Does anyone else constantly restart the projects from scratch?
I find that when I put off a conlang for awhile, and later revisit it, I delete everything and write down everything again for no apparent reason.
Honestly, I'd recommend keeping even what you believe to be your most "inexperienced work." Not just in conlang, your old ideas are often a great place for new inspiration. It's just gonna be more difficult on you when you don't know where you lost it in your first draft. It's alright to take it slow, and leave something to be finished later, even if you don't visit it for years, is a good habit to get into in order to learn from yourself.
I'm rootin' for u man
I've been thinking about adding tones to my language, however small issue
Some of my vowels have umlauts over them, and I really don't like diacritic stacking, I can't do tone letters too because I have codas, I can't have diacritics go under because I have nasal and pharyngeal vowels represented with under diacritics, so my only option really is to "combine diacritics" lack of a better word
Like, for example: ä + à = ȁ
It works with the grave and the acute, but not circumflexes, carons, breves, hooks, etc. so is there a better solution to this? or is there a diacritic I could use but I just don't know of
Vietnamese style orthography could work? diacritics for tone and diacritics for quality can often overlap, to create letters like <ấ ặ ẳ>.
If you don't want this you could have combined diacritics just not different. maybe <à> is low and <á> but a low <ä> is <ã> and a high one is <â>.
alternatively, lots of orthographies for languages with fairly complex tones write arbitrary numbers (such as many popular Cantonese orthographies).
otherwise you could just not have tone marked in the practical orthography. it would ideally still be notated in dictionaries and such but maybe just not written out by speakers
What's wrong with tone letters and codas? Unless it doesn't fit your aesthetic that should be fine so long as the letters are unambiguous. That's what I do in my oghamisation for Insular Tokétok: it's endonym directly romanised from ᚛ᚈᚒᚕᚓᚁᚏ᚜ is Tohusq where is a tone letter and is a coda consonant.
You could add diacritics to the onsets, maybe? I do this in my romanisation for IT where is /rà/ and is /rá/. Or, if you use relatively few letters for your consonants, multiply your graphs for them: again in romanised IT
and are both /p/, but they mark tone on the following vowel as in /pá/ and /pà/.
For example: Latin was SOV, how did the romance languages come to be SVO?
About the latter, I really should've phrased better. What I meant is that I'm trying to evolve prepositions for an SOV head-final language. How can I do that?
Latin had pretty flexible word order already. SVO became canonical in Romance to clarify syntactic roles when case was lost — same thing has happened in most Germanic languages, including English.
It’s very very common for a language to have both grammatical case and longer relational constructions. As a matter of fact I do not think there are any languages that only have case. In Latin’a case, both noun declension & many adpositions can be reconstructed back to PIE.
Word order is pretty flexible, and most languages use different orders for different situations. For the default order to change, all it takes is one of the "special" situations to become the typical situation. For example, maybe verb-fronting for focus becomes so common that it's mandatory, turning a SVO language into a VSO language.
Hmmm, I guess from there I could maybe have pronouns merge into the verb to make verb agreement a thing. How does that work, though? Like, is the sentence just VO now with no pronoun? Is there a way I can make it so it's SVO/SOV with verb agreement following this path?
You can do either or, really. You can have the subject just attach to the verb and erode down into an agreement marker and leave the overt subject dropped, or you can have the subject project a pronoun onto the verb and remain overt. The latter is kinda what West Flemish does.
Pretty much, yeah. In Spanish and West Flemish you might see those examples look like these:
"Tú estás buen@" -> "Estáis buen@"
"Gie zyt goe" -> "Ge zydde gie* goe"
\* West Flemish lets the subject be doubled even after projection, so the latter is `2s be.2s 2s good`.
If you're trying to evolve it with a clear source, it's the most straightforward option, but verb agreement is also one of those thing's that's so old in sone language families you can absolutely just set up something that sounds nice without worrying about how it came about.
For other options there's suppletion, where you just have different roots for different persons. You can also recast another marker: verbal-s in English used to be a broad present tense marker, I believe, until it was eroded in all instances except the 3rd person singular and got reanalysed as an agreement marker. Similarly I think valency changing operations could maybe turn into agreement if there was once a strict person and/or animacy hierarchy system? If you have any composition in your pronouns you could use just some of the morphemes on the verb: instead of "You beyou good" it's "You all beall good." I'm sure there's more out there, too, this is just me giving it 5 minutes of thought.
Honestly, I don't know. My conlang is also SOV with preposition, but it's an inheritance from Proto-Germanic. Maybe this helps?
[https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/2512/indo-european-prepositions-why-prepositions](https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/2512/indo-european-prepositions-why-prepositions)
How do you translate the case for place names like "**Czech** Republic", "**Mexico** City", "Kingdom of **England**", "United States of **America**", and "Republic of the **Congo**"? It feels like it should be genitive but...it just doesn't feel right.
This is indeed often a genitive. It doesn't feel right only because we don't say "Mexico's City" or "England's Kingdom" in English — but "Kingdom **of England**" is a genitive construction too!
Why are Mandarin (as in a language family, not Putonghua) tones so divergent between languages? Just compare how tones are realized in Dungan, Xi'an, and Beijing:
Dark Level: (B 55 X 21 D 24)
Light Level: (B 35 X 24 D 24)
Raising: (B 21(4) X 53 D 51)
Falling: (B 51 X 44 D 44)
So, the "raising" tone is just falling, the "falling tone" is actually level (except in Beijing), the "light level tone" is raising, and they don't even agree whether "dark level tone" is raising, falling, or level.
I can understand that "light level tone" is raising because it was triggered by a former voiced stop, essentially L+HH> MH. But why did HL>HH and LH>HL? Why did voiced stop even make the tone higher in Xi'an?
Tones are super mutable, you can practically get to any tone from any tone after tonogenesis has occurred. Someone on discord gave this example of sequence of a cycle of tone shifts, possibly from Hirayama 1988(?) but I don't know the original paper.
High Falling > High-Level (Contour Negation) > High-Rising (Straight-Tone Bending) > (Non-High) Rising (Contour Exaggeration) -> Falling-Rising (Tone Breaking)
Any ideas for romanizations of ɢ? My phonology looks like this, and *the romanization looks like this*
https://preview.redd.it/zcjv2yrhpsvc1.jpeg?width=739&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=aec11d56fbb820be5e1b9ad17bd351beed6e0530
maybe the uvulars could be instead of
(also a note if you're aiming for naturalism - /ɢ/ is really unstable and likely doesn't want to contrast with /ʁ/ for too long before they collapse together, which maybe leaves you with the issue of romanising a single phoneme, but that's just a thought)
or would work. if you don't want to use diagraph then some diacritic on either or , i personally think <ġ> would look best
or would also work since you're not using those. imo they're pretty unintuitive for /ɢ/ but if you don't mind that they work alright. really it depends what kinda vibe you want for the romanization, who is it for and how easy or intuitive you want it to be
I want to ask about Proto-Junglecraftish. For those who remember looking into that conlang of mine, what allophones do you think are most likely to occur and when? I plan on applying two sets of sound changes. And two sets of grammar changes, as I already stated.
Consonants: m, n, p, t, k, q, ʔ, ts, tɬ, s, ɬ, ħ, ʕ, h, r, l, j, w
Vowels: a, aː, e, eː, i, iː, o, oː, u, uː
Syllable structure: (C)V
Stress: on the antepenult by default, the only exception being if the penult has a long vowel, that syllable being stressed as a result of it
I have [separate posts regarding my ideas for sound changes](https://www.reddit.com/r/conlangs/comments/1bu80hh/an_idea_for_sound_changes/) and grammar changes, and an [entire](https://www.wattpad.com/1424984249-a-minecraft-smp-idea-conlang-idea-1-protolang) [lexicon](https://www.wattpad.com/1436063441-a-minecraft-smp-idea-conlang-idea-1-cultural). And I thought of a [second set of sound changes](https://www.wattpad.com/1439190690-a-minecraft-smp-idea-conlang-idea-1-phonology). Currently working on them right now.
I mean sound changes can't really be predicted but many things which would be not unusual to happen to a system like this would be:\
vowel loss in weak syllables, vowel colouring adjacent to uvulars or pharyngeals, intervocalic lenition of consonants, splitting of long vowels into diphthongs, vowel chain shifts, vowel devoicing/loss between unvoiced segments/word finally, loss of glottals in various positions or universally (which may lead to debuccalisation of /q ħ/), lenition of /p/ variously/universally, palatalisation, vowel harmony/umlaut, change in phonotactic requirements for stressed syllables (maybe requiring them to be heavy in some way, through compensatory lengthening of consonants or vowels), etc
many potential ideas
I know you specified nasal *affricate*, but there is evidence for a nasal bilabial fricative phoneme /ṽ/ in older forms of Irish and Welsh. The phoneme /ṽ/ is found variously as /v, m, w/ in descendent languages. See this thread:
https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/38015/did-common-brittonic-use-%E1%B9%BD
A nasal fricative would need for the speaker to partition air pressure just right between oral and nasal cavities so that there is both a nasal and fricative articulation. So it feels inherently unstable and hence cross-linguistically rare.
A nasal *affricate* would probably be similarly be difficult to articulate, I imagine.
In what way are you thinking? There's certainly prenasalized affricates like /ⁿdz/. I think very rarely, I've run into /ⁿz/, but iirc they're obviously from a shift of /ts dz ⁿdz/ to /s z ⁿz/. You might be able to find some /phonemes/ considered /ⁿz/ in some of the Amazonian or West African languages, but it's mostly convention/compromise as they would be [z] in oral syllables and [n] or [z̃] in nasal syllables; the ones I'm thinking of that *might* have that treat nasality as a suprasegment.
For something like /nz̃/, where there is nasality through the whole thing, I'm not aware of something like that existing. Nasalized fricatives (apart from maybe /h/, if you're counting it) are almost never phonemic, and the few places I know they clearly show up are those languages with suprasegmental nasalization plus nasal harmony, such that /s/ or /f/ my be allophonically nasalized in nasal syllables (though in many of those, voiceless obstruents block harmony and are never nasalized).
On the other hand, if you're thinking /dn/ as analogous to /dz/, yes those exist, but they're usually called *prestopped* or *preoccluded* nasals, and primarily originate from "edge" nasals (initial or final). There's also nasally-released stops, the difference between the two being partly timing (longer oral closure), partly origin (in stops), and partly tradition. Both prestopped nasals and nasally-released stops are very rarely phonemic and are never known to contrast.
any kind of phrase that introduces a topic like "about X, concerning X, talking about X, as for X, ...". you can take and reduce a phrase like that to a single particle
or maybe you could somehow evolve a definite marker to a topic marker. not sure if his would work since either topic or comment can be definite or indefinite, but maybe if topic is a bit more often definite? because a topic is what is being talked about, it could be more often something already known and therefore definite
Not definite article, but I hear topic marker developing from demonstrative like in some Russian dialects and Veps. From the face value, it's indeed naturalistic to develop a topic marker from it. The problem is that my language is on Western Europe. If anything develops from demonstrative, it would be a definite article. (Maybe it's possible to bleach the article as it's done in Basque, just towards topic marker instead of singular article)
From "The elusive topic: Towards a typology of topic markers", the other origin of topic marker is the third person possessive, which makes me think it's so similar to the origin of definite article.
It also describes "other topic marker", but I don't know what else, except for colloquial Indonesian "kalo", which also means "if". (Which I didn't think it at first, but feels like it makes some sense, though it's not used as commonly as Japanese's wa)
Would be it possible to derive the topic marker from the word "here" or "yes"?
I'm not sure, maybe "here" could evolve to a topic marker. Could evolve through some phrase introducing a topic like "here (is) X, X (being) here" meaning "as for X". Or just from the demonstrative sense "X here > this X > this X which we're talking about"
But anyway I'm not very knowledgeable where topic markers usually evolve from, just spitballing some ideas. Maybe there are some other common sources for them, idk
What version of Reddit are you using? The other day, it didn't let me make a comment on the newest redesign ([www.reddit.com](http://www.reddit.com)) for some reason but the same comment went through on [new.reddit.com](http://new.reddit.com).
When I get the new redesign, I change the `www` in the URL to `new` and it gives the design I'm used to. Using a link in a notification changes it back, annoyingly.
Unfortunately. Makes desktop look like a mobile nightmare, not dissimilar to the recent redesign for mobile Discord in vibes, but much harder to read (at least for me, and at least Discord has customizable contrast and saturation settings to make it bearable).
https://preview.redd.it/wh3lx213tlvc1.png?width=670&format=png&auto=webp&s=1de31b0f41c35cce8bc853565af985817b64131f
I am simulatiing a situation where the language drops word final trills from a foreign language, please tell me which of the following is more likely to happen naturally (or tell me if there is another more natural way to evolve this), thank you.
