz]

https://www.quothalinguist.com

A whole month has gone by, but perhaps we could still make a thread for it here on the CBB!

We do still have 11 months left, there's plenty of time for catchup. I say we should make one.

Well, here we are! Daily prompts can be found on https://www.quothalinguist.com.

[Arayaz]

Conlang Year Day 37: Explore romanization strategies.

The phonology of modern Izre is:

/p b t d k g/
/ts dz tʃ dʒ/
/f v s z ʃ x ɣ/
/m n ŋ/
/w r j/

(and the allophonic consonants /pf bv kx/)

/i y u/
/ɛ œ ɔ/

/iə yə uə/
/ɛə œə ɔə/

plus low/high register tone

The consonants aren't too tough to romanize, since there's no phonemic or allophonic /h/. I can just do /tʃ dʒ ʃ ɣ j ŋ/ <ch j sh gh y ng>, nothing out of the ordinary.

Acute accent for high tone should work fine, and umlauts for the front rounded vowels. As for the schwa offglide, I'll romanize that <a>.

This gets me the following spellings for my words:

Spoiler:

bech
duje
dzear
dzeare
dzing
dzitsé
dzur
dzür
ede
ghots
izre
jok
jók
kóx
kxedze
kxítkó
kxoa
kxoj
kxosh
kxot
kxut
móm
ném
nüs
ók
ów
reashe
rét
rodz
tsear
tses
tséts
tsise
tsuwo
yéa

which I'm pretty happy with.

[_Just_A_Sketch]

I've already shown of my romanization alongside the phonology in the thread for my conlang year language family, the Awloyan Languages, but I'll go into more detail here.

Here is the phonology from that thread:
/m m: n n: ɲ ɲ:/ m mm n nn nh nnh
/b p: d t: ɟ c: g k:/ b p d t j c g k
/β β: z z: ʝ ʝ: ɣ ɣ:/ bh bb z zz jh jj gh gg
/lʷ l l: ʎ ʎ:/ lw l ll lh llh
/w j/ w y

/i i: y:~ʉ: u u:/ i ii ü u uu
/e e: ø:~ɵ: o o:/ e ee ö o oo
/ai̯ ä au̯/ ai a au

I chose to romanize /ɲ/ and /ʎ/ like in Portuguese by adding an <h> to the alveolar equivalent. The palatal stops are also pretty straightforward, with <c> and <j> for /c:/ and /ɟ/. What I'm the most split on is romanizing the obstruents. Diachronically, the fricatives result from voiced stops and the stops result from voiceless stops (short voiceless stops became short voiced, geminated voiceless stops stayed the same). So I could take the history into account and get this:
/b p: d t: ɟ c: g k:/ p pp t tt c cc k kk
/β β: z z: ʝ ʝ: ɣ ɣ:/ b bb z zz j jj g gg
Or I could continue using the current romanization:
/b p: d t: ɟ c: g k:/ b p d t j c g k
/β β: z z: ʝ ʝ: ɣ ɣ:/ bh bb z zz jh jj gh gg
I'm still not completely set on either so any advice is very appreciated.
Another thing of note is choosing <bh> for /β/ rather than <v>. There's not much reasoning for this, I just find <bh> more aesthetically pleasing. Last for the consonants is the romanization of digraphs. I use two different strategies for this. With the sonorants, I double the first grapheme and only have one <h>, and with the fricatives I double the first grapheme and drop the <h>. I chose to do this because the geminate fricatives remain distinct when only their first grapheme is doubled so the <h> is unnecessary. Olwöa does not feature any consonant clusters so the digraphs are unambiguous.

The vowel romanization is quite straightforward. I'm also fine with using <ue> <oe> in place of <ü> and <ö>. Olwöa features a lot of vowel hiatus, so when two vowels need to be shown as separate an apostrophe is placed between them. For example <mai> would be /mai̯/ but <ma'i> would be /ma.i/.

I believe that covers it. I'm excited to see what everyone else makes this year.

[_Just_A_Sketch]

Conlang Year Day 40
Awloya and Olwöa will both be head final, with APV or SV word order and ergative-absolutive alignment.

Here are several clause templates:
Transitive verb + inanimate agentt: "Baza laibe ghan" - tree flower have
Transitive verb + animate agent: "Aigo mau emma" - bird plant eat
Intransitive verb + inanimate subject: "Jen jedal" - rock stay
Intransitive verb + animate subject: "Jhooe bhülha" - mammal sleep

[Arayaz]

Conlang Year Days 39/40

Basically the same thing both days, so:

Much as it pains me, I'm going to do pure nom/acc here...
Word order is probably just SVO, with some shuffling permitted, and head-initial lightly preferred.

[_Just_A_Sketch]

Conlang Year Days 43-46
These last few days have been focused on deciding what features are marked on nouns and how they're marked. Due to the similar theming I am grouping these days together into one post.
For Awloya I've decided to make nouns relatively simple. Nouns in Awloya are only marked for plurality, which is shown by reduplicating the onset and nucleus of the final syllable. Definiteness is not marked, but demonstratives can be used to fulfill a similar role. Case is also unmarked, with the ergative and absolutive cases being shown syntactically and additional cases requiring postpositions.
In Olwöa, the demonstratives and postpositions could become affixes on the noun.