What did you accomplish today? [2011–2019]

[alynnidalar]

I sorted out the passive for Old Azen, or at least the construction that fulfills that role. I was trying very hard to not just stick another suffix on the verbs, and I did end up doing that, but it's in a way that I can live with. Basically, you add the nominalizing suffix -čI.

Jumurtkama jēke.
egg-ACC eat-PST.1
I ate the egg.

Jumurtka jēkči.
egg-NOM eat-PST.3-NMZ
The egg was eaten.

Jumurtka menøl jēkči.
egg-NOM 1SG.INSTR eat-PST.3-NMZ
The egg was eaten by me.

In a sense, you could translate these as "the egg is an eaten thing". Where potential confusion comes in is that -čI is also used to form agent nouns... but for agent nouns, you simply use the verb stem directly.

Jumurtka jēči.
egg-NOM eat-NMZ
The egg is an eater. (???)

So I don't think it'll be confusing. I'm still not 100% sold on it, but I like it more than any other idea I had, especially because I could make use of structures that were already in place in Old Azen.

[Ahzoh]

I sorted out the passive for Old Azen, or at least the construction that fulfills that role. I was trying very hard to not just stick another suffix on the verbs, and I did end up doing that, but it's in a way that I can live with. Basically, you add the nominalizing suffix -čI.

Jumurtkama jēke.
egg-ACC eat-PST.1
I ate the egg.

Jumurtka jēkči.
egg-NOM eat-PST.3-NMZ
The egg was eaten.

Jumurtka menøl jēkči.
egg-NOM 1SG.INSTR eat-PST.3-NMZ
The egg was eaten by me.

In a sense, you could translate these as "the egg is an eaten thing". Where potential confusion comes in is that -čI is also used to form agent nouns... but for agent nouns, you simply use the verb stem directly.

Jumurtka jēči.
egg-NOM eat-NMZ
The egg is an eater. (???)

So I don't think it'll be confusing. I'm still not 100% sold on it, but I like it more than any other idea I had, especially because I could make use of structures that were already in place in Old Azen.

I think it is an interesting use of nominalizers.

[quadrilabial]

An addendum to my post about having worked out a distinctive feature system for my consignlang... here's what it looks like. (It's a smartphone photo, so if you've got a slow connection be warned that it's huge.)

I don't know what you guys know about feature geometry, but this is the fully-worked out tree for the... 'phoneme' isn't the right word, 'syllable' is closer but less relatable to the concept of a feature geometry... signing unit, I guess, in the conlang. The spoiler below hides the calculations for the number of phonemically distinct signing units.

Spoiler:

The smallest sign in the language can have maximally two holds in the dominant hand, where each hold consists of a handshape (of which there are 95), a specific wrist orientation (of which there are 9), a contact point on the hand (of which there are 4), and a contact point in signing space (of which there are 48). This works out to 41,040 holds and 1,684,240,560 two-hold combinations. As you can see, I already have a problem, as we haven't added in the non-dominant hand, the non-manuals, or the movement character. One-hold signs that don't use the dominant hand or non-manuals have six movement characters possible (including non-moving), so 246,240 possible one-hold gestures, and the movement can be made once, a specific number of times, or trilled- 738,720. Add to that 30,316,330,080 for every two-hold combination with every move character and repetition value- 30,317,068,800. Thirty billion, three hundred seventeen million, sixty-eight thousand eight hundred values for the node labeled 'Dominant' in the picture.

Each of these can have an inactive non-dominant hand (1...), a non-dominant hand maintaining a hold (... + 41,040...), a non-dominant hand that starts with a separate hold from the dominant hand but ends up in the same hold (... + 41,040...), a non-dominant hand that mirrors the dominant hand's movements exactly (... + 1...), that mirrors the dominant hand's movements but reverses their order (... + 1...), that follows without reversing (... + 1), and that follows and reverses (... + 1.) 41,045 possible values for the non-dominant hand. I tried working out how many two-hand gestures that was, but my computer's calculator starts giving me scientific notation at this point: 1.244364089×10¹⁵).

Finally, the eyebrows can be in one of 3 positions, the eyelids in one of 3 as well, the eyes themselves pointing in 9 directions, the lips in 3 positions, and the mouth aperture opened to 4 degrees, giving 972 non-manuals.

The end result is 1.209521894×10¹⁸ phonemically distinct minimal signs, and, god help me, there's no particular reason a morpheme shouldn't contain more than one of them. I will never complain about the information density of a conlang sketch's phonology space ever again.

Edit: Wolfram Alpha holds onto more significant figures and gives me 1,209,521,894,406,912,000 as the final number.