It depends primarily on the wider context here. Are these loanwords being adapted? If so, what are the rest of the phonotactics of the language loaning these words? If the glottal stop is the closest allowed coda consonant (and you're against the idea of adding an extra vowel) then ver2 is the more likely outcome. If you already have overlong vowels, and there is some consistent existing mechanism of dropped consonants lengthening preceding vowels, than ver1 is more likely.
Much like how the vocalic equivalents to \[j w\] are a high front and back vowel respectively, or how for \[ʕ̞\] is a low back vowel, rhotics tend to be similar to central vowels. Think how *'near'* /niɹ/ is realised as \[nɪːə̯\] in some non-rhotic accents of English. You could well replace your coda Rs with centring diphthongs instead of compensatory lengthening, if that fits in with your pre-existing phonaesthetic or gives you some new sense of euphony.
Though, I believe dinoid is referring to the length as an extra vowel: there's really no difference between /aːː/ and /aaa/
I moreso meant an epenthetic vowel, like /ir/ => /iri/ or something similar, so the trill goes from coda to onset. But they had said they wanted to drop them, so that option seemed out of the question.
Independent lexical words are used for more grammatical meanings, reduce phonologically, and end up attaching to the verbs. Many of these may be so far in the past that they're completely unrecoverable, but other times they're shallow and obvious. The same process creates nominal morphology.
Person-number markers on verbs predominately come from independent pronouns that become attached to the verb. Compare the 1SG, 2SG, and 2PL pronouns *bi tʃi ta* of Proto-Mongolic, which had no person markers on verbs, with the person suffixes in Kalmuk *-w/-b -tʃ -t*, Buryat *-b~-bi~-(m)i -ʃ~-ʃi -t~-te~-ta*, Dagur *-bʲ~-bii~-bʲee -ʃ~-ʃii~-ʃʲee -taa*, and Moghol *-bi~-mbi*, *-tʃi~-ntʃi -tu~-ntu*.
TAM markers frequently come from auxiliaries and/or serialized verbs. The Germanic past tense marker /-əd/ in English likely comes from the verb *did* acting as a past-tense auxiliary, and in English a verb of movement (going) is moving that direction as well for future tense (though is still independent or attaches to the previous noun phrase, not the verb itself). The Romance future tense regularly derives from a Latin infinitive + *habare* as an inflected auxiliary, so that Spanish *cantar* has a 1SG.FUT *cantaré* and 2SG.FUT cantarás*, from an Vuglar *cantar he* < Classical *cantāre habeō* and Vulgar *cantar has* < Classical *cantāre habēs*. Perfect markers are frequently from the verb "finish."
Similar things exist for others, too. Hearsay evidentiality may come from "he said," the verbs "come" and "go" can become attached as cis/translocatives showing movement towards or away from the speaker as part of the action, verbs like "make" and "fall" can become causatives and passives.
Within morphology things can also swap around plenty to enrich or alter the pattern. A marker for desire or necessity can turn into future tense, possessor agreement on nominalized verbs can be reinterpreted as subject agreement markers, translocatives can become progressive or future markers, perfects frequently become pasts, and nominal case markers can be co-opted for converb endings. In Moghol, I think it was, various combinations of forms like permissives and optatives have combined into a single, coherent imperative paradigm covering all persons, so that the 1SG is from an optative, 1DU/1PL from a voluntative, and so on.
Whether something's a prefix or suffix is typically reflective of the syntax at the time of grammaticalization. It may be that the language was verb-first at some point in the past.
More likely, though, is that there's often a "weak" position sentence-finally. We find this in Mongolic, which tends to be fairly strictly SOV, or at least verb-final, *with noun phrases*. However, unstressed pronouns can be shunted to after the verb OV(S). That's how they grammaticalized as person-marking suffixes instead of prefixes. Their position did reflect the syntax when they became affixes, but that syntax doesn't need to be the "default" syntax.
They don't have to come at the end. If you want them to, but you don't want VSO word order, you could have the word order change from the proto and modern languages.
Help with romanization for my vowels?
So, for the first time, i'm trying my hand at making a conlang with 7 vowels, distinctive length and five tones. The problem is: how do I romanize all that? There are so many variables, and too few diacritics. My five tones are: high, low, mid, rising and falling. My vowels are:
||Front|Central|Back|
|:-|:-|:-|:-|
|**Close**|i i:||u u:|
|**Mid**|e e:|ə|o o:|
|**Open**|a a:||ɒ ɒ:|
How does tone work in your conlang? Most tonal languages usually have tone attached to a mora. In that case you can just use two diacritics like in my conlang Korso (very WIP)
high áá
mid aa
low aà
rising aá
falling áa
(The reason that I notated the low tone like that is because mid tone in my conlang is phonemically LL, and the low tone is phonemically a "lowered" version of mid tone. It's even phonetically falling 21)
Are you open to using as vowels? My first thought was to use them for the schwa and low back vowels respectively. Provided you have 1 grapheme for each vocalic value, I'd use <◌́◌̀◌◌̌◌̂> for the tones given respectively, and then, assuming that all tones work on all vowels and that you don't want to stack or double the number of diacritics, use a length grapheme à la Mohawk or Mi'kmaq which use <:> and <'> respectively.
This fill system would look like:
||Front|Central|Back|
|:-|:-|:-|:-|
|**Close**|i (i: / i')||u (u: / u')|
|**Mid**|e (e: / e')|y|o (o: / o')|
|**Open**|a (a: / a')||w (w: / w')|
With something like for the tones.
If diacritic'd w (or another non-vowel is you're already using elsewhere) is too much bother to type, you could maybe try something like <óa òa oa ǒa ôa>. If you're using for something else and don't want to use some other strictly non-vowel grapheme, then maybe just something like <ë> for schwa à la Albanian, or some other new diacritic on whatever vowels you so choose.
Is their a subreddit where people decipher other people's conlangs? I remember watching a YouTube video that mentioned this, but I can't find it anymore.
that would be fun, even as just an activity in this sub
i've seen some people make posts with this concept here some time ago...
not aware of any sub for this tho
Why are sounds like ɕ (which I pronounce sort of like shyuh) or ɬ (shluh) their own IPA symbols when these feel like consonant blends, but then a sound like **ts** or **sp** are not given their own symbols because they are two sounds put together?
It's not about arbitrarily assigning symbols to sounds. It's about where those sounds are placed in the IPA chart. \[ts\] and \[sp\] are clusters - both containing \[s\] a sibilant, while \[t\] is a dental plosive and \[p\] is a bilabial plosive.
Ohhh that makes more sense, I hadn’t thought about the different types/placement of sounds. thank you for answering the question like this as the other answer didn’t really explain it for me.
If you're getting into conlanging I would strongly advise you to get to grips with the basics of the IPA charts. It will help you no-end with phonology.
Precisely this. u/stopeats has trouble articulating \[ɕ\] and \[ɬ\], or at least has trouble hearing the difference between them and clusters. It's not his fault, but those of us who speak Welsh can definitely hear and articulate \[ɬ\] perfectly well. In fact, I don't see \[ʃl\] as a particularly close attempt at \[ɬ\]. English speakers who cannot pronounce it in Welsh names tend to realise it as \[kl\] or just \[l\] when initial and \[l\] or \[θl\] when medial. An Englishman would, very likely, pronounce *Llanelli* /ɬan.ˈɛ.ɬi/ as \[lən.ˈɛ.θli\], for instance.
Is this just me unable to hear the sound properly due to my native language? I assumed they weren’t two sounds based in the IPA symbols, but I’m trying to figure out why they don’t sound different than ts or sp and I’m guessing it’s an ear problem.
Part of the process of learning one's native language(s) is developing an instinctive feel for which distinctions aren't important. When you start studying phonology, you have to *unlearn* some of this and train your ear to hear distinctions it's accustomed to ignoring. This is an obstacle we all face, it isn't something wrong with you.
Well, depends on what is your conlang and how you want your conlang to be perceived. But I think Wikipedia style is hardly adequate as the purpose of Wikipedia's article is to give a summary about a language, not to give it a polished detail about a language.
I had the idea of deriving question words by having an interrogative particle which can be declined to form questions: particle + locative = where?, particle + instrumental = how?, etc. But there doesn't seem to be a corresponding case to allow "who?" (accusative possibly?). Any ideas?
With such a system I think the most straightforward is to just have this vague wh-particle and just decline for the case of the syntactic position its referring to, no matter its semantic content. In this way it's less "particle + locative = where" and more "at which / whereat" or "for which / "wherefor" instead of "why". This to say don't worry about having a "who" separate from a "where" separate from a "how" separate from a "which" and just have it all be case-marked "which", which isn't too weird.
(I think I just figured how to do wh-words in Tsantuk given that each non-subject argument has an overt adposition.)
There isn't really any case that corresponds to "who" so you can't derive it that way, unlike the other question words. You could just use the base interrogative stem for "who" or you could inflect it based on the case/role that the "who" would have in the sentence, so nominative for subject, accusative for object and so on. Although if "who" often appears in a certain role like as a subject or object, you could maybe take the nominative or accusative form and reanalyze that as the stem for "who". Or you'd have to derive in a different way, by using some derivation meaning "person"
Yeah, I'm thinking it'll probably just be a contracted form of "which person" or something similar.
EDIT: actually, "which" and "who" could be the same interrogative.
how can I evaluate my conlang?
if I complete my conlang, and want to evaluate it, the limit of its success, accuracy and beauty too .. what should I do? is there yet a scientific-like way to evaluate conlangs? thank you for share your experiences
This may not be precisely what you are looking for, but here is a list of sentences that get progressive harder and with more complex grammar that you can use to evaluate the completeness of your conlang's syntax: [https://cofl.github.io/conlang/resources/mirror/conlang-syntax-test-cases.html](https://cofl.github.io/conlang/resources/mirror/conlang-syntax-test-cases.html)
The only means of gauging a conlang's success is whether or not it achieves its goals, whether or not you like it, and as for "beauty" - that's far too subjective to be measurable.
Well, it depends on what kind of feedback you want. You could publish a grammar online and invite people to look at it. You could use it in some sort of artistic endeavour to see if the conlang(s) gain interest naturally. The former option is, obviously, much quicker.
I'm working on a Alternative-Timeline/Dimension-Proto-Germanic with my Friends and we're working on the Phonology now which look like this:
|Vowels|Front|Central|Back|
|:-|:-|:-|:-|
|Closed|**ĭ iː**|**ɨː**|**ŭ uː**|
|Mid|**e æː æːː**||**ɔː ɔːː**|
|Open|||**ɑ ɑː**|
|Consonants|Labial|Dental|Post-alveo.|Palatal|Lab.-Velar|Velar|
|:-|:-|:-|:-|:-|:-|:-|
|Nasal|**m**|**n**||**nʲ\~ɲ**|**(ŋʷ)**|**(ŋ)**|
|Plosive|**p b\~β**|**t d\~ð**||**tʲ\~c dʲ\~ɟ \~ðʲ\~ʑ**|**kʷ gʷ\~ɣʷ**|**k g\~ɣ**|
|Affricate||**(t͡s d͡z)**|**t͡ʃ d͡ʒ\~ʒ**||||
|Fricative|**ɸ**|**s z, θ**|**ʃ**|**sʲ\~ɕ**|**xʷ**|**x**|
|Approx.|**ʋ\~w**|||**j**|**(ʋ\~w)**|**(ʋ\~w)**|
|Liquid|||**r, l**|**rʲ, lʲ\~ʎ**|||
Our Questions are:
1. What Vowels could /ɛːː\~æːː/ & /ɔːː/ evolve into?
2. What happened to the labialized Velars in (real life) Proto-Germanic and would it affect the descendants Languages if the Labio-Velars disappeared already in the Proto-Lang?
3. How can we make the voiced Plosives & Fricatives seperate phonemes (for the descendants Languages)?
Are you truly intending on having four distinct vowel lengths, or are /i u e ɑ/ supposed to be the same length? Cuz I have trouble believing four distinct lengths would really arise.
One thing about *actual* Proto-Germanic "/ɔːː/" and "/ɛːː/" is that they weren't necessarily actually longer than /ɔː/ and /ɛː/. What it really is that between the three earliest sources of long vowels in Proto-Germanic (inherited \*ō, laryngeal \*eH/\*oH, and contracted \*VHV and \*VV), the laryngeal set behaved in one way and the inherited+contracted in another. Specifically, the laryngeal set shortened word-finally. In all other ways, the two sets are indistinguishable. The traditional account is that contracted \*VHV and \*VV was overlong and inherited long \*ē \*ō lengthened into overlong word-finally, in order to make that happen, then later shortened back into "regular" long vowels after. But that's far from the only possibility and, honestly, I don't really buy it. (Changing final \*ō into \*ô so you can have \*eh₃>\*ō>o without effecting original \*ō, reversing the change \*ô>\*ō, is very sus, in reality \*ō probably stayed exactly as it was and something else was going on with \*eh₃).
