Mýr language (Rúbímýri)

[J Reggie]

Rúbímýri, commonly known as Mýr, is spoken by most natives of the planet Mýr. It is an agglutinating language where every noun has a verb associated with it.

Phonemes:
/p m mb t n nd k ŋ ŋɡ ͡tʃ ͡kʃ ʋ ɹ̟ j ɸʰ/
⟨p m b t n d k ng g c x w r j f⟩
/i a ɒ u ʉ̜ (ɨ̹)/
⟨i a o u y⟩̹

R is an alveolar approximant articulated almost at the teeth.

There are two tones, a high and a low, and a neutral short tone that causes the following consonant to be geminated. The vowel of the neutral tone becomes slightly centralized.

Vowel coloring often occurs between vowels of the same height separated by a consonant, but the rules for this are irregular.

Syllables are all CV.

Words are formed in the following order:
mínà - person marker
nací - verb
góro - mood indicator
wíwá - noun
xajá - adjective/adverb

Mínà:
The beginning of a word marks the person. Mýr has two repeating 3rd persons (3 and 4) as well as a generic person marker. No vowel denotes duplication of following vowel as neutral tone.
m
1st singular
mà
1st dual exclusive
rí
1st plural exclusive
fù
1st dual inclusive
ngí
1st plural inclusive
k
2nd singular
kì
2nd dual
wú
2nd plural
c
3rd singular
cù
3rd dual
cú
3rd plural
t
4th singular
tò
4th dual
tó
4th plural
d
generic singular
já
generic plural


Nací:
Verbs all start and end with a consonant. Every full word has a verb. This means that to express what we think of as a transitive verb, you would need two verbs that relate to each other, giving both nouns agency. This makes direct translation hard between Mýr and most other languages, as there is information that is relevant in Mýr that may not be present in other languages. For instance, if you wanted to translate the sentence “I saw Romò”, you would start with “Mijìki” (1SG see EMPH), but then you would need to know what Romò was doing. Well, in Mýr you would say “Cipìmytúromò mijìki” (3SG walk EVID Romò 1SG see EMPH) or “I saw Romò walking”. Verbs also take the place of prepositions.

Góro:
Every word has to have a mood indicator.
a - generic information, somewhat similar to gnomic but used to state information that can be assumed based on other words. This mood, when present, is almost always the first word in a statement.
i - energetic, or emphasis of statement. This is used to present new information.
ytú - evidential belief, used to state a direct experience
ácì - denotes negative emotion, similar to Finnish aggressive structure. Mostly used informally (also á)
íbí - (also í) directive/imperative (functions as imperative for 2nd person, denotes requirement)
uwà - prohibitive (states what should not be)
irá - optative/proposative - indicated hope or wish
úxỳ - conditional - then of "if then"
ó - subjunctive (if)
ítù - interrogative
udó - dubitative
òfá - presumptive (probably)
ì - inferential/assumptive
í - contrary evidence (but) or confirming previous statement ("I do!")

Wíwá:
Nouns tend to be pretty straightforward. They have no person or number marking of any kind. They are also optional.

Xajá:
The final part of the word includes descriptors for the whole word. They are both adjectives and adverbs, as they describe the set of verb and noun. For instance, to translate “I walk quickly”, you would say “Mipìmibý” (1SG walk EMPH fast). In this case, the xajá “bý” is describing both the speaker and the action of walking.

I will try and continue this thread with more info about the language. I hope to get into word order and certain irregularities. I also plan to post something about the culture in the concultures board. But for now, I’m interested in what you have to say about this.

Also a specific question: how would you do the grammar markings? I’m not particularly familiar with this system and am not quite sure how all of the moods would be notated.

[gestaltist]

What's the story of the whole planet speaking one language? That's rather atypical.

[J Reggie]

What's the story of the whole planet speaking one language? That's rather atypical.

The short story is that one culture peacefully took over the large portion of one continent and became the anchor point for interplanetary trade when contact was made. There are many dialects that very widely but this is the dialect that is spoken in the largest city (conveniently also called Mýr, another story for another time). I plan to post more about the history of the culture in conworlds, because I have a fair amount written and even more in my noggin.

I also had a request to post about numbers in Mýr. In the language, a base 12 counting system is used. The basic numbers are:

0 - di
1 - kù
2 - nó
3 - bí
4 - fí
5 - cà
6 - gijì
7 - wu
8 - pỳ
9 - wòná
10 (A) - xá
11 (B) - ri
12 (10) - kà

From there it goes on largely as expected: kàkù, kànó, kàbí...
But when we get to 20 (24 base 10), the numbers work like this: kànódi, kànókù, kànónó, kànóbí... etc.
This causes some vowel coloring, such as 73 (87 base 10) kàwybí and B1 (133 base 10) kàrykù.

