Saipačn Liše

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Saipačn Liše

Post by Corphishy »

Okay, so the current thread on Saipačn is kind of a jumbled mess of mostly scrapped half-thoughts. So I figured I would try to consolidate all the current info both in that thread and in my head into a new thread. So feel free to join me yet again as I embark on this mission.

Let’s start this thread like the last one did: with some basic phonological information.

PHONEMIC INVENTORY and ROMANIZATION
/m n ɲ/ m n ň
/p b t d k g/ p b t d k g
/ps ts tʃ dʒ ks/ ψ c č j ξ
/ɸ β θ ð s z ʃ ʒ ɬ h/ f v þ đ s z š ž ł h
/r l j w/ r l y w
/i y u e ø o a/ i ü u e ö o a
/ew øj oj aj aw/ eu öi oi ai au
/m̩ n̩ ɲ̩/ m n ň

This romanization is strictly phonemic, as with most language’s I make. This doesn’t particularly matter, as Saipačn’s allophony is rather minimal, so you’ll never encounter any French or Tibetan funness unfortunately.

This is a romanization and not an orthography. Perhaps at some point in the future I will develop a native writing system, but for now I’ll just keep it how it is. The problem with a native writing system is that unlike most languages I have made, this one is intentionally not meant to have a definite culture or history behind it; so, you know, there are no natives.

PHONOTACTICS
The max syllable is CRVC
C=a consonant
R=/r l j w/
V=a vowel or consonant
*C cannot be any of R if there contains a CR cluster

Saipačn generally tries to avoid VCCCV clusters, especially if the first V in question is a diphthong. It will sometimes occur because of compounding or affixation, however.

STRESS
Now I’m no expert, but I had read in the Art of Language Invention by DJP about how language stress works, so let me give it a try.

Feet are formed from left to right. Secondary stress is placed on the rightmost syllable of a foot, and primary stress is formed on the final syllable. If a syllable is outside of a foot (i.e. a word has an odd number of syllables) then it also receives secondary stress.

I’m thinking about implementing a rule whereby adding syllables to a word (be it reduplication, affixation, or compounding) will change secondary stress, but not primary stress. It sounds cool, but in practice it may be silly. I’ll have to keep an eye out for it.

Also, words which either end in a consonant or a diphthong (or both) are considered closed. Else they’re open

ALLOPHONY
[i y u e ø o a]/[ɪ ʏ ʊ ɛ œ ɔ ə]/_σ[+closed]/_σ[+stress]
/i y u e ø o a/ also become [ɪ ʏ ʊ ɛ œ ɔ ə] when it is the unstressed syllable in a foot where both syllables have the same vowels.¹
V/V[-voice]/S[-voice]²_
[i y u e ø o a]/[iɚ uo˞ yø̯ɚ ɚ øɚ o˞ ao˞]/_ɾC,_ɾ#
ɾ//_C
ɾ/ʐ/_#

1. I don’t know how one would write such a rule using the notation I am (I also don’t know the name of it, just that it seems to be a modified SCA² type thing)
2. S=all affricates and sibilant fricatives. Also this rule does not apply to diphthongs or syllabic nasals.

I’ll be back later tomorrow (or rather, later today as it's currently midnight) with a description of Saipačn verbs. See ya soon! Kaž he anłamö paił tüse!
Aszev wrote:A good conlang doesn't come from pursuing uniqueness. Uniqueness is usually an effect from creating a good conlang.
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Re: Saipačn Liše

Post by Corphishy »

So actually since I have a lot of information on verbs (which is to say compared to like every other part of speech) I think I should spend this time discussing nouns, and covering verbs next.

Nouns do not decline for much. Most nouns have no number distinction, and the oblique case is a largely vestigial case marker which only occurs when it turns nouns which end in syllabic nasals into vowels. (/m̩ n̩ ɲ̩/ > /o a e/). However, it is reified in other ways. Namely that objects in Saipačn cannot take a definite article.

Nouns are also split into two to three categories; masculine, feminine and genderless. These are semi-arbitrary categories and purely semantically based. It is less like French and more like Dyirbal in this way; nouns are the gender they are because they’re associated semantically with other things which are in a certain gender. For example, most body parts are masculine (even some female-specific ones, like nmnorađ “ovaries,” but this is only because it’s a compound of nm “egg” and norađ “bag, pouch, sack,” the latter of which is a masculine noun), most plants are feminine, etc. I say mostly arbitrary because I’ll usually decide one thing is one of the three, and then when I make new words which belong to the same “category,” I’ll tend to keep the pattern alive. This is probably the least naturalistic part of the language in my opinion, because it is 100% based on me (not that that’s a bad thing; this is a personal language and is specifically not intended to be naturalistic).

