(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 Creyeditor »

yangfiretiger121 wrote: 22 Oct 2018 17:30 Is "lateral mutation" an accurate way to describe changes like [lh → ɬ] and [lð → ɮ̪]? On a related note, is "rhotic mutation" an accurate way to describe changes like [kr → r̥]?
I know mutation in the sense that a phonological segmental change indicates a morphosyntactic category. So if the changes are totally regular and not restricted to any morphosyntactic context, my answer is no.
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Re: (Conlangs) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by yangfiretiger121 »

Creyeditor wrote: 22 Oct 2018 20:22
yangfiretiger121 wrote: 22 Oct 2018 17:30 Is "lateral mutation" an accurate way to describe changes like [lh → ɬ] and [lð → ɮ̪]? On a related note, is "rhotic mutation" an accurate way to describe changes like [kr → r̥]?
I know mutation in the sense that a phonological segmental change indicates a morphosyntactic category. So if the changes are totally regular and not restricted to any morphosyntactic context, my answer is no.
Okay. Essentially, an adjacent [l] lateralized any fricative or trill, and an adjacent [r] acquired the voicing characteristics of adjacent consonants, which were—eventually—elided due to illegality. Are there any decent descriptions for those series of changes or not?
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So overall this looks like fusion (aka coalescence) of the two segments into one. If you want to keep the two step idea it's assimilation followed by ellision, as you correctly pointed out.
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Re: (Conlangs) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by Nachtuil »

Ælfwine wrote: 16 Oct 2018 23:19
Okay, let me explain.

The Kalaallisut have only /p t k q/ without voiced or aspirated pairs. Old Norse likely had /pʰ p tʰ t kʰ k/.

Of course I could have /q/ in the conlang, but it is far more likely to have /q/ -> /k/ on the Kalaallisut side and /pʰ tʰ kʰ/ -> /p t k/ on the Norse side. I agree /p t k kʰ/ doesn't seem any more likely than /p t k q/. So I guess the likely inventory would be merely /p t k/.

Since Old Norse geminate plosives were pre-aspirated, I'll probably have qajaq -> kajakk like in Faroese, but without the aspiration, the geminate /k/ being a remnant of that.
Ah ok! I guess I had checked the old Norse entry on wikipedia but they had a voicing distinction on stops and I hadn't questioned it.

You know though, strange stuff does happen http://linguistics.berkeley.edu/~saphon ... viaoP.html :)
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Post by Nachtuil »

It seems that collaborative conlangs seems especially ephemeral. I know the prevailing wisdom is they are difficult to sustain so I wonder, are there any easy examples of collaborations that lasted a really long time and were super productive? What makes for a successful collab-conlang?
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Re: (Conlangs) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

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One reason for the early death of many collaborative conlangs may be that they are side projects to those who are working on them, and thus quickly lose momentum as the participants focus on their main projects: when they find that they have spread themselves too thinly over too many projects, they throw out the unimportant ones, which usually includes the collaborative languages. Another reason may have to do with the particular kind of collaborative conlangs we see here on the CBB, where people vote on the features. I never was of the opinion that this leads to good, coherent conlangs; in fact, most of the votelangs (as I call them) I have seen here are rather incoherent and do not form a unified whole, which leads to people being frustrated about the results and abandoning them.
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Post by shimobaatar »

I think another factor could be that, for the kind of collablangs commonly seen here on the CBB, one person (the thread's "manager") typically ends up having to do a lot more work than everyone else (the voters). A few years ago, I volunteered to temporarily take over the management of a voting-based collablang thread, but then got stuck as the new manager when the original didn't return, and the thread died because I just didn't have time to keep tallying votes and coming up with new questions and such. I still feel a little bad about that, but it probably would have died eventually anyway.

I don't think there have been any voting-based collablang threads that have been long-lasting and very successful. However, there have been some fairly long-lasting collaborative conlanging/conworlding projects of other kinds, such as the Akana project, or whatever it's called.

But yeah, as much fun as I have voting on things while these projects last, the kind of collablangs that are most common on the board seem inherently doomed.
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Re: (Conlangs) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by Ælfwine »

Another thing is that a lot of people have their own unique vision for conlangs, and that these collablang tend to not be that coherent.
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Post by Reyzadren »

tbh I'd rather see more conlang collabs metaly, where people actually use their own conlang(s) to produce something as a collaboration.

Unfortunately, from what I've experienced, most people don't really have a conlang that is up to a suitable level that allows them to write or translate much, so they are unable to contribute or participate.
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Re: (Conlangs) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by KaiTheHomoSapien »

A collablang is something I could never participate in because my conlang is personal to me and that's what motivates me to work on it.

Plus I'd just be bossy and hog the whole project [:P]
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Post by WeepingElf »

One way of collaborative conlanging that IMHO works quite well is this: starting with a common proto-language, each member develops his own language diachronically, where there can be further rounds where these languages are used as starting points for further diachronic development. There's a whole world built that way. I also tried to start such a project within the League of Lost Languages a few years ago, but it soon lost momentum (now, the League is dormant altogether).

Alas, the resulting families are often rather patchy, as languages that went into utterly different directions sit side to side, rather than showing the patterns of intersecting isoglosses one sees in natlang families.
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Post by Vlürch »

I'd be interested in alt-future a posteriori collablangs, especially if conculture stuff was involved. You know, you'd take a real language and then have it be influenced by conlangs and detail the interactions between its speakers' culture and concultures; maybe even roleplaying with characters like future heads of state and whatnot, haha. You know, like a combination of alt-future/micronation roleplaying and collaborative conlanging. Different people would introduce loanwords, calques, etc. from their conlangs, sound changes were applied, etc.

