Davush wrote: ↑21 Mar 2018 18:48
How do you all organise your lexicons? Do you memorise words as you go along or make a conscious effort to learn vocabulary in your conlang? Do you look up words in a lexicon when creating examples or translating? I am finding this quite frustrating as I will often forget words, or forget I have created a word, and end up with 5 synonymous or near-synonymous words. ((This can sometimes be a good thing for adding quirky nuances, though). I also don't have the time/energy to actually 'learn' my conlangs, which makes creating examples using more than 10 core words laborious. I find Excel depressing and dull, but it is probably the most efficient way of managing a lexicon. Does anybody use any other programs/methods?
I don't even try to memorise anything when it comes to conlangs because my brain is already getting enough natlangs mixed up. Sometimes I end up "learning" certain words or grammatical features of my conlangs, but that's never intentional. I just write all the rules down in an .rtf file along with a huge disorganised mess of vocabulary. I always
try to organise them somehow, usually either alphabetically or in some kind of thematic way (animals, bodyparts, etc.), usually with derivatives like antonyms and whatnot below, but that's not that important because ctrl+f exists.
So, basically, I have lists like this:
[word in the conlang] - [English translation(s)]
Random example that isn't from any of my actual conlangs:
luh - cold, cool, frozen
mole - tortoise, turtle
nūnā - happiness, joy, enjoyment, fun, etc.
binūnā - sadness, depression, boredom, etc.
oba - pizza
obanūnā - the taste of pizza and the good feeling derived from eating it
luhoba - cold pizza that no one wants to eat
Parlox wrote: ↑22 Mar 2018 04:25In my conlang Manchi, stops have a five way distinction. Voiceless, voiced, voiceless aspirated, breathy voice stops, and prenasalised stops. How realistic is this, and what should i change?
Doesn't seem unrealistic to me. What DesEsseintes said is one option, but another one would be to give the prenasalised stops aspirated counterparts as well; that's close to what
Wa has, although with the exception that it doesn't have plain voiced aspirated stops. Some stuff on Hmong says it has voiceless/voiced±aspirated±prenasalised stops, but other stuff (like
the Wikipedia article on Hmong) only mention the voiceless ones having prenasalised aspirated counterparts, while the voiced ones are either prenasalised or aspirated but not both; however, on
another article on Wikipedia only the voiced ones are implied to occur as prenasalised aspirated, so I don't know... I guess it simply means that voicing isn't distinctive in the prenasalised aspirated stops.
Theoretically, you could even have prenasalised preaspirated stops, but that's getting kinda ridiculous since AFAIK no language has those (and there are no results on Google for ʰⁿt, ⁿʰt, etc. or "prenasalised preaspirated", etc.) and they'd most likely simply be clusters of /h/ and a prenasalised stop, a nasal and a preaspirated stop or a (pre)aspirated nasal and a (prenasalised/preaspirated) stop, because how else would they really be articulated? Still, no one is stopping anyone from going crazy with phonemes like /ʰᵐp ʰⁿt ʰᵑk/, especially if giving them phonemic status was simply a matter of convenience, eg. if the language's phonotactics didn't permit other clusters and/or the nasalisation was phonetically on the preceding vowel, etc.
Anyway, if you like your phonology just the way it is and think adding prenasalised aspirated stops and/or preaspirated stops would make it worse, there's no reason to add them.