100 (144 base 10) is wí.

That's all I'll post for now. Feel free to ask any more questions; it'll help me develop the language and the culture.

[Omzinesý]

Mínà:
The beginning of a word marks the person. Mýr has two repeating 3rd persons (3 and 4) as well as a generic person marker. No vowel denotes duplication of following vowel as neutral tone.
m
1st singular
mà
1st dual exclusive
rí
1st plural exclusive
fù
1st dual inclusive
ngí
1st plural inclusive
k
2nd singular
kì
2nd dual
wú
2nd plural
c
3rd singular
cù
3rd dual
cú
3rd plural
t
4th singular
tò
4th dual
tó
4th plural
d
generic singular
já
generic plural

Isn't it quite much redundancy to have no person marked with zero?

Nací:
Verbs all start and end with a consonant. Every full word has a verb. This means that to express what we think of as a transitive verb, you would need two verbs that relate to each other, giving both nouns agency. This makes direct translation hard between Mýr and most other languages, as there is information that is relevant in Mýr that may not be present in other languages. For instance, if you wanted to translate the sentence “I saw Romò”, you would start with “Mijìki” (1SG see EMPH), but then you would need to know what Romò was doing. Well, in Mýr you would say “Cipìmytúromò mijìki” (3SG walk EVID Romò 1SG see EMPH) or “I saw Romò walking”. Verbs also take the place of prepositions.

An interesting idea!
So how do you mark which VP(?) is the subject and which is the object? What about adjuncts? The boundary between subordinate clauses and adjuncts is blurred. That's an interesting lang when we consider finiteness.
We don't know about Mýr discourses, but most object VPs would just have some stative verb 'be', 'stay'... is you translate our discourses to Mýr.

Wíwá:
Nouns tend to be pretty straightforward. They have no person or number marking of any kind. They are also optional.

In which situation is the noun not used? What does the VP look like then?

[J Reggie]

Isn't it quite much redundancy to have no person marked with zero?

Yeah, I've been considering having generic person marked with zero. But I think it's important for person to be marked especially since there's no grammatical gender.

An interesting idea!
So how do you mark which VP(?) is the subject and which is the object? What about adjuncts? The boundary between subordinate clauses and adjuncts is blurred. That's an interesting lang when we consider finiteness.
We don't know about Mýr discourses, but most object VPs would just have some stative verb 'be', 'stay'... is you translate our discourses to Mýr.

The idea is that there is no subject and object. It's very different from any human language that I know of, and indeed it's something slightly other than human. It's a lot to consider when translating, because in Mýr you want to have information about all nouns that may not be present in the source material. In some cases, it's easier (if I pick this thing up, it will move), but sometimes in translation you have to infer something (I talked to him but did he listen? did he agree? was he bored?). A lot of these ideas came to me when I was learning about problems people face translating between Javanese and English, how to create a good translation you necessarily have to add some information that wasn't in the source material and lose some information that was.

There are also some verb pairs that don't entirely make sense when translated literally and separately; I'll have more on that as I develop the language further.

In which situation is the noun not used? What does the VP look like then?

Usually in the first or second person, or when a noun would be repeated in a phrase. Note that nouns can be used in the first and second person in lieu of a copula (as Mýr is essentially a zero-copula language).

[Omzinesý]

I just mean if I say "I saw and John ran." how you infer that it was John or his running that I saw, not the flying spaghetti monster? You could infer that my seeing of the flying spaghetti monster was the cause of his running, instead.

[J Reggie]

This is done in a number of ways. One is word order, which can get fairly complex but in most cases follows some basic rules. Another is just context.

Take the sentence:
Cagácaromò tucúpacìjì mingìcíngi bogorapý.
Ca-gác-a-romò tu-cúp-a-cìjì mi-ngìcíng-i bo-gor-a-pý.
3SG-ALIEN-GNO-Romò 4SG-leave-GNO-plant 1SG-carry-EMPH 3SG(non-repeating)-out.of-house
“I carried Romò's plant out of the house.”

We start with Romò's alienable possession of something. This verb is usually directly followed by what is possessed: a plant. So in a sense you could analyze the plant as being the object of Romò's alienable possession. But then, the plant is doing something. It's leaving; cúp means to leave aided by some method of transportation. This is often used when taking a train, but there's no train in this sentence and plants don't usually ride on trains, so we can assume there's no train involved. Then I'm doing something: I'm carrying. There are two words this could relate to, Romò possessing or the plant leaving. It comes directly after the plant leaving, and that's the verb that most closely matches up with carrying, so it's the plant that I'm carrying. Then the house is also doing something: it's out-of-ing? This verb is functioning like how we would use a proposition, it's telling us how the house is relating to all of this. The plant and I are going out of the house. Is Romò going out of the house? No, there's a little bit of ambiguity there, but all he's doing is having the plant. He could be having the plant out of the house, but that doesn't really make sense.

