(Conlangs) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here [2010-2020]

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Re: (Conlangs) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by Baffin »

Are there any good examples? It doesn't seems like a very common feature
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Re: (Conlangs) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by shimobaatar »

Badfin wrote:Hello! I've been lurking here for years and I guess I'm ready to start participating.

Question: Are there any languages with just a two way coronal contrast that is not dental/alveolar and palatal?
Well, palatal consonants are dorsal, not coronal, if memory serves. Did you mean postalveolar (as in /ʃ t͡ʃ ʒ d͡ʒ/)?

There are some languages (Tamil comes to mind, I believe) where the distinction is made between dental and alveolar consonants, instead of just "blurring" them together, which is what I assume you mean by "dental/alveolar".

But that's only if you're talking about POA. You could do something like /s sʷ/, or I believe even /s z/. That is a two way contrast (voiced vs. voiceless) with coronal consonants.
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Re: (Conlangs) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by shimobaatar »

Badfin wrote:Are there any good examples? It doesn't seems like a very common feature
Basque, namely. Check out this Wikipedia article under "Themes" for a larger list.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laminal_consonant


And keep in mind, "not common" can be very interesting if done well. I'd encourage you to try using some features that aren't extremely common.

"Not attested in any natural language" can be a different story, however.
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Re: (Conlangs) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by Micamo »

Ahzoh wrote:Also I don't know what is being ask by "Alignment of Verbal Person Marking" is it referring to my language marking verbs for person or is it referring to my language's morphosyntactic alignment in general? And the WALS article doesn't give me much help...
Oftentimes languages have different alignments of case and verb marking: Hence why it's broken down into two questions.
Ahzoh wrote:I am filling questions on CALS, and I dunno how to answer this question.

When asked "Order of Object, Oblique, and Verb", I don't what order it is for my language, and I can't see any clear distinction between O and X. I don't know if it could be XOV or OXV or because, my language switches to VSO in passive sentences, to be VOX.
"X" is the stand-in for Oblique objects.

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The dominant order in English is VOX, because even though sentence-initial obliques are possible, they're a marked option: They require a prosodic break like displaced objects do.

The one you want is "No dominant order."
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Re: (Conlangs) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by gach »

Badfin wrote:Are there any good examples? It doesn't seems like a very common feature
California is one place to look for the dental/retroflex or lamino-dental/apico-alveolar contrast. The situation is often more complex that what you might hope for as there might be affricates and the coronal fricatives might have slightly different contrasts than what the stops and affricate have. Valley Yokuts is a fairly clean example of a two way lamino-dental/retroflex contrast if you forget the single affricate series or don't count them to be a logical extension of the stop system.

Australia might appear to be another promising place to check. Unfortunately those Australian languages that have a simple two way laminal/apical contrast mostly realise it as a lamino-palatal/apico-alveolar contrast. The realisation of the laminal phonemes can be somewhat fluid though, and fluctuate between dental and palatal.
shimobaatar wrote:Basque
Don't forget that Basque also has postalveolar sibilants and affricates so in those series you have a three way contrast.
Last edited by gach on 24 Jul 2014 00:33, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: (Conlangs) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by shimobaatar »

gach wrote:
shimobaatar wrote:Basque
Don't forget that Basque also has postalveolar sibilants and affricates so in those series you have a three way contrast.
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Re: (Conlangs) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by QuantumWraith »

So what's the cross-linguistic tendency for ejectives to outnumber non-ejected plosives? I've read that Abkhaz does this if you ignore the voiced series. Which other languages are there?

The inventory I'm currently working on will have a few more ejected versions than non:

/p' t' ts' ts\' k'/ vs. /t k/

However, I figured I'd justify this diachronically by positing previously ejected fricatives fortifying over time:

/t t' k k'/
/p\ p\' s s' s\ s\' x x'/

p\' > p'
s' > ts'
s\' > ts\'
x' > (k)x'

All together the current inventory looks like:

/m n J N/
/t k ?/
/p' t' ts' ts\' k'/
/p\ s s\ x (k)x' h/
/j w/

Is there any way to tell how long something like this could be stable?
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Re: (Conlangs) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by MIGUELbM »

Are switch reference systems usable for nesting prepositions? For example:

INDF-tree-ABS be on.top DEF-house-NOM and-SAME be next.to DEF-river-NOM
The house is on top of a tree next to the sea

Where a non-canonical SR marker states that what is next to the sea is the tree (object), not the house (subject)

or that's not how it works :P?

