New CBB

Understood. Thank you.

Woops.


!! That is exactly what I was looking for! Thank you so much, that is an amazing resource.

That helps, thank you. I guess I'll need to do some research into the varying sentence structures to ensure I can portray, or at least convey their information.

That is an interesting point. With my verbs freed up of tense would it be possible to attach an affix that served as a preposition? EDIT: I have been informed my perception of verbs as the domineering conveyors of tense was incorrect.

Haha, yes I'm discovering that more and more. Are there any other useful online resources to "balance" Wiki?

That is beautiful. Thank you. I'm going to save this explanation as well.

Aha! Alright, you're correct on both counts. I was referring to how I gloss the language in English, however, my misunderstanding about tense and verbs came from the fact that I was referred to a doctor of linguistics through a series of friends and favors to ask about potential noun tense in languages, they told me that was a contradiction in terms, but did give several examples in Tagalog and Greek of "de-verbal nominal constructions that carry some tense/aspect with them, as well as plurality and case". I suppose I misinterpreted his dislike for the idea.

So yes, I was confused about that, but I was primarily referring to how it literally translated in English.

Understood, that is good to know. Thank you Trailsend.

I see. Well that is good to keep in mind. How does this carry over with the whole "Aylæs can't have 2 consecutive consonants in the same syllable" rule? I'll be honest the main reason I went for universal aspiration was because I assumed as they wouldn't be assimilated (correct term?) by prior consonants my plosives would lead the respective syllable they were in. But even if that is wrong it isn't a big deal I will look into working out different allophones and phonemes later anyway because I'm far from done with the language. I had originally only started it to try and devise a naming language but then discovered I was having fun with it, so I won't likely be stopping any time soon.

"Traditional" tense-marking, as found in a languages like English - pertains to the clause as a whole. If we take a clause like "Peter stabs John" , the tense-marking (which in English and many other languages is put on the verb) applies to the whole clause, or the event (the stabbing) it refers to. The tense-marking tells when the stabbing takes place (at the moment of the utterance, some time in the past, or in the future). The task of such traditional tense-marking is not (primarily) to give any information about the participants of the events (Peter or John, the subject and object).

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constructedlanguages.net

You can find a lot of great papers via Google Scholar. A lot of them get very, very technical though, so what worked for me was to start with Wikipedia, figure out what the terms meant, and then read bits of academic papers at a time (reading one all the way through would burn out my brain). Gradually I accumulated the background I needed to tackle full papers at once. (A key trick here is to only look at papers on things that you personally find really really interesting. They're already pretty dry, so if you aren't excited about the topic you're just needlessly torturing yourself.)


Xing covered this pretty well. In terms of where tense is marked, though, there's certainly attested cases of tense marking on nouns.

To clarify the point I was making: verbs, by virtue of being verbs, are not inherently tensed crosslinguistically. In Mandarin, for example, you don't mark tense on verbs, so it wouldn't make any sense to say that the verb 去 is somehow "inherently" present tense. It has no tense whatsoever.

In terms of how you do the gloss, most linguists will use a bare "lemma" form of the word for the English gloss, even when the verb does mark tense. For example, from Spanish:

comí
com-í
eat-1.PAST
I ate.

Note that the stem of the verb is glossed as eat, even though the verb is conjugated in past tense.


Ah, that is the related but separate issue of phonotactics.


Ha! Don't you love it when a project grabs you and refuses to let go?

There are tons of conditioning factors besides adjacent consonants that can cause phonemes to be realized as different allophones. For example, in General American English, /t/ and /d/ are both realized as [ɾ] when they occur between vowels and before an unstressed syllable. (If you speak General American, listen carefully to how you pronounce <latter> and <ladder> in rapid speech.)

Also, consonants can be conditioned by adjacent vowels. For instance, in my main WIP, /ʃ/ is realized as [ʂ] when followed by /a u o/ and [ʃ] when followed by /e i/.

_________________
任何事物的发展都是物极必反，否极泰来。

I am impressed by this thread.

_________________
I am not responsible for the accuracy of my sources; they're responsible for their own mistakes, if any, and also responsible for defending their own statements if you disagree with them.

I know, right?? Newbie of the year!

_________________
任何事物的发展都是物极必反，否极泰来。

Yes, and I've also been impressed by the advisors' posts.

_________________
I am not responsible for the accuracy of my sources; they're responsible for their own mistakes, if any, and also responsible for defending their own statements if you disagree with them.

