Ancient Vaal - my first conlang scratchpad
Posted: 08 Aug 2018 20:51
Hey, so I now wanted to make my first ever topic about my first-ever conlang. As is customary, starting out with the phonology, although that is something I have always struggled with. Obviously open to any kind of critique! I hope I haven't violated the rules and standards of phonology too much, and that the pictures will neither be so small/blurry as to cause headaches nor make the forum explode / stretch from being too big.
CONTENTS
PHONOLOGY
VERBS
NOUNS
PHONOLOGY
NB: Any information relating to orthography refers to the romanization. There exist two romanizations with very slight differences: the phonemic transliteration and the simplified transliteration. The purpose of the latter is to make typing on an English-layout keyboard easier by cutting down somewhat on the diacritical marks. In this text, the phonemic transliteration is preferred and often the only romanization provided; in cases where both are provided, it is always the phonemic transliteration that comes first, followed by the simplified transliteration after a semicolon.
Vowels
Vowel phonemes, with the exception of the schwa, are divided into four front /i y ɛ ø/ <i ú á ó> and three back vowels /u o a/ <u o a>. Front and back vowels phonemically distinguish length. Orthographically, front vowels are distinguished by an acute accent; long back vowels are indicated by a macron (in the simplified transliteration, the relevant vowel is reduplicated) and long front vowels by a grave accent.
Allophony
When stressed, [ɛ] becomes /e/ and [ɛ:] turns to /e:/. While [o] is rendered as /o/ in open syllables, it becomes [ɔ] in closed syllables, including those ending with a silent consonant (see below under Consonants); under the same conditions, [ø] may be rendered as /œ/, but this is not realized by all speakers.
Consonants
Allophony
Voiced plosives as well as the voiced fricative [v] plus [h] are silent in word-final position, although they re-appear in form of a sandhi (cf. French "liaison") if the following word begins with a vowel.
The alveolar fricatives [ s ] and [ʃ] (including its occurrence in [tʃ]) are voiced if they are the single consonant in either the onset or coda of a lengthened syllable.
Voiced consonant phonemes that have a voiceless counterpart become silent before nasals in the most common varieties, whereas they devoice in conservative varieties. Across word boundaries, this rule does not apply (except in the most conservative varieties).
Phonotactics
Here, I have so far merely come up with a few general rules - I hope I will manage to make this more systematic once I get round to it, though phonology and phonotactics in general are things I struggle with, as mentioned at the beginning!
The syllable structure is:
(C)(C)(C)V(C)(C)
- [h] only occurs as a single consonant, never in clusters [NB for formation of negatives: h+y=>y]
- In the onset, all approximants and the uvular trill may occur only in the position closest to the nucleus
- Lateral approximants may occur only in the position closest to the nucleus
- Three-consonant clusters:
- always involve a (lateral) approximant or the uvular trill as the third consonant
- second consonant is devoiced if it is a plosive
- Approximant reduction: in syllables with a lengthened vowel, <ʀ> is changed to /ɹ/ and <ʟ> to /l/ in syllable codas.
As I said, the above is not yet an exhaustive description accounting for all possible clusters and excluding all illegal - but I just wanted to get this out there for now :)
Stress
In nouns and verbs, stress is always on the first syllable of the (generally bisyllabic) nominal or verbal root. While this often happens to be the penultimate syllable, it is by no means granted due to compound words, lexical suffixes etc. In romanization, hyphens are often introduced to break words with many syllables down into the individual constituents, so that there is, where possible, only one unhyphenated "chunk" of word remaining that's made up of two syllables not separated by a hyphen, which will then be unambiguously identified as the root (the first syllable of which is stressed). Single syllables whose vowel is a schwa are not "hyphenated away".
I am well aware all this may read somewhat confusing - I will fill all of it (not only this section) in with examples in the near future!