So that's how a lot of sentences work. The words relate to each other in various ways and the lines between object and subject get kind of blurred in the process. You can analyze it in different ways but the language doesn't make a distinction. Sometimes there's ambiguity, but flying planes can be scary.

(Oh and I don't think I mentioned this yet, but I added a non-repeating 3rd person to the language, along with the 3 other 3rd persons.)

[J Reggie]

Góro: the difference between -a- and -i-:

These are the two most commonly used moods, and the distinction between them is a bit complicated. The Góro i is used to mark the emphasis of a statement. This is the point you're trying to get across in a sentence. There can be more than one word in a sentence with this mood, and it can also be the only word in a sentence.
The Góro a marks a word that's not as important or interesting, usually serving a function in relation to another word while not being a focus of the sentence. It almost always comes before the more important word, except in cases such as location verbs.

Take the two sentences:
Cotongỳgagácùmu mumúxými.
Co-tongỳg-a-gácùmu mu-múxým-i.
3SG-be.enjoyed-GNO-cake 1SG-eat-EMPH
“I ate the cake (and it was yummy).” or “I ate the yummy cake.”

Mumúxýma cotongỳgigácùmu.
Mu-múxým-a co-tongỳg-i-gácùmu.
1SG-eat-GNO 3SG-be.enjoyed-EMPH-cake
“The cake was yummy (I know because I ate it).” or “The cake that I ate was yummy.”

These are the same two words except for their order and the Góro, but switching them changes the focus of the sentence from taking about me to talking about the cake. One way to analyze this is switching the agent and the patient or the subject and the object, but that way of thinking can get dangerous with longer sentences. Not all sentences can be flipped around like this; many will either sound unnatural or just make no sense if this is done. Understanding the difference between these is essential for people learning to speak the language (and there are more non-native than native speakers).

That’s all I have time to write up for the moment, but feedback is welcome. Does anyone have any ideas for a better glossing scheme for these? What I’ve been using (GNO and EMPH) gets the point across but is in no way correct.

[J Reggie]

Person in Mýr

I’ve made some changes to the person markers (mínà):
m - 1st singular
mà - 1st dual exclusive
rí - 1st plural exclusive
fù - 1st dual inclusive
ngí - 1st plural inclusive
k - 2nd singular
kì - 2nd dual
wú - 2nd plural
c - 3rd singular
cù - 3rd dual
cú - 3rd plural
t - 4th singular
tò - 4th dual
tó - 4th plural
b - 3rd non-repeating singular
bò - 3rd non-repeating dual
bó - 3rd non-repeating plural
Generic person (eg. one should…) is zero-marked.

1st person distinguishes between inclusive and exclusive because of contact with languages from other families. 1st person is also used in more situations than in most languages. It is used nearly all the time when telling a story about a person, either fiction or biography, and is often used for lengthy descriptions of objects. Context will generally make it clear if the writer or speaker is not the first person.
2nd person is pretty simple; there is only one set of 2nd person markers, with no level attached.
3rd person, by rule of thumb, should only be used for one noun per paragraph. This should generally be the primary focus of a paragraph, or the secondary focus if 1st person is being used. Generally the wíwá (noun) is only needed the first time it is mentioned, and simply using 3rd person after that will imply you are talking about the same subject. Further embellishments can be added later if wanted.
4th person is similar to 3rd person except it can be switched to a different subject more frequently. If 4th person has not been used for a few sentences, it will often switch to referring to something else. Switching every sentence is a valid stylistic choice but must be done carefully to avoid excessive ambiguity.
The 3rd person non-repeating is what it sounds like; using it twice does not imply talking about the same thing. It is used when a subject comes up in a sentence that is not likely to be mentioned again soon, and must always be paired with a wíwá in order to make sense.

As always, I’m happy to answer any questions, as it helps me work out things I may not have thought of before.

[J Reggie]

More góro stuff - í

Góro tend to be mood markers, but í functions in ways that are not traditionally thought of as grammatical mood. Its two main uses are providing contrary evidence and confirming a previous statement. These two functions are not generally differentiated by native speakers, but they do cover two distinct uses that tend to be different in other languages.

When providing contrary evidence, it functions similarly to “but”. This is a way to indicate and emphasize that the information being stated in this word goes against what was just said. Since there are no conjunctions, this is the primary way that Mýr deals with this type of statement; other constructions are unusual and cumbersome.

Its second function, confirming a previous statement, is the most common way of saying yes. There is no one word for the affirmative, so the main verb in a question is repeated, with the góro í. (The most common way of saying no is the negative di, which also means zero.) The imperative íbí can become í with certain verbs; in this case, the two góro are differentiated by context.

[eldin raigmore]

I am fascinated. I intend to lurk.