At some point when I’m a withered old man I’ll have figured out a fakestorical reason for why genderless nouns exist, but for now you just have to accept that they do. The reason I call them genderless is because instead of behaving like the other genders, it instead behaves as if it’s an anti-gender. For example, neither verbs, adjectives, adverbs, conjunctions nor articles et al agree for these genders. In all cases, they require the use of the bare, or “genderless” form: for verbs, this is the same as the 2nd person non-past form, for most other things, it’s a removal of the -e/-iđ¹ paradigm. In the case of articles, they just can never have any definite article. They can, however, take an indefinite article for faketymological reasons (namely that the indefinite article is just the word for one, ef and numerals do not agree for gender). Also, genderless nouns decline for nothing.

There is no real official way to mark plurality in Saipačn. Probably the most common practice is simply to use the word kał “many.” it may be a little generic, but come to think of it it gives me some ideas on how one could shift Saipačn into having phonetically based gender by cliticizing/affix-izing kał. Hmm, I’ll keep that idea in my back pocket for now.

Previously I just slapped a very haphazard genitive clitic into Saipačn because I didn’t really care at the time. Now I’ve seen the error of my ways, and have decided to replace the genitive with a possessive preposition ce (more on that in the thread on articles/particles).

Now Saipačn might not decline nouns for very common things, it does have what I have coined the “conjunctive case.” This is the case that nouns take when they are being modified by a conjunction, which in Saipačn is generally analyzed as a weird combination of an adjective and a postposition (more on that later). The paradigm for this case is -ai/-aiđ.

1. Whenever you see a paradigm written as X/Y, assume that X is masculine and Y is feminine. In the case of X/Y/Z or X/Y/Z/W, assume it means genderless/masculine/feminine/(negative), such as the general adjectival paradigm -(a)/-e/-iđ/iš.

I think that’s everything about nouns that I am aware of at the currently. I was just so excited to get this going I started right after posting the last one. I should really be heading to bed, as its 2 am. Un hi oψemö đel liše.
Aszev wrote:A good conlang doesn't come from pursuing uniqueness. Uniqueness is usually an effect from creating a good conlang.
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Re: Saipačn Liše

Post by Corphishy »

Boy howdy! I've been a little busy lately. Let's not waste any more of my free time and get on with that section on verbs I was planning. Now, let me get the boring charts out of the way first, as this is a direct quote from the old thread, with some small edits of myself by myself.

IMPERFACTIVE
"This is the basic paradigm for all verbs in the imperfective aspect:
Spoiler:
Image
All classes, and in fact almost all verbs, follow this paradigm. The thing that makes it unpredictable are the different classes which appear similar on the surface.

CLASS I
Class 1 verbs conjugate the most "normally."
Here are the conjugations with examples from each subclass:
Spoiler:
Image

Image
notice here how the -u merged with the -o ending on the 3m.NPST ending

Image
this is a weird thing, but it's sort of the same as the subclass 2 verbs, where *-ou > -u, only here it's *-ei > -i


CLASS II
Those seems easy and regular and all that, and they are. Class 2 verbs are a little different:
Spoiler:
Image

Faketymologically speaking, these verbs originally ended in *-ə. So, *đonəj and *đonəw

CLASS III
These are verbs which conjugate exactly the same as class I verbs, however their second person nonpast (or "unmarked) forms are -n/-m/-ň (as opposed to -a/-o/-e ). In this way, class III and IV are related from an old verb form which ended in a syllabic nasal. These nasals "lenited" because they were stuck between two consonants, except for in the unmarked form.

CLASS IV
These verbs are the most distant from the normal paradigm. Similar to class IV, these verbs at one point ended in syllabic nasals. But, because of a very uncontroversial sound change (namely N[+syllabic]/N/V_) these verbs look rather odd comparatively.
Spoiler:
Image

Image

Image
Now, I normally wouldn't write that <aa> and <ii> (or a hypothetical <uu>, or <ou> or <ei> for that matter), I would have collapsed them into <a> or <i> (<u>, <u> and <i> as well). I only did that in these charts so that you could see what's going on."

