(Conlangs) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here [2010-2020]

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Re: (Conlangs) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by Frislander »

Ahzoh wrote: 13 Sep 2018 16:44Is it possible or attested for a language to have word-final lenition of stops?
Danish iirc.

Also any language that loses final stops can be argued to be leniting them in a way.
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Re: (Conlangs) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by Ahzoh »

Frislander wrote: 13 Sep 2018 17:00
Ahzoh wrote: 13 Sep 2018 16:44Is it possible or attested for a language to have word-final lenition of stops?
Danish iirc.

Also any language that loses final stops can be argued to be leniting them in a way.
And what about the possibility that this allophonic rule could be ignored, such when a noun that normally ends in a gender ending has that ending removed (basically this is a disfix) in the construct state?
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Re: (Conlangs) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by Frislander »

Ahzoh wrote: 13 Sep 2018 17:12
Frislander wrote: 13 Sep 2018 17:00
Ahzoh wrote: 13 Sep 2018 16:44Is it possible or attested for a language to have word-final lenition of stops?
Danish iirc.

Also any language that loses final stops can be argued to be leniting them in a way.
And what about the possibility that this allophonic rule could be ignored, such when a noun that normally ends in a gender ending has that ending removed (basically this is a disfix) in the construct state?
Sounds like a good way to restore word-final stops, no issue with that imho.
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Post by Shemtov »

Frislander wrote: 13 Sep 2018 17:00
Shemtov wrote: 13 Sep 2018 06:42 Can a Retroxflex and Palatal series merge? And if so, which direction is more naturalistic?
I'd say it's more plausible for a palatal to retroflex direction rather than vice-versa, because retroflexes resit any kind of palatal co-articulation simply due to their articulatory properties, whereas palatal consonants (or at least palatalised consonants) gain at least some degree of retroflexion fairly often.
That's actually quite perfect, as I was planning for a family to have a North Branch, which would fuse the palatals and retroflexes, and then have it split into Deltic and North Islandic subbranches, the latter of which would fuse the retroflexes (or palatals) with the Dentals, except /s/>θ and /ʂ/>/s/, with a palatalazation of the velars before certain vowels somewhere along the way.
Question:
What are some reflexes of prenasalised stops, other then stop+nasal vowel? Could a Geminate Nasal work?
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Re: (Conlangs) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by yangfiretiger121 »

To paraphrase myself (and make sure the question gets answered), does [j→ʎ] change the outcome of palatalizations ([kʲ→c], etc.)? If so, how?
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Post by CarsonDaConlanger »

is i>ɛ/Cɣ_ realistic?
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Post by Frislander »

yangfiretiger121 wrote: 14 Sep 2018 04:04 To paraphrase myself (and make sure the question gets answered), does [j→ʎ] change the outcome of palatalizations ([kʲ→c], etc.)? If so, how?
No, because they're different kinds of change. It's perfectly fine for the glide to change when on its own but palatalisations like you describe to carry on as normal, and honestly I'd expect that over /j/ becoming lateral everywhere. Glides in general can behave pretty wildly; one example which particularly comes to my mind is how in certain Austronesian languages, original glides remained as-is, but phonetic-glides inserted automatically before and after high vowels underwent fortition (e.g. Narum *laqia > *lia > ləjeəh, *duha > *dua > dəbeh but *ayam > ayam, *jaway > jaweəy).
CarsonDaConlanger wrote: 14 Sep 2018 14:31 is i>ɛ/Cɣ_ realistic?
I'd say so as a complex change, where i>e with subsequent lowering.
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Re: (Conlangs) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by Ahzoh »

Shemtov wrote: 13 Sep 2018 20:46 Question:
What are some reflexes of prenasalised stops, other then stop+nasal vowel? Could a Geminate Nasal work?
One of my conlang derived prenasals from germinate nasals.
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Ahzoh wrote: 14 Sep 2018 20:31
Shemtov wrote: 13 Sep 2018 20:46 Question:
What are some reflexes of prenasalised stops, other then stop+nasal vowel? Could a Geminate Nasal work?
One of my conlang derived prenasals from germinate nasals.
(geminate) Stops and (geminate) nasals are possible. The voicing might also change.
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Post by Ælfwine »

In one of my langs, out of the blue, I've decided it would become intolerant of heterorganic consonant clusters (e.g. all consonant clusters must have the same POA.)