Hmmm. That is good to know, I think English was affecting my perception of tense quite drastically. I'll have to pay special attention. Thank you for the explanation Xing.


Alright, I'll do that. Thanks. I have a few papers from SIL that I was weeding through to try and figure out how to devise an orthography for an unwritten language.


Alright, that makes sense. It may take a while for me to pick up on what the correct lemma forms of words are to use. But you did say "most" so perhaps it isn't required?

I suppose I'll try updating the opening post with glosses and morphology. I hope I get this right.


Understood.


It is quite... exhilarating. I would never have thought constructing a language could keep me so excited as to make me unable to sleep. Surprising doesn't do it justice, though, I am loving every minute of it.


That is useful, I'm unsure if I'll tackle allophones yet, but it is good to know. Thanks.

I feel like I'm missing out on some great pronunciation trick here. I suppose I'll have to bribe some American friends into using latter in a sentence several times.


That's cool. At first I was curious how it would work but your example makes a lot of sense. It also seems... dare I say, natural? I suppose a laymans insight is rather useless, but it does inspire me to attempt some of this within Aylæs as it shows complexity serving a purpose beyond mere complexity.


Everyone has been incredibly polite and in depth in their help. It's unusual on the internet, though certainly not unwelcome, and greatly appreciated.

:) Breaking out of my English brain was one of my main motivations when I got into conlanging. I remember talking with someone about a project I was working on that had seven tenses, and they responded, "But everything happens in the past, or the present, or the future! That's just the way time works!"



A general rule in glossing is that you should fudge the gloss according to what you're trying to show. Here's an extreme example from my WIP:

Take the two words:

lukkàorhxáxkoshokwkw, the meat is over the fire
lukkàorhkúxkoshokwkw, the meat was put over the fire

If I wanted to gloss them in highest-possible detail, it would look like this:

lukkàorhxáxkoshokwkw
l<u-kk<ào>rh-x-á-xk;o-sh<o>kw>kw
place<LEADING-fire<ABLATIVE.INAN>-STAT-INTRANSITIVE-meat;INAN.SG-space_above<LOC.INAN>>
the meat is over the fire

lukkàorhkúxkoshokwkw
l<u-kk<ào>rh-k-ú-xk;o-sh<o>kw>kw
place<LEADING-fire<ABLATIVE.INAN>-PRFV-CAUSATIVE-meat;INAN.SG-space_above<LOC.INAN>>
the meat was put over the fire

Which is a little bit , right? But what if I'm just trying to use these examples to explain how causatives and intransitives work in the language? Then all of this detail is not actually helpful, and it's just going to distract people from what is actually important in the example. So I can do something like this:

lukkàorhxáxkoshokwkw
lukkàorh<xá>xkoshokwkw
there_is_meat_over_fire<STATIVE.INTRANSITIVE>
the meat is over the fire

lukkàorhkúxkoshokwkw
lukkàorh<kú>xkoshokwkw
there_is_meat_over_fire<PERFECTIVE.CAUSATIVE>
the meat was put over the fire

Notice how I collapsed all the information from the first version into the lemma. The "true" lemma for this word is the base root, l*kw, place/located. But in the second version, I pretended that the root was actually lukkàorh*xkoshokwkw, which means something like there is meat over the fire.

So for your glosses, if you really want to separate out as much detail as possible, a good rule of thumb for lemma forms is to get the barest form of the English word you can find. For verbs this is typically the one you find in infinitives (to eat); for nouns it's typically the singular form. But, you can also collapse things onto the lemma to better focus on the specific feature you're actually talking about.


Looks great! I only see one thing amiss: the second and third lines of your glosses should always have exactly the same number of hyphens.

Pii atam tay sijir.
Pi-i atam tay sijir
1s.POS-PRS PRS-son be PRS-warrior
My son is a warrior.

The second line has only 1 hyphen, but the third line has 3. So the gloss is telling me that the word atam should be segmentable into one piece meaning PRS, and one piece meaning son. But the second line doesn't show me what that segmentation is.

It looks like the problem is that your present marking for non-pronouns is actually to leave the word unmarked, right? For future you would add u-, for past you would add a-, but for present you add nothing at all.

There are a couple of ways to deal with this, but it looks to me like the best one to use in this case is the "null" symbol, Ø, which linguists use to represent nothing. So the gloss would look like this:

Pii atam tay sijir.
Pi-i Ø-atam tay Ø-sijir
1s.POS-PRS PRS-son be PRS-warrior
My son is a warrior.