So now that you can conjugate, let's briefly discuss some semantics. In the present tense, the imperfective acts very similarly to the English progressive and simple aspects. It implies an action that is either currently happening or which has current relevancy.

However, unlike in English, the past tense does not imply that an action was interrupted (when you say "i was going to the store," you expect something to happen during that action). Rather, it has a much more simple (as in the aspect) connotation of just "I went to the store." To do that, you will need the other aspects.

besides the imperfective, verbs can also be found in two other flavors; perfective and habitual.

PERFECTIVE

Perfective verbs are quite simple to conjugate with; you simply use the unmarked form of the verb, and then add -ła. This is a reduced form of the word anła "do," which is a class II verb. As such, the -ła suffix is then combined with the imperative paradgm. For example, ka mlał dau "the man eats/the man is eating" will become ka mlał dału "the man has eaten."

Again, similar to the imperfective, it has a very similar nonpast connotation, but a very different past connotation. In Saipačn, the perfective nonpast refers to current events which are not currently happening (if you have eaten, you're not eating anymore). However, the perfective in the past implies that something happened during or s a direct result of the action. You would never say a sentence like un dałaþ "I ate/had eaten/was eating," without following up with another clause which either interrupted or immediately followed, like un dałaþ, (yem) un kmk-mereþ "i was eating, (but/and) then I threw up (lit. "made colors")"

HABITUAL
The habitual aspect is the easiest of all to conjugate. You take the base form of any verb, and then add -m. Class III verbs do lenite their syllabic nasals, and class IV verbs add an a to the end as a repair strategy (otherwise the verb would end with a coda cluster, which is a big nono in Saipačn). So maybe it isn't as simple as the other forms. You dont, however, need to conjuagate at all for person or tense.

The semantics of this aspect are pretty straightforward. It is the pure wikipedia definition of he habitual. It however does also have a gnomic connotation to it; you for example use it in the phrase un naumom X "my name is X"

That's about it for verbs currently. I will discuss things like participles and moods when I discuss auxiliaries, but otherwise verbs is just verbs.
Now, one thing right off the bat. I think heading forward I will actually start caring a tiny bit more about "naturalism" and etymological funsies, just because what little i have here reminded me that it's fun to do.

Also, I realize now probably the biggest blunder of this whole language; my decision to make the dictionary form of verbs the first person nonpast form. Why, you ask, is this such a problem? Well, it basically means that class II and III are complete phonological ninjas. A verb ending in just -i can be either class I, II, III or, if the consonant before it is a nasal, it could also be a class IV verb. Why would I do that? The reason, I think, is bias from Latin, for whatever reason, because that's how people choose to dictionarify Latin verbs. I later retconned that it is also the infinitive form of a verb. While i enjoy that particular ambiguity, I disagree again with the motivation. English writes verbs in their infinitive form, so so does Saipačn. Indeed, I didn't fully think through the implications of such a system. From henceforth, I will be writing verbs in their "unmarked" form, for infinite% more clarity.

As a last note, I apologize that most of my comparisons in this language are to English. The only other language I "know" (as in I have gotten straight Bs in for 3 years straight) is French, so any linguistic concepts I understand are compared to how English does things.

Well, I'll see y'all again soon. I think next topic will be on modifiers, just because I don't have enough content I dont think for just adjectives, just adverbs, and just (p)articles. Please feel free to comment down below. I know there's not a whole lot of new infor yet, but it'll come soon. I'd love to see someone's virgin take on Saipačn, I know the old thread is, well, old and there's a few more new eyes this time around. Đel miblicepača pane, un friξai kur numeja!
Aszev wrote:A good conlang doesn't come from pursuing uniqueness. Uniqueness is usually an effect from creating a good conlang.
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Re: Saipačn Liše

Post by Corphishy »

Today I have some semi-old, semi-new, semi-revised material discussing the topic of modifiers in Saipačn.

ADJECTIVES
Adjectives in Saipačn appear after the noun they modify. They agree to the gender of a noun in this paradigm:-(a)/-e/-iđ/-iš (genderless/masculine/feminine/negative). The reason i have put the a in parentheses is because it only appears as a repair strategy to make sure that adjectives do not end in a coda cluster.

