Project K

[Corphishy]

Hello everypony. It has been a while since I have made a post here, but I feel like making an official/public outline of this language will help aid its development. I have been working on this language on and off for a couple of years now, and language scraps similar to it for many years more. As an undergrad I attended a conlanging class and created a language called Old Kuoan. It is the proto-form of the lingua franca of my conworld. It is essentially the in-world version of Common translated into English akin to Westron. The main use within my writing project is as a source language for names, places and in-world concepts, however for now I kind of just want to make a language. I have been tinkering with this project since I graduated, but I think writing it out in a thread will help to nail down what it is I wish to add, remove or modify.

The first thing I have done is change the name. Kuoan was just a name from a semi-scrapped language I posted about a while ago. Indeed, during the entirety of that class I did not develop a real in-language name for Old Kuoan. I will instead be using the epithet of Project K or just K, just because I think K fits the vibe of the language, and the eventual real name will start with a K.

The primary goals for now are to update and retool the proto-language, now known as Proto-K (PK). I will then use this to develop multiple daughters including the modern day lingua franca Modern Standard K (MSK). PK has a similar place in the world as Latin, being used throughout the world for academic purposes, but not being understood by the wider population; especially not after all the apocalypse.

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Alright, enough preamble, let’s get into the basics of Proto-K Grammar, starting with phonology.

CONSONANTS
/m n/ m n
/p b t d ts dz k ɡ/ p b t d ts dz k g
/p’ t’ ts’ k’/ p’ t’ c’ kʼ
/f v θ ð s z x ɣ h/ f v th dh s z kh gh h
/w l r j/ w l r j

PK has a moderately large consonant inventory with 27 phonemes. Additionally, /h/ becomes [ʔ] intervocalically and is spelled <‘>.

VOWELS
/i u e o a/ i u e o a

Nothing too crazy.

PHONOTACTICS
max syllable: CCVC

An onset cluster consists of an obstruent, specifically one of /pʼ p b tʼ t d kʼ k g s z/ and a medial /w l r j/ (excluding *Pw clusters). /ŋ/ cannot occur in onset position.

A coda consonant is one of /n p t k s w l r j/. /n/ will agree in PoA with the following consonant.

STRESS
Proto-K has a weight-based stress system. The last heavy syllable in a word receives primary stress. Words which do not contain any heavy syllable default to penultimate stress.

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Well, its 1 AM right now, so I will leave you with this. I will be updating this thread soon with more!

[Isfendil]

MIGHTY phonology, very pleasing to the irrational phonaesthetic in my brain

[Corphishy]

MIGHTY phonology, very pleasing to the irrational phonaesthetic in my brain

Thank you. My main inspirations for phonology are languages like Georgian and afrasian langs. Although when it comes to phonotactics it is much more European. So Armenian, I guess.

[Creyeditor]

Nice phonology, very pleasing to the eye. Looking forward to the phonological processes/allophony/morphophonology.

[Imralu]

/ŋ/ cannot occur in onset position.

... which is unsurprising as it doesn't exist.

[thethief3]

I suppose 27 is big compared to some inventories.

[DesEsseintes]

/ŋ/ cannot occur in onset position.

... which is unsurprising as it doesn't exist.

I laughed.

[Corphishy]

which is unsurprising as it doesn't exist.

Yes I realized this this morning. I had originally included ŋ but then removed it. In fact, I am taking this opportunity to change the phonology a little bit. This incoude the addition of /ŋ/, the deletion of /v ð z ɣ/ and /m n ŋ/ can all appear in coda position.

I suppose 27 is big compared to some inventories.

Using the definition provided by WALS, moderately large consonant inventories have between 26 and 33 consonants. However, now my inventory is 24 consonants large, so itd be considered just average.

I am still working on the nouns and adjectives post. There is a lot to cover: gender, ergativity and other fun/complicated things. Stay tuned, should be posting sometime this week.

[Corphishy]

Alright, so now I will delve more into nouns and adjectives. The two act very similarly so they are generally lumped together.

In Proto-K, there are multiple levels of 'gender' working in tandem with each other. At the broadest level, there is an animacy distinction between animate and inanimate. This does not affect much wrt agreement, but it has a major role in determining ergativity, which I will get into later.

In the animate class, there are 'human' and 'nonhuman' nouns. This has less to do with the actual humanity of the nouns but rather just describes the hierarchy. The 'primary' nouns in each class are people and animals respectively, though nonhuman nouns also include diminutives and collective nouns as well as words like *dzume "child." These two classes also relate to ergativity.

Human nouns contain a sex-based gender distinction between masculine and feminine (which are not ranked against each other in the hierarchy). Nonhuman nouns only contain one gender, known as the epicene gender. In the plural, there is only one animate gender which shares its agreement paradigm with the epicene gender (hence its name). This also means that plural 'human' nouns are treated as nonhuman for the purposes of ergativity.

Inanimate nouns also contain two genders: neuter and divine. Neuter nouns comprise the so-called residue class of Proto-K, and are largely composed of 'concrete' nouns. Divine nouns on the other hand include abstract nouns, collectives, senses, natural phenomena and of course spirits and gods. Inanimate nouns do not make any number distinctions.

These five genders: masculine, feminine, epicene, neuter and divine, are the 'surface genders' in which other words agree. Gender can often be determined via the ending of a word. Here is a handy chart to help.



In addition to this, K nouns agree for three or four cases depending on their animacy (4 for human nouns, 3 for everybody else). These four are: Nominative, Accusative, Ergative and Oblique. For nouns with only 3 cases, the nominative and accusative merge. The first three cases are known as the 'core' cases which are used to mark morphosyntactic alignment. I will get into this more when I make a post about verbs, but for now I will say that ergativity is triggered by the animacy of the subject. For first person, second person, and third person human nouns, the sentence will act 'accusatively' marking the subject with the nominative and the object with the accusative. All other nouns trigger ergativity, the subject taking the ergative case while the object takes the, ahem, "nominative" case. Yes, this does mean that plural human nouns trigger this shift as well. Anyway, have another chart:



Some of these suffixes, particularly the ergative suffix -or is particularly 'tricky' in that it triggers the deletion/mutation of the root vowel. There is yet another set of classes based on the end phoneme of the root, divided between consonant stem, a or e stem, o or u stem, and i stem. For consonant stem nouns, it is a very simple concatenation of suffixes. For the a/e stem nouns and o/u stem nouns, the final vowel is deleted next to -or. For i stem nouns, the final i becomes j and is deleted next to -ju. Here is a chart showing the declensions of multiple nouns to help illustrate this. Note the lack of NOM/ACC distinction for inanimate nouns.



One might wonder why I made a distinction between a/e and o/u nouns when they act essentially the same. This is because their difference becomes a little more noticeable for adjectives. Adjectives agree for gender, but I'm not sure if I want them to agree for case (it would be a pretty easy and boring agglutination of suffixes if so). Here is a chart similar to the one above portraying the different adjectives 'classes.'



As you can see, the -a suffix is rendered as -o in adjectives which end in -u or -o.

Finally, and maybe this is a bit backwards, I wish to discuss the syntax of this language. For one, this language is head initial, with the adjectives coming after the nouns they modify. Sententially speaking, PK has a somewhat free word order, preferring an "SV'' order. The most common word orders are SVO, OSV and SOV (yes, in that order). I will get more into the V aspect of this language next time.