Now all of the hyphens match up, and I can quickly see that the "present" form of nouns is unmarked.


Phonotactics is a little easier to handle than allophony because it typically deals just with phonemes rather than specific allophones. It's also more important early on in the sense that it guides how you actually build words. Allophony you can totally put off until later, because you can still invent words even if you don't know exactly how to pronounce them. But phonotactics governs how you put those words together in the first place.

(Granted, it's perfectly possible to put off the phonotactics as well. I still, after several years, can't give you a clear answer about the phonotactic restrictions in my WIP. I just have a sense of what words look like they fit in the language and what words don't—the way dobble looks like it could fit in English, but ngibr doesn't. One of these days I'll sit down and actually translate those impressions of mine into clear phonotactic rules, but that day is not today.)





Good call. Allophony is a bottomless rabbit hole of potential detail; you could go in and never come out. (For some conlangers, phonology and phonetics are their favorite parts of conlanging, so this is precisely what they prefer to do.) Fortunately, having no or minimal allophony sketched will almost never cause problems for you as you develop the morphology or syntax of the language.


Ha! My coworkers had to get used to getting lots of weird questions from me. The trick is that you can't just say "Hey Bob, say 'ladder'!" because now you've primed his pronunciation. You have to trick him into saying the word without actually saying it yourself. "Hey Bob, strange question. What do you use to climb up on a roof?" "Hey Bob, fill in the blank: It's not the former, it's the..."

What dialect do you speak?


One of the benefits of allophony for actual conversation is that it builds in informational redundancy. This isn't something that people consciously think about, but because sounds condition nearby sounds, we have a much easier time correctly hearing words even in noisy environments. (The "source-filter theory" of speech production even suggests that what we really use for information exchange is just vowels, and how those vowels have been modified by other sounds.) If we're in a crowded room and one of your consonants gets blurred by noise, my brain is so good at recognizing patterns that it can use what it heard of the nearby sounds to work out what the blurred sound must have been—and all of this happens so quickly, I don't even consciously notice. It just sounds to me like you made the sound my brain thinks you must have made. Brains are really cool.


It helps when the person asking for help has done their own research in advance, is open to feedback, and asks good questions about the information they receive

_________________
任何事物的发展都是物极必反，否极泰来。

Hahaha, that is an amazing quote. Though I'm quite certain a couple of weeks ago I'd have said the same thing.







Just... a tad. That is quite the intense language. Are you conveying entire sentences within singular words?



That does help target my glossing approach. So, how would I denote questions then? The glossing rules I'm reading say:
"Q - question particle/marker" so following my syntax would I gloss like this?



Mui atam tay sijir yæ?
Mu-i Ø-atam tay Ø-sijir yæ?
2n.POS-PRS PRS-son be PRS-warrior Q
Your son is a warrior, yes?

Mui atam tay sijir yæ tay?
Mu-i Ø-atam tay Ø-sijir yæ tay?
2n.POS-PRS PRS-son be PRS-warrior Q be
Is your son a warrior?

Mui atam tay yæ?
Mu-i Ø-atam tay yæ?
2n.POS-PRS PRS-son be Q
Your son is what?

Does that work? I suppose I should check if my syntax rules work first, huh? Hrm. I'll edit the OP.



Ah, okay so the hyphens need to match, that is useful. Thanks for the null symbol that will prove incredibly handy. I was testing glosses earlier and kept getting confused with denoting PRS without an affix. That helps a lot. Thank you.

I must admit I am a bit confused as to the periods (Or full stops I guess) within the glossing. Is this the correct usage?

Ke Sifal siya
Ke si-fal siya
small PRS.PL-house two
The two small houses

The glossing rules were a bit murky to me.



Haha, well you're obviously far more versed in linguistics than I am. I wouldn't want to think of what would happen to my conlang if I didn't transcribe it all. Dobble. I like that word.

On a potentially related note I'm finding as I pronounce certain terms I have a tendency to alter the pronunciation of [j] when preceded by /l m n/ to more of a [ɪ] (or perhaps it is when followed by /s/?). Looking them up that means its changing around nasals and a lateral (or a sibilant)? Would that be a case of allophone or am I just not abiding by my own language rules strictly enough?