EDIT: Because I guess I can just add the extra info next to 'tree' instead of 'house', but people can forget to add that information since 'tree', being indefinite, must go before the verb. In that situation I would like to have a system to avoid confusion
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Re: (Conlangs) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by eldin raigmore »

MIGUELbM wrote:Are switch reference systems usable for nesting prepositions?
No, I don't see how what are usually called switch-reference marking systems would be useful for nesting adpositions.
But your method of nesting adpositions looks neat and cool (or whatever); maybe it shouldn't be called a switch-reference system, or isn't what would usually be called a switch-reference system; but if you want to, go for it! I'd like to see it.
BTW I also replied to a similar post of yours on the "Non-Finite Verbs" thread.
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Post by Ahzoh »

eldin raigmore wrote:
MIGUELbM wrote:Are switch reference systems usable for nesting prepositions?
No, I don't see how what are usually called switch-reference marking systems would be useful for nesting adpositions.
But your method of nesting adpositions looks neat and cool (or whatever); maybe it shouldn't be called a switch-reference system, or isn't what would usually be called a switch-reference system; but if you want to, go for it! I'd like to see it.
BTW I also replied to a similar post of yours on the "Non-Finite Verbs" thread.
A switch-reference system sounds interesting. I wonder, do I have use a marker/affix to mark a switch-reference, or could I use subject dropping to mark a co-referent? In this way, a switch reference will be marked with a subject. Example: I will get you, will get your little dog too.
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Re: (Conlangs) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by eldin raigmore »

Ahzoh wrote:A switch-reference system sounds interesting. I wonder, do I have use a marker/affix to mark a switch-reference, or could I use subject dropping to mark a co-referent? In this way, a switch reference will be marked with a subject. Example: I will get you, will get your little dog too.
The marker could be an "independent" word, or a clitic, rather than an affix.
I suspect that using subject-dropping to mean same-subject is on the verge of serial-verb-construction rather than clause-chaining. But that's just my first impression.
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Post by MIGUELbM »

eldin raigmore wrote:
MIGUELbM wrote:Are switch reference systems usable for nesting prepositions?
No, I don't see how what are usually called switch-reference marking systems would be useful for nesting adpositions.
But your method of nesting adpositions looks neat and cool (or whatever); maybe it shouldn't be called a switch-reference system, or isn't what would usually be called a switch-reference system; but if you want to, go for it! I'd like to see it.
BTW I also replied to a similar post of yours on the "Non-Finite Verbs" thread.
Well, it may not be a switch reference system but I like it anyways, I think I'll work on 'it' (whatever it may be called). And thank you very much for your answer, it really helped [:D]
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Re: (Conlangs) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by Ahzoh »

eldin raigmore wrote:
Ahzoh wrote:A switch-reference system sounds interesting. I wonder, do I have use a marker/affix to mark a switch-reference, or could I use subject dropping to mark a co-referent? In this way, a switch reference will be marked with a subject. Example: I will get you, will get your little dog too.
The marker could be an "independent" word, or a clitic, rather than an affix.
I suspect that using subject-dropping to mean same-subject is on the verge of serial-verb-construction rather than clause-chaining. But that's just my first impression.
That's ashame, I can't really think of an morpheme that I haven't used already, and I'm quite disposed towards affixes.
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Re: (Conlangs) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by Julanga »

Badfin wrote:Are there any languages with just a two way coronal contrast that is not dental/alveolar and palatal?
Swedish distinguishes between /n t d s/ and /ɳ ʈ ɖ ʂ/.
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Post by sangi39 »

Badfin wrote:Are there any languages with just a two way coronal contrast that is not dental/alveolar and palatal?
Palatals are dorsal aren't they? Did you mean retroflex?
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Re: (Conlangs) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by Baffin »

@sangi

I was looking for a coronal retroflex distinction without a palatal POA because it seemed like the majority of languages with retroflex series also had palatal series, Australian and Indian languages. I've just confusedly been thinking of palatal as a coronal POA.
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Re: (Conlangs) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by eldin raigmore »