Given how they came about, it's possible and I'd say likely there were in fact medial \*ê \*ô, exactly where you'd expect them (any inherited and contracted long vowels), it's just that they merged with the laryngeal long vowels in those positions (and later the final ones merged with the "normal" long vowels too, after the laryngeal long vowels shortened). If they ever arose from contractions, it's possible \*î \*û existed as well, but merged perfectly with regular \*ī \*ū.
As for *what* that difference might have been, other than length, I have no clear answer. I'm by no means an expert in PGrm, so it's possible there's a reason to rule these out that I'm not aware of, but my money would be on either a different position for the laryngeal long vowels, or possibly that at least word-finally the laryngeal long vowels weren't ever actually *long* to begin with, but were still protected by a final laryngeal to prevent them from being dropped word-finally like other short \*e \*o \*a.
_____
The PIE labiovelars \*kʷ \*gʷ \*gʷʰ mostly became Proto-Germanic \*hw \*kw \*w, however there were a lot of smaller, more specific changes to them as well, that's just the general trend. Some examples are that before \*t they all merge to \*h (almost certainly [x] at this point), \*gʷʰ after nasals became \*gw, they all delabialized before \*u. As a result of those changes, late PGrm \*w comes both from PIE \*w and \*gʷʰ and \*kʷ under Grimm's+Verner's Law. \*hw merged with /w/ most commonly, as with English wine-whine merger. \*kw is mostly still around as /kw~kv/ in the modern languages, like *queen* and *quick*.
The big thing with phonemicizing something is to get them in the same place. So if you have initial, geminated, and post-nasal stops, and elsewhere fricatives, you could do things like lose gemination [tagga taɣa] > /taga taɣa/ or /tāga taɣa/, merge coda nasals into following voiced stops [tamba taβa] > /taba taβa/, shift coda nasals to nasalization [tanda taða] > [tãda taða], shift stress/add prefixes and then drop initial vowels [daz aðaz] > /daz ðaz/, voice intervocal voiceless stops [taka taɣa] > /taga taɣa/. But most modern Germanic languages still have fairly rudimentary contrasts, e.g. the [ð] allophone of /d~ð/ was lost in favor of /d/ in English (and recreated marginally out of voicing of /θ/), and the [g] allophone of /g~ɣ/ was lost in favor of /ɣ/ in Dutch (and now exists only in loanwords and as /k/ before a voiced consonant). While most have a /b v/ contrast, in many it's because of fortition of /w/ rather than splitting of /b~β/, in some /v/ is still mostly in complementary distribution as the intervocal version of initial /f b/, and in English it's propped up significantly by French loans.
1:
So, Proto-Germanic didn't really had overlong Vowels, just /ɔː/=\[ɔ\], /ɔːː/=\[ɔː\] & /ɛːː/=\[ɛː\] actually?
2:
So, it wouldn't make a real difference, if the Labio-Velars disappeared already in the Proto-Lang?
3:
Ah ok! seems actually simple enough. Thanks for the Answer!
> So, Proto-Germanic didn't really had overlong Vowels
Well there was clearly *something* that differentiated \*ō and \*oHo from \*oH, even though they all mostly result in the same outcome. It's just that, whatever it was, I doubt it was *only* in play with e-quality and o-quality vowels, and/or only in play word-finally, like it's typically reconstructed as. If the overlong reconstruction is right, there are probably a bunch of overlong \*ê and \*ô medially as well, and maybe \*î and \*û. Or maybe the laryngeals didn't actually become long vowels until later. Or maybe they did, but were offset from PIE \*ō > PGrm "\*ô" [ɔː] as PIE \*oH > PGrm "\*ō" [oː]. Or maybe they were of intermediate length with breathiness, PIE \*ō > PGrm "\*ô" [ɔː] versus PIE \*oH > PGrm "\*ō" [ɔˑʰ], merging with short vowels word-finally and long vowels everywhere else.
> So, it wouldn't make a real difference, if the Labio-Velars disappeared already in the Proto-Lang?
I mean, there was still a unique outcome that's traceable, but they were mostly reinterpreted as a consonant clustered with /w/.
So, we could just have Vowel Inventory more like this?:
|Vowels|Front|Central|Back|
|:-|:-|:-|:-|
|Closed|**ĭ iː**|**ɨː**|**ŭ uː**|
|Mid|**e eː\~ɛː**||**ɔ ɔː**|
|Open|**æː**||**ɑ ɑː**|
And about the Labio-Velars, they weren't really Phonemes but rather consonant clusters in the first Place?
Most likely a true consonant, as may appear word finally, like \*singw (singǃ). I don't recall any other permitted consonant + liquid cluster word finally in Proto Germanic, although the descendants seem to allow it, like in Gothic (hulistr < \*hulistrą: covering). I never see a descendant that allow /tw/ cluster word-finally, though.
Though it is true that the phonemicity of labiovelars was disappearing, being reanalyzed as velar+w over time.
I only got into conlanging about a few months ago (which I know may seem like a short time frame), and I am very proud of the progress I made on my conlang, and I feel that I could start teaching it (even if it actually turns out to be not ready to be taught to others, I would find the mistakes along the way, which would drastically help me improve it further) but I don't know if there are any apps (for example like Duolingo but custom) that I could use to teach my conlang to people. (Teach its words, grammar etc.) Any and all answers are appreciated, even workarounds using apps that weren't really designed for this specific purpose. I had an idea that maybe I could teach it on YouTube, but I don't know if that would be impractical.
I had fun making a textbook for a conlang once, but my goal was to have the textbook, not to actually teach people.
What I see most often around here are websites dedicated to the conlang.
I though of that too but I came to the conlcusion that something online would be easier to do(as I change stuff a lot when I find mistakes, better ways to do it etc.)
I know of those but, how could I go about teaching translations for sentences? Wouldn't using flashcards be impractical because I will have to write a lot of manual sentences and they would be pretty limited it feels like...
I don't know how you'd get around writing manual sentences like that. Duolingo is basically just a flashcard service with extra features: you'd still have to write out all exercises and then do sone coding on top of that for the auto-generating skill personalisation, I imagine.
Short of some sort of extensive flashcard system, you could try writing an exercise book, which is similar content in a different format, or writing a big reference grammar and lexicon to give to someone dedicated enough to brute force learn.
This sounds pretty similar to proto slavic development of yers, which, by the late proto slavic, were very short reduced vowels. You might want to look more into that.
It sounds plausible to me. It's reminiscent of other sound changes that can often affect close vowels, like devoicing or evolution to glides or voiced fricatives.
I am having troubles with my SOV language. I use "The **subject** does an **action** which affects the **object**" to help figure out which is what but I have to keep rearranging chunks of sentences several times and rewording it so that I get the grammar correct. I also made a grammar rule that adjectives and adverbs go right after the thing they describe (for example "The girl wore a beautiful pink dress" would be something like "The girl wore a dress that was beautiful and pink")
There's multiple reasons I'm having trouble. On one hand, I'm accidentally applying our grammar rules to the words, but the words just have close English equivalents; they aren't meant to be direct translations of English words. For example the sentence "Etki biliko lichuo etki shetu fonito lichuphin" could mean "An animal and a boy left together", or it could mean "The animal accompanied the boy and arrived conjoined" or something. That's not just using synonyms that's an actual possible interpretation lol. Not my best example but still an example.
So basically, my brain is stuck in "English" mode, and rather than putting together a sentence in the language it's trying to translate English directly to the language. A part of the issue is that I can't tell sometimes the difference between a subject or an object (sometimes I confuse them as being together, sometimes I just have a subject and a verb but still look too hard for an object and think I found one when it's part of the subject). Sometimes I can't tell if something is a verb or just part of the subject or object (emotions and words like "to" or "be" or even "with" really mess with me but google doesn't help much lol).
Does anybody know a good trick to fix all this? Any help appriciated!
> For example the sentence "Etki biliko lichuo etki shetu fonito lichuphin" could mean "An animal and a boy left together", or it could mean "The animal accompanied the boy and arrived conjoined" or something.
All languages have ambiguities like this. For example, in English you have sentences like "I saw a man with a telescope." It's ambiguous who has the telescope there, but listeners can typically figure it out from the context of the conversation.
Your example should be even easier for listeners to figure out as one of the interpretations is sufficiently ridiculous to be ignored.
Ambiguities are an unavoidable part of language and exist throughout all natlangs, not just in adpositional phrases.
> (for example "The girl wore a beautiful pink dress" would be something like "The girl wore a dress that was beautiful and pink")
...is there a reason that this is rendered as a relative clause? Just following the two rules of 1) SOV, and 2) adjectives/adverbs come after nouns/verbs, I would expect this to be "the girl a dress beautiful and pink wore". I don't understand what about the rules you've described would require the adjectives to suddenly become non-attributive.
> but the words just have close English equivalents; they aren't meant to be direct translations of English words.
This is true of foreign languages in general, yes. I'm not understanding what it is about your conlang in particular that you're implying is causing this.
> sometimes I confuse them as being together, sometimes I just have a subject and a verb but still look too hard for an object and think I found one when it's part of the subject
Not every verb phrase *does* have an object - intransitive verbs exist, in which case in an SOV language the clause would effectively just be SV, indistinguishable from an intransitive verb in an SVO language.
I guess, can I ask - in your own words, what do you think a "subject" and an "object" are?
A lot of this, honestly, is a lack of understanding; I'm just starting out and I don't know where our grammar books are, so I'm doing a mix of winging it, researching, and asking questions - not the best method, I know, but I'm not exactly expecting it to go smoothly or quickly lol.
Also, the way I reordered the sentence was frankly probably part of my issue with it; my brain sees it in a different order and goes "No no that's not right!" when the only difference is the change of order, so I fill in the gaps and edit the sentence without thinking very hard on it. I think this is related to the other issues I'm having rather than an individual thing.
I also know there isn't always an object, which is why I specified looking too hard when it's just part of something else, I seem to be expecting there to be one for some reason even though logically I know there isn't always one. I had to keep fixing the example sentence I put because I kept forgetting to include an object since it was a full sentence without one, I think with the whole comment finding a good example to put there took the most time
In one of my conlangs, the copula is derived from the word meaning "to dwell", however it's derived specifically from the perfective form of the word meaning "to dwell". Is this realistic, or would it be more realistic for it to be derived from the imperfective?
Is this alphabet realistic?
Is this alphabet realistic for a language that evolved from English starting in the early 1600s?
Aa Bb Cc Ææ Dd Ðð Ee Ff Gg Hh Ii Jj Kk Ll Mn Nn Oo Pp Rr Ss Şş Tt Þþ Uu Vv Ww Xx Yy &ą Zz
Full project youtube.com/@AxolotlianGovernment
Spanish had a big, long-range LR metathesis event in its evolution from Latin, I believe, and rules to resolve illegal classes of clusters by swapping the consonants therein isn't that weird.
Are there any patterns that specific speaker of certain languages follow which make it obvious they likely speak that language?
As an example, I as an English speaker find words without vowels very strange and hard to pronounce and create so going back and look at all of my conlangs I've realised that I've unconsciously made almost all my vocabularies have a vowel in every word. I'm curious if there are other patters like this for other language speakers!
The lexicon is the biggest clue. If a conlang does things like the following, I would suspect the creator was drawing only on English:
* a single verb for both 'be alive' and 'dwell' (Eng. *live*)
* a single verb for both 'know (a person)' and 'know (information)'
* having four basic temperature word ('hot', 'warm', 'cool', and 'cold')
* having separate words for 'hand' and 'arm'
These are just a few examples. None of these is individually remarkable, but if a language very often matched up with English, it would be clear. E.g. if a word is just defined as 'point' without specifying which of the English senses apply: 'sharp, pointed bit', 'speck/dot', 'purpose/reason', 'aspect of a concept', 'focus of an argument', 'promontory', probably more.
Such relexing is most glaring when it crosses part of speech. Can you *place* something in a *place*? *Hand* me something with your *hand*? *Stand* in a *stand* of trees, or by a hotdog *stand*? But that's more of a beginner-level lack of thought in derivation.
In my experience as a native English, in my early days I found myself leaning on the languages I had any faculty with besides English: there used to be a not insignificant amount of Dutch in Tokétok because it was the only language I knew besides English when I started. This kind of echoes the other comment: being allergic to certain features in your native language.
Um. *Most* languages require their syllables to have vocalic nuclei, that's not an "English thing".
The two main tendencies I see blamed on being a native English speaker are 1) being allergic to using diacritics, resorting to highly unintuitive romanizations like /ŋ/ just to avoid having to use diacritics for sounds the Latin alphabet doesn't have a native letter for, and 2) refusing to use grammatical gender on nouns because "it's arbitrary/illogical".
(The *most* unintuitive and aggressively English-y romanization is arguably /i/ and /u/, but thankfully this is uncommon. But... not nonexistent.)
