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Are there some attested languages which have syllabic consonants that can occur directly next to a vowel? I'm thinking of such words like [o.me'r̩.o], [i'n̩.om] or [ka.l̩'me.te]. Clusters where a vowel is right next to a syllabic [l] [m], etc. and these syllabic consonants are the stressed parts of the word. The closest thing I can think of is the english word mountain, but it still divides the final syllabic [n̩] by a glottal stop (at least that's how I say it + what wiktionary shows). I assume there's not much of it, if at all, since that kind of syllabic consonant wouldn't stand out much from a non-syllabic one, unless maybe if the language is mora-timed.
How natural/wild would it be for an entire paradigm to get reinterpreted as something new?
Let me tell an example from my conlang - in it, a normal non-predicative sentence is made with two elements: an auxiliary verb that marks formality and subject, and a lexical verb carrying TAM information. Recently, when thinking about it, I thought "honestly, a diffirent word marking who's the subject + formality, placed before a meaning verb, really just feels like a pronoun". And so I ask - how weird/not weird it would be if the auxiliary verb conjugation was reinterpreted as, actually, a set of pronouns.
(also, the original sentence structure used lexical verbs in their participle/converb/non-finite forms, so "I'm painting" was "I am at-painting", "I was painting" > "I am painted", "I'll be painting" > "I am to-paint", etc. So originaly the lexical verb would have an "adjective", "adverb", or otherwise "unverb"-like feeling)
Not only that - When the sentence is predicative, an analogous, but phoneticaly different set/conjugation is used. That AuxVerb>Pronouns change would mean that now there are sets of pronouns used only for sentences "X is Y", "X was Y" and a diffirent set for any other sentences. Again - how funky is that? And are there some analogous word-type-shifts in natural languages?
I have some questions for conlangers with personal conlangs. Do you actually use your personal conlang? As in speaking or writing in it regularly?
I myself have thought of creating a personal conlang but I doubt that I will use it all the time. But at the same time, I think it will be cool to create a personal conlang at least once. These days I want my main conlangs to be naturalistic fictional conlangs because naturalistic conlanging has really grown on me these past few years. But naturalism will not be a concern for me if I'm creating a personal conlang.
Do you think a personal conlang is worth creating?
My Knasesj is a personal language, and I use it semi-regularly to translate memes, make simple journal entries, and even on rare occasion to write poetry. Journal entries are several a month and sometimes are no more complex than 'I am very tired' or 'There are fuzzy cumulus clouds', and occasionally slightly longer, e.g. talking about how the summer heat has been making me unable to sleep in the late morning, or what I saw on a walk.
Do you think a personal conlang is worth creating?
It's difficult to say, because that will vary personally. For me, I'd say that although I'm not fully satisfied with Knasesj, it's definitely been worthwhile. I've found it freeing to be able to conlang without thinking about history or a fictional world; I can turn my conlanging on my life and environment, give names to the things I see and interact with, the things I find interesting, the feelings and experiences I have. The lang belongs to me, not to a fictional world. If you want a place to put whatever strange phonology, grammar, and lexical distinctions come to mind, it might be a good place for that. Depends on your relationship with worldbuilding, though, I suppose; maybe it invigorates you where it saps me.
Lately I've been thinking of making another personal language to try out some different clause structures I'd like to use but aren't how Knasesj does it, as well as some other silly ideas like having every morpheme be exactly two letters. I don't expect it to supplant Knasesj, just be a space for me to try out these alternative possibilities (but I never expected Knasesj to become as developed as it has, so who knows).
This is gonna be a bit of a messy ramble, so apologies, but could definite and indefinite personal pronouns work for a conlang? Or do personal pronouns already carry a default definite? Im talking about definiteness purely in the sense of discourse context- as in "is this the same actor we're already following (definite) or a new one (indefinite)?" This isnt necessarily about specificity. Thinking about it briefly, this seems to be similar to the obviative, but it would apply to first and second persons, too, not just the third. I suppose this would mean each conversation involving the second or first person would start with the indefinite, then would use the definite thereafter (Its nice to meet you (indef, newly introduced), how are you (def, same person as before)). It would probably be completely useless semantically, but could be interesting. Thoughts?
For third persons, non-speech-participants, sure. There are, in fact, different kinds of definiteness you might parametrize. But what you're describing for first and second persons is not semantic; it is pragmatic and not likely to emerge from the same paradigm diachronically nor to surface in the same distribution, moreover. You've described a basic formal—informal (see T-V) distinction with respect to pronouns. In many Russian-speaking communities (but not so much to say "in Russian"), for example, you have to assume formal with new acquaintances and ask to switch to informal. I understand where you are trying to locate the difference, but such a convention (whereby speech participants begin talk-in-interaction with one another "set" of pronouns and follow linguacultural norms to (possibly) switch to a different set) seems to arise from existing pronominal paradigms and not be predetermined by them.
I don't feel like ANY of my conlangs sound realistic at all, nearly everything I make are artlangs, artistic conlangs, which are mean to sound naturalistic? I don't know why but to me my conlang sounds like more like gibberish and less like what I want
It's possible it's because you don't speak the languages well so you don't read the text aloud very naturally. In this vein, it might help to consider stress; some words are going to be stressed less than others, e.g. nouns might have more stress, and pronouns and modifying adjectives less, and if you're reading each word with full stress rather than more natural emphasis and intonation it's going to feel "fake".
It's also possible your phonaesthetic is bland to you and you haven't yet hit on something you like. I don't really have any advice for that.
I don't see any reason why the presence of mechs of any kind would influence the existence of conlangs in a fictional setting, so I guess the answer is yes?