Of course, that kind of a thing would have the problem of almost certainly being inherently offensive to the speakers of whatever real languages were be chosen... I mean, since even alt-history is sometimes taken to be offensive due to the assumption that all of it is nationalistic propaganda due to its propagandistic use by nationalists. On the other hand, nationalists are obviously offended by alternative portrayals of their countries... so, it's probably not a good idea. [>_<]

Maybe I'm just being paranoid, though. I'd like to think having fun with languages hasn't been so thoroughly demonised yet, but... [:x]

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Random question: say I have a vowel inventory that generally has two phonetic lengths. However, certain vowels are long when stressed, short when unstressed and in free variation (or intermediate) with secondary stress. The rest of the vowels are always either long or short regardless of stress. Does it make sense to consider the vowels whose length depends on stress to be phonemically half-long?

Don't mind this vowel inventory being blatantly ripped off from Persian:
/ɑ ə ɪ ɔ ʊ/
/æˑ eˑ oˑ/
/ɒː iː uː/

For example:
In /ˈbɑbɑˌbɑ/, every /ɑ/ would be [ɑ]...
In /ˈbɒːbɒːˌbɒː/, every /ɒː/ would be [ɒː]...
In /ˈbæˑbæˑˌbæˑ/, the first and second /æˑ/ would be [æː] and [æ] respectively, but the last /æˑ/ could be any of [æː~æˑ~æ].

PS: Why do I get logged out like every other time I click "preview" now? It used to happen after like an hour or something, now it happens after five minutes or something. It's getting annoying... hopefully I'm not the only one this happens to?
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Re: (Conlangs) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by Ælfwine »

What about a collaborative north america? With european colonies more diverse than real life.
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Vlürch wrote: 24 Oct 2018 18:50
Random question: say I have a vowel inventory that generally has two phonetic lengths. However, certain vowels are long when stressed, short when unstressed and in free variation (or intermediate) with secondary stress. The rest of the vowels are always either long or short regardless of stress. Does it make sense to consider the vowels whose length depends on stress to be phonemically half-long?
I think calling them underspecified for length would make much more sense. Or opposing stable and unstable vowels wrt length.
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Re: (Conlangs) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by Vlürch »

Creyeditor wrote: 24 Oct 2018 19:34I think calling them underspecified for length would make much more sense. Or opposing stable and unstable vowels wrt length.
Thanks, I think that makes sense. But should they be grouped with the short or long vowels? I mean, grouping them separately seems like the most convenient way to go about it, but...
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Re: (Conlangs) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by yangfiretiger121 »

Doan's working lenition of stops into fricatives adjacent to near-back vowels potentially causes minimal pairing for [tɑ̟] and [θɑ̟], among many others. To prevent this, are changes similar to [tɑ̟ → t͡ħɑ̟] or [θɑ̟ → t͡ħɑ̟] more likely?
Last edited by yangfiretiger121 on 25 Oct 2018 03:20, edited 2 times in total.
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Re: (Conlangs) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

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Vlürch wrote: 24 Oct 2018 19:57
Creyeditor wrote: 24 Oct 2018 19:34I think calling them underspecified for length would make much more sense. Or opposing stable and unstable vowels wrt length.
Thanks, I think that makes sense. But should they be grouped with the short or long vowels? I mean, grouping them separately seems like the most convenient way to go about it, but...
I think there are several ways to group your vowels, depending on the criteria you applay. All of them make sense. I will use /v̆/ for the stable short vowels, /vː/ for the stable long vowels and /v/ for the unspecified/unstable vowels.
Vowels that do undergo length alternations vs. vowels that do not: {/v/} vs. {/v̆/, /vː/}
Vowels that are long in stressed syllables vs. vowels that are short in stressed syllables: {/v/,/vː/} vs. {/v̆/}
Vowels that long in unstressed syllables vs. vowels that are short in unstressed syllables: {/vː/} vs. {/v̆/,/v/}
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Re: (Conlangs) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by CarsonDaConlanger »

How (or should) should I add declension and/or conjugation classes for my agglutinative conlang? Do agglutinative languages tend to have multiple conjugation/declension classes?
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Post by sangi39 »

CarsonDaConlanger wrote: 25 Oct 2018 16:01 How (or should) should I add declension and/or conjugation classes for my agglutinative conlang? Do agglutinative languages tend to have multiple conjugation/declension classes?
IIRC, Hungarian has a couple of conjugation classes for its verbs based on what form the third person singular takes, and Finnish nouns take different forms for the partitive, which from what I can remember is the result of sound change. I seem to recall the some Nahuan languages divide nouns between animate and inanimate which decline more or less the same in most instances, but I think inanimate nouns couldn't be plural.
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Re: (Conlangs) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by shimobaatar »

sangi39 wrote: 25 Oct 2018 16:27 I seem to recall the some Nahuan languages divide nouns between animate and inanimate which decline more or less the same in most instances, but I think inanimate nouns couldn't be plural.
Yeah, inanimate nouns could not be pluralized in Classical Nahuatl, as far as I know, but I believe that most modern varieties allow for any noun to be pluralized.
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