To accomplish this, I've decided that palatalization will operate, transforming clusters like [sk] into [ʃc], and an epenthetic schwa vowel will be inserted in between "illegal" consonant clusters, like [rk] -> [rək].

Is this a realistic thing to do? Secondly, besides palatalization and epenthesis, what else might I expect to happen?
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Post by yangfiretiger121 »

Ælfwine wrote: 15 Sep 2018 00:23 In one of my langs, out of the blue, I've decided it would become intolerant of heterorganic consonant clusters (e.g. all consonant clusters must have the same POA.)

To accomplish this, I've decided that palatalization will operate, transforming clusters like [sk] into [ʃc], and an epenthetic schwa vowel will be inserted in between "illegal" consonant clusters, like [rk] -> [rək].

Is this a realistic thing to do? Secondly, besides palatalization and epenthesis, what else might I expect to happen?
Hate to break it to you, mate, but [ʃc] is still illegal as [ʃ] is postalveolar and [c] is palatal. I think you meant [ɕc]. Unfortunately, you'll have to wait for someone better-versed than me for other options.
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Post by shimobaatar »

yangfiretiger121 wrote: 15 Sep 2018 03:11
Ælfwine wrote: 15 Sep 2018 00:23 In one of my langs, out of the blue, I've decided it would become intolerant of heterorganic consonant clusters (e.g. all consonant clusters must have the same POA.)

To accomplish this, I've decided that palatalization will operate, transforming clusters like [sk] into [ʃc], and an epenthetic schwa vowel will be inserted in between "illegal" consonant clusters, like [rk] -> [rək].

Is this a realistic thing to do? Secondly, besides palatalization and epenthesis, what else might I expect to happen?
Hate to break it to you, mate, but [ʃc] is still illegal as [ʃ] is postalveolar and [c] is palatal. I think you meant [ɕc]. Unfortunately, you'll have to wait for someone better-versed than me for other options.
I assume the language in question treats [ʃ] as palatal, as some languages do.
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Post by Ahzoh »

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subject%E2%80%93object%E2%80%93verb wrote:In linguistic typology one can usefully distinguish two types of SOV languages in terms of their type of marking:
  1. dependent-marking has case markers to distinguish the subject and the object, which allows it to use the variant OSV word order without ambiguity. This type usually places adjectives and numerals before the nouns they modify and is exclusively suffixing without prefixes. SOV languages of this first type include Japanese and Tamil.
  2. head-marking distinguishes subject and object by affixes on the verb rather than markers on the nouns. It also differs from the dependent-marking SOV language in using prefixes as well as suffixes, usually for tense and possession. Because adjectives in this type are much more verb-like than in dependent-marking SOV languages, they usually follow the nouns. In most SOV languages with a significant level of head-marking or verb-like adjectives, numerals and related quantifiers (like "all", "every") also follow the nouns they modify. Languages of this type include Navajo and Seri.
How strong is the binary-ness of these two types? Because my conlang Vrkhazhian has SOV order but fits neither type.
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Post by Pabappa »

I'd be interested in this too, though I can attest that in 20 yrs of making SOV conlangs I've never felt that something was wrong with how I order other parts of speech. Adjectives are verbs and thus always follow their heads, but I also use predominantly suffixing morphology, with some infixes but no prefixes. I sometimes have noun cases and sometimes not.

÷÷÷÷÷
Inuktitut might be a good counterexample, as it seems to be 1) SOV, 2) suffixing only, 3) adjs are verbs, 4) uses noun cases. My conlangs are generally close to this model.
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Post by CarsonDaConlanger »

