New CBB

That was the plan. I'm presently redesigning the phonology a bit though, and I might be taking that process out, as the phonological theory I'm using as a basis doesn't really account for it. I might have a similar alternation, although it will work a bit differently.



Indeed I did, although once again this rule probably won't be staying in the new version (or if it does it will apply to all coda consonants and not just coronals and uvulars).

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The new phonology continues with a bit of lexical phonology:

This post will be rather short. One of the principles of GP is the 'Projection Principle', which states that the government relations within the word are set in the lexicon and thus may not be modified by (post lexical) phonological processes. As some of the processes of affixation in Kantaranyan will affect whether a segment is syllabified as a coda or onset, these must be regarded as part of the lexical phonology. The main lexical phonological processes are the following:

-The nominal plural ending -/ə̯/ replaces the final consonant of a nominal root ending in one.
-The verbal aspect affixes are suffixed to a verb root ending in a consonant (in which case this consonant will be syllabified as a coda in the direct progressive, and an onset (with the affix as rhyme) in the other forms), or infixed into a verb root ending in a vowel (before the final vowel, in which case the final consonant of the affixes /in/, /am/ and /uk/ are syllabified as onsets rather than codas).
-A glottal stop is inserted into any empty onsets.

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And now for the post-lexical rules (and the phoneme inventory).

Important here are element theory (which is how GP represents the phonological make up of sounds), and projection government.

In GP, sounds are composed of one or more 'elements'. Elements are either there or not there (so no +/- whatever as in feature based analyses of phonology), and each element is supposed to be phonetically interpretable in isolation - for example, the element |U| in isolation is the vowel /u/, but in combination with other elements can produce other rounded vowels or labial consonants, while the element |ʔ| in isolation is a glottal stop, but combined with other elements produces various stop consonants.

In Kantaranyan, I'm using the set of elements proposed here (in the 'segmental structure' chapter). I've chosen to distinguish the palatals and uvulars from coronals and velars respectively by the use of headed place elements (underlined below). Note that other papers propose different analyses of certain segments - especially in the case of the coronals.

Kantaranyan presently has the following phoneme inventory:

Consonants:
|ʔh.U|-/p/, |ʔh.I|-/t/, |ʔh.A|-/k/, |ʔh.A|-/q/, |ʔ|-/ʔ/
|ʔ@.U|-/m/, |ʔ@.I|-/n/, |ʔ@|-/N/
|h.I|-/s/, |h.I|-/ʃ/, |h|-/h/
|h@.U|-/β/, |h@.I|-/l/, |h@.I|-/ʝ/, |h@.A|-/ʁ/, |@|-/ə̯/

Vowels:
|@.U|-/u/, |@.UA|-/o/, |@.A|-/a/, |@.IA|-/e/, |@.I|-/i/

/ʔ/, /N/ and /ə̯/ appear in codas only (although note that [ʔ] does appear in onset position as an epenthetic consonant before an underlyingly vowel-initial syllable), while /s/, /ʃ/ and /h/ are limited to onsets. Consonants from either cannot appear as the final consonant in a consonant-final verb root.

I mentioned in an earlier post the notion of 'complexity'. This is fairly simple - a segment with more elements is more complex than a segment with fewer elements. (Note, however, that the source I linked to in this post suggests a slightly more complex approach whereby different elements have slightly differing properties, but this is not directly relevant to the phonology of Kantaranyan, so I won't go into detail on that.)

I also mentioned 'projection government', which is how GP deals with non-local processes like vowel harmony. Essentially, constituents with something in common (such as nuclei) can be 'projected' to a special phonological tier where the process operates, so that the government processes can be said to be local within the projection. The directionality of projection government is set in a given language by a parameter. In Kantaranyan it operates left to right. (More details on projection government here.)

To prevent this post from getting too long, the actual post-lexical processes I've set up for Kantaranyan are in a separate document:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/41280522/Postlexical%20rules%20%28Kantaranyan%29.docx
(Note that the suppression of place elements in the coda is motivated by the need for final codas to be simple enough to be governed by the vowel in the nucleus, and that the 'consonant harmony' rule is based on projection government. Feet and stress are still determined as detailed in this post.)