Vowel mutation
The morphology of Ancient Vaal noun and verb forms is rooted in vowel mutations, with vowels changing from a specific back vowel to the relevant "complementary" front vowel, and vice versa. In the Vaal grammatical tradition, this is referred to as "vowel melody", which is based on the relationship between the vowel phoneme in the primary (stress-bearing) syllable and secondary syllable (following the primary syllable) of the bisyllabic root. Vowel phonemes, with the exception of ə <e>, which is regarded as neutral, are divided into four front /i y ɛ ø/ and three back vowels /u o a/. Vowels are usually short, but can be lengthened in the process of changing the vowel melody. This "vowel melody" of a noun/verb can be described as:
Neutral: both primary and secondary syllable either front (verbs) or back (nouns)
Falling/drop: primary syllable front, secondary syllable back (ergative case in nouns; deontic modality in verbs)
Rising: primary syllable back, secondary syllable front (third or "copular/declarative" case in nouns; epistemic modality in verbs)
Rising and falling melodies can be transformed into a so-called "sharp" rise or drop, respectively, by lengthening the vowel of the primary syllable, resulting in:
Sharp drop: lengthened primary syllable front, secondary syllable back (ergative case in possessed state; deontic modality combined with interrogative mood)
Sharp rise: lengthened primary syllable back, secondary syllable front (third case in possessed state; epistemic modality combined with interrogative mood)
These five permutations plus a sixth, a variant of the neutral melody with lengthened primary vowel, form the basis of case declension (including variants of all cases in the possessed state) and verb conjugation (solely into moods - indicative, epistemic and deontic mood - with a fourth modality, the interrogative, which can be combined with any of those three).
The "backness" of the vowel is changed according to following mutations:
a <=> á / i
o <=> ó
u <=> ú
The brief overview above already discloses the first small complication; when changing [a], it is unpredictable whether it should become [á] or from the word; the reason for is the existence of an obsolete phoneme (most likely /ɯ/), which has merged with /a/. In word lists for this document, the nature of the change will be indicated by "a=>i" in square brackets after the word; otherwise it is assumed that [a] is fronted as [á]. If both syllables in a word contain [a] as vowel, changes are indicated in the form of "a1/2=>i".
The second complication is that a sizeable number of nouns, only one syllable of the root shows in the absolutive case, which is the common citation form. For such words, the part of the root missing in the citation form is indicated herein by attaching it in parentheses directly after the word without a space).
The dictionary form of the AV word for "wind" is tusa; i.e., this is in the absolutive (ABS) case, and in the non-possessed state (AV nouns do not form plurals). The ergative case is formed by changing the neutral melody of tusa into a falling melody - so the primary syllable must feature a front vowel, while the secondary syllable needs to have a back vowel. In the secondary syllable no change is needed, but the primary syllable must undergo mutation according to the mutation rules provided above:
tusa (ABS) => túsa (ERG)
['thusa] => ['thysa]
The following table shows a full example noun paradigm - this is all the morphological changes a noun can undergo:
That's it for now - thanks if anybody really did read through (at least parts of) that
CONTENTS
PHONOLOGY
VERBS
NOUNS
PHONOLOGY
NB: Any information relating to orthography refers to the romanization. There exist two romanizations with very slight differences: the phonemic transliteration and the simplified transliteration. The purpose of the latter is to make typing on an English-layout keyboard easier by cutting down somewhat on the diacritical marks. In this text, the phonemic transliteration is preferred and often the only romanization provided; in cases where both are provided, it is always the phonemic transliteration that comes first, followed by the simplified transliteration after a semicolon.
Vowels
Vowel phonemes, with the exception of the schwa, are divided into four front /i y ɛ ø/ <i ú á ó> and three back vowels /u o a/ <u o a>. Front and back vowels phonemically distinguish length. Orthographically, front vowels are distinguished by an acute accent; long back vowels are indicated by a macron (in the simplified transliteration, the relevant vowel is reduplicated) and long front vowels by a grave accent.
Allophony
When stressed, [ɛ] becomes /e/ and [ɛ:] turns to /e:/. While [o] is rendered as /o/ in open syllables, it becomes [ɔ] in closed syllables, including those ending with a silent consonant (see below under Consonants); under the same conditions, [ø] may be rendered as /œ/, but this is not realized by all speakers.
Consonants
Allophony
Voiced plosives as well as the voiced fricative [v] plus [h] are silent in word-final position, although they re-appear in form of a sandhi (cf. French "liaison") if the following word begins with a vowel.
The alveolar fricatives [ s ] and [ʃ] (including its occurrence in [tʃ]) are voiced if they are the single consonant in either the onset or coda of a lengthened syllable.
Voiced consonant phonemes that have a voiceless counterpart become silent before nasals in the most common varieties, whereas they devoice in conservative varieties. Across word boundaries, this rule does not apply (except in the most conservative varieties).
Phonotactics
Here, I have so far merely come up with a few general rules - I hope I will manage to make this more systematic once I get round to it, though phonology and phonotactics in general are things I struggle with, as mentioned at the beginning!