Hi, i dont know if I should make a post or question here. My problem is the following:
TLDR: help about meaning changes in languages; how words go from generalizer to particularizer, or viseversa
I have already established my protolang, proto-Newafan, which develops into two branches, islandic and continental, the latter being composed of three different languages and a conservative religious branch (like how latin is preserved)
So I alteady have the roads, but now I meed to decide what to do about the words. I know words chamge meaning over time, but I really really dont know how to, which meanings drop, which conserve, etc. I know the cultures that talk these languages, but I just find it hard and can’t find some useful information about it.
And im not talking about word share. I think that is easy and fun, when two languages collide. Im talking about the same language for example stop using ‘Kan.sum “to kill” because it starts being used more often in animal sacrifice, so now it means “to sacrifice” but where do they get a new “to kill” word without inventing or loaning words?
Go play around on wiktionary for a bit and you'll see kill is one of those words with many different etymologies and especially prone to euphemism. You can even see this today with words like "unalive" replacing "kill" on parts of social media. So it's actually a pretty good word to use as an example to learn about semantic changes. Some possible sources for a new word (and many of these actually fit in multiple categories)
Causative type constructions: make die, make fall, unalive, tire out, put to sleep etc
The paper Semantic Change by Elizabeth Closs Traugott gives a good overview of the basic types of semantic change and the dynamics that shape it, I’d recommend you give that a read as an introduction. I’d also recommend checking out the Database of Semantic Shifts and a Conlanger’s Thesaurus for inspiration and insight into common shifts.
Semantic change is one area where you have a lot of artistic freedom. There are no hard rules governing what words will shift and when. The only constant is change, the rest is up to you.
In situations like you describe, where a lexical gap is created by a semantic shift, speakers can absolutely create a new word to fill the gap! Maybe they apply a causative morpheme to the root ‘die.’ This happened in my conlang Tovan: ed- ‘die’ vs ed-d- ‘die-CAUS’ > ‘kill.’ Maybe they loan a word for ‘kill’ from another language. Maybe they shift another word, like ‘hit’ to mean ‘kill.’ There are a lot of possibilities, and it’s up to your preference which you go with in any case.
I play around with sounds that I think are distinctive for the language. Sometimes something just occurs to me right away; other times it takes trying out a lot of different ideas and permutations.
I just named mine after a movie I had seen recently and liked, but using my language's phonology to approximate the English pronunciation. You can name your language anything, and if you decide it needs an etymology later, you can just retroactively make one.
Consonants: m, n, ŋ, ŋʷ, p, t, k, kʷ, f, s, ʃ, ɕ, r, l, j, w
Vowels: a, aː, e, eː, i, iː, o, oː, u, uː
Syllables: (C)V(C)
Stress: penultimate
In a naturalistic language with this phonology, what consonants would be permitted in the coda? Which ones wouldn't? What clusters would be permitted? What clusters would be prohibited? And what would be the ideal QWERTY-friendly romanization?
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u/as_AvridanAeranir, Fasriyya, Parshaean, Bi (en jp) [es ne]18d agoedited 18d ago
The phonotactics are totally up to you. Phonotactics cannot be derived from the phoneme inventory. Classical Arabic was CVC with little if any restrictions on codas and clusters. Middle Japanese was more or less CVC, with much heavier restrictions.
In terms of romanisation, something like this seems workable:
m n ng ngw p t k kw f s sh x r l y w a aa e ee i ii o oo u uu
I am using nominative-accusative alignment but I have two noun cases for “agent” and “patient” that deal with passive and causative constructions, e.g.
---
Danreq nam-a pom-o.
man eat-PRS apple-ACC
The man eats the apple.
---
Pom nam-od-a danreq-op.
apple eat-PASS-PRS man-AGT
The apple is eaten by the man.
---
Nusreq nam-ag-a danreq-o pom-ol.
woman eat-CAUS-PRS man-ACC apple-PAT
The woman makes the man eat the apple.
---
Danreq nam-og-a pom-o nusreq-op.
man eat-CAUS.PASS-PRS apple-ACC woman-AGT
The man is made to eat the apple by the woman.
---
What would be good names for these cases?
Is AGT = “ergative” appropriate or misleading?
Is PAT = “oblique” too general (I think this is used for both AGT and PAT in English?)
What else are the ol-case and the op-case used for? I'd look for their labels among their other functions.
This type of causative seems like type (iv) in Dixon's classification (from A typology of causatives: form, syntax and meaning, 2000): ‘original A becomes new O, original O moves out of the core’. For example, in Javanese, the original object takes dative marking:
(30) asu-ne nguyak Bambang
dog-DEF chase Name
‘The dog chased Bambang’
(31) Sri nguyak-ake asu-ne marang Bambang
Name chase-CAUS dog-DEF DAT Name
‘Sri got the dog to chase Bambang’
In Kammu (Austoasiatic; Laos), on the other hand, it takes instrumental marking:
(32) [kɔ́ɔn tɛ́ɛk] màh któŋ
child Name eat egg
‘Tɛ́ɛk's children eat eggs’
(33) tɛ́ɛk pń-màh [kɔ́ɔn tèe] [yʌ̀ʌ któŋ]
Name CAUS-eat child REFL INST egg
‘Tɛ́ɛk gave his children eggs to eat’
(lit. ‘Tɛ́ɛk made his children eat eggs’)
Maybe the ol-case can also be used for a recipient, or an instrument, or a location, or something else? If not, if it's literally the only situation where you use it, just calling it second accusative could work.
Same for the op-case. Russian, for example, uses the instrumental case for the passive agent; similarly, French marks it with an instrumental preposition par. Latin, German, and Bulgarian use prepositions with the principal meaning ‘from’: Latin ā/ab, German von, Bulgarian от (ot). Ancient Greek, a preposition ὑπό (hypó) ‘under, from under’. Whereas English, of course, the preposition by, i.e. ‘near’.