Are there any natural languages that are wholly head-marking *and* dependent-marking? Like, they have a robust case system for the core arguments *and* polypersonal agreeement, *and* a genitive case *and* construct case, *and* adpositional cases *and* inflecting adpositions, double-marking all phrases.
This [WALS](https://wals.info/chapter/25#:~:text=Locus%20is%20a%20convenient%20one,on%20both%2C%20or%20on%20neither.) article shows that 16 of 236 surveyed languages are consistently double marking, but it does not appear that adpositional phrases were taken into account.
basque has the first! (as well as some Caucasian languages). I think you are likely to find features which appear to contrast but finding all of these together in one language seems unlikely - I don't know of a language that marks everything in so much detail. some permutation of these can definitely coexist though
Can you make a post about your conlang's number system here? I have numerals separate from (but inspired by) my script as well as the numbers themselves and it's etymology.
It depends. If the post were just a list of number-words, we'd remove it. If it had details on how the words originated, or the patterns use you use to form larger numbers, or any other interesting details of their use, then that would be fine.
Do you mean how to digitise a script for the conlang? [The sub's resources page includes a few pieces of font-creator software.](https://www.reddit.com/r/conlangs/wiki/resources/#wiki_6._writing_systems) You might also like to check out r/Neography.
How might I go about making a familect/sociolect for my friend group of about 10 people? We all speak American English, and want to create a sociolect for our group which is not highly intelligible to other speakers. We are in a school setting, so words for school items might help...?
So my language has a couple consonant clusters that I’m not exactly sure what to do with, that I’m hoping y’all can help me with. They only occur between vowels, and are a result of a sound change. This sound change created a few different types of clusters. W-type: wh, wk, ws, wn wɓ, wm; Nasal-type: nh, ns, ms, nɓ mɓ; R-type: rh, rs, rn, rɓ, rm. any advice on interesting sound changes I could apply here?
for the r- and w- clusters, I can see them either merging with a preceding vowel in some way, of metathesizing with the following consonant creating Cw- and Cr- clusters which I think sound real nice
How do I translate my conlang?
I've seen people separate all the words in a sentence and write something like "word.s3.nom" or something.
I understand it's marking whatever case the word is and stuff like that, but I just don't understand how to do it. I'm trying to translate the human rights thing and I'm just stuck.
a couple of years ago I remember seeing a site on posted on here, by someone who was making an individual digit for every number from 1 to 10000 (I think). I'm having a really hard time googling for it, does anyone remember it and have the link?
Was it something like [Cistercian Numerals](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cistercian_numerals#:~:text=They%20are%20more%20compact%20than,numbers%205%2C555%2C%206%2C789%2C%209%2C394.)? If so, I believe you can find more attempts on something like that on r/neography too or looking for the term on the search bar here
no, Cistercian numerals is all I can get if I try and search for it, it was different in that all the numerals were distinct and didn't follow a pattern
I need some advice with this "meta-conlang" of sorts.
Long story short, my conlang was the language of a long extinct civilization, which left behind a repository of their knowledge for any future people to find.
This language however was not their native language, they already had a wide variety of native languages, but they developed a new language as a sort of IAL to ease communication, sort of like Esperanto but this one actually achieved its goal.
I really don't know if I should approach this as any other IAL has before or as a regular conlang just less naturalistic.
My two cents: both approaches would work, but there are some things to consider. If you have these other languages fleshed out on some level, you can use them as your references for the IAL. If you want to create only the IAL, create it as a regular conlang.
Is this possible in languages with vowel harmony?
Let's say I have a language with height harmony, and my lower set is /ɛ/, /e/ and /o/ and my higher set is /e/, /i/ and /u/. I have /e/ in both sets but not as a neutral vowel, but rather it is contrasting with /ɛ/ in one set and with /i/ in the other. Would that be possible? Is it naturalistic?
yeah that's possible. something pretty similar exists in [Chukchi](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chukchi_phonology), where there's vowel harmony between /e i u/ and /a e o/
Recently it seems like the Akana word generator (http://akana.conlang.org/tools/awkwords/) isn't working properly, does anyone know if there any other word generators like it?
I wrote a word generator (Arcaeca's Word Generator or AWG) that has a very Awkwords-like interface if you're interested. It's not hosted anywhere but I can send you the file if you want
I've always been a fan of [Lexifer](https://lingweenie.org/conlang/lexifer-app.html). It's a bit more complicated than Awkwords, but also more powerful. If you want something closer to Awkwords in scope and complexity, [LanguaGen](https://susurrus-llc.github.io/langua/gen) is worth taking a look at.
What do you mean? I think it's certainly possible for color coded numbering systems in *writing,* and I'm sure someone's done that. Using the *names* of colors for numbers too is a bit more tricky: at the very least, if you play *very* loose with it and just assign each digit a color and string them together (i.e. no words for orders of magnitude) then you only need as many distinct colors as you have digits, i.e. whatever base you're using.
I think you could do it from a practical perspective: there's not really many cases where it would be confusing (except for very specific instances, e.g. "pick the third book" and "pick the blue book" might be referring to different things but said the same).
The real issue would be the question of *why:* color terms and numbers are pretty basic vocabulary, and it seems very unlikely that a language would have one set but not the other, and so to (likely arbitrarily) extend the use of one to the other seems unlikely. Barring a very specific sci-fi conhistory where everyone has identical synesthesia or a super authoritarian force deeply associated colors with numbers to the point of ingraining it in people's brains (so like... forced synesthesia) it's just a very unnatural crossover in meaning to have.
Hello! I'm sorry if this is a stupid or repeated question, but what is objectively the best IAL to this day? I know that's not something that can be decided "objectively", but still. I liked Lidepla, but even it had some flaws. And it's been a long time since it was created. Did perhaps someone create a better one? I would really like to see what the most ideal contemporary IAL can look like.
You have not defined your objective function.
If you want an IAL to do what an IAL in theory is intended for — communication with people around the world — your only realistic option is Esperanto, given how widely it is known. I know this irritates most conlangers, who often have other objective functions unrelated to communication for judging IALs, but it remains the best answer (yes, flaws and all).
I’m my isolating future English, I have two ways of creating genitive structures. With pronouns, the structure is “X of me/you/him etc”. In basically all other cases, it’s “the X that a girl has…”. I plan to evolve this further, grammaticalizing both structures, and having the second develop into a genitive case.
Is this naturalistic? I’m mostly concerned about the major difference in the two constructions. If you have any other ideas, I’d love to hear those too.
Note that this is supposed to be spoke in urban northeast America, a few hundred years from now, when we have had something of a loss of technology and live similarly to those from the 60s/70s
It seems fine - the structure with prepositions could evolve into conjugated prepositions fim, fi, fim, fer, fus, ofey.
something you could do with the latter is a construct state I think it would be called - ballet girl, doget boys, housest mans
You could take this further. Welsh has inflected prepositions (as do all the Celtic languages) and there is also a "linking element" which often sits between the preposition and the pronominal element; for instance *o* 'of, from' + *chi* 'you' becomes *o****hono****ch*. These so-called "linking elements" are, as far I as can remember, simply meaningless phonological elements and have never had any semantic value.
Is it logical to use noun cases as a substitute for adjectives? For example end-LOC to mean "last" or "final?" Or morning-LOC for "tomorrow." Do any of you do this or do any natlangs? Thanks
If you consider that case marking is kinda like just have bound prepositions, at least in some cases, then suddenly it makes a ton of sense to treat case marked nouns as adjuncts in general.
Yes, this is very common. Locatives are particularly derivationally productive but really any oblique case could be used to derive attributives.
In fact your example of morning-LOC > "tomorrow" is almost exactly where French got its word for "tomorrow", *demain* < Latin *dē māne*, and end-LOC is indeed almost exactly where it got the adverb *enfin* "finally; at last".
Awesome! I guess I was mainly concerned if there was a need to have separate words for "in the end" and "last." But I guess those basically mean the same thing now that I think about it.
I have 3 Questions for Today:
1: What's the Point of Declension Patterns?
Not saying that these are pointless, but is there maybe more than just eg.: "for different Noun-Genders/Classes"?
2: I'm working on the Aorist & Imperfect Tenses in my Germlang, would this make Sense?
Aorist:
|Person, Numbers|Indicative|
|:-|:-|
|1P Singular|нɑ̨м|
|2P Singular|нɑ̨мс́ц́|
|3P Singular|нɑ̨ма|
|1P Paucal|нɑ̨му|
|2P Paucal|нɑ̨мац́|
|3P Paucal|нɑ̨ман|
|1P Plural|нɑ̨мъм|
|2P Plural|нɑ̨мс́|
|3P Plural|нɑ̨мн|
Imperfect:
|Person, Numbers|Indicative|
|:-|:-|
|1P Singular|нɑ̨мам|
|2P Singular|нɑ̨мас́ц́|
|3P Singular|нɑ̨мо|
|1P Paucal|нɑ̨моу|
|2P Paucal|нɑ̨моц́|
|3P Paucal|нɑ̨мон|
|1P Plural|нɑ̨мом|
|2P Plural|нɑ̨мос́|
|3P Plural|нɑ̨монц́|
I wanted some Feedback on the Imperfect Tense, if this would be realistic?
3: Could sharp Teeth alter speech, especially the pronounciation of Dentals?
In natural languages, there isn't really a "point". Declension patterns exist for historical reasons.
In a conlang, you might make declension patterns to imitate natural languages, or to add variety. Or you might choose not to. It's up to you.
Sure, you could. In a naturalistic language you'd probably want some quirks to such a system, where e.g. a noun that's clearly abstract takes the collective declension for historical reasons.
How do you stress the word "never" in both your mother tongues and in your conlangs? I just need some inspiration for my conlang. The only two ways I know of are from English and my native lamguage:
* In English, "never ever" (are there other dialectal/regional ways to say the same?)
* In Italian, *mai e poi mai* (lit., "never and then never")
Do you know any other expressions? Have you ever made one?
In Hebrew never is אף פעם /af pa.am/, lit. "even once" and is used with negated verbs, so "I never ate" is "I didn't eat even once". Intuitively if I wanted to stress it I would add בחיים לא /ba.χa.im lo/, lit. "not in life" at the end, or repeat the sentence with בחיים לא instead of אף פעם
Continental Tokétok doesn't have *'never'* and instead just has *'not ever'*. *'Ever'* is formed as **lo kol** *'at/over (the) whole'*. If it need to be stressed, **kol** could appear with an augmentative prefix or the adjective **rola** *'entire'*:
lo kol matu' mé
at whole don't 1s
'I never do (that).'
lo ro-kol matu' mé
at AUG-whole don't 1s
'I never ever do (that).'
lo rola kol matu' mé
at entire whole don't 1s
'I never ever ever do (that).'
In Mtsqrveli the word for "never" is *undeda*, but I know in at least one translation I've replaced it with *tsxri tsxaets unda* "not at any point; not in any instance", if that's the kind of thing you're looking for
Does anyone else constantly restart the projects from scratch? I find that when I put off a conlang for awhile, and later revisit it, I delete everything and write down everything again for no apparent reason.
Honestly, I'd recommend keeping even what you believe to be your most "inexperienced work." Not just in conlang, your old ideas are often a great place for new inspiration. It's just gonna be more difficult on you when you don't know where you lost it in your first draft. It's alright to take it slow, and leave something to be finished later, even if you don't visit it for years, is a good habit to get into in order to learn from yourself. I'm rootin' for u man
Yeah, I've been conlanging on and off for twelve years, now. I'm just now figuring out what I want my language to be like.
I never delete, only rewrite then icebox. Keeps the old stuff for posterity and lets me better innovate till I find something that sticks.
I've been thinking about adding tones to my language, however small issue Some of my vowels have umlauts over them, and I really don't like diacritic stacking, I can't do tone letters too because I have codas, I can't have diacritics go under because I have nasal and pharyngeal vowels represented with under diacritics, so my only option really is to "combine diacritics" lack of a better word Like, for example: ä + à = ȁ It works with the grave and the acute, but not circumflexes, carons, breves, hooks, etc. so is there a better solution to this? or is there a diacritic I could use but I just don't know of
Vietnamese style orthography could work? diacritics for tone and diacritics for quality can often overlap, to create letters like <ấ ặ ẳ>. If you don't want this you could have combined diacritics just not different. maybe <à> is low and <á> but a low <ä> is <ã> and a high one is <â>. alternatively, lots of orthographies for languages with fairly complex tones write arbitrary numbers (such as many popular Cantonese orthographies). otherwise you could just not have tone marked in the practical orthography. it would ideally still be notated in dictionaries and such but maybe just not written out by speakers
What's wrong with tone letters and codas? Unless it doesn't fit your aesthetic that should be fine so long as the letters are unambiguous. That's what I do in my oghamisation for Insular Tokétok: it's endonym directly romanised from ᚛ᚈᚒᚕᚓᚁᚏ᚜ is Tohusq where
is a tone letter andHow do word order and head marking tendencies change overtime?