The syllable structure is:
(C)(C)(C)V(C)(C)
- [h] only occurs as a single consonant, never in clusters [NB for formation of negatives: h+y=>y]
- In the onset, all approximants and the uvular trill may occur only in the position closest to the nucleus
- Lateral approximants may occur only in the position closest to the nucleus
- Three-consonant clusters:
- always involve a (lateral) approximant or the uvular trill as the third consonant
- second consonant is devoiced if it is a plosive
- Approximant reduction: in syllables with a lengthened vowel, <ʀ> is changed to /ɹ/ and <ʟ> to /l/ in syllable codas.
As I said, the above is not yet an exhaustive description accounting for all possible clusters and excluding all illegal - but I just wanted to get this out there for now :)
Stress
In nouns and verbs, stress is always on the first syllable of the (generally bisyllabic) nominal or verbal root. While this often happens to be the penultimate syllable, it is by no means granted due to compound words, lexical suffixes etc. In romanization, hyphens are often introduced to break words with many syllables down into the individual constituents, so that there is, where possible, only one unhyphenated "chunk" of word remaining that's made up of two syllables not separated by a hyphen, which will then be unambiguously identified as the root (the first syllable of which is stressed). Single syllables whose vowel is a schwa are not "hyphenated away".
I am well aware all this may read somewhat confusing - I will fill all of it (not only this section) in with examples in the near future!
Vowel mutation
The morphology of Ancient Vaal noun and verb forms is rooted in vowel mutations, with vowels changing from a specific back vowel to the relevant "complementary" front vowel, and vice versa. In the Vaal grammatical tradition, this is referred to as "vowel melody", which is based on the relationship between the vowel phoneme in the primary (stress-bearing) syllable and secondary syllable (following the primary syllable) of the bisyllabic root. Vowel phonemes, with the exception of ə <e>, which is regarded as neutral, are divided into four front /i y ɛ ø/ and three back vowels /u o a/. Vowels are usually short, but can be lengthened in the process of changing the vowel melody. This "vowel melody" of a noun/verb can be described as:
Neutral: both primary and secondary syllable either front (verbs) or back (nouns)
Falling/drop: primary syllable front, secondary syllable back (ergative case in nouns; deontic modality in verbs)
Rising: primary syllable back, secondary syllable front (third or "copular/declarative" case in nouns; epistemic modality in verbs)
Rising and falling melodies can be transformed into a so-called "sharp" rise or drop, respectively, by lengthening the vowel of the primary syllable, resulting in:
Sharp drop: lengthened primary syllable front, secondary syllable back (ergative case in possessed state; deontic modality combined with interrogative mood)
Sharp rise: lengthened primary syllable back, secondary syllable front (third case in possessed state; epistemic modality combined with interrogative mood)
These five permutations plus a sixth, a variant of the neutral melody with lengthened primary vowel, form the basis of case declension (including variants of all cases in the possessed state) and verb conjugation (solely into moods - indicative, epistemic and deontic mood - with a fourth modality, the interrogative, which can be combined with any of those three).
The "backness" of the vowel is changed according to following mutations:
a <=> á / i
o <=> ó
u <=> ú
The brief overview above already discloses the first small complication; when changing [a], it is unpredictable whether it should become [á] or from the word; the reason for is the existence of an obsolete phoneme (most likely /ɯ/), which has merged with /a/. In word lists for this document, the nature of the change will be indicated by "a=>i" in square brackets after the word; otherwise it is assumed that [a] is fronted as [á]. If both syllables in a word contain [a] as vowel, changes are indicated in the form of "a1/2=>i".
The second complication is that a sizeable number of nouns, only one syllable of the root shows in the absolutive case, which is the common citation form. For such words, the part of the root missing in the citation form is indicated herein by attaching it in parentheses directly after the word without a space).
The dictionary form of the AV word for "wind" is tusa; i.e., this is in the absolutive (ABS) case, and in the non-possessed state (AV nouns do not form plurals). The ergative case is formed by changing the neutral melody of tusa into a falling melody - so the primary syllable must feature a front vowel, while the secondary syllable needs to have a back vowel. In the secondary syllable no change is needed, but the primary syllable must undergo mutation according to the mutation rules provided above:
tusa (ABS) => túsa (ERG)
['thusa] => ['thysa]
The following table shows a full example noun paradigm - this is all the morphological changes a noun can undergo:
That's it for now - thanks if anybody really did read through (at least parts of) that