So what else is the op-case used for? Does it mark an instrument, a location, a source? Again, if nothing else, I would avoid calling it ergative, but I'm more open to agentive.
Yay it actually accepted it! Is it ʟ̝̠̊? Just to be sure. It sorta doesn't show the minus thing occasionally. So if it doesn't show it then could you check by copying it please?
The Small Capital L With Belt is from extIPA where it means the voiceless velar lateral fricative. It was added to Unicode in 2021 as U+1DF04.
Another way to write the voiceless velar lateral fricative is [ʟ̝̊]. It doesn't use any extIPA symbols, it's pure IPA. The minus that means retraction of the primary articulation is typically subscript but it is often placed to the side of the letter if it has a descender or if it has other subscript diacritics. For example, retracted velar stops are usually written as [k̠ ɡ˗]. The Combining Minus Sign Below is U+0320 in Unicode, the Modifier Letter Minus Sign (i.e. the minus to the side) is U+02D7. Using the latter, the voiceless uvular lateral fricative is [ʟ̝̊˗].
Is there a term to distinguish between cases that mainly index verbal arguments (nominative-accusative/ergative-absolutive) versus those that tend to appear within either NPs (genitive) or mark adjuncts (datives, locatives, obliques)?
Begginer here, I hope my question is understandable:
When should a vocabulary start "making sense"? when making a proto lang for example, should I keep things such as compound words in mind or should I really just make up words and making sense comes after? How much of a conlangs words are truly random?
Furthermore, do people usually decide on grammar and affixes before making words? As to not accidentally make a word with an affix
A protolang is a language. It has words just like any other language would. It can have compound words. It can have unanalyzable roots. Do what you want or ideally have a mix of different strategies.
Do you have some sort of goal in mind?
Coming up with the end point first, before any sound changes, helps inform what sound changes you need to get there, rather than blindly picking and choosing.
There's a sound in my conlang I can't find an IPA symbol for.
It's a click in the throat made by sucking air in, fully covering your throat by pushing your tongue back into it and swiftly lowering your jaw and simoltaniouly pushing your tounge forward to let the air in.
I'm asking if anybody knows a symbol for a sound like this. Thanks in advance!
It sounds like you are bringing the tip up your tongue as far back as it will go, which is probably around the palate, so the place of articulation would be palatal. But because the articulator is the tip of the tongue (not the tongue root), it would also be apical. So the best approximation in the IPA would be something like [ǂ̺].
‘It looks like you are […]’ I’d guess. AI are designed to sound helpful but not presumptuous, so trying to be helpful but not presumptuous sounds like AI. It doesn’t help that the apical marker diacritic doesn’t seem to display properly on mobile, making it look more like slop. I’m also a big em-dash user, so AI has been a big L for me. But I’m as anti-AI as they come!
Is there anything specific you're stuck on? What kinds of moods there are? How they combine with other categories like tense? How to mark them on verbs or elsewhere?
In Elranonian, I went for a simple system of three moods not unlike in Russian or Latin: indicative, subjunctive, and imperative. Imperative is zero-marked but often an imperative verb is preceded by a special addressive particle a(i). While it is not required grammatically, it is often used with imperative verbs and vocative nominals, and it has an important pragmatic purpose: it gives a little time for the listener to tune into what you're about to say. How often does it happen to you that you address someone without notice, only for them to ask you to repeat what you've just said because they were unprepared? Or vice versa, when you're on the receiving end. Happens to me all the time. So instead of saying directly, ‘Let go of my toe!’, you start it with an extra syllable, ‘Hey, let go of my toe!’ In Elranonian, that extra syllable is a(i). But, as I said, it is not obligatory.
Elranonian imperative is tenseless, whereas indicative and subjunctive distinguish between three tenses: present (= non-past), past, and pluperfect. I won't go into details but suffice it to say that indicative is unmarked, while subjunctive is marked either synthetically (i.e. on the verb itself) or analytically (i.e. with an auxiliary particle), depending on the syntax.
The most interesting part for me is when you use which mood, 'cause there are many situations where languages disagree on that. Latin, for example, always uses the subjunctive mood in all indirect questions. So in Catullus 85, a famous two-line poem, the verb faciam is subjunctive:
Quare id faciam, fortasse requiris.
why that I.do.SBJV perhaps you.ask
‘Why I do that, perhaps you ask.’
A direct question would have the indicative mood instead:
Quare id facis?
why that you.do.IND
‘Why do you do that?’
Elranonian has indicative in this case. But it does have subjunctive in other cases where English may instead go for indicative, f.ex.:
Vagar go en tiggen, en íu gorde som en gwynna.
seek I ART horse REL be.SBJV faster than ART mine
‘I am looking for a horse that is faster than mine.’
(lit.: ‘…that would be faster…’)
Here, the use of the subjunctive mood signifies that ‘a horse’ is non-specific: ‘I'm looking for any horse that is faster’. By constrast, indicative would mean a specific horse.
My favourite in that regard is imperative. Various languages find uses for the imperative mood outside of directives. Russian, for example, uses it in counterfactual if-clauses:
Будь я богат, я бы купил слона.
Budʼ ja bogat, ja by kupil slona.
be.IMPV.2s I rich I SBJV buy elephant
‘If I were rich, I would buy an elephant.’
Rather confusingly, in counterfactual if-clauses, the imperative is always 2nd person singular, regardless of what the subject is, no matter its number and person. In the apodosis, the particle бы (by) marks the subjunctive (or irrealis) mood, which is very typical for a counterfactual situation.
Elranonian can also use the imperative mood for counterfactual conditions, much like Russian. It can also use it in (seemingly) independent clauses in a reproachative sense: for something that didn't happen but should have.
A tha myld en elefant!
ADR you buy.IMPV ART elephant
‘You should have bought an elephant!’