Is a system in which vowel length is affected by the length of the following morphemes realistic?
I.E:
sak+a=saka
sak+ā=skā
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Ahzoh wrote: 18 Sep 2018 16:46
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subject%E2%80%93object%E2%80%93verb wrote:In linguistic typology one can usefully distinguish two types of SOV languages in terms of their type of marking:
  1. dependent-marking has case markers to distinguish the subject and the object, which allows it to use the variant OSV word order without ambiguity. This type usually places adjectives and numerals before the nouns they modify and is exclusively suffixing without prefixes. SOV languages of this first type include Japanese and Tamil.
  2. head-marking distinguishes subject and object by affixes on the verb rather than markers on the nouns. It also differs from the dependent-marking SOV language in using prefixes as well as suffixes, usually for tense and possession. Because adjectives in this type are much more verb-like than in dependent-marking SOV languages, they usually follow the nouns. In most SOV languages with a significant level of head-marking or verb-like adjectives, numerals and related quantifiers (like "all", "every") also follow the nouns they modify. Languages of this type include Navajo and Seri.
How strong is the binary-ness of these two types? Because my conlang Vrkhazhian has SOV order but fits neither type.
I don't think it's that rigid. For one, binary types of languages almost never hold up in language typology and second Wikipedia does not even cite a source, IINM. Also, I don't know many SOV natlangs, but at least some of the ones I know, do not fit nicely.

I have a terminology question by the way. A cipher I would define as (unwittingly) taking the grammar (in a very broad sense) and combining it with a new phoneme inventory and a new vocabulary (where each word takes up the same place in the semantic space as some word in the source language. But I have a few language where I kind of do the opposite. I take the vocabulary and the phoneme inventory of some source language and combine it with new morphological categories and exponents and new syntactic strures. Is there a name for it? Anti-Cipher? Un-Cipher?
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Re: (Conlangs) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by Ahzoh »

CarsonDaConlanger wrote: 19 Sep 2018 14:49 Is a system in which vowel length is affected by the length of the following morphemes realistic?
I.E:
sak+a=saka
sak+ā=skā
Yes, this looks like it would be length-induced vowel syncope.
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Post by yangfiretiger121 »

I'm working on Dyoan's allophony rules. Is something similar to [fs→fs̪] in the same syllable plausible? A prominent English example is "hoofs" being analyzed as [ho͡ofs̪], not [ho͡ofs].

Does object-subject-verb syntax work with a Latinesque pronoun structure?

Judging by Wiktionary, the vowels in göttlich and Öl have an un-trilled /r/ tagged onto the end in Standard German. Having fronted [o→ø], does Dyoan need the trilled /r/ in words similar to ᴀʟꜱɪɴᴅᴏᴇʀ?
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Post by shimobaatar »

yangfiretiger121 wrote: 23 Sep 2018 16:21 Does object-subject-verb syntax work with a Latinesque pronoun structure?
What do you mean by "Latinesque pronoun structure"?
yangfiretiger121 wrote: 23 Sep 2018 16:21 Judging by Wiktionary, the vowels in göttlich and Öl have an un-trilled /r/ tagged onto the end in Standard German. Having fronted [o→ø], does Dyoan need the trilled /r/ in words similar to ᴀʟꜱɪɴᴅᴏᴇʀ?
Although I don't hear anything rhotic in "göttlich", the audio Wiktionary gives for "Öl" sounds very strange to me. Could a native German speaker perhaps weigh in on this? Is that really how "Öl" is pronounced?
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yangfiretiger121 wrote: 23 Sep 2018 16:21 Judging by Wiktionary, the vowels in göttlich and Öl have an un-trilled /r/ tagged onto the end in Standard German. Having fronted [o→ø], does Dyoan need the trilled /r/ in words similar to ᴀʟꜱɪɴᴅᴏᴇʀ?
Although I don't hear anything rhotic in "göttlich", the audio Wiktionary gives for "Öl" sounds very strange to me. Could a native German speaker perhaps weigh in on this? Is that really how "Öl" is pronounced?
[/quote]

In the Öl exemple, I hear something like what you call an un-trilled /r/ tagged onto the end of the ö. The effect may be due to over-pronounciating and somewhat lengthening the word for recording.

In the exemple "göttlich", I don't hear that attached sound, and the Speaker seems to be a native German.

As the sounds are vowels, have you considered that the un-trilled sound might be just the vibrating vocal cords (or some resonance form other parts of the larynx)?

A couple of days ago, I had a similar discussion with a native speaker of Turkish about the pronunciation of the consonant ç in the word çay which he thought to be pronunced slightly different.
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