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Nammuq

Hello! I'm Alex and this is my conlang; Nammuq. The name Nammuq comes from the word nammụ, which means 'to speak like me'. I'm a bit embarrassed, because I'm not as good at linguistics as all of you guys (I actually failed my grammar exam in university...). But I'm gonna try, and with your helpful comments I might actually be able to make a decent presentation out of this.

I decided to put everything up in documents instead, because I'm already losing track of the posts in the thread. So I'll just post the links like so:

• About the language: Nammuq (Dropbox link)
  This is a document of what I'd written in this thread so far, but with recent changes and updates.

• Map and breef info of conregion: Uhoq (Dropbox link)
  A map rather beautifully drawn by yours truly in MS Paint.

a, i and u look incredibly lonely up there.

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| [ˌdɛt͡ʃɛmaɹiˈetɪs] | | conlang skarihe

I like the phonem inventory, it seems naturalistic to me

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Creyeditor
"Thoughts are free."
Produce, Analyze, Manipulate
1 2 3 4
/w/,/l/;/ɭ/,/f/;/c/,/k/;/t/;;/e/,/u/;/i/

nothing wrong with that; some conlangers feel a small inventory makes it more challenging or more fun.



sound good; a variation on some classic natlangs. (Mandarin off the top of my head)



hey, if you don't pace yourself, you'll burn yourself out, and your conlang will either die or be murdered. (and we don't want either to happen)

great work thus far, and looking forward to seeing more of Nammuq.

he did explain how they could become [e~ɛ] and [o~ɔ].

Yes, he did.

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| [ˌdɛt͡ʃɛmaɹiˈetɪs] | | conlang skarihe

Just by seing the name I immediately thought of Greenlandic, and seeing the phonology, even more, but your <q> representing a glottal stop rather than an actual /q/ of course makes a big difference in the end.

Phonologies like these are very nice. Moar.

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‹› · Ḿḿ Ńń Ĺĺ Śś Źź Ąą Ǫǫ Ųų Æ̨æ̨ Ǽǽ Œ̨œ̨ Œ́œ́ Ɣɣ Y̋y̋ Įį Şş Z̧z̧ θ
Āā Ēē Īī Ōō Ūū ↗ Ṭṭ C̣c̣ Łł Ḍḍ Ṣṣ Ẓẓ Ṇṇ Ŋŋ e˞ o˞ ʷ ʲ ʰ ə

Three vowel systems are the best!

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Ikasmu ati'uki nai uraiur.
Hinai nimuśim naimi nai sasamiur urukani. Śi'ama nai huhumiur na ni'amuśim nai sasamiur.
Pumaki nimuśim śima'a na ami nimuśim ara'a. Hini nihrasum i'aku tumra urukani na nihrasum sanik hraspir.

decemarietis: Don't worry - they're best friends, so they're not lonely!

Creyeditor: I'm glad you like it! I didn't want anything too off the chart, so naturalistic sounds good!

Keenir: Thank you! I'm very motivated now. Hopefully I'll be able to post some more on it soon.

Skógvur: Haha, yes, it looks similar to Greenlandic, especially the name of the language. It wasn't intentional, but I can't say I don't like Inualeut feel to it! Hopefully the W:s and the Y:s and the H:s will help separating them!

Ossicone: I agree!

You say you're not very experienced yet this 'start' is very nice. Most people, as you may know, start with kitchen-sink languages, so seeing a beginner go with a small inventory and simple but tidy rules is refreshing :D.

I approve. Mais!

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Native:
Fluent:
Inept:
Interested:

I like this so far! The example words make me think of something Inuktitutish. I especially like the <qC> clusters.
From your etymology of the language's name I can see that it's going to be something incorporating and polysyntheticky and awesome. I'm curious to see what you'll do with it.

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sup

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have some lessons

Taernsietr: Thank you! I guess I like being prepared when I do things like this, so I won't look like a total beginner. I'm not a fan of the kitchen-sinky style myself, so hopefully I'll be able to avoid that.