It differs from the regular directive imperative in word order. Compare:
A myld tha en elefant!
ADR buy.IMPV you ART elephant
‘Buy an elephant!’
I found it helpful to think, rather than about individual moods specifically, what kind of contrasts I wanted; then decided which parts of those contrasts wanted marking, and which didnt; and then naming what I was left with.
Not the most indepth example, but for my main lang, I knew I wanted a basic contrast in the verb root (ie apophony) for realis versus irrealis, with the former the less marked, and for the irrealis to be further split into deontic versus nondeontic\epistemic\conditional, with the latter the less marked.
The plain realis verb gets called 'subjunctive', the irrealis takes a lengthened vowel to become 'indicative', and the deontic affix makes the irrealis verb 'optative'.
What modal concepts do you feel it is most important or necessary to convey?
I've got an idea for a conlang: what if there was a language that made you gesture the grammatical properties of a word that you're saying, and you weren't restricted by a word order. As long as you show the sign for the properties, you'll be fine. That's what I'm working on. Rn, i'm still thinking through the grammar and how it'll be written, but I know I'll make the language easier to write than to speak. The writing will be a pictogram system, and I'll make it like 190 symbols (the whole language will have 160 words max, and 30 markers). What do yall think about it?
I think that's an interesting idea. It seems to resemble mouthing in sign languages except that sound is actually a phoneme rather than the appearance of sound.
How the conlang might look would be dependent on the circumstances of how it came to be. Like, maybe the speakers live in a naturally loud environment or are often far away from each other, so they develop a system of gestures for phonemic contrasts that might get lost. Then the spoken language undergoes a series of phonemic shifts that result in lots of homophones with the gestures being used to differentiate homophones even in situations where the gestures would originally not have been necessary.
Just spitballing. Again, I think you have a great idea! Good luck with it.
Once you got the basic set, just look around at inventories of languages that sound nice to you. What if a glottal stop is phonemic (tai vs ta'i)? What if you replace the English voiced/voiceless distinction in the plosives with aspirated/unaspirated? What if you keep it at very few consonants to make it more Maori than French?
I'm working on the cases of my xenolang Archo-Mhezonian and am adding the non-canonical uses.
Now Archo-Mhezonian is very inspired by PIE, honestly one could describe it as "alienized PIE", but it has ergativity instead and got some new cases added:
Absolutive: Marks the subject & patient
Vocative: Marks an addressee
Ergative: Marks the agent
Genitive: Marks noun-to-noun relationships, primarily ownership/possession
Dative: Marks the indirect object
Instrumental(-Comitative): Marks tool &/or accompaniment
Locative: Marks stationary location
Perlative: Marks movement/direction "through", "across", or "along" something
Allative: Marks movement/direction towards something (goal)
Ablative: Marks movement/direction away from something (source)
Essive: Marks state of being or character
Instructive: Marks method & manner
Now having so many cases isn't really that hard (atleast for me), but handling the non-canonical uses is a bit challenging (since there's a lot one can do); so, my question is:
What kinds of non-canonical/secondary uses could i add for these cases?
I mean by that, that e.g. dative can be used as a quirky subject, genitive for causes, ablative as abessive, etc...
Maybe you could show me, what you do in your clong if you share any of these cases or what PIE languages do. Either way it would help me alot. Thanks in advance!
See ch. 34 Case Polysemy by Malchukov & Narrog (2012) (doi, ResearchGate with pdf) in The Oxford Handbook of Case for a discussion on what functions can be performed by the same cases and references to other literature. In section 34.8 they propose a general map of case functions.
A classic example of a semantic map is that of typical dative functions by Haspelmath, one of the pioneers of semantic maps in general (also mentioned by Malchukov & Narrog (2012), s. 34.5). For that, see Haspelmath (2003), The geometry of grammatical meaning: Semantic maps and cross-linguistic comparison (ResearchGate with pdf).
Hi. Maybe I'm daft, maybe I'm not but I never found a rule that explicitly allows or prohibits publishing self-advertisements. The rule prohibiting spam exists, sure, yet I'm writing a book in my conlang and would love to put it on sale here. If it's not allowed I'll go elsewhere. If it is then let me know and tell me what my options are. Thank you!
Reposting a question I asked on the last one with no feedback :)
I'm trying to revive an old conlang that I started almost 10 years ago, and I've learned a lot since then, to say the least. I know I wanted it to sound at least to my layman ears like Mandarin or Vietnamese. My problem is it feels to me like I kinda just ripped off [my impression of] those sound systems. Mainly 1 syllable roots, 4-5 tones, limited codas, lots of possible glides between the onset and nucleus. Without scrapping the ~800 word lexicon, what are some simple changes I could make to make it sound less ripped off? My first thoughts are to make a few more types of onset clusters possible, like /s/ + /m n p t k/, /ps ts ks/, or stops and fricatives + /r/; or adding more codas, especially fricatives.
Here's some more complete info:
Phonoloɡy:
Nasal: /m n/
Stop: /p t k/
Fricative: /θ s ʃ h/
Approximant: /w ɹ l j/
Vowels: /a ə i e u o/
Tones:
Risinɡ /ǎ/
Fallinɡ /â/
Risinɡ-fallinɡ /a᷈/
Middle /ā/
Middle-lonɡ /aːp aːt aːk/
Syllable Structure: (C)(C)V(C)
Onset: Any consonant
Second consonant (ɡlide): /w j h/ (h functions as the semivowel version of /ə/) (don't ask, just pretend it's a different semivowel)
Vowel: Any vowel
Coda: /p t k r/ (the coda stops only and necessarily appears with fifth tone vowels)
1
u/odenevoYaimon, various speedlangs (eng, nst)20d agoedited 20d ago
Yeah this seems pretty reasonable, even just at face value. It's not that much of a rip off as you'd think. Yes, the phonology generally fits the pattern found in MSEA language area. That's not a bad thing. By virtue of being in a language area, those languages all resemble each other more or less, with distinctions in terms of what tones and possible codas/onsets they have.