The example words in the document are /qatu/ 'make', /esome/ 'cloud', /ʃaʃu/ 'fifteen', /kat/ 'take' and /taʔsa/ 'tail'.

Finally, to round this post out, here's the romanisation:


/p/ - <p>, /t/ - <t>, /k/ - <k>, /q/ - <q>, /ʔ/ - <h>
/m/ - <m>, /n/ - <n>, /N/ - <n>
/s/ - <s>, /ʃ/ - <x>, /h/ - <h>
/β/ - <v>, /l/ - <l>, /ʝ/ - <y>, /ʁ/ - <r>, /ə̯/ - <r>
/u/ - <u>, /o/ - <o>, /a/ - <a>, /e/ - <e>, /i/ - <i>

Note that epenthetic [ʔ] is not romanised.

Notes on final <r> and <n>:

-In final position in nouns, the graphemes <r> and <n> represent /ə̯/ and /N/ respectively.
-In final position in verbal stems, <r> represents /ʁ/ and <n> represents /n/.

Romanisation is based on phonemes rather than the surface form. The exception to this rule is the Romanisation of morpheme-internal codas, which are romanised according to the surface form as follows:

[p˺] - <p>, [t˺]/[c˺] - <t>, [k˺] - <k>, [q˺] - <q>
[m] - <m>, [n]/[ɲ]/[ŋ]/[ɴ] - <n>
[w] - <v>, [j] - <y>, [ɰ]/[ʁ̞] - <r>

So, that's the new phonology! Comments and feedback are welcome.

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Nice
You really make a phonology, not a phoneme inventory.

Was TAVI a bird or red in your phrases?

Does your language have incorporation? You may have said it but I read badly.

Make a proto language for that and call it kantakantaranyan in Finnish.

Thanks! Phonology is the area of linguistics I'm most interested in, and know most about.

Tavi meant red, although I'll probably change it to teve. Bird is tarieh (tariat in the older version).

There isn't incorporation, no. The language is fairly analytic, although there are various inflections. It does make use of infixes though.

I might just make a proto-language actually!
(It would be good to have some neighbouring languages worked out so I can borrow some words from them.)

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I'm currently working on various postpositional phrases.

This post will deal with phrases with the locative suffix -ti (which replaces the earlier -li).

-ti denotes static location or fixed points in time, and appears in the following postpositional phrases:
(-ti affixed to a noun on its own may be translated 'in', 'at' or 'on'.)

Akanti (from akan ‘heart’)

-Refers to location inside something. E.g. omakomi aakanti = ‘inside our house’.
-With words referring to large areas, it can mean ‘in the middle of’. E.g. mara aakanti = ‘in the middle of the forest’.

Vaheti (from vahe ‘head’)

-Referring to physical location, vaheti means ‘on’, ‘above’ or ‘on top of’. E.g. petta avaheti = ‘on top of the mountain’.
-Referring to time, vaheti indicates the beginning of a time period. E.g. qema avaheti = ‘in the early hours of night’.

Yotxati (from yotxa ‘foot’)

-Refers to location below or underneath something. E.g. valasopeh ayotxati = ‘under the carpet’.

Lenti (from len ‘side’)

-Refers to approximate location, or location nearby. E.g. mara alenti varra = ‘a town near the forest’.
-It is also used to refer to the subject of speech, songs, stories etc., like English ‘about’. E.g. tarier milemmiti kolemi = ‘a song about birds’.

Tatxati (from tatxa ‘tail’)

-Referring to physical location, tatxati means ‘behind’. E.g. Emi nitatxati sanki = ‘he is standing behind me’.
-Referring to time, tatxati refers to the end of a period of time. E.g. sahin atatxati = ‘at the end of the day’.

Umonti (from umon ‘back’ [typically of an animal rather than a person])

-Refers to the middle of a period of time. E.g. qema aumonti = ‘in the middle of the night’.