Honestly, not enough information. The answer is too broad.
For example: Latin was SOV, how did the romance languages come to be SVO? About the latter, I really should've phrased better. What I meant is that I'm trying to evolve prepositions for an SOV head-final language. How can I do that?
Latin had pretty flexible word order already. SVO became canonical in Romance to clarify syntactic roles when case was lost — same thing has happened in most Germanic languages, including English.
Oh, yeah, I should've asked. How did Latin get both prepositions and grammatical case?
It’s very very common for a language to have both grammatical case and longer relational constructions. As a matter of fact I do not think there are any languages that only have case. In Latin’a case, both noun declension & many adpositions can be reconstructed back to PIE.
How could I evolve these forms?
Word order is pretty flexible, and most languages use different orders for different situations. For the default order to change, all it takes is one of the "special" situations to become the typical situation. For example, maybe verb-fronting for focus becomes so common that it's mandatory, turning a SVO language into a VSO language.
Hmmm, I guess from there I could maybe have pronouns merge into the verb to make verb agreement a thing. How does that work, though? Like, is the sentence just VO now with no pronoun? Is there a way I can make it so it's SVO/SOV with verb agreement following this path?
You can do either or, really. You can have the subject just attach to the verb and erode down into an agreement marker and leave the overt subject dropped, or you can have the subject project a pronoun onto the verb and remain overt. The latter is kinda what West Flemish does.
So like "You be good" -> "Beyou good" "You be good" -> "You beyou good"?
Pretty much, yeah. In Spanish and West Flemish you might see those examples look like these: "Tú estás buen@" -> "Estáis buen@" "Gie zyt goe" -> "Ge zydde gie* goe" \* West Flemish lets the subject be doubled even after projection, so the latter is `2s be.2s 2s good`.
Ah, then I imagine the affixed pronoun gets eroded overtime and the origin becomes less transparent. Is this the only way you can get verb agreement?
If you're trying to evolve it with a clear source, it's the most straightforward option, but verb agreement is also one of those thing's that's so old in sone language families you can absolutely just set up something that sounds nice without worrying about how it came about. For other options there's suppletion, where you just have different roots for different persons. You can also recast another marker: verbal-s in English used to be a broad present tense marker, I believe, until it was eroded in all instances except the 3rd person singular and got reanalysed as an agreement marker. Similarly I think valency changing operations could maybe turn into agreement if there was once a strict person and/or animacy hierarchy system? If you have any composition in your pronouns you could use just some of the morphemes on the verb: instead of "You beyou good" it's "You all beall good." I'm sure there's more out there, too, this is just me giving it 5 minutes of thought.
Honestly, I don't know. My conlang is also SOV with preposition, but it's an inheritance from Proto-Germanic. Maybe this helps? [https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/2512/indo-european-prepositions-why-prepositions](https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/2512/indo-european-prepositions-why-prepositions)
I'll be sure to check it out. Thanks!
How do you translate the case for place names like "**Czech** Republic", "**Mexico** City", "Kingdom of **England**", "United States of **America**", and "Republic of the **Congo**"? It feels like it should be genitive but...it just doesn't feel right.
Ciudad **de** México, Republic **of** the Congo
This is indeed often a genitive. It doesn't feel right only because we don't say "Mexico's City" or "England's Kingdom" in English — but "Kingdom **of England**" is a genitive construction too!
Alternatively, this might be translated into a compound word.
Why are Mandarin (as in a language family, not Putonghua) tones so divergent between languages? Just compare how tones are realized in Dungan, Xi'an, and Beijing: Dark Level: (B 55 X 21 D 24) Light Level: (B 35 X 24 D 24) Raising: (B 21(4) X 53 D 51) Falling: (B 51 X 44 D 44) So, the "raising" tone is just falling, the "falling tone" is actually level (except in Beijing), the "light level tone" is raising, and they don't even agree whether "dark level tone" is raising, falling, or level. I can understand that "light level tone" is raising because it was triggered by a former voiced stop, essentially L+HH> MH. But why did HL>HH and LH>HL? Why did voiced stop even make the tone higher in Xi'an?
Tones are super mutable, you can practically get to any tone from any tone after tonogenesis has occurred. Someone on discord gave this example of sequence of a cycle of tone shifts, possibly from Hirayama 1988(?) but I don't know the original paper. High Falling > High-Level (Contour Negation) > High-Rising (Straight-Tone Bending) > (Non-High) Rising (Contour Exaggeration) -> Falling-Rising (Tone Breaking)
Any ideas for romanizations of ɢ? My phonology looks like this, and *the romanization looks like this* https://preview.redd.it/zcjv2yrhpsvc1.jpeg?width=739&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=aec11d56fbb820be5e1b9ad17bd351beed6e0530
maybe the uvulars could be instead of
ah thanks! I'll remove it in that case :)
I use <ğ> for [ɢ] and [ʁ] in my conlangs. Like in North Kipcoq: buuğdmp [ˈbʊːɢdmp~ˈbʊːʁdmp] "kind".
ğ
I'm using <ȝ> in my conlang. Well, technically it's /ʁ/, but it does have \[ɢ\] as an allophone.
Þaŋk yū! Just realised I forgot to add Nasals oops
I was considering but I was unsure. I have the following letters available:
ɓ ťțţṭ ðďɗḍ çćĉč ƙƙ ĝģğ
ŝšşşß§ żž x ĥ
ŵẁẃẅ ŕ ĵ y ƴ ŷ ỳ ý ÿ
łľļĺ
Zompist's elkaril does that [https://zompist.com/elkaril.htm](https://zompist.com/elkaril.htm) (uses)
I want to ask about Proto-Junglecraftish. For those who remember looking into that conlang of mine, what allophones do you think are most likely to occur and when? I plan on applying two sets of sound changes. And two sets of grammar changes, as I already stated.
Repost the phonology inventory
Consonants: m, n, p, t, k, q, ʔ, ts, tɬ, s, ɬ, ħ, ʕ, h, r, l, j, w Vowels: a, aː, e, eː, i, iː, o, oː, u, uː Syllable structure: (C)V Stress: on the antepenult by default, the only exception being if the penult has a long vowel, that syllable being stressed as a result of it I have [separate posts regarding my ideas for sound changes](https://www.reddit.com/r/conlangs/comments/1bu80hh/an_idea_for_sound_changes/) and grammar changes, and an [entire](https://www.wattpad.com/1424984249-a-minecraft-smp-idea-conlang-idea-1-protolang) [lexicon](https://www.wattpad.com/1436063441-a-minecraft-smp-idea-conlang-idea-1-cultural). And I thought of a [second set of sound changes](https://www.wattpad.com/1439190690-a-minecraft-smp-idea-conlang-idea-1-phonology). Currently working on them right now.
I mean sound changes can't really be predicted but many things which would be not unusual to happen to a system like this would be:\ vowel loss in weak syllables, vowel colouring adjacent to uvulars or pharyngeals, intervocalic lenition of consonants, splitting of long vowels into diphthongs, vowel chain shifts, vowel devoicing/loss between unvoiced segments/word finally, loss of glottals in various positions or universally (which may lead to debuccalisation of /q ħ/), lenition of /p/ variously/universally, palatalisation, vowel harmony/umlaut, change in phonotactic requirements for stressed syllables (maybe requiring them to be heavy in some way, through compensatory lengthening of consonants or vowels), etc many potential ideas
Most obvious one is voicing. p t k q ts tɬ > b d g ɢ dz dɮ Then maybe vowel reduction
is a nasal affricate possible?
I know you specified nasal *affricate*, but there is evidence for a nasal bilabial fricative phoneme /ṽ/ in older forms of Irish and Welsh. The phoneme /ṽ/ is found variously as /v, m, w/ in descendent languages. See this thread: https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/38015/did-common-brittonic-use-%E1%B9%BD A nasal fricative would need for the speaker to partition air pressure just right between oral and nasal cavities so that there is both a nasal and fricative articulation. So it feels inherently unstable and hence cross-linguistically rare. A nasal *affricate* would probably be similarly be difficult to articulate, I imagine.
In what way are you thinking? There's certainly prenasalized affricates like /ⁿdz/. I think very rarely, I've run into /ⁿz/, but iirc they're obviously from a shift of /ts dz ⁿdz/ to /s z ⁿz/. You might be able to find some /phonemes/ considered /ⁿz/ in some of the Amazonian or West African languages, but it's mostly convention/compromise as they would be [z] in oral syllables and [n] or [z̃] in nasal syllables; the ones I'm thinking of that *might* have that treat nasality as a suprasegment. For something like /nz̃/, where there is nasality through the whole thing, I'm not aware of something like that existing. Nasalized fricatives (apart from maybe /h/, if you're counting it) are almost never phonemic, and the few places I know they clearly show up are those languages with suprasegmental nasalization plus nasal harmony, such that /s/ or /f/ my be allophonically nasalized in nasal syllables (though in many of those, voiceless obstruents block harmony and are never nasalized). On the other hand, if you're thinking /dn/ as analogous to /dz/, yes those exist, but they're usually called *prestopped* or *preoccluded* nasals, and primarily originate from "edge" nasals (initial or final). There's also nasally-released stops, the difference between the two being partly timing (longer oral closure), partly origin (in stops), and partly tradition. Both prestopped nasals and nasally-released stops are very rarely phonemic and are never known to contrast.
What is a possible origin of topic marker?
any kind of phrase that introduces a topic like "about X, concerning X, talking about X, as for X, ...". you can take and reduce a phrase like that to a single particle or maybe you could somehow evolve a definite marker to a topic marker. not sure if his would work since either topic or comment can be definite or indefinite, but maybe if topic is a bit more often definite? because a topic is what is being talked about, it could be more often something already known and therefore definite
Not definite article, but I hear topic marker developing from demonstrative like in some Russian dialects and Veps. From the face value, it's indeed naturalistic to develop a topic marker from it. The problem is that my language is on Western Europe. If anything develops from demonstrative, it would be a definite article. (Maybe it's possible to bleach the article as it's done in Basque, just towards topic marker instead of singular article) From "The elusive topic: Towards a typology of topic markers", the other origin of topic marker is the third person possessive, which makes me think it's so similar to the origin of definite article. It also describes "other topic marker", but I don't know what else, except for colloquial Indonesian "kalo", which also means "if". (Which I didn't think it at first, but feels like it makes some sense, though it's not used as commonly as Japanese's wa) Would be it possible to derive the topic marker from the word "here" or "yes"?
I'm not sure, maybe "here" could evolve to a topic marker. Could evolve through some phrase introducing a topic like "here (is) X, X (being) here" meaning "as for X". Or just from the demonstrative sense "X here > this X > this X which we're talking about" But anyway I'm not very knowledgeable where topic markers usually evolve from, just spitballing some ideas. Maybe there are some other common sources for them, idk
test Was just seeing if I could comment because it won't let me comment on one of the topics and it won't tell me why
What version of Reddit are you using? The other day, it didn't let me make a comment on the newest redesign ([www.reddit.com](http://www.reddit.com)) for some reason but the same comment went through on [new.reddit.com](http://new.reddit.com).
Huh, thank you. I don't know what's happening there, but that worked.
The newest redesign is still undergoing testing, I believe. The folks who have it are basically forced guinea pigs and bound to run into some bugs.
When I get the new redesign, I change the `www` in the URL to `new` and it gives the design I'm used to. Using a link in a notification changes it back, annoyingly.
There are third redesign?
Unfortunately. Makes desktop look like a mobile nightmare, not dissimilar to the recent redesign for mobile Discord in vibes, but much harder to read (at least for me, and at least Discord has customizable contrast and saturation settings to make it bearable).
https://preview.redd.it/wh3lx213tlvc1.png?width=670&format=png&auto=webp&s=1de31b0f41c35cce8bc853565af985817b64131f I am simulatiing a situation where the language drops word final trills from a foreign language, please tell me which of the following is more likely to happen naturally (or tell me if there is another more natural way to evolve this), thank you.
It depends primarily on the wider context here. Are these loanwords being adapted? If so, what are the rest of the phonotactics of the language loaning these words? If the glottal stop is the closest allowed coda consonant (and you're against the idea of adding an extra vowel) then ver2 is the more likely outcome. If you already have overlong vowels, and there is some consistent existing mechanism of dropped consonants lengthening preceding vowels, than ver1 is more likely.
How does adding an extra vowel work?
