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

[Salmoneus]

I guess that from a 'semantic' point of view, you could look at logical operators. In particular, if you consider the operation of implication in different logics, and the inverses ('given that', etc), it'll give you possibilities.

It's probably more useful to think about pragmatics, though - about information structure, foregrounding and backgrounding, new and old information, surprising and unsurprising information, illocutionary force and so on.

[Pabappa]

I'd be interested in this too, as I've reworked the conjunctions and particles of all of my languages lately, and I'm still kind of just messing around. As a fallback, Play has a morpheme -(v)e that turns any content word into a subordinating
conjunction, with meaning like "having an X of [whatever follows]". And Dreamlandic has -si with the same function, though it's often worn down to nothing through sound change and has mostly yielded its function to analytic constructions.

One thing Im currently doing in Play is having "if .... then" and "because .... (therefore)" distinguished only by a mood marker on the first clause.

Another is having polarity morphemes that often would translate to nothing in English; they set the listener's expectations, that's all. Might be helpful in a mostly-SOV language like Play where the verbal negation is often the last word in the sentence. But there's also a positive polarity marker and probably others with mixed truth values.

AND+NOT is a good one to have.

There might be conjunctions corresponding to what some languages use noun cases for. For example, how about a benefactive subordinating conjunction? English uses "for", though it's not bound exclusively to that use.

[Kesshin]

This is something new in Daas I added to avoid excessively long /ɑ::/ and /ɛ::/
Vowel Repetition Due to Affixes:
Two a’s: the second “a” becomes “e”.
Two e’s: second “e” becomes “a”
Isn't this technically vowel harmony?

[Arayaz]

This is something new in Daas I added to avoid excessively long /ɑ::/ and /ɛ::/
Vowel Repetition Due to Affixes:
Two a’s: the second “a” becomes “e”.
Two e’s: second “e” becomes “a”
Isn't this technically vowel harmony?

No. I'd call it vocalic dissimilation; vowel harmony is a process of vocalic assimilation. That is, in vowel harmony, the vowels in a word must have some feature in common (e.g. frontedness; this is an oversimplified version, but it's just for clarification purposes); in your system, when two vowels come in a row, one of them changes to be less like the other. So no, it's not vowel harmony.

[Flavia]

This is something new in Daas I added to avoid excessively long /ɑ::/ and /ɛ::/
Vowel Repetition Due to Affixes:
Two a’s: the second “a” becomes “e”.
Two e’s: second “e” becomes “a”
Isn't this technically vowel harmony?

This is called dissimilation. Vowel harmony involves assimilation and is generally larger in scope than a single hiatus.

[Kesshin]

This is something new in Daas I added to avoid excessively long /ɑ::/ and /ɛ::/
Vowel Repetition Due to Affixes:
Two a’s: the second “a” becomes “e”.
Two e’s: second “e” becomes “a”
Isn't this technically vowel harmony?

No. I'd call it vocalic dissimilation; vowel harmony is a process of vocalic assimilation. That is, in vowel harmony, the vowels in a word must have some feature in common (e.g. frontedness; this is an oversimplified version, but it's just for clarification purposes); in your system, when two vowels come in a row, one of them changes to be less like the other. So no, it's not vowel harmony.

This is called dissimilation. Vowel harmony involves assimilation and is generally larger in scope than a single hiatus.

Ohh okay. Thank you!

[Dormouse559]

There might be conjunctions corresponding to what some languages use noun cases for. For example, how about a benefactive subordinating conjunction? English uses "for", though it's not bound exclusively to that use.

To avoid confusion, I want to point out that “for” as a conjunction isn’t benefactive. It expresses cause, like “because”. The closest English conjunction to what you’re describing, as far as I can tell, would be “so that”. That said, I do like the idea of a benefactive conjunction; I suppose the “beneficiary” would be a certain action or event that is aided somehow by the independent clause.

[Imralu]

In my language, Tobarese, the orthography that was designed by missionaries marked ejectives with a following <!>, so <p! t! k! ts! ch! tl!>. For the new orthography, I’m using <q>, which also represents a glottal stop, but it’s unambiguous because there are no clusters where they could be confused and whectives never occur word-finally.

Aesthetically, I prefer <!>, but I’m assuming it might be a nightmare in digital applications. E.g. in the Glosbe dictionary of Swahili, it’s impossible to search the translation database for examples of words that contain /ŋ/ because it’s spelt <ng’> and it treats what comes before and after as separate words… and when you search in the dictionary, it treats the straight and the curly apostrophe differently, and some people have to ben entered words with the acute accent symbol. Just a nightmare.

So, for anyone who knows computery stuff: having ! in the orthography is likely to cause a lot of this kind of headache, isn’t it?

[Nel Fie]

In my language, Tobarese, the orthography that was designed by missionaries marked ejectives with a following <!>, so <p! t! k! ts! ch! tl!>. For the new orthography, I’m using <q>, which also represents a glottal stop, but it’s unambiguous because there are no clusters where they could be confused and whectives never occur word-finally.

Aesthetically, I prefer <!>, but I’m assuming it might be a nightmare in digital applications. E.g. in the Glosbe dictionary of Swahili, it’s impossible to search the translation database for examples of words that contain /ŋ/ because it’s spelt <ng’> and it treats what comes before and after as separate words… and when you search in the dictionary, it treats the straight and the curly apostrophe differently, and some people have to ben entered words with the acute accent symbol. Just a nightmare.

So, for anyone who knows computery stuff: having ! in the orthography is likely to cause a lot of this kind of headache, isn’t it?

I'm a hobby-programmer rather than a pro-programmer, and I can only speak based on the experience of creating my own conlanging software: "!" is not inherently troublesome, but you might well run into issues if you use other people's software.

Purely based on how a computer handles text, "!" isn't any more special than any other character, and you shouldn't encounter any trouble in something like a text editing app. However, other kinds of software (e.g. search engines and databases) are often programmed to treat "!" differently, which probably belies that in English and many other languages, it is used for punctuation; and has also seen uses in general symbol-based communication (e.g. road signs), and this association seeps into usage. So you might well find "!" to be unavailable for use in various apps that you perhaps intend to use in the creation and documentation of your conlang.

There's even a good example in linguistics of this differentiated use of "!", where I've seen it used to "invert" phonological environments (e.g. writing "!s_" is supposed to mean "except after /s/").