Kemiti (from kemi ‘face’)

-Refers to location in front of something. E.g. Emi mako akemiti sanki = ‘he is standing in front of the house’.

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What's "Post-lexical" mean in this context?
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It looks like you've got morphemes' and words' phonology down, but;
What about the morphology?
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Did you already cover the prosody (stress and rhythm)?

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It's 'post-lexical' to distinguish it from lexical phonology. I'm using it here to refer to the phonological rules which apply after the syllabic structure of the word is determined, as opposed to the processes that can change the syllable structure as the result of morphological processes, which I'm referring to as the lexical phonology.
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I've covered morphology a bit here, although I need to revise those morphemes a bit. I should probably redo it.
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Word-level prosody is in this post. The words used as examples there are out of date (I might go back and update them later), but the rules for determining feet and stress are the same. Sentence/phrase-level prosody is still to be sorted out.

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I think that's some sort of sandhi.
Word-internal sandhi, I guess. And/or, environmentally-conditioned allophony.
"Processes that can change the syllable structure as the result of morphological processes" are probably allomorphy, or morphophonology, or inter-morphemic sandhi.
(If both of them are some kind of sandhi, they're both word-internal. If you consider them two different types of word-internal sandhi, you might want to call one "conditioned allophony" and call the other "morphophonology".)

The terminology you have is not bad. But I don't think it's standard (is it?).
If it's not standard, you need to explain it early and clearly before you use it; sensibly, just before the first use.
(If it is standard, can you show me a reference, preferably on-line, that says so?)

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I don't think it's necessarily universally employed, but dividing phonological processes into different levels that occur at different points in the derivation of a word has been proposed by some phonologists. See for example this paper: http://www.stanford.edu/~kiparsky/Paper ... LC1982.pdf.

I'm making the distinction here because I've tried to describe the phonology based on the principles of Government Phonology, and one of the principles of Government Phonology states that the syllable structure of the word is set in the lexicon, and subsequent phonological rules cannot change it. Therefore any processes that do modify the syllable structure have to be part of lexical processes (although you're quite right in saying most of the lexical rules I stated could be referred to as morphophonology).

As you say, I probably should have made it more clear what the terms meant when I used them.

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Hello again! I've been somewhat distracted by exams and such like over the past week or two, hence the lack of activity here. I intend to get back to working on Kantaranyan this week (and be more active on the forum). For now, I thought I'd make my self a to-do list of things I want to work on:

-Refine the description of morphology.
-Describe the common relational nouns (which is apparently the real name for what I've been calling 'postpositional phrases') for the other postpositional suffixes, like I did for -ti earlier.
-More work on syntax, especially on how to form complex sentences. (I've only really got simple sentences worked out properly at the moment.)
-Numerals!
-Once the grammar's done to a more satisfactory level, I'd like to start working on various areas of the vocabulary (which will probably require some conworlding to sort out what words I want).

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I look forward to reading it and listening to it.

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Thanks! I've started working on nominal morphology, so I might post that tomorrow, maybe.

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Only nominal?
Well, it'll be fun to read, and then I'll still be looking forward to something else.

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I'm planning to put the nominal and verbal morphology in separate posts, so I'm doing the nominal stuff first.

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Well, here's the nominal morphology as promised. I'll put verbal morphology and derivational morphology in separate posts.

A Kantaranyan noun consists of a stem, which may stand alone (in which case it denotes a singular noun), plus prefixes and suffixes, according to the following template:

Quantifier prefix - determiner/possessive prefix - stem - plural suffix - possessive plural suffix - postpositional suffix

The prefixes are as follow:

Quantifier prefixes:

Ma- (no, none, not any), e.g. maoroner (none of the fish), maneni (no child)
Su- (all, every), e.g. suyehi (every man), suome (all of us)
In- (any), e.g. inkan (any tree), inkiyehir (any of those men)
Ha- (some), e.g. haamar (some people)
Ku- (many), e.g. kutarier (many birds), kumar (many of them)
Hi- (few), e.g. himelir (a few pots)
Ya- (which one), e.g. yalumakoyti (in which one of your houses?)