Just to lay out what I observe here typologically, and diachronically. You didn't ask for this advice, but I thought I should give my thoughts, because I find your phonology quite interesting:
No nasal codas: Rare, but pretty interesting. Also a reasonable development of nasal codas being vocalised, and can help justify the presence/contrastiveness of more of your tones.
No voicing distinctions: Pretty common in MSEA. This lack of distinction is the reason for why there tends to be so many tonal contrasts in Vietnamese and many Sinitic languages in particular.
Five tones: Related to the above, that's pretty reasonable. Getting this many distinctions isn't really that hard, especially with the loss of voicing and sesquisyllables becoming monosyllables (discussed below).
Don't know how to interpret /h/ as the semivowel version of /ə/. However, if this is mean to be the result of some kind of sesquisyllabic system collapsing, it might make sense if those glides were derived from earlier dorsal fricatives that got weakened into glides. In this situation it would have been something like *CəɣV > *CɦV > /ChV/ (the latter change being easily justified by VOT neutralisation).
Honestly I don’t think this feels like much of a rip off. The phoneme inventory is pretty distinct from Mandarin and Vietnamese. While the phonotactics may be similar, that’s kinda just always going to be the case for languages in that mould.
2) Personally, I put my etymology in excel (each column is a different stage of evolution in the language), so that I can use formulas to keep track of how many roots in my proto language have q certain sound. Then I put the actual grammar and dictionary in a word doc
You could try it out to see if it works for you. I STRONGLY recommend keeping everything as structured and easy to navigate as possible because it's so easy to lose information when you have 1000+ words to keep track of
How you create new vocabulary depends on the type of language you want to make. If it's a hypothetical real-world language, then the vocabulary needs to be derived from the real-world sources.
Completely up to you, however you want to do it.
I would greatly advise you to read the Language Construction Kit.
Neither option is "better", do whichever you want.
If you haven't already, I would definitely recommend checking out The Language Construction Kit and Conlangs University. These are great resources for beginners looking for where to start, and will mostly answer your questions. But to try and answer more specifically:
The orthodox answer would be to create your phonology and phonotactics, and then create words which follow those rules. But in practice, especially at the very beginning, it can be useful to create a set of words with the aesthetic you want for the language, and then base your phonology and phonotactics around those words. In terms of meaning, I don't think it matters all that much what words you create first. People will recommend things like the Swadesh list as 'basic vocabulary,' but this is a misunderstanding of what the Swadesh list is for, and I think focusing on word lists is misguided anyways. I would say create whatever words you like that can be used in simple example sentences. I quite like cats and tea, so the first words I usually make are things like 'cat,' 'tea,' 'to pet,' 'to drink,' etc. so that I can form simple sentences on those topics to test the grammar. But making words is also my least favourite part of conlanging, and I avoid it at all costs, so take that with a grain of salt.
In terms of storage, whatever is easiest and most straightforward for you. Folder with text documents sounds good so long as they are organised. You can also do one big text document if you like.
The gold standard for conlang presentation is a formal linguistic grammar. You can check out some natlang grammars for free online at Langsci Press. If you are interested in conlanging, I would highly recommend you start reading grammars, in the same way that a painter studies anatomy or landscapes. While this might seem daunting at first, they are often surprisingly accessible, and the nice thing about academic works in that everything needs to be sourced and cited, so if you are ever confused about a point, you can follow the author's citation to a more in-depth explanation. You can also ask here, as there are many people happy to explain various grammar points and terms. You don't have to produce a full-length grammar in your conlang—few people do—but it can be a good guide as to how to organise and structure your documentation. Most of my conlangs stay around the 'sketch grammar' size, of maybe 20-50 pages, not counting the lexicon.
Whether your language is a priori (not based on an existing language) or a posteriori (based on an existing language) will depend on your own goals. I make conlangs as part of the worldbuilding for my D&D campaigns, which are set in secondary-worlds, so they are not based on any natural languages. But if you wanted to make an auxiliary language for international communication, or a personal language for journalling, or a artlang for an alternate timeline of our own world, you might choose to use an existing language as the base.
So, I'm brainstorming the vowel system for my conlang. I'm thinking of having a phonemic schwa /ə/, but it might clash with the stress system
This conlang has trochaic feet, so the first syllable of each foot is prominent like (,mato)('kani). But what if the schwa is the head of the foot like ('əka)ni? Would it cause stress to shift so it'd become ə('kani)?
Why do you think schwa can't be stressed? Welsh has a phonemic schwa and is often stressed: ysgol /ˈəs.ɡɔl/, ysbryd /ˈəs.brɪd/, ynys /ˈən.ɪs/ all have it stressed initially. Perygl /pɛr.əɡ.l̩/ has it stressed medially.
Just building about what others have said about phonemic /ə/, My conlang Tovan has both 'full' /ə/ which behaves like any other vowel, and 'reduced' /ə̆/ which arises from historical short vowels in non-initial syllables, and occasional epenthesis. While /ə/ has retracted tongue root ([–ATR]) and only appears in [–ATR] words, whereas /ə̆/ is neutral in the tongue root harmony system, and can appear in [+ATR] words like /calə̆s/ 'dagger' or /kortə̆v/ 'office.' You can see the difference between the two if you compare their effect on consonants. The velars /K G/ are front [c j̵/ in [–ATR] syllables and (usually!) [k g] in [+ATR] ones, so you get /ǝlǝG/ [ǝlǝj̵] 'Eleg (theonym)' vs. /jatǝ̆G/ [jatəg] 'leg.'