[Ahzoh]

I spent all lunch defining many agent nouns, which I list here alphabetized:
ʾadkaš - pillager
ʾakkaẕ - dead person
ʾalkam - watcher
ʾankal - blind person
ʾaǧkat - sailor
ʾaškar - cook
ḵahkan - driller
ḵalkaj - kneader
ḵamkat - crawler
vaḵkal - rotator
daẕkad - cutter
daẕkal - coward
daẕkam - breaker
dagkaẕ - reducer
darkan - sleeper
daṉqaẕ - divider
bahkal - punisher
badkan - archivist
balkaḵ - failure
balkad - analyst
balkaj - quitter
sadkan - oppressor
sabkad - researcher
saǧkam - summarizer
ẕalkan - judge
ẕankaj - thinker
ẕankar - strategist
ẕaqkan - actor
yaḵkal - eroder
yaǧkam - narrator
kaʾkaf - counter
kadkaf - seller
kaẕkam - dying one
kafkan - trader
kafkaš - buyer
gankaš - harvester
gaškar - corrupter
ḷadkaẕ - separator
maʾkat - driver
maskan - servant
malkaḥ - friend, ally
mankat - runner
maškad - command
nabkaḵ - helper
naẕkan - philosopher
napkaš - possessor
ǧatkar - swimmer
padkač - worshiper
paẏkad - sacrificer
palkam - thief
paḥkal - taker
pařkal - giver
ṗadkaẕ - Divider of Seven
ṗaẏkab - listener
ṗamkat - pedestrian
jamkat - escapist
ramkaḥ - mixer
fadkaš - leader
šaḵkan - interrogator
šavkar - antagonist
šadkad - speaker
šadkam - holder
šakkar - hater
šalkak - destroyer
šalkam - balancer
šamkaḻ - supporter
šafkar - desecrator
šaẇkam - creator
šařkal - spoiler
šaṉkam - builder
ṭankaš - owner
čahkar - purifier
ḻapkal - deliverer
ḥaʾkal - seer
qadkaẕ - distinguisher
qaẇkad - concealer
řabkad - collaborator

[taylorS]

I live around Philadelphia, and here it's /ɹ/. I'm pretty sure that's the rhotic in General American, too. When you say "Upper Midwest", do you mean the area around Minnesota/North Dakota/South Dakota/Wisconsin? I guess you guys have /ɻ/, then. It's not a huge difference, so it's definitely possible.

I live in the Fargo, ND area.

I found this very interesting paper about the American English R from 1994 via Reddit which says that the majority of people sampled have an apical retroflex articulation rather than the alveolar and "molar" articulations. The author mentions his surprise because it was previously thought that the retroflex was the least common of the 3 variants of R in American English.

[Chagen]

I read through my sanskrit grammar once again. I now have an idea for a language spoken near Pazmat. It will adhere to Sanskrit's look and form even more (there are voiced and voiceless aspirated stops), but will different verbs and nouns. Verbs will probably be more agglutinative. And nouns will use the idea of different stem grades seen in PIE and Sanskrit. Combine this with Greek-style contractions and fun stuff results. To provide examples:

The underlying morphemes here are -Ø, -ma, -a, -kis, -ita. They have no meaning right now (neither do the words):

nitu
nituma
nitva
nitukis
nitvita

vūbhi
vūbhima
vūbhya
vūbhikis
vūbhīta

daghe
daghema
daghē
daghekis
daghīta

śanto
śantoma
śantō
śantokis
śantūta

netṛ
netṛma
netra
netṛkis
netrita

I might combine this with vowel infixes to roots (which eventually contract), so we have things like a root bhog- taking an infix to get *bhoîg > bhūg, obscuring the relationship between the two roots.

[Micamo]

psst

you should make a polysynthetic pazmat relative

[Chagen]

Maybe...not sure how I'd derive that from Proto-Pasuu though.

Speaking of the new unnamed language I just came up with, I've gotten the specifics of how syllable weight affects various historical vowel combinations:

A syllable is heavy if it contains a diphthong, a long vowel, or ends with more than one consonant.

*iVC and *uVC behave differently depending on the weight of the previous syllable. If it is light, they turn into glides; if they are heavy, they behave like normal:

*putiat > putyat
*niśuat > niśvat
*putriat > putrīt
*niśruat > niśrūt

*yiV and *wuV act like normal. However *yiVC *wuVC become -iyVC- -uvVC-

*putyia > putyī
*putyiat > putiyat
*niśwua > niśvū
*niśwuat > niśuvat

Now I need to come up with a cool grammar for this language that doesn't mindlessly rip off my previous work or an IElang.

[Thrice Xandvii]

Man, half the posts in the thread are invalidated by other posts later on. That place is a mess.

That's why I like using Wikis. You can simply edit the things that are wrong and never have to look at them again. However, there's a history, so any change you make is saved for perpetuity so that if you change your mind, you can find what it used to be.

But, the public facing side is always right!