Note that ku- and hi- always occur with the plural form of the noun, while the others may occur with both singular and plural nouns.

Determiner prefixes:

Si- (this)
Ki- (that)
Nu- (that)
Ya- (what, which)

The difference between si- and ki-/nu- is based on distance: si- is used to refer to something near to the speaker and listener, and ki- and nu- to things that are further away. The difference between ki- and nu- is that ki- refers to things that are visible, while nu- refers to things that are out of sight.

Possessive prefixes:

Ni- (1st person singular)
O- (1st person plural inclusive)
Xi- (1st person plural exclusive)
Lu- (2nd person)
Mi- (3rd person animate)
A- (3rd person inanimate)

Note that possessive and determiner prefixes may not occur within the same word.

Plural suffix:

The plural suffix is -r. If the stem of the noun ends a consonant, then the final consonant is deleted when -r is added (compare xuka (pig) vs. xukar (pigs) and amah (person) vs. amar (people). Note also that -r becomes -y before a following coronal consonant or y (cf. kar (trees) vs. kayti (in the trees)), and -v before a labial consonant (cf. makor (houses) vs. mimakovmi (their houses)).

Possessive plural suffix:

The possessive plural suffix is -mi. It is used with possessed nouns to denote that the possessor is plural. Thus, for example, mimurah means 'his/her cat', while mimurapmi means 'their cat'. It is obligatory even when the possessive prefix itself always denotes a plural possessor (thus, 'our (inclusive) house' is omakomi, not *omako, for example).

Postpositional suffixes:

There are four postpositional suffixes used to denote general spatial or temporal relationships. These are:

-ti (static location: 'in', 'at', 'on')
-ka (destination: 'to', 'towards', 'until')
-na (point of origin: 'from', 'since')
-nu (something moved past, across or through)

In addition, the instrumental suffix -hi also appears in this slot.

Relational nouns are often used instead, however, as these give more specific information. For example, phrases like mako aakanti (in the house), mako alenti (by the house, near to the house) and mako akemiti (in front of the house) are often preferred to simply makoti, which is more vague.

It is important to note that all of the affixing processes described above occur before stress assignment and allophony (with the exception of the variation between -r, -y and -v in the plural suffix, which reflect different allophones.

Finally, pronouns:

Pronouns in Kantaranyan have the much the same morphological properties as other nouns, with the exception that they cannot take determiner prefixes and possessive affixes, and that the personal pronouns do not take the plural suffix, as they are already inherently singular or plural. The main pronouns are as follow:

Personal pronouns:

Neh (1st person singular)
Lueh (2nd person singular)
Emeh (3rd person singular animate)
Ahi (3rd person singular inanimate)
Ome (1st person plural inclusive)
Xine (1st person plural exclusive)
Roa (2nd person plural)
Mar (3rd person plural animate)
Yer (3rd person plural inanimate)

Demonstrative pronouns:

Sieh (this)
Kieh (that [in sight])
Nueh (that [out of sight])

The interrogative pronoun is yeh, meaning 'what?' or 'who?'.

Further pronouns may be formed by prefixing the quantifier prefixes to the base -neh. (E.g. maneh 'nothing', suneh 'everything', yaneh 'which one?' and so on.)

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If anyone's wondering why I haven't posted anything in this thread the past few days, it's because I got about half way through working out the verbal morphology and then got distracted by trying to make a proto-language for Kantaranyan. Unfortunately I can't seem to work out how I want it's phoneme inventory to be.

As part of this, I decided today to see what the frequency of each grapheme in my current Kantaranyan vocabulary file (which excludes pronouns and grammatical morphemes [and only has 137 words]) is, to get a [rather rough] indication of what the frequencies of each phoneme are. I might as well post the frequencies here:

Consonants, in order of frequency:

n (42), k (40), x (35), t (34), l (32), m (29), h (28), r (26), y (24), v (16), s (13), p (8), q (8)

Vowels, in order of frequency:

a (127), e (52), i (43), u (32), o (25)

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Finally, I think I've got the verbal morphology down.