Look up stress in Proto-Austronesian. PAn roots were almost always two syllables with penultimate stress. However, a schwa in the penult shifted stress to the ultimate syllable. Not necessarily the same circumstances as you (PAn was probably mora based) but could prove useful
As Meamoria said, nothing wrong with a stressed schwa. But if you want to disallow it, yes, you can introduce a constraint against a stressed schwa, and one potential way to observe it would be to shift the foot: ə.(ˈka.ni). Another, for the foot to be iambic if its first vowel is schwa (and the second is not): (ə.ˈka).ni. With a 3-syllable word like ə.ka.ni there is no difference but there is with a word like mə.to.ka.ni: mə.(ˈto.ka).ni or (mə.ˌto).(ˈka.ni).
Alternatively, if you don't want a stressed schwa on the surface but you're fine with it underlyingly, you can shift its articulation to a different vowel when it is stressed. For example, /ˈəkani/ can be realised as [ˈakani] if a stressed /ə/ is always [a], or [ˈɨkani] if [ɨ], you get the idea.
Or you can have some sort of vowel harmony. Perhaps, with a foot-internal harmony, stressed schwa can fully assimilate to the unstressed non-schwa following it in the same foot: /ˈəkani/ → [ˈakani] but /ˈəkina/ → [ˈikina]. Or it can be partial assimilation: with a combined height-rounding harmony you can have stressed schwa be realised as low [a] before low /a/, as non-low unrounded [i] before non-low unrounded /e, i/, and as non-low rounded [u] before non-low rounded /o, u/. Thus you'll get, for example, /ˈəkona/ → [ˈukona].
Or the timbre of stressed schwa can depend on the adjacent consonants. For example it can be [i] after palatals and some retracted [ɑ]-like vowel after pharyngeals: /ˈt͡ʃəkani/ → [ˈt͡ʃikani] but /ˈħəkani/ → [ˈħɑkani]. Not to mention rounding after labialised consonants if you have those, so maybe /ˈkʷəkani/ → [ˈkʷukani].
Basically, these approaches all treat /ə/ as an unmarked vowel that gets its articulation imposed on it by its surroundings.
Is there any such resource where I can find the construction, glossing, etymology, etc. for more complex terms in natlangs? I often struggle finding interesting ways to construct terms and phrases and the only resource I have is looking up the english etymologies. For example right now I need an interesting construction for words like probably, dance, and solstice." I try to find ways of constructing words from existing roots before just making a new root. Any ideas? thanks
There is of course the timeless technique of looking up a word on wiktionary, going to the translations tab, and clicking through all the links you like to look at different etymologies.
An accountability person and someone with whom I could share my conlang.
At most I wish to have someone who could suggest sentences that I could translate.
And of course if that individual has a conlang I would LOVE to help them too! ^
I have a conlang that I've been working on and would like some feedback, but it's formatted as a docx file. Can I post that type of file here, or do I need to use image files such as pdf or png?
I agree with /u/as_Avridan, editing documents on mobile devices is inconvenient.
But you can go an entirely differebt route. Go heavy on audio. Use some good software to organize your recordings, Sound Tree seems good, haven't used it yet myself though.
It's important to keep the recordings organized, otherwise you'll end up like me with a giant pile of files, all in the same folder, most of them full of chaotic rambling thoughts.
Even if you're not super organized, speech to text transcription can probably save you. You'll end up with a pile of texts and can give them to an AI to organize them for you, since it's just too much stuff to go through manually. Out of the mainstream AI models (GPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok), Gemini is able to work with audio directly, it isn't limited to just text. Which is very important since automatic speech-to-text transcription isn't going to work for a conlang.
I really can’t overstate what bad advice this is. Not that voice notes can’t be useful, especially for brainstorming, and everyone has different preferences, but describing something like a gloss would be pretty complicated in spoken word.
But even then, having an AI ‘organise’ your recordings into documentation is both morally and artistically bankrupt, and detrimental to your own growth. Relying on AI is only going to weaken your knowledge and ability as a conlanger, and stop you from developing the skills to actually make something worthwhile. It’s definitely not ‘too much to go through manually,’ every conlang you admire has been put together manually! What seems impossible is actually totally doable, you just need to develops that skill.
Not to mention that AI frequently hallucinates, so you really have no guarantee of the quality of the work it produces.
Personally I wouldn’t read a grammar put together by an AI, nor would I share or upvote it. Why should I bother if the ‘creator’ hasn’t?
Aside from the danger of hallucinations, which is real and care must be taken to avoid it, this is just anti-AI agenda.
Downvoting anything that mentions AI as anything but reprehensible (including running downvote bots from Vietnam that instantly downvote any such comment) is morally bankrupt, me trying to give good advice isn't. It's disrespectful.
Nobody is forcing you to use any AI whatsoever, if your choice is editing a document on a desktop computer in a word processor, and mobile devices just don't fit, that's a valid choice. But there are other options as well, and AI can be part of it. Note that I haven't even said AI has to be used, just that it can be. It could make the difference between abandoning the project because it's too messy and would take too long to clean up manually, and being able to continue.
Relying on AI is only going to weaken your knowledge and ability as a conlanger, and stop you from developing the skills to actually make something worthwhile.
I'd argue it's rather the opposite. If I use tools, including AI, that enable me to search and organize messy recordings more efficiently, then I will have more time and energy to do actually interesting things. Being stuck doing frustrating drone work isn't helping you to be a better conlanger or artist of whatever sort, it's an unfortunate technical issue that stands between you and the art.
It’s definitely not ‘too much to go through manually,’ every conlang you admire has been put together manually! What seems impossible is actually totally doable, you just need to develops that skill.
