The Conlang Coven

Anyone else on ConWorkShop?

Edited by TheWhistleTropes on Sep 12th 2020 at 10:03:31 AM

Just had a thought about my language. /r/ (alveolar approximant) is used in my language, but very sparingly—only to refer to something especially harsh, like fights ("rung").

WIP of my conlang on ConWorkShop: https://conworkshop.com/view_language.php?l=AFM

Looking good, Whistles

Hey Geek! Do you have any conlangs?

Not at all. Just a spectator here.

Thoughts on split ergativity?

It's cool. I like splitting ergativity based on animacy.

I'm kinda a conlanging normie in doing it based on activity. In Alfeme, I have made it so that if it's a voluntary action, it's marked with nominative, but if it's involuntary it's accusative. So something like "Me padete"—literally "they see"—it would mean something like "they looked", but something like "Mal padete"—"them see"—it would be more literal of a "they see."

Wouldn't that be confusing with more than one argument? How do you differentiate between "they saw the dog" and "they looked at the dog"?

Using the dative case. Something like "me isemam padete" is "they look at the snake"; "mal isemam padete" is "they see the snake."

Sight is intangible. Therefore, to see something is to give someone your sight, hence the use of the dative case.

The dative case could be used as an instrumental case as well. "Lu tuñem umal lamso" means "I was cutting the fruit with a knife." While it could be theoretically used as a comitative as well, its usage as the recipient of an intransitive verb makes it unusable. Therefore, "I saw the volcano with Mike" would be "Lol a Maicol letolbam padexa", not "Lol Maicom letolbam padexa," which would imply something like "I saw Mike volcano."

I'm wondering whether to add an ablative noun case or whether to make the genitive do double-duty.

Would using /V/ instead of /w/ in all contexts make a language sound Slavic-ish?

That is what Slavic languages do, but so do German, Turkish, Hindi, and plenty other languages.

Yeah, it would give it some odd Slavic flavor. Although I don't want it to sound too harsh, a dragon's mouth can't reasonably produce a /w/ sound, so I use the labiodental approximant /V/ instead as a substitute.

Do they not have lips? Maybe use /ɰ/?

They have lips, but I think it would be somewhat hard to make a /w/ sound—even though they can make /u/ and /o/.

What makes it difficult for them?

Actually, I'm kinda unsure. It was unlisted on a Dragon-centric inventory, so I just decided to use it as a substitute.

Then I thought it sounded cool and just rolled with it.

Here's some sound changes I worked up to create a root-pattern system similar to Semitic languages, though much simpler:

• Original vowels: /a,i,u,ə/, with initial stress
• a i ə > o y u / _C(C)u
• a u ə > e y i / _C(C)i
• i u ə > e o a / _C(C)a
• u > y / yC(C)_
• {e,y} o a > i u ə / ˈVC(C)_
• Stress moves to the penultimate syllable of every word.
• {a,e,o} > ə / _(C)ˈ
• ə > o / {ˈ_,_C{C,#}}
• ə > Ø
• Ø > i / {#_CC,CC_{C,#}}
• y > i
• Modern vowels: /a,e,i,o,u/

Analogy would then take over, using patterns for roots that originally had none until a root-pattern system takes hold.

Edited by TotallyNotAnAlien on Sep 28th 2020 at 7:09:48 AM

For example, let's say *silak meant "to speak" and *silak-un meant "speaker".

The modern language would have selak "to speak" and islokun "speaker".

That sounds pretty nice!

What are its consonant sounds? Are they more like Arabic or Hebrew, or are they something different?

I'm actually going for something more like Navajo with the consonants (and tones, but I'll figure those out later).

Debating how many vowels to have in my conlang. I currently have a five-vowel system (a, e, i, o, u), but u is pretty underused—little more so than its approximant counterpart /v/^note through allophony, it becomes /w/ after, but not between, vowels.

Is the /u/ vowel relatively underused in languages with a five-vowel system? The /o/ phoneme sounds better to me in some ways. Dothraki doesn't even have /u/. Artifexian's Oa uses an /a/, /i/, /o/ three-vowel system, inspired by Pirahã. And Esperanto's noun/adjective/verb alignment uses -o, -a, -i.