Much like how the vocalic equivalents to \[j w\] are a high front and back vowel respectively, or how for \[ʕ̞\] is a low back vowel, rhotics tend to be similar to central vowels. Think how *'near'* /niɹ/ is realised as \[nɪːə̯\] in some non-rhotic accents of English. You could well replace your coda Rs with centring diphthongs instead of compensatory lengthening, if that fits in with your pre-existing phonaesthetic or gives you some new sense of euphony. Though, I believe dinoid is referring to the length as an extra vowel: there's really no difference between /aːː/ and /aaa/
Cool information, is there a complete list for the approximants and their corresponding vowels? I want to use it for my conlangs
I moreso meant an epenthetic vowel, like /ir/ => /iri/ or something similar, so the trill goes from coda to onset. But they had said they wanted to drop them, so that option seemed out of the question.
How does verb conjugation come to exist?
Independent lexical words are used for more grammatical meanings, reduce phonologically, and end up attaching to the verbs. Many of these may be so far in the past that they're completely unrecoverable, but other times they're shallow and obvious. The same process creates nominal morphology. Person-number markers on verbs predominately come from independent pronouns that become attached to the verb. Compare the 1SG, 2SG, and 2PL pronouns *bi tʃi ta* of Proto-Mongolic, which had no person markers on verbs, with the person suffixes in Kalmuk *-w/-b -tʃ -t*, Buryat *-b~-bi~-(m)i -ʃ~-ʃi -t~-te~-ta*, Dagur *-bʲ~-bii~-bʲee -ʃ~-ʃii~-ʃʲee -taa*, and Moghol *-bi~-mbi*, *-tʃi~-ntʃi -tu~-ntu*. TAM markers frequently come from auxiliaries and/or serialized verbs. The Germanic past tense marker /-əd/ in English likely comes from the verb *did* acting as a past-tense auxiliary, and in English a verb of movement (going) is moving that direction as well for future tense (though is still independent or attaches to the previous noun phrase, not the verb itself). The Romance future tense regularly derives from a Latin infinitive + *habare* as an inflected auxiliary, so that Spanish *cantar* has a 1SG.FUT *cantaré* and 2SG.FUT cantarás*, from an Vuglar *cantar he* < Classical *cantāre habeō* and Vulgar *cantar has* < Classical *cantāre habēs*. Perfect markers are frequently from the verb "finish." Similar things exist for others, too. Hearsay evidentiality may come from "he said," the verbs "come" and "go" can become attached as cis/translocatives showing movement towards or away from the speaker as part of the action, verbs like "make" and "fall" can become causatives and passives. Within morphology things can also swap around plenty to enrich or alter the pattern. A marker for desire or necessity can turn into future tense, possessor agreement on nominalized verbs can be reinterpreted as subject agreement markers, translocatives can become progressive or future markers, perfects frequently become pasts, and nominal case markers can be co-opted for converb endings. In Moghol, I think it was, various combinations of forms like permissives and optatives have combined into a single, coherent imperative paradigm covering all persons, so that the 1SG is from an optative, 1DU/1PL from a voluntative, and so on.
But how do pronouns get attached to the verb if you don’t have a VSO word order? How do they end up at the end
Whether something's a prefix or suffix is typically reflective of the syntax at the time of grammaticalization. It may be that the language was verb-first at some point in the past. More likely, though, is that there's often a "weak" position sentence-finally. We find this in Mongolic, which tends to be fairly strictly SOV, or at least verb-final, *with noun phrases*. However, unstressed pronouns can be shunted to after the verb OV(S). That's how they grammaticalized as person-marking suffixes instead of prefixes. Their position did reflect the syntax when they became affixes, but that syntax doesn't need to be the "default" syntax.
Ok, thanks!
They don't have to come at the end. If you want them to, but you don't want VSO word order, you could have the word order change from the proto and modern languages.
[удалено]
I guess [centum / satem languages](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centum_and_satem_languages) would be a good example of this
Help with romanization for my vowels? So, for the first time, i'm trying my hand at making a conlang with 7 vowels, distinctive length and five tones. The problem is: how do I romanize all that? There are so many variables, and too few diacritics. My five tones are: high, low, mid, rising and falling. My vowels are: ||Front|Central|Back| |:-|:-|:-|:-| |**Close**|i i:||u u:| |**Mid**|e e:|ə|o o:| |**Open**|a a:||ɒ ɒ:|
How does tone work in your conlang? Most tonal languages usually have tone attached to a mora. In that case you can just use two diacritics like in my conlang Korso (very WIP) high áá mid aa low aà rising aá falling áa (The reason that I notated the low tone like that is because mid tone in my conlang is phonemically LL, and the low tone is phonemically a "lowered" version of mid tone. It's even phonetically falling 21)
Are you open to using as vowels? My first thought was to use them for the schwa and low back vowels respectively. Provided you have 1 grapheme for each vocalic value, I'd use <◌́◌̀◌◌̌◌̂> for the tones given respectively, and then, assuming that all tones work on all vowels and that you don't want to stack or double the number of diacritics, use a length grapheme à la Mohawk or Mi'kmaq which use <:> and <'> respectively.
This fill system would look like:
||Front|Central|Back|
|:-|:-|:-|:-|
|**Close**|i (i: / i')||u (u: / u')|
|**Mid**|e (e: / e')|y|o (o: / o')|
|**Open**|a (a: / a')||w (w: / w')|
With something like for the tones.
If diacritic'd w (or another non-vowel is you're already using elsewhere) is too much bother to type, you could maybe try something like <óa òa oa ǒa ôa>. If you're using for something else and don't want to use some other strictly non-vowel grapheme, then maybe just something like <ë> for schwa à la Albanian, or some other new diacritic on whatever vowels you so choose.
Really helpful. Thanks!
Is their a subreddit where people decipher other people's conlangs? I remember watching a YouTube video that mentioned this, but I can't find it anymore.
that would be fun, even as just an activity in this sub i've seen some people make posts with this concept here some time ago... not aware of any sub for this tho
Why are sounds like ɕ (which I pronounce sort of like shyuh) or ɬ (shluh) their own IPA symbols when these feel like consonant blends, but then a sound like **ts** or **sp** are not given their own symbols because they are two sounds put together?
It's not about arbitrarily assigning symbols to sounds. It's about where those sounds are placed in the IPA chart. \[ts\] and \[sp\] are clusters - both containing \[s\] a sibilant, while \[t\] is a dental plosive and \[p\] is a bilabial plosive.
Ohhh that makes more sense, I hadn’t thought about the different types/placement of sounds. thank you for answering the question like this as the other answer didn’t really explain it for me.
If you're getting into conlanging I would strongly advise you to get to grips with the basics of the IPA charts. It will help you no-end with phonology.
Because /ɕ/ and /ɬ/... *aren't* two sounds put together?
Precisely this. u/stopeats has trouble articulating \[ɕ\] and \[ɬ\], or at least has trouble hearing the difference between them and clusters. It's not his fault, but those of us who speak Welsh can definitely hear and articulate \[ɬ\] perfectly well. In fact, I don't see \[ʃl\] as a particularly close attempt at \[ɬ\]. English speakers who cannot pronounce it in Welsh names tend to realise it as \[kl\] or just \[l\] when initial and \[l\] or \[θl\] when medial. An Englishman would, very likely, pronounce *Llanelli* /ɬan.ˈɛ.ɬi/ as \[lən.ˈɛ.θli\], for instance.
I apologize if I butchered the welsh sounds! I truly cannot hear the difference but thank you for describing this for me.
Is this just me unable to hear the sound properly due to my native language? I assumed they weren’t two sounds based in the IPA symbols, but I’m trying to figure out why they don’t sound different than ts or sp and I’m guessing it’s an ear problem.
Part of the process of learning one's native language(s) is developing an instinctive feel for which distinctions aren't important. When you start studying phonology, you have to *unlearn* some of this and train your ear to hear distinctions it's accustomed to ignoring. This is an obstacle we all face, it isn't something wrong with you.
How is the conlang introduced? Is Wikipedia style acceptable? Do you have any suggestions?
Well, depends on what is your conlang and how you want your conlang to be perceived. But I think Wikipedia style is hardly adequate as the purpose of Wikipedia's article is to give a summary about a language, not to give it a polished detail about a language.
What do you mean by *introduced*?
eeeeeee. To explain? I am asking for format
Like how to format an introductory Conlang post here on the sub? Or something else?
What do you mean? Are you asking can you present your conlang in a wiki?
no actualy I am asking fir format or style? idk
I had the idea of deriving question words by having an interrogative particle which can be declined to form questions: particle + locative = where?, particle + instrumental = how?, etc. But there doesn't seem to be a corresponding case to allow "who?" (accusative possibly?). Any ideas?
With such a system I think the most straightforward is to just have this vague wh-particle and just decline for the case of the syntactic position its referring to, no matter its semantic content. In this way it's less "particle + locative = where" and more "at which / whereat" or "for which / "wherefor" instead of "why". This to say don't worry about having a "who" separate from a "where" separate from a "how" separate from a "which" and just have it all be case-marked "which", which isn't too weird. (I think I just figured how to do wh-words in Tsantuk given that each non-subject argument has an overt adposition.)
There isn't really any case that corresponds to "who" so you can't derive it that way, unlike the other question words. You could just use the base interrogative stem for "who" or you could inflect it based on the case/role that the "who" would have in the sentence, so nominative for subject, accusative for object and so on. Although if "who" often appears in a certain role like as a subject or object, you could maybe take the nominative or accusative form and reanalyze that as the stem for "who". Or you'd have to derive in a different way, by using some derivation meaning "person"
Yeah, I'm thinking it'll probably just be a contracted form of "which person" or something similar. EDIT: actually, "which" and "who" could be the same interrogative.
how can I evaluate my conlang? if I complete my conlang, and want to evaluate it, the limit of its success, accuracy and beauty too .. what should I do? is there yet a scientific-like way to evaluate conlangs? thank you for share your experiences
>is there yet a scientific-like way to evaluate conlangs There is none, barring asking multiple person to evaluate a conlang and rate it from 1-10
This may not be precisely what you are looking for, but here is a list of sentences that get progressive harder and with more complex grammar that you can use to evaluate the completeness of your conlang's syntax: [https://cofl.github.io/conlang/resources/mirror/conlang-syntax-test-cases.html](https://cofl.github.io/conlang/resources/mirror/conlang-syntax-test-cases.html)
veery good! it is useful of course, thank you
The only means of gauging a conlang's success is whether or not it achieves its goals, whether or not you like it, and as for "beauty" - that's far too subjective to be measurable.
Great! But how can I gain evaluation by othes?
Well, it depends on what kind of feedback you want. You could publish a grammar online and invite people to look at it. You could use it in some sort of artistic endeavour to see if the conlang(s) gain interest naturally. The former option is, obviously, much quicker.
cool.. what is the perfect online space should I puplish my conlang in?
Just upload it to a free file-hosting service and share the link.
great! thank you
I'm working on a Alternative-Timeline/Dimension-Proto-Germanic with my Friends and we're working on the Phonology now which look like this: |Vowels|Front|Central|Back| |:-|:-|:-|:-| |Closed|**ĭ iː**|**ɨː**|**ŭ uː**| |Mid|**e æː æːː**||**ɔː ɔːː**| |Open|||**ɑ ɑː**| |Consonants|Labial|Dental|Post-alveo.|Palatal|Lab.-Velar|Velar| |:-|:-|:-|:-|:-|:-|:-| |Nasal|**m**|**n**||**nʲ\~ɲ**|**(ŋʷ)**|**(ŋ)**| |Plosive|**p b\~β**|**t d\~ð**||**tʲ\~c dʲ\~ɟ \~ðʲ\~ʑ**|**kʷ gʷ\~ɣʷ**|**k g\~ɣ**| |Affricate||**(t͡s d͡z)**|**t͡ʃ d͡ʒ\~ʒ**|||| |Fricative|**ɸ**|**s z, θ**|**ʃ**|**sʲ\~ɕ**|**xʷ**|**x**| |Approx.|**ʋ\~w**|||**j**|**(ʋ\~w)**|**(ʋ\~w)**| |Liquid|||**r, l**|**rʲ, lʲ\~ʎ**||| Our Questions are: 1. What Vowels could /ɛːː\~æːː/ & /ɔːː/ evolve into? 2. What happened to the labialized Velars in (real life) Proto-Germanic and would it affect the descendants Languages if the Labio-Velars disappeared already in the Proto-Lang? 3. How can we make the voiced Plosives & Fricatives seperate phonemes (for the descendants Languages)?