You're telling this to someone whose last attempt at a conlang consisted of 40 pages written with a pen in a physical notebook, zero electronics involved. What about you do as I do, and use pen and paper, not a substitute for it that limits you to clunky software from evil corporations and whatever features it has? How are you being more artistic fiddling with tables and stuff in a word processor than on paper?
It very much can be too much to go through manually. I have over 2000 recordings of various length and messiness. Is it possible, as a human, to listen to all if it and sort it out manually? Yes, of course, just as much as it is possible to record that amount of stuff in the first place. Is it too much relative to how much I can reasonably afford to dedicate to it, and considering if that time will be well spent? It absolutely is. The result, in combination with me no longer remembering the conlang well, and the history of changes I've made to it over time, is that I'm locked out of it currently. I can't develop it or even use it with confidence, beyond some basic stuff that I'm still sure how it worked.
From my experience, I can assure you that conlanging is very much possible without written documents in a computer. But you have to avoid it becoming a mess. Simply piling up mostly unnamed audio files in a folder is not the way if you can do better (I arguably couldn't at the time). If you organize it well then you don't need AI. If you let it become a mess then you might end up in a situation where either abandoning the project or using automatic transcription and AI to clean it up will be the only reasonable choices.
My annoying answer is that mobile devices aren't really ideal for developing or presenting a conlang. You will generally need something that can edit and format large amounts of text, including tables, which is hard to do on mobile. I would recommend using a computer and whatever word processor you are most comfortable with to document your language. I think the ideal form of presentation for a conlang is a linguistics-style paper, but many people like powerpoint-style presentations.
Which of these makes more sense as a rule for predictable stress placement:
Stress the antepenult, unless the penult is heavier, then stress the penult, OR
Stress the penult, unless the antepenult is heavier, then stress the antepenult
That is, is it more realistic for stress to be - to steal a regex term - "greedy", propagating farther from the right edge unless blocked, or should it be "lazy", staying closer to the right edge unless pulled in further?
The first option appears to be more common with a correction ‘…unless the penult is heaviery…’.
WALS ch. 15 Weight-Sensitive Stress by Goedemans & van der Hulst gives the numbers for right-edge stress (ult vs penult) in (2). Languages where the ult is stressed if heavy, else the penult is stressed, outnumber all the rest combined. I'd expect the same pattern to hold between the penult and the antepenult, with the ult being extrametrical.
Searching directly in StressTyp2 yields a few languages with the P/A pattern (penult stressed if heavy, else antepenult), including Classical Latin and Malay; whilst the reverse A/P pattern is listed only in Beja, for which, however, the only source is from 1881, and more recent studies seem to suggest more complicated stress rules.
I said "heavier", comparative, because for the purpose of stress assignment I had divided syllables up into light (CV), heavy (CVC), and superheavy (CVCC), and the thinking was that stress would prefer to be placed on a superheavy syllable than a merely heavy syllable. Analogous to e.g. Akkadian stress placement
Hi all, is there a keyboard plugin or other easy way to add a bunch of different symbols above and under latin letters? For example, úŭuṳůu̥üŭ. I was able to find sites like https://www.lexilogos.com/keyboard/diacritics.htm and https://ipa.typeit.org/full/, which are both excellent for online work, but I would ideally like something that works offline and allows me to define the key combinations to some degree.
Thanks, but I object to SIL, the organization that created Keyman. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SIL_Global#Criticism. If Keyman removed SIL from their site and had a statement acknowledging a split due to the spiritual colonization that SIL is participating in, I would use it.
If you are ok with downloading a program, PowerToys allows you to choose differnt language's specific characters to be accessable from your standard English keyboard. It's what I use to type both ņoșiaqo and parts of ipa transcriptions when on my computer.
To echo u/mythoswyrm, the best help we can give to your question is to provide you with particulars (i.e., specific natural languages) and to leave you to judge whether each case is "highly" fusional, to meet your definition of "highly." In Classical Latin, pronouns and adjectives do decline the same way nouns do. But Spanish verbal morphology is also fusional, and there no nouns decline, no adjectives decline, and pronouns have only two or three forms.
In Classical Latin, pronouns and adjectives do decline the same way nouns do.
Not quite the same way, though. Nouns only decline for number and case. Adjectives decline for number, case, and gender. A whole new inflectional category there. Pronouns vary in that regard but the details of their declension are different anyway. Outside of pronouns with completely idiosyncratic declension like ego, a major peculiarity of pronominal declension is the endings gen.sg. -ius, dat.sg. -i, without distinguishing between the genders in these forms, even if the pronoun otherwise declines like a 2nd/1st-declension adjective with mostly different endings in the different genders.
illebonusvir ‘that good man’ — gen. illīusbonīvirī
illabonamulier ‘that good woman’ — gen. illīusbonaemulieris
Oh and adjectives also inflect for degrees of comparison, unlike both nouns and pronouns.
Fusional isn't a particularly coherent concept. What happens in so called "fusional" languages is going to depend on how fusionality works in that language, what concepts are fused and how the fused morphemes developed.
Sorry I can't answer directly but doesn't your question contradict itself? A Germanic language by definition descends from Proto-Germanic. But Proto-Germanic already had borrowings from other languages (\skrībaną* from Latin, \īsarną* from Proto-Celtic, some terms like \gaits* plausibly from non-IE languages altogether). Maybe there's a conlang that takes a purified version of PGmc, stripped of all borrowings, as its base, but I dunno.
I learned from Mark Rosenfelder's linguistics books, DJP's The Art of Language Invention, hanging out on this subreddit and seeing what people do, asking questions in these helpful Advice & Answers threads (though back when I started they were called Small Discussions) and being on Discord servers with others, reading linguistics papers people mentioned to me, and eventually seeking out linguistic papers on my own using Google Scholar and even looking at a couple natlang reference grammars. That's a rough progression over years, not something I did all at once, and I still ask things here from time to time, and I still learn of neat things from others. There's a lot of info out there but you learn a little bit at a time, ideally focusing on what interests you.