Chagen, in the above post, that appears to be orthography, what do <v> and <w> represent, their IPA sound? Or are they both /w/ they are just represented differently in the two 'langs?

[Micamo]

Some conworlding today:

Kóŋǎl Gí Dógôr was an unskilled but well-meaning anthropologist and linguist who was one of the first arrivals to the Pakara Sea, the homeland of the Haneians. Dogor held the unpopular opinion that the native peoples encountered by Esseran colonization efforts were people, just as deserving of life and liberty as Esserans. Nonetheless, the leaders of the colonization efforts gave his work great respect: The natives trusted Dogor enough to tell him all about their language, their culture, techniques to survive in the alien (to the Esserans) environment, and the locations of their villages and food sources, information that was invaluable to conquering and controlling them. When Dogor realized his work was being used this way, he started deliberately giving false reports to stymie the colonists' efforts; For this reason most of what was documented about the pre-colonization Pakarans is suspect at best.

The names "Haneko" and "Pakara Sea" are both attributable to Dogor; His mastery of the native languages was incomplete at best. When he asked the natives what they called their homeland, they answered "Ahiwe Pakara" which literally means "Pakara Forest" but "ahiwe" sounded to Dogor much like the Esseran word síwà meaning "ocean" and the name stuck. (In spite of his progressive views, Dogor believed that Esseran was the original human language, and all other tongues are "corruptions" of it. But unlike his contemporaries he also believed that this did not make them unworthy of study.)

He incorrectly asked a native man what he called his language, literally asking "How do you speak?" The informant, somewhat bewildered, answered "Haneko" which means "with words." (The correct way to phrase the question would have been "What do you name imitating you?" but the answer of what the pre-contact pakarans called themselves is lost to time.)

Eventually Dogor would be caught helping an enslaved Haneian family escape a sugar plantation, and was executed.

[felipesnark]

With the help of sangi39, I think I have come up with the various realizations of the aspect suffixes of Shonkasika based on the type of stem they are attaching to.


As with everything I do, it is subject to change, but I am generally happy with the variation there is with this system. As I learn more about different options of outcomes of vowel mergers, I may modify the system somewhat.

The variation above would only occur in the active voice. Since the other voices are marked with suffixes before the aspect marker, all forms in that voice would be of one stem. For example, since the passive is marked with the suffix -te, all passive forms would use e-stem aspect markers. Unless I make the voice markers infixes before the stem (thematic) vowel of the verb...decisions, decisions!

[Ahzoh]

This is a map of a portion of a continent that contains Vrkhazh (not complete), it will eventually have mountains and small islands:

[Chagen]

Chagen, in the above post, that appears to be orthography, what do <v> and <w> represent, their IPA sound? Or are they both /w/ they are just represented differently in the two 'langs?

<w> is used in to represent /w/ in the "proto-lang" (scare quotes because it's only like 400 years before the "modern" lang). In the "modern" lang, I use <v> to represent /w/'s descendent which takes on an approximant pronunciation in certain positions. Also I just like <v>.

In other news, I kinda want to rip off Sanskrit again and make an instrument suffix -trā which inflects like a 3rd-declension vowel stem (i.e vatrā "a telescope" inflected as vatroṣu vatroyam vatrāna vatrasā vatrasoṣu vatrasoyam vatrasāna). Or maybe -trī. Perhaps I can link that to the random few female names in -rīs like Patrīs and Vṛdhatrīs.

[DesEsseintes]

I think I'm going to totally mess up Hííenununóóoþa by doubling the vowel system in one fell swoop. Front rounded - and perhaps back unrounded vowels - are invading the system... I may reduce the number of consonant phonemes as well.

[Lao Kou]

Front rounded - are invading the system...

Come over to the Dark Side...

[Chagen]

I rewrote the setting to one of my conworlds. I then realized that it ended up similar to an old and abandoned conworld of mine from about two years back. I then tried to merge the two as I felt their concepts complemented each other.

However this has become an ordeal. Getting these two settings to play nice with each other is really fucking hard. Ugh. I think I can get something good out of this though.

[Ahzoh]

Front rounded - are invading the system...

Come over to the Dark Side...

[Lambuzhao]

Front rounded - are invading the system...

Come over to the Dark Side...

Whatever you do, don't invade into the system too early-



You remember what happened to Admiral Ozzel....

[Lambuzhao]

Front rounded - are invading the system...

Come over to the Dark Side...

I can sooooo hear the lame, milquetoasty middle-managementesque voiceover in my head.

[DesEsseintes]

Front rounded - are invading the system...

Come over to the Dark Side...

Hmm, it does indeed seen like malignant forces are at work... What used to be clean and streamlined little Arapahoesque Hííenununóóoþa now has clusters such as łłtł þþt ffb and front roundeds playing havoc all over the place.

I wonder if I need to start a new thread or just continue using the old one?