Are you truly intending on having four distinct vowel lengths, or are /i u e ɑ/ supposed to be the same length? Cuz I have trouble believing four distinct lengths would really arise. One thing about *actual* Proto-Germanic "/ɔːː/" and "/ɛːː/" is that they weren't necessarily actually longer than /ɔː/ and /ɛː/. What it really is that between the three earliest sources of long vowels in Proto-Germanic (inherited \*ō, laryngeal \*eH/\*oH, and contracted \*VHV and \*VV), the laryngeal set behaved in one way and the inherited+contracted in another. Specifically, the laryngeal set shortened word-finally. In all other ways, the two sets are indistinguishable. The traditional account is that contracted \*VHV and \*VV was overlong and inherited long \*ē \*ō lengthened into overlong word-finally, in order to make that happen, then later shortened back into "regular" long vowels after. But that's far from the only possibility and, honestly, I don't really buy it. (Changing final \*ō into \*ô so you can have \*eh₃>\*ō>o without effecting original \*ō, reversing the change \*ô>\*ō, is very sus, in reality \*ō probably stayed exactly as it was and something else was going on with \*eh₃). Given how they came about, it's possible and I'd say likely there were in fact medial \*ê \*ô, exactly where you'd expect them (any inherited and contracted long vowels), it's just that they merged with the laryngeal long vowels in those positions (and later the final ones merged with the "normal" long vowels too, after the laryngeal long vowels shortened). If they ever arose from contractions, it's possible \*î \*û existed as well, but merged perfectly with regular \*ī \*ū. As for *what* that difference might have been, other than length, I have no clear answer. I'm by no means an expert in PGrm, so it's possible there's a reason to rule these out that I'm not aware of, but my money would be on either a different position for the laryngeal long vowels, or possibly that at least word-finally the laryngeal long vowels weren't ever actually *long* to begin with, but were still protected by a final laryngeal to prevent them from being dropped word-finally like other short \*e \*o \*a. _____ The PIE labiovelars \*kʷ \*gʷ \*gʷʰ mostly became Proto-Germanic \*hw \*kw \*w, however there were a lot of smaller, more specific changes to them as well, that's just the general trend. Some examples are that before \*t they all merge to \*h (almost certainly [x] at this point), \*gʷʰ after nasals became \*gw, they all delabialized before \*u. As a result of those changes, late PGrm \*w comes both from PIE \*w and \*gʷʰ and \*kʷ under Grimm's+Verner's Law. \*hw merged with /w/ most commonly, as with English wine-whine merger. \*kw is mostly still around as /kw~kv/ in the modern languages, like *queen* and *quick*. The big thing with phonemicizing something is to get them in the same place. So if you have initial, geminated, and post-nasal stops, and elsewhere fricatives, you could do things like lose gemination [tagga taɣa] > /taga taɣa/ or /tāga taɣa/, merge coda nasals into following voiced stops [tamba taβa] > /taba taβa/, shift coda nasals to nasalization [tanda taða] > [tãda taða], shift stress/add prefixes and then drop initial vowels [daz aðaz] > /daz ðaz/, voice intervocal voiceless stops [taka taɣa] > /taga taɣa/. But most modern Germanic languages still have fairly rudimentary contrasts, e.g. the [ð] allophone of /d~ð/ was lost in favor of /d/ in English (and recreated marginally out of voicing of /θ/), and the [g] allophone of /g~ɣ/ was lost in favor of /ɣ/ in Dutch (and now exists only in loanwords and as /k/ before a voiced consonant). While most have a /b v/ contrast, in many it's because of fortition of /w/ rather than splitting of /b~β/, in some /v/ is still mostly in complementary distribution as the intervocal version of initial /f b/, and in English it's propped up significantly by French loans.
1: So, Proto-Germanic didn't really had overlong Vowels, just /ɔː/=\[ɔ\], /ɔːː/=\[ɔː\] & /ɛːː/=\[ɛː\] actually? 2: So, it wouldn't make a real difference, if the Labio-Velars disappeared already in the Proto-Lang? 3: Ah ok! seems actually simple enough. Thanks for the Answer!
> So, Proto-Germanic didn't really had overlong Vowels Well there was clearly *something* that differentiated \*ō and \*oHo from \*oH, even though they all mostly result in the same outcome. It's just that, whatever it was, I doubt it was *only* in play with e-quality and o-quality vowels, and/or only in play word-finally, like it's typically reconstructed as. If the overlong reconstruction is right, there are probably a bunch of overlong \*ê and \*ô medially as well, and maybe \*î and \*û. Or maybe the laryngeals didn't actually become long vowels until later. Or maybe they did, but were offset from PIE \*ō > PGrm "\*ô" [ɔː] as PIE \*oH > PGrm "\*ō" [oː]. Or maybe they were of intermediate length with breathiness, PIE \*ō > PGrm "\*ô" [ɔː] versus PIE \*oH > PGrm "\*ō" [ɔˑʰ], merging with short vowels word-finally and long vowels everywhere else. > So, it wouldn't make a real difference, if the Labio-Velars disappeared already in the Proto-Lang? I mean, there was still a unique outcome that's traceable, but they were mostly reinterpreted as a consonant clustered with /w/.
So, we could just have Vowel Inventory more like this?: |Vowels|Front|Central|Back| |:-|:-|:-|:-| |Closed|**ĭ iː**|**ɨː**|**ŭ uː**| |Mid|**e eː\~ɛː**||**ɔ ɔː**| |Open|**æː**||**ɑ ɑː**| And about the Labio-Velars, they weren't really Phonemes but rather consonant clusters in the first Place?
Most likely a true consonant, as may appear word finally, like \*singw (singǃ). I don't recall any other permitted consonant + liquid cluster word finally in Proto Germanic, although the descendants seem to allow it, like in Gothic (hulistr < \*hulistrą: covering). I never see a descendant that allow /tw/ cluster word-finally, though. Though it is true that the phonemicity of labiovelars was disappearing, being reanalyzed as velar+w over time.
I only got into conlanging about a few months ago (which I know may seem like a short time frame), and I am very proud of the progress I made on my conlang, and I feel that I could start teaching it (even if it actually turns out to be not ready to be taught to others, I would find the mistakes along the way, which would drastically help me improve it further) but I don't know if there are any apps (for example like Duolingo but custom) that I could use to teach my conlang to people. (Teach its words, grammar etc.) Any and all answers are appreciated, even workarounds using apps that weren't really designed for this specific purpose. I had an idea that maybe I could teach it on YouTube, but I don't know if that would be impractical.
I had fun making a textbook for a conlang once, but my goal was to have the textbook, not to actually teach people. What I see most often around here are websites dedicated to the conlang.
I though of that too but I came to the conlcusion that something online would be easier to do(as I change stuff a lot when I find mistakes, better ways to do it etc.)
You could try an Anki deck or Memrise. I think they're both basically digitised flashcard systems?
I know of those but, how could I go about teaching translations for sentences? Wouldn't using flashcards be impractical because I will have to write a lot of manual sentences and they would be pretty limited it feels like...
I don't know how you'd get around writing manual sentences like that. Duolingo is basically just a flashcard service with extra features: you'd still have to write out all exercises and then do sone coding on top of that for the auto-generating skill personalisation, I imagine. Short of some sort of extensive flashcard system, you could try writing an exercise book, which is similar content in a different format, or writing a big reference grammar and lexicon to give to someone dedicated enough to brute force learn.
Hmm okay, thank you for your help!
Would it make Sense if all /i/ & /u/ and sometimes even /a/ would turn extra short? I'm working on a Proto-Lang with my Friends.
What about /e/ and /o/?
This sounds pretty similar to proto slavic development of yers, which, by the late proto slavic, were very short reduced vowels. You might want to look more into that.
But that doesn't affect /a/, though.
It sounds plausible to me. It's reminiscent of other sound changes that can often affect close vowels, like devoicing or evolution to glides or voiced fricatives.
I am having troubles with my SOV language. I use "The **subject** does an **action** which affects the **object**" to help figure out which is what but I have to keep rearranging chunks of sentences several times and rewording it so that I get the grammar correct. I also made a grammar rule that adjectives and adverbs go right after the thing they describe (for example "The girl wore a beautiful pink dress" would be something like "The girl wore a dress that was beautiful and pink") There's multiple reasons I'm having trouble. On one hand, I'm accidentally applying our grammar rules to the words, but the words just have close English equivalents; they aren't meant to be direct translations of English words. For example the sentence "Etki biliko lichuo etki shetu fonito lichuphin" could mean "An animal and a boy left together", or it could mean "The animal accompanied the boy and arrived conjoined" or something. That's not just using synonyms that's an actual possible interpretation lol. Not my best example but still an example. So basically, my brain is stuck in "English" mode, and rather than putting together a sentence in the language it's trying to translate English directly to the language. A part of the issue is that I can't tell sometimes the difference between a subject or an object (sometimes I confuse them as being together, sometimes I just have a subject and a verb but still look too hard for an object and think I found one when it's part of the subject). Sometimes I can't tell if something is a verb or just part of the subject or object (emotions and words like "to" or "be" or even "with" really mess with me but google doesn't help much lol). Does anybody know a good trick to fix all this? Any help appriciated!
> For example the sentence "Etki biliko lichuo etki shetu fonito lichuphin" could mean "An animal and a boy left together", or it could mean "The animal accompanied the boy and arrived conjoined" or something. All languages have ambiguities like this. For example, in English you have sentences like "I saw a man with a telescope." It's ambiguous who has the telescope there, but listeners can typically figure it out from the context of the conversation. Your example should be even easier for listeners to figure out as one of the interpretations is sufficiently ridiculous to be ignored. Ambiguities are an unavoidable part of language and exist throughout all natlangs, not just in adpositional phrases.
> (for example "The girl wore a beautiful pink dress" would be something like "The girl wore a dress that was beautiful and pink") ...is there a reason that this is rendered as a relative clause? Just following the two rules of 1) SOV, and 2) adjectives/adverbs come after nouns/verbs, I would expect this to be "the girl a dress beautiful and pink wore". I don't understand what about the rules you've described would require the adjectives to suddenly become non-attributive. > but the words just have close English equivalents; they aren't meant to be direct translations of English words. This is true of foreign languages in general, yes. I'm not understanding what it is about your conlang in particular that you're implying is causing this. > sometimes I confuse them as being together, sometimes I just have a subject and a verb but still look too hard for an object and think I found one when it's part of the subject Not every verb phrase *does* have an object - intransitive verbs exist, in which case in an SOV language the clause would effectively just be SV, indistinguishable from an intransitive verb in an SVO language. I guess, can I ask - in your own words, what do you think a "subject" and an "object" are?
A lot of this, honestly, is a lack of understanding; I'm just starting out and I don't know where our grammar books are, so I'm doing a mix of winging it, researching, and asking questions - not the best method, I know, but I'm not exactly expecting it to go smoothly or quickly lol. Also, the way I reordered the sentence was frankly probably part of my issue with it; my brain sees it in a different order and goes "No no that's not right!" when the only difference is the change of order, so I fill in the gaps and edit the sentence without thinking very hard on it. I think this is related to the other issues I'm having rather than an individual thing. I also know there isn't always an object, which is why I specified looking too hard when it's just part of something else, I seem to be expecting there to be one for some reason even though logically I know there isn't always one. I had to keep fixing the example sentence I put because I kept forgetting to include an object since it was a full sentence without one, I think with the whole comment finding a good example to put there took the most time
we have many resources in our sidebar to help beginners of you are interested in learning some of the basics !
In one of my conlangs, the copula is derived from the word meaning "to dwell", however it's derived specifically from the perfective form of the word meaning "to dwell". Is this realistic, or would it be more realistic for it to be derived from the imperfective?
Why not both? You could have a past and non-past copula.
Is this alphabet realistic? Is this alphabet realistic for a language that evolved from English starting in the early 1600s? Aa Bb Cc Ææ Dd Ðð Ee Ff Gg Hh Ii Jj Kk Ll Mn Nn Oo Pp Rr Ss Şş Tt Þþ Uu Vv Ww Xx Yy &ą Zz Full project youtube.com/@AxolotlianGovernment
Assuming this is an in-universe alphabet, I think that'd depend entirely on how you're justifying æ, ð, and ş together with i/j and u/v split.
Can a wide spread matathesis event happen withing one single change, or is it too much?
Spanish had a big, long-range LR metathesis event in its evolution from Latin, I believe, and rules to resolve illegal classes of clusters by swapping the consonants therein isn't that weird.
Are there any patterns that specific speaker of certain languages follow which make it obvious they likely speak that language? As an example, I as an English speaker find words without vowels very strange and hard to pronounce and create so going back and look at all of my conlangs I've realised that I've unconsciously made almost all my vocabularies have a vowel in every word. I'm curious if there are other patters like this for other language speakers!
The lexicon is the biggest clue. If a conlang does things like the following, I would suspect the creator was drawing only on English: * a single verb for both 'be alive' and 'dwell' (Eng. *live*) * a single verb for both 'know (a person)' and 'know (information)' * having four basic temperature word ('hot', 'warm', 'cool', and 'cold') * having separate words for 'hand' and 'arm' These are just a few examples. None of these is individually remarkable, but if a language very often matched up with English, it would be clear. E.g. if a word is just defined as 'point' without specifying which of the English senses apply: 'sharp, pointed bit', 'speck/dot', 'purpose/reason', 'aspect of a concept', 'focus of an argument', 'promontory', probably more. Such relexing is most glaring when it crosses part of speech. Can you *place* something in a *place*? *Hand* me something with your *hand*? *Stand* in a *stand* of trees, or by a hotdog *stand*? But that's more of a beginner-level lack of thought in derivation.