Verbs inflect for aspect, of which Kantaranyan has three (the imperfective, which denotes that the action is viewed as a state or process, the perfect, which is used when the action is viewed as a discrete event (or events), and the anterior used to denote things that occurred before the time being referred to) [Incidentally, I wonder if stative/eventive would be more appropriate than imperfective/perfective here...], voice, as well as having direct and inverse forms.

I'll cover precisely how the direct and inverse forms are used in Kantaranyan when I get to syntax. The 'voices' are fairly straightforward though:
-in transitive verbs, the basic form is transitive, while the other two voices are used if one of the arguments is not overtly expressed: the passive removes the agent, and the antipassive the patient (compare, for example active emeh pula axa (s/he is eating a fruit) with antipassive emeh axah (s/he is eating) or active emeh melu sakiya (s/he broke the pot) with passive melu sakina (the pot broke)).
-intransitive verbs have a basic intransitive form, as well as a causative form (compare, for example, ahi imaq (it is strong) with emeh ahi imatsi (s/he strengthened it) or ahi kikonti sanki (it is standing there) with emeh ahi kikonka sankisi (s/he stood it there)).

The forms of the affixes used depend on the shape of the stem. I've made a separate document with the appropriate affixes, along with a few examples, in table form here:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/41280522/Kantaranyan%20verb%20tables.pdf

(Affixes given in angle brackets are infixes, while those preceded by a dash are suffixes).

Kantaranyan also makes another aspectual distinction secondary to those above: an iterative form of the verb can be derived by reduplicating the last foot (e.g. axa > axaaxa, valan > valanlan). The reduplication is performed after inflection (so the passive form corresponding to axaaxa would be axayxar, for example). Furthermore, if the the verb form ends with an unfooted syllable, the foot preceding that syllable is reduplicated (e.g. sanki > sansanki, imatsa > imapmatsa).

The iterative can be combined with any of the above affixes. Typically, an imperfective iterative suggests a habitual action (e.g. suxerhati emeh pula axaaxa (s/he eats fruit every morning)), a perfective iterative a particular action or event that occurs multiple times (as in emeh kumelur qatiyutiyu (s/he made a lot of pots), where the iteratives emphasizes the number of times a pot was made), while the use of the iterative with the anterior form of a verb suggests and action that was habitual, but is no longer performed (somewhat like English 'used to': for example suxerhati emeh pula axukaxuka means something like 's/he used to eat fruit every morning').

Other aspectual and modal distinctions can be signalled by suffixing an auxiliary verb stem to the main verb. This auxiliary then takes the inflections. Examples of such verbs include -mehi (be able), -kam (start to, become), -mat (try) and so on.

Hope that's all clear enough. I'd be happy to have feedback/criticism if anyone has any opinions on it.

(I'll need to update some of the nominal stuff at some point in light of what I've worked out of the Proto-Language too.)

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So, I've decided to actually try to write up a nicely presented grammar of Kantaranyan. I've started off by writing up the phonology section (which aims to be a more straightforward description of the phonemes and their surface forms that the explanation of the underlying theory given earlier in this thread).

Here's a link to the pdf for anyone interested:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/41280522/Kant%20Phonology%20%28Grammar%29.pdf

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Brilliant, I'll read your PDF more thorough during the day (hopefully), but just a quick notice. Firstly, I get that your [e] and [o] are a bit lowered, but since they're nor lowered from any phonemic standard in your language, I find the markings superfluous, also because you've made it so clear in your vowel chart. (They basically did the same thing in the wikipedia article on Modern Hebrew Phonology, this is of course not wrong, only a bit redundant (perhaps only to my tastes.)

Secondly, if you felt it necessary to mark [e] and [o] as lowered in comparison to phonetic standard, your other vowels seem kinda Daniel Jones-y, but again, might be a matter of personal taste!

Keep up the good work, looking forward to more of this!