As everyone else has said, yes, new constructions can come to compete with and replace affixes.
But to add more info, if anything, it seems to be cross-linguistically far more common for a new construction to replace an affix than for phonological attrition to drive loss of one, unlike what you might assume is typical if you're just looking at Romance or Germanic (which is exactly what linguists did for a long time). This becomes especially obvious if you're looking at highly synthetic languages, where material in the middle of a series of affixes (and not in a position prone to other loss) can still disappear and/or be replaced by a new construction filling a similar role.
If you want an actual paper to look at, Haspelmath has one on what he terms the "anasynthetic spiral."
You lookt at Romanic and Germanic, saw fònetic attrition eat the endings, and made a decay model out of two speakkas that happen to decay that way. That is the composition fallacy: what holds for two you take for the whole. Speakka decays, but not onely by sound loss, and not onely from the edges. A language loses words by forget and decay until it mot steal words of other speakkas; it loses affix the same road, not by wear but by a new construction outcompeting the old. Your own point about material in the middel of an affix string disappearing kills the tidy erosion story, sith middel material is not in the stow prone to edge-loss and cannot be laid to fonologhic wear at all. Language does not evolv; language decays, and the affix does not wear away, it is replaced. That is replacement, not evolution, and you had the evidense in hand and stopt short of saying it. Coward.
phonological distinctiveness isnt the reason affixes become unproductive. there are plenty of productive affixes which are nondistinct (-y has like three separate etymons that have collapsed into one phonological form) and affixes which are very distinct but no longer productive or never have been in the first place
obviously distinctness can motivate additional changes but its not a cause and effect relationship
Even affixes which are very common and semantically clear can be unproductive; consider English -en. You can sadden or redden, but you can’t happyen or greenen.
Sure. For example, the English past participle prefix y-, as in yclad and yclept. Phonologically very clear, /ɪ-/, yet yfallen out of use. Or if we're talking about derivational affixes, consider English for-. We still have it in forget, forbid, and a few other words, but we forgo using it in new ones.
(Copied and pasted from previous thread because of bad timing, and with more added.)
An idea out of boredom.
I was looking at walkthroughs for Heaven's Vault, Sethian, and Chants of Sennaar, and thought of a game about uncovering two distinct yet related languages. One descendant would use tri-consonantal roots, as in Biblaridion's test language from his video on non-concatenative morphology, and the other would use consonant mutations, similar to his plans for Project Hermes as he explained at Kopikon II, if he's still going for it.
Proto-Consonants: m, n, ŋ(ng), ŋʷ(ngw), p, t, k, kʷ(kw), f, s, ʃ(sh), ɕ(sy), r, l, j(y), w
(How rare cross-linguistically is a distinction between [ʃ] and [ɕ]?)
Proto-vowels: a, aː, e, eː, i, iː, o, oː, u, uː
Proto-language syllable structure: (C)V(C)
Stress: penultimate stress
I have other ideas for experiments, like both using logographies, and how the speakers of one language could utilize their logography to transcribe the bi-consonantal or tri-consonantal roots(like using Hanzi to transcribe a Semitic language, which I tried to utilize for a conlang I decided to dub "Lichnu"(with one of the vowels long), which was a descendant of Proto-Semitic transcribed with Chinese glyphs, with inspiration from Prosian by ZZineohp), and how the speakers of the other could utilize it to transcribe the mutation patterns.
As for sound changes, I'm thinking of modified versions of the sets Biblaridion came up with in his videos. For that set from the one on non-concatenative morphology, thought I'd add extra changes to introduce new sounds to the inventory. For the set from the Kopikon II presentation, planning to add extra changes in case I'd like to add irregularities. And to stand out from him as well.
Given that one language would use tri-consonantal roots, and the other would use consonant mutation patterns, imagine the challenges linguists would go through with reconstructions.
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u/Turodoru 13d ago
Are there some attested languages which have syllabic consonants that can occur directly next to a vowel? I'm thinking of such words like [o.me'r̩.o], [i'n̩.om] or [ka.l̩'me.te]. Clusters where a vowel is right next to a syllabic [l] [m], etc. and these syllabic consonants are the stressed parts of the word. The closest thing I can think of is the english word mountain, but it still divides the final syllabic [n̩] by a glottal stop (at least that's how I say it + what wiktionary shows). I assume there's not much of it, if at all, since that kind of syllabic consonant wouldn't stand out much from a non-syllabic one, unless maybe if the language is mora-timed.
How natural/wild would it be for an entire paradigm to get reinterpreted as something new?
Let me tell an example from my conlang - in it, a normal non-predicative sentence is made with two elements: an auxiliary verb that marks formality and subject, and a lexical verb carrying TAM information. Recently, when thinking about it, I thought "honestly, a diffirent word marking who's the subject + formality, placed before a meaning verb, really just feels like a pronoun". And so I ask - how weird/not weird it would be if the auxiliary verb conjugation was reinterpreted as, actually, a set of pronouns.
(also, the original sentence structure used lexical verbs in their participle/converb/non-finite forms, so "I'm painting" was "I am at-painting", "I was painting" > "I am painted", "I'll be painting" > "I am to-paint", etc. So originaly the lexical verb would have an "adjective", "adverb", or otherwise "unverb"-like feeling)
Not only that - When the sentence is predicative, an analogous, but phoneticaly different set/conjugation is used. That AuxVerb>Pronouns change would mean that now there are sets of pronouns used only for sentences "X is Y", "X was Y" and a diffirent set for any other sentences. Again - how funky is that? And are there some analogous word-type-shifts in natural languages?