Examples are; <Ilys> from [ɪl-js] to [ɪl-ɪs] and <Lamys> from [lɑm-js] to [lɑm-ɪs]



Eh, well it seems depending on the above, I may have accidentally stumbled into said hole earlier than intended. >_>;;



That is quite a sly method. I'll be sure to remember that.

Oh boy, my dialect... I imagine its a mangled mix of Philippine/American/New Zealand English. Though to be perfectly honest I have no idea.



Haha, that is cool. Is that related to "mishearing" as well? Our brains misapplying a pattern?

:) My favorite thing about learning different languages is the way they teach me to put ideas together in different ways, and not take concepts for granted.


Hah! Thanks. There are many natural languages that are even worse. (In general, languages that can say in a word what takes a whole sentence in English are called "polysynthetic". A lot of conlangers try their hand at a polysynthetic language at some point, probably because they're often quite different from English.)

One of my favorite words in Feayran (<-- my WIP) so far is from a myth I'm working on:

Nawiwàosjikásnoòzudùisnite.
I will fetch the waters from (the house of the sun) and deliver them to you, elder.


Ooooh, that is also fun! I kinda want to bunny trail and ask you more questions about these structures (What do you mean when you say content questions always put <yæ> after the verb functioning as object? How would you ask questions like Who is a warrior? or Who stabbed your son?), but to first answer your question, yes, these glosses look beautiful. You caught on quick!


This gloss tells me that the <si> prefix on <sifal> indicates both that the noun is in present tense, and that it is plural. If that's correct, then this is perfect!

Periods only appear in the third line of the gloss (which is called the "metalanguage"). They indicate that a particular morpheme is fusional, which means that one morpheme gives you multiple pieces of information. Again, looking at the Spanish example:

Comí.
com-í
eat-1.SG.PAST
I ate.

The hyphens line up correctly, so I can see that the morpheme <com-> means eat, and the morpheme <-í> means 1.SG.PAST, i.e., first person, and singular number, and past tense. Because those three pieces of information are all contained in a single, unsegmentable piece, they're connected with periods.

Compare that to these two examples from English:

painted
paint-ed
paint-PAST

ate
ate
eat.PAST

<painted> is segmentable—it is composed of two distinct morphemes, <paint-> and <-ed>. That's why you separate them with hyphens, and each gets translated in the metalanguage.

But <ate> is not segmentable. You can't split off the piece that means "past tense." The word is a single morpheme that means "eat" and "past tense" together. So, in the metalanguage you connect the two pieces of information with a period. Does that make more sense?


Nice! Like everything else, this is entirely up to you. If you like that difference, you can make it an allophony rule (it's a perfectly valid one). Or if you don't, you can try to train yourself out of it.

(Notation fix: You would want to say, "I have a tendency to alter the pronunciation of /j/ when preceded by /l m n/ to more of a [ɪ]." You want slashes around that /j/ because you're talking about how you actually pronounce an underlying phoneme.)

So your rule would be:

/j/ is realized as [ɪ] when preceded by /l m n/. (If the same thing happens when it's proceeded by /r/, then you could just say "/j/ is realized as [ɪ] when preceded by a sonorant consonant.")




Shiny!


Exactly!

_________________
任何事物的发展都是物极必反，否极泰来。

How nice of you to say so!





And btw I am enjoying lurking on this thread.

_________________
I am not responsible for the accuracy of my sources; they're responsible for their own mistakes, if any, and also responsible for defending their own statements if you disagree with them.

Yeah, no kidding. It is actually kind of staggering just how much I took/take for granted.



Wow, that is awesome. I can see why most people try their hand at them eventually. That is impressive.



Huzzah! That is exciting. Now I just need to not mess up on future ones.



What I think I meant was that because Ayæs is SVO I would place "yæ" after the verb because in such questions it functions as the object. I didn't really answer your question as much as rephrase my original statement, huh? Hrm. I think that sentence was more acting as a reminder for myself as to how content questions would be formed so I didn't go placing objects in, but also because yæ acts as an object it could be inflected. To be perfectly honest I'm not entirely certain if you're asking a question or if you're just subtly letting me know I made a mistake. I'll try another gloss to see if that helps.

Sisya ut ahi Ayæ?
Sisya-Ø ut ahi A-yæ?
Sisya-PRS do see PAS-Q
Who did Sisya see?

Does that help/work?



A lot would depend on the context of the conversation, for example:

Sijir tay yæ?
Ø-Sijir tay Ø-yæ?
PRS-warrior is PRS-Q
Who is a warrior?