Now, you may know what all those genders are, but what does the "negative" mean? Well, I had originally meant it as a kind of derivation, but now I have a more nefarious purpose for it. Basically Saipačn does not care if you want to negate just the noun or just the modifier; it will negate both. The way that nouns do that is by use of the negative article kol. Then, the adjective with take the -iš ending regardless of gender.

ADVERBS
Adverbs agree with the person of a verb using this paradigm:

-i

-u
-yo

There's also a distinction between temporal adverbs and non-temporal adverbs (which at one point i had called spacial but now realize that the manner of an action not related to its point in time are not necessarily ones related to the manner of an action in terms of space. For example, it would be extremely obtuse to say that "actually run" or "understandably vomitted" are related to the space in which you ran or vomitted).

The main reason for such a distinction is that most description of the time in which an action occured are actually whole noun-phrases. In these cases, they are treated like their own clause, fronted and the dummy construction keuþ/đo ul then the phrase is inserted. I'll talk about that in more detail when I get to relative and other dependant clauses, but suffice it to say that this rule was reanalysed to just put any adverb relating to time in that position, with or without the initial dummy construction.

Otherwise, adverbs go after the verb they modify. That is to say, they (like nouns) are strictly after the thing they modify, and never the entire verb (or noun) phrase.

PREPOSITIONS
Unlike adjectives, these modifiers appear before the noun. They require the noun to take the oblique case, and "replace" any articles. These are the simplist grammatically speaking as they do not agree for anything, unlike adjectives. As of now there are only three prepositions (at least only three which are one lexeme and not some kind of… "prepositional phrase" *shudder*)

đel - at, in, on (top)
yar - on (the side), to(ward), by, next to, between
bag - (away) from, off, of, "distant to" (i.e. the opposite of "near" or "next to")

Basically you have three different motions; in or at a location, moving towards a location, and moving away from a location respectively.

NUMERALS
Similar to prepositions, numerals also appear before the noun they modify, do not agree to anything, and replace any articles. They do not, however, change the case of the noun.

Saipačn is a base ten language. The numbers one through ten are as follows:

1 ef
2 ψe
3 ňas
4 ełke
5 kel
6 dem
7 öiwa
8 acn
9 žir
10 jaň

The way numbers are formed is rather simple:
10-19 = jaň+#
20-29 = φejaň+#
30-39 = ňasjaň+#
etc etc

The word for 100 is yamsi. There are no higher unique numbers, and the same pattern is used to create higher numbers. For example, 2018 would be ψejaňyamsi-jaňacn. Or "twenty hundreds plus ten eights"

There are things considered numerals which are not numbers. For example, the previously mentioned word kał means "many" and even though it does agree with the gender of a noun, it still appears before the noun and is considered a kind of numeral.

ARTICLES
There are three kinds of articles in Saipačn; definite, indefinite, and negative.

The definite articles ka/ał are used very liberally, like Romance languages. If you were a bit obtuse, you might even consider these prefixes or clitics which denote the nominative case. In fact, definite articles are even used with proper nouns, especially names.

The indefinite article, which is just the word for one, has a dual purpose. Since Saipačn doesn't actually mark number, ef means both "one of a given group" or "some of a whole." You can generally tell from context or with some quantitative adjective (aka the non-numerical numerals).

Finally, the negative article kol. As previously mentioned, this is used in conjunction with the negative adjective to negate a noun phrase. Outside of this role, it can also be used by itself as a pronoun meaning "none, nothing."
At a later date I will discuss comparatives, superlatives and conjunctions (and other ways to connect two or more words together). That later date will either be later today or sometime tomorrow. For now, I have some school work I have been neglecting over spring break. Kaž he iš danemö kur ξlone!
Aszev wrote:A good conlang doesn't come from pursuing uniqueness. Uniqueness is usually an effect from creating a good conlang.
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Re: Saipačn Liše

Post by Corphishy »

So not every day can be as productive as every other. I've been dealing with back to school shit, and have been working relatively hard trying to fix the extremely stupid lexicon I have created for this language (for example, rainbo "read" or the infinitely clever hentai "tentacle"). What I considered funny has changed a lot in three years, or maybe it's just that three years time has made a joke that was funny for a second all the more stale and crusty.

Anyway, I said I was going to discuss ways to connect various parts of speech together. One can do this many ways; comparatives, superlatives, and conjunctions are the three I will be discussing today.