Ahzoh wrote:
eldin raigmore wrote:
Ahzoh wrote:A switch-reference system sounds interesting. I wonder, do I have use a marker/affix to mark a switch-reference, or could I use subject dropping to mark a co-referent? In this way, a switch reference will be marked with a subject. Example: I will get you, will get your little dog too.
The marker could be an "independent" word, or a clitic, rather than an affix. I suspect that using subject-dropping to mean same-subject is on the verge of serial-verb-construction rather than clause-chaining. But that's just my first impression.
That's ashame, I can't really think of an morpheme that I haven't used already, and I'm quite disposed towards affixes.
Well; I don't see why you shouldn't give it a shot anyway.
In the first place, so what if your system is somewhere between serial-verb-construction and clause-chaining with switch-reference-marking? If it's a cool system, use it, and figure out what to name it later.
In the second place, I could be wrong.
And in the third place, you can use clitics or affixes or whatever you want.

Lots of forward-chaining (that is, the referenced clause is always after the marked clause, and the anchor clause is always the last clause in the chain) switch-reference-marking languages actually arrange for the switch-reference-marker to be the last word in each medial clause -- rather as if it were a "subordinating" conjunction (but medial clauses are dependent but not embedded, therefore they're not really subordinate).

OTOH at least some writers want the switch-reference-marker to be an affix on the medial verb, or else they won't call it a switch-reference marker; that's a little like refusing to call an adposition a case-marker IMO.
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Re: (Conlangs) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by Thrice Xandvii »

eldin raigmore wrote:OTOH at least some writers want the switch-reference-marker to be an affix on the medial verb, or else they won't call it a switch-reference marker; that's a little like refusing to call an adposition a case-marker IMO.
Just to make sure I am understanding this chain of thought: that would be using the logic that an adposition is a separate word and not a declension of the noun and therefore not a case marker?
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Re: (Conlangs) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by eldin raigmore »

XXXVII wrote:
eldin raigmore wrote:OTOH at least some writers want the switch-reference-marker to be an affix on the medial verb, or else they won't call it a switch-reference marker; that's a little like refusing to call an adposition a case-marker IMO.
Just to make sure I am understanding this chain of thought: that would be using the logic that an adposition is a separate word and not a declension of the noun and therefore not a case marker?
Yes.
One group would say that since the adposition is a separate word and not an affix it's not a case-marker;
the other group would say that since the reference-switching word is a separate word and not an affix it's not a switch-reference marker.
I'm not saying either group is wrong.
Based on what I know now, I'd prefer that whatever marked a reference-switch (or reference-stability) get called a switch-reference-marker, whether or not it's an independent word.
But I haven't seen the arguments requiring that it be a verbal affix; if I ever do they may convince me (or not).
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Re: (Conlangs) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by Ahzoh »

eldin raigmore wrote:
Ahzoh wrote:
eldin raigmore wrote:
Ahzoh wrote:A switch-reference system sounds interesting. I wonder, do I have use a marker/affix to mark a switch-reference, or could I use subject dropping to mark a co-referent? In this way, a switch reference will be marked with a subject. Example: I will get you, will get your little dog too.
The marker could be an "independent" word, or a clitic, rather than an affix. I suspect that using subject-dropping to mean same-subject is on the verge of serial-verb-construction rather than clause-chaining. But that's just my first impression.
That's ashame, I can't really think of an morpheme that I haven't used already, and I'm quite disposed towards affixes.
Well; I don't see why you shouldn't give it a shot anyway.
In the first place, so what if your system is somewhere between serial-verb-construction and clause-chaining with switch-reference-marking? If it's a cool system, use it, and figure out what to name it later.
In the second place, I could be wrong.
And in the third place, you can use clitics or affixes or whatever you want.

Lots of forward-chaining (that is, the referenced clause is always after the marked clause, and the anchor clause is always the last clause in the chain) switch-reference-marking languages actually arrange for the switch-reference-marker to be the last word in each medial clause -- rather as if it were a "subordinating" conjunction (but medial clauses are dependent but not embedded, therefore they're not really subordinate).

OTOH at least some writers want the switch-reference-marker to be an affix on the medial verb, or else they won't call it a switch-reference marker; that's a little like refusing to call an adposition a case-marker IMO.
My only justification for calling it a SR by subject dropping was on the grounds that any new pronoun would act like a marker for SR, not the absence of a subject marking the same subject. But some SR seem to also have the function of [ A [ B ] [ C ] ] where subordinate clause C would refer to main clause A, not B. This would not work if there was subject dropping.

So I guess it seems more like serial verb construction, only there are subordinating clauses.
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