Pirka: Yes, I believe this language would be seen as rather incorporating and polysyntheticky (if I've understood those words correctly). Can't say yet though, having no idea of how to classify languages myself, but the words tend to come out rather long and few, so I guess that might be a slight sign of polysynthesis? However, I'm glad you like it!

It's really pretty, but I'm wondering whether the characters might need more distinction. There's a fair amount of similarities. I love the name of the thing too.

MK:DD!! is such a good game. We always play it at forum meetups for a Swedish board that I frequent. At one of them, I stuck around for 100 multiplayer races with 3 other players in one night<3 Looking forward to the next time. Mario Kart DS is my favourite, though, I think.

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‹› · Ḿḿ Ńń Ĺĺ Śś Źź Ąą Ǫǫ Ųų Æ̨æ̨ Ǽǽ Œ̨œ̨ Œ́œ́ Ɣɣ Y̋y̋ Įį Şş Z̧z̧ θ
Āā Ēē Īī Ōō Ūū ↗ Ṭṭ C̣c̣ Łł Ḍḍ Ṣṣ Ẓẓ Ṇṇ Ŋŋ e˞ o˞ ʷ ʲ ʰ ə

To be honest, the term "polysynthesis" is kind of an ambiguous shortcut term. A "polysynthetic" language usually refers to a language the root to morpheme ratio of which is relatively high: for example, English, a analytical-synthetic language, has an average root to morpheme ratio of 1:1; Greenlandic varies between 1:1 and 1:5; Finnish, an agglutinating language, is usually either 1:1 or 1:2.
The reason "polysynthesis" is problematic as a term is mainly because its definition of what is "relatively high" is ambiguous and arbitrary; in other words, how "high" is "polysynthetic"? Other features that "polysynthetic" languages are considered to exhibit are both agentive and patientive marking on the verb (like Greenlandic) and noun-incorporation (sometimes). Still others consider polysynthetic languages those that heavily mark the head phrase. As you can see, the definition of "polysynthesis" varies and often involves several unrelated linguistic features at once, making the practical use of such a term debatable. It also doesn't help that traditionally non-polysynthetic languages like Hungarian exhibit polysynthetic features like the occasional relatively heavy head-marking.

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sup

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have some lessons

There is at least one attempt to formally define "polysynthesis", by Mark C Baker. IIRC, a polysynthetic languages is a language where each argument of a head must be indicated by a morpheme on that head. For verbs, this means that subject and object must be indicated somehow, either by agreement affixes, or by noun-incorporation. This extents to other kinds of heads as well, with the result that simple words (heads) can contain information corresponding to a whole sentence in a non-polysynthetic language.

We should note that Baker's definition is more narrow than the usual, more vague idea of polysynthesis. Many languages that are usually considered "polysynthetic", do not meet Baker's criterion. For example, Greenlandic would not be a polysynthetic language, according to Baker's definition.

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constructedlanguages.net

How exactly do <h> and <q> work? Where are they attached to the other letters? Underneath them? And does the <q> really have three strokes or are they alternative letters?

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Creyeditor
"Thoughts are free."
Produce, Analyze, Manipulate
1 2 3 4
/w/,/l/;/ɭ/,/f/;/c/,/k/;/t/;;/e/,/u/;/i/

Skógvur: Yes, you're right. They're quite similar; kinda how I feel about Korean Hangeul too though. I love it, but I have troubles distinguishing some characters.

And I must say your meet-ups sound like fun! I play with my friend whenever we're at her place and we never get tired of it.

Pirka (and Xing): I'm sorry to say I didn't understand much of that. Maybe we'll sort it out if I post some examples later.

Creyeditor: Characters h and q are written on their own, below other characters. The q characters are two different characters representing the same sound. They're used in different positions below different characters, but they're basically the same thing.