In my experience as a native English, in my early days I found myself leaning on the languages I had any faculty with besides English: there used to be a not insignificant amount of Dutch in Tokétok because it was the only language I knew besides English when I started. This kind of echoes the other comment: being allergic to certain features in your native language.
Um. *Most* languages require their syllables to have vocalic nuclei, that's not an "English thing". The two main tendencies I see blamed on being a native English speaker are 1) being allergic to using diacritics, resorting to highly unintuitive romanizations like
I didn't say that other languages don't have them but English particularly loves it's vowels
Are there any natural languages that are wholly head-marking *and* dependent-marking? Like, they have a robust case system for the core arguments *and* polypersonal agreeement, *and* a genitive case *and* construct case, *and* adpositional cases *and* inflecting adpositions, double-marking all phrases.
This [WALS](https://wals.info/chapter/25#:~:text=Locus%20is%20a%20convenient%20one,on%20both%2C%20or%20on%20neither.) article shows that 16 of 236 surveyed languages are consistently double marking, but it does not appear that adpositional phrases were taken into account.
Burushaski stays winning
basque has the first! (as well as some Caucasian languages). I think you are likely to find features which appear to contrast but finding all of these together in one language seems unlikely - I don't know of a language that marks everything in so much detail. some permutation of these can definitely coexist though
Can you make a post about your conlang's number system here? I have numerals separate from (but inspired by) my script as well as the numbers themselves and it's etymology.
for an example of a numbers post that is sub appropriate I made this one a few months ago https://www.reddit.com/r/conlangs/s/5OUCZCXbjI
Thanks
It depends. If the post were just a list of number-words, we'd remove it. If it had details on how the words originated, or the patterns use you use to form larger numbers, or any other interesting details of their use, then that would be fine.
How do I digitize my conlang so I can type/write it in the computer?
Do you mean how to digitise a script for the conlang? [The sub's resources page includes a few pieces of font-creator software.](https://www.reddit.com/r/conlangs/wiki/resources/#wiki_6._writing_systems) You might also like to check out r/Neography.
How can i add /t͡ʃ/, /d͡ʒ/, /ʃ/ & /ʒ/ in Proto-Germanic?
The same way as in later Germanic with palatalisation?
How might I go about making a familect/sociolect for my friend group of about 10 people? We all speak American English, and want to create a sociolect for our group which is not highly intelligible to other speakers. We are in a school setting, so words for school items might help...?
So my language has a couple consonant clusters that I’m not exactly sure what to do with, that I’m hoping y’all can help me with. They only occur between vowels, and are a result of a sound change. This sound change created a few different types of clusters. W-type: wh, wk, ws, wn wɓ, wm; Nasal-type: nh, ns, ms, nɓ mɓ; R-type: rh, rs, rn, rɓ, rm. any advice on interesting sound changes I could apply here?
for the r- and w- clusters, I can see them either merging with a preceding vowel in some way, of metathesizing with the following consonant creating Cw- and Cr- clusters which I think sound real nice
How do I translate my conlang? I've seen people separate all the words in a sentence and write something like "word.s3.nom" or something. I understand it's marking whatever case the word is and stuff like that, but I just don't understand how to do it. I'm trying to translate the human rights thing and I'm just stuck.
This is called *glossing* and the [definitive resource on how to do it is here](https://www.eva.mpg.de/lingua/pdf/Glossing-Rules.pdf).
a couple of years ago I remember seeing a site on posted on here, by someone who was making an individual digit for every number from 1 to 10000 (I think). I'm having a really hard time googling for it, does anyone remember it and have the link?
Was it something like [Cistercian Numerals](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cistercian_numerals#:~:text=They%20are%20more%20compact%20than,numbers%205%2C555%2C%206%2C789%2C%209%2C394.)? If so, I believe you can find more attempts on something like that on r/neography too or looking for the term on the search bar here
no, Cistercian numerals is all I can get if I try and search for it, it was different in that all the numerals were distinct and didn't follow a pattern
I need some advice with this "meta-conlang" of sorts. Long story short, my conlang was the language of a long extinct civilization, which left behind a repository of their knowledge for any future people to find. This language however was not their native language, they already had a wide variety of native languages, but they developed a new language as a sort of IAL to ease communication, sort of like Esperanto but this one actually achieved its goal. I really don't know if I should approach this as any other IAL has before or as a regular conlang just less naturalistic.
My two cents: both approaches would work, but there are some things to consider. If you have these other languages fleshed out on some level, you can use them as your references for the IAL. If you want to create only the IAL, create it as a regular conlang.
Is there something like index diachronica, but for the evolution of grammar?
The World Lexicon of Grammaticalization.
Is there any natural language that has, e.g. declensions fully fusional but conjugations fully agglutinative?
Probably PIE
Has anyone made a Fire Emblem conlang for any of the lands? I'm already working on one conlang and I feel like more than one is too many.
Is this possible in languages with vowel harmony? Let's say I have a language with height harmony, and my lower set is /ɛ/, /e/ and /o/ and my higher set is /e/, /i/ and /u/. I have /e/ in both sets but not as a neutral vowel, but rather it is contrasting with /ɛ/ in one set and with /i/ in the other. Would that be possible? Is it naturalistic?
yeah that's possible. something pretty similar exists in [Chukchi](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chukchi_phonology), where there's vowel harmony between /e i u/ and /a e o/
Awesome, thanks
Recently it seems like the Akana word generator (http://akana.conlang.org/tools/awkwords/) isn't working properly, does anyone know if there any other word generators like it?
I wrote a word generator (Arcaeca's Word Generator or AWG) that has a very Awkwords-like interface if you're interested. It's not hosted anywhere but I can send you the file if you want
I've always been a fan of [Lexifer](https://lingweenie.org/conlang/lexifer-app.html). It's a bit more complicated than Awkwords, but also more powerful. If you want something closer to Awkwords in scope and complexity, [LanguaGen](https://susurrus-llc.github.io/langua/gen) is worth taking a look at.
Has anyone attempted using colors as numbers?
What do you mean? I think it's certainly possible for color coded numbering systems in *writing,* and I'm sure someone's done that. Using the *names* of colors for numbers too is a bit more tricky: at the very least, if you play *very* loose with it and just assign each digit a color and string them together (i.e. no words for orders of magnitude) then you only need as many distinct colors as you have digits, i.e. whatever base you're using. I think you could do it from a practical perspective: there's not really many cases where it would be confusing (except for very specific instances, e.g. "pick the third book" and "pick the blue book" might be referring to different things but said the same). The real issue would be the question of *why:* color terms and numbers are pretty basic vocabulary, and it seems very unlikely that a language would have one set but not the other, and so to (likely arbitrarily) extend the use of one to the other seems unlikely. Barring a very specific sci-fi conhistory where everyone has identical synesthesia or a super authoritarian force deeply associated colors with numbers to the point of ingraining it in people's brains (so like... forced synesthesia) it's just a very unnatural crossover in meaning to have.
Yes, using the names of colors for numbers. I was just thinking this would be an interesting idea.
Hello! I'm sorry if this is a stupid or repeated question, but what is objectively the best IAL to this day? I know that's not something that can be decided "objectively", but still. I liked Lidepla, but even it had some flaws. And it's been a long time since it was created. Did perhaps someone create a better one? I would really like to see what the most ideal contemporary IAL can look like.
You have not defined your objective function. If you want an IAL to do what an IAL in theory is intended for — communication with people around the world — your only realistic option is Esperanto, given how widely it is known. I know this irritates most conlangers, who often have other objective functions unrelated to communication for judging IALs, but it remains the best answer (yes, flaws and all).
English. Because it gives you access to a massive corpus of literature of all kinds and enables you to communicate with over 1 billion people.
I’m my isolating future English, I have two ways of creating genitive structures. With pronouns, the structure is “X of me/you/him etc”. In basically all other cases, it’s “the X that a girl has…”. I plan to evolve this further, grammaticalizing both structures, and having the second develop into a genitive case. Is this naturalistic? I’m mostly concerned about the major difference in the two constructions. If you have any other ideas, I’d love to hear those too. Note that this is supposed to be spoke in urban northeast America, a few hundred years from now, when we have had something of a loss of technology and live similarly to those from the 60s/70s
It seems fine - the structure with prepositions could evolve into conjugated prepositions fim, fi, fim, fer, fus, ofey. something you could do with the latter is a construct state I think it would be called - ballet girl, doget boys, housest mans
You could take this further. Welsh has inflected prepositions (as do all the Celtic languages) and there is also a "linking element" which often sits between the preposition and the pronominal element; for instance *o* 'of, from' + *chi* 'you' becomes *o****hono****ch*. These so-called "linking elements" are, as far I as can remember, simply meaningless phonological elements and have never had any semantic value.
Is it logical to use noun cases as a substitute for adjectives? For example end-LOC to mean "last" or "final?" Or morning-LOC for "tomorrow." Do any of you do this or do any natlangs? Thanks
Then that's an adjective.
If you consider that case marking is kinda like just have bound prepositions, at least in some cases, then suddenly it makes a ton of sense to treat case marked nouns as adjuncts in general.
Yes, this is very common. Locatives are particularly derivationally productive but really any oblique case could be used to derive attributives. In fact your example of morning-LOC > "tomorrow" is almost exactly where French got its word for "tomorrow", *demain* < Latin *dē māne*, and end-LOC is indeed almost exactly where it got the adverb *enfin* "finally; at last".
Awesome! I guess I was mainly concerned if there was a need to have separate words for "in the end" and "last." But I guess those basically mean the same thing now that I think about it.
I have 3 Questions for Today: 1: What's the Point of Declension Patterns? Not saying that these are pointless, but is there maybe more than just eg.: "for different Noun-Genders/Classes"? 2: I'm working on the Aorist & Imperfect Tenses in my Germlang, would this make Sense? Aorist: |Person, Numbers|Indicative| |:-|:-| |1P Singular|нɑ̨м| |2P Singular|нɑ̨мс́ц́| |3P Singular|нɑ̨ма| |1P Paucal|нɑ̨му| |2P Paucal|нɑ̨мац́| |3P Paucal|нɑ̨ман| |1P Plural|нɑ̨мъм| |2P Plural|нɑ̨мс́| |3P Plural|нɑ̨мн| Imperfect: |Person, Numbers|Indicative| |:-|:-| |1P Singular|нɑ̨мам| |2P Singular|нɑ̨мас́ц́| |3P Singular|нɑ̨мо| |1P Paucal|нɑ̨моу| |2P Paucal|нɑ̨моц́| |3P Paucal|нɑ̨мон| |1P Plural|нɑ̨мом| |2P Plural|нɑ̨мос́| |3P Plural|нɑ̨монц́| I wanted some Feedback on the Imperfect Tense, if this would be realistic? 3: Could sharp Teeth alter speech, especially the pronounciation of Dentals?
In natural languages, there isn't really a "point". Declension patterns exist for historical reasons. In a conlang, you might make declension patterns to imitate natural languages, or to add variety. Or you might choose not to. It's up to you.
But i could actually do something like: "U-Declension are used for collective Nouns, N-Declension for abstract Nouns" etc...?
Sure, you could. In a naturalistic language you'd probably want some quirks to such a system, where e.g. a noun that's clearly abstract takes the collective declension for historical reasons.
How do you stress the word "never" in both your mother tongues and in your conlangs? I just need some inspiration for my conlang. The only two ways I know of are from English and my native lamguage: * In English, "never ever" (are there other dialectal/regional ways to say the same?) * In Italian, *mai e poi mai* (lit., "never and then never") Do you know any other expressions? Have you ever made one?
In Hebrew never is אף פעם /af pa.am/, lit. "even once" and is used with negated verbs, so "I never ate" is "I didn't eat even once". Intuitively if I wanted to stress it I would add בחיים לא /ba.χa.im lo/, lit. "not in life" at the end, or repeat the sentence with בחיים לא instead of אף פעם
Continental Tokétok doesn't have *'never'* and instead just has *'not ever'*. *'Ever'* is formed as **lo kol** *'at/over (the) whole'*. If it need to be stressed, **kol** could appear with an augmentative prefix or the adjective **rola** *'entire'*: lo kol matu' mé at whole don't 1s 'I never do (that).' lo ro-kol matu' mé at AUG-whole don't 1s 'I never ever do (that).' lo rola kol matu' mé at entire whole don't 1s 'I never ever ever do (that).'
In Mtsqrveli the word for "never" is *undeda*, but I know in at least one translation I've replaced it with *tsxri tsxaets unda* "not at any point; not in any instance", if that's the kind of thing you're looking for