COMPARATIVE
When I discuss derivational morphology, I will talk more about reduplication. For now, the kind of reduplication I am discussing is the one used for forming comparatives in adjectives and adverbs.

For both parts of speech, it's as simple as reduplicating the onset and nucleus (or the body) of the first syllable. If there is no onset, then the pattern is to reduplicate the first vowel and the consonant directly following. For example:

tiz > titiz
"red > redder"

oc > ococ
"dark/black > darker"

That's fine and all, but I distinctly remember not explaining how to, you know, actually compare two things. You use conjunctions! Specifically, you use ak. For example:

Ka mlał trütrüe nimaiđ akiđ.
DEF.M man COMP-good-M woman-CNJ.F COMP-F
"The man is better than the woman."

Ak/ake/akiđ is a special conjunction which means something like "with (respect to)" and comes from an old word *akə "hold" (fun fact, it's also where they get the word for spine, akakak, which is a compound akə-kak literally translating as "holds the body." Even funner fact, *kak is also where we get the masculine definite article, via its use as an old demonstrative). It has a much more narrow usage generally nowadays, just when comparing two things.

SUPERLATIVES
Now that you know how to form comparatives, you probably also want to know how to form superlatives. That's also pretty simple; you preface the modifier with the other modifier furþa or "superior." (This also has use as a semi-functional augmentative marker when compounded with nouns; for example, furþama "leader; king" lit. "superior-person")

In adjectives, furþa will agree to the gender just like the adjective it modifies. Otherwise, it does not agree to anything (eg it will not agree to the person of the adverb it modifies). Actually comparing things with the superlative works the exact same way;

Ka mlał furþe-trüe brodn ak.
DEF.M man SUP.M-good-M world COMP-Ø
"The man is the best in the world."

CONJUNCTIONS
Conjunctions in Saipačn are treated pretty differently than in most languages, I think it's safe to say. For nouns, conjunctions act as a combination of an adjective and a postposition; they agree with the gender of the noun and require a special case, the "conjunctive" (which i have been glossing as CNJ).

There is no real semantice difference, but some conjunctions in Saipačn would be more accurately be transliterated as prepositions in English for example. Like the previouse sentence brodn ak would be most accurately rendered as "in/with (respect to) the world." I'd say that the distinction is that prepositions in Saipačn generally refer to the relationship between the object and the environment, while conjunctions refer to the relationship between two elements in a sentence (a far more abstract concept to be sure).

Conjunctions on every other part of speech take on the -me suffix, a general marker for "a modifier of some kind." They agree to the person of the verb/adverb that they modify, and the gender of the adjective they modify. For things like numerals or prepositions which do not agree for anything, these also do not agree for anything.

Something I did not cover in the post on conjunctions is how one would form sentences with multiple elements, or multiple kinds of relation. The first point is that with regards to nouns, all terms in a conjuncted list after the first are in the conjunctive form. If there is only one kind of relation, you only need to add the conjunction on the first element; however, it's supposedly proper to include it for each element (in practice that gets pretty tedious, obviously). Otherwise, if you had a statement like "you can bring the man and the woman or the dog" you have to first realize that there's multiple interpretations of this statement:

You can bring the man and the woman, or the dog = the man and woman come together, and cant come if the dog does.

You can bring the man, and the woman or the dog = the man is coming, and in addition the woman or the dog can come.

In Saipačn, these are analyzed differently. Namely, like so:

Kaž ψödň hemö mlał nimaiđ daiđ, kuparai heξe.
2S be.able bring man.OBL woman-CNJ and dog-CNJ or
"You can bring the man and the woman, or the dog."

Kaž ψödň hemö mlał, nimaiđ kuparai heξe daiđ.
2S be.able bring man.OBL woman-CNJ dog-CNJ or and
"You can bring the man, and the woman or the dog."

In this way, the conjunction also acts as a clitic, as it can also appear at the end of phrases.
As I've said, school and other personal things have kept me away from really working hard on this stuff. That other language I made isn't abandoned either, it's just taking a lot of thinking that I don't really have space for currently. I'll get back to you soon. I really want to nail down things like reduplication and especially derivatiojal morphology, so I will probably discuss that next. See you then! Un hulioþ!
Aszev wrote:A good conlang doesn't come from pursuing uniqueness. Uniqueness is usually an effect from creating a good conlang.
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