Could also mean "what is a warrior?", "where is a warrior?", or other less sensible questions such as "when is a warrior?".

Alright, lets try the second one. Hrm interesting, following my present form it would denote both "who stabbed your son" and "your son stabbed who?", I see a flaw unless "yæ" is allowed to move... Is that what you were pointing out? Hrmmmm this is tricky. I don't think I want to just leave it to context on this one.

Okay, I think I see the problem:

Mui atam tay yæ?
Mu-i Ø-atam tay yæ?
2n.POS-PRS PRS-son be Q
Your son is what?

Translates to either "What is your son?" and "Your son is what?" under the present rules (I'm assuming word order doesn't maintain when translating since not all languages have the same?). So, I either need to allow "yæ" to act as either subject or object instead of just automatically assuming the role of object in every instance or I could instigate a rule about forming sentences so that "who stabbed your son?" is allowed but "your son stabbed who?" has to be formed as "who did your son stab?". Would that solve it?

Mui atam mepu Ayæ?
Mu-i Ø-atam mepu A-yæ?
2n.POS-PRS PRS-son cut PAS-Q
Who stabbed your son?

Mui atam ut mepu Ayæ?
Mu-i Ø-atam ut mepu A-yæ?
2n.POS-PRS PRS-son do cut PAS-Q
Who did your son stab?

Or perhaps that is a really cheap copout and I'm just slaughtering SVO. Some languages invert word order under certain situations don't they? So if I'm doing that it could become a rule, however, I don't feel comfortable just assuming I'm getting that right so I'll try moving the yæ.

Ayæ mepu Mui atam?
A-yæ mepu Mu-i Ø-atam?
PAS-Q cut 2n.POS-PRS PRS-son
Who stabbed your son?

Which makes my original attempt...

Mui atam mepu Ayæ?
Mu-i Ø-atam mepu A-yæ?
2n.POS-PRS PRS-son cut PAS-Q
You son stabbed who?

That seems simpler, though it would mean I need to reorder several of my previous question gloss examples. I think I need to be able to move the yæ. I feel like my head just exploded.



Okay, that is what I meant. That is comforting to know.



That makes perfect sense, thanks for taking the time to explain it.



That is wonderful, looking at it now it does seem like something I'll want to have occur when proceeded by /r/. Thanks trailsend! I'll do my best to stop while I'm ahead on allophones though and leave them for when I'm better at this.



I'm not sure I'm ready to tackle this just yet but thank you for the very in depth detail on how to go about it.

I will save it so I can make use of it when next I tackle allophones.

Does it make sense for your language to use the auxiliary "do" to indicate that the object, rather than the subject "son" is the one being stabbed? Maybe that is the case, but it seems like it may just be a holdover from English (maybe not). Many languages can get by without it, simply by changing the word order.

Mandarin:
誰戳了你的兒子?
shéi chuōle nǐ de érzi?
who stab-PERF 2 GEN son
Who stabbed your son?

你的兒子戳了誰？
nǐ de érzi chuōle shéi?
2 GEN son stab-PERF who
Who did your son stab? (lit. Your son stabbed who?)


...which looks like what you've achieved here.


Nice! I don't think it makes much sense to analyze <yæ> as simply an interrogative particle, but rather an interrogative pronoun which can take tense prefixes like all other nouns.


With this analysis, though, there's also an interesting situation presented by this example:

Literally, this would be "A warrior is who?", but if yæ can move, you could consider the option of also distinguishing

yæ tay sijir
Ø-yæ tay Ø-sijir
PRS-Q is PRS-warrior
Who is a warrior?

..which could have a slightly different meaning to it. Maybe it's a matter of emphasis or fronting/topicalization or something.

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力在公蝦米????

flags

That is a good point, it was very likely a holdover from English. I didn't even have a word for 'do' in my lexicon. That is a good point you make about changing the word order. I'll likely go with that option now that I know my carry over made little sense.


Oooh, those Mandarin examples are helpful. Thanks!


Hrm, a fair point. So that would mean it would represent "who, whom, what, which, whose" wouldn't it? That would mean I need new words to represent "where, what, when, how" etc.


That is a good point. I'll have to do some more research into how different languages deal with asking questions I think. Thank you for the insight.

Perhaps <yæ> (or whatever you chose to have serve as the Question) is used for what we distinguish as "where, what, when, how, who"...and further clarification can be built on there (yæ-person, perhaps, yæ_here)

just a thought.