New CBB

Hello, everyone! I'm new to the CBB, but not to conlanging (some of you might recognize my username; I'm an infrequent poster at the ZBB). Gomain is the conlang I've been working on for ten years now(!). Having recently finished redoing the font for the conscript associated with Gomain, I decided to share not only it with you, but also the whole conlang. The PDF of my Gomain grammar is here; additional information on my conscript (the Pékrif) is in this PDF. A current Gomain-English dictionary is located here.

I'm looking for feedback on just about anything right now, so if you have any thoughts on anything, please share them. Thank you in advance!

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HUGE piece of work. :) And I got surprised by the way you use the acute accent to differentiate the lax and tense vowels. It's the first time I see someone not making them as allophones.

The phonology looks pretty European-like though.

You couldn't help yourself to have θ ð, huh? :3

Thanks! The tense/lax distinction comes from an earlier length distinction; the modern tense vowels are the descendants of the long vowels, which got marked with an acute (similarly to Old Irish).

Admittedly, the phonology isn't too exciting. I made (the first version of) it way before I started learning about conlanging and linguistics (via Zompist's online LCK), so the phoneme inventory started out as "English with front rounded and nasalized vowels" (I actually made the first version of the Pékrif before Gomain by making up new symbols for all the phonetic symbols in a 1970s English dictionary, and Gomain's phonology came straight from that). Since then, I've dropped a couple of phonemes, added a couple more, and tried to come up with a reasonable set of sound changes to explain the phoneme inventory. Of course, once you get started with diachronics, it's hard to stop, whether you're working forwards or backwards (as I am); my eventual goal is to back-derive 7-8 older forms of Gomain and its ancestors, all the way up to Proto-Yavian, whence I'll have a much easier time deriving all the other Yavian languages.

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Really??

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constructedlanguages.net

Alife has lax and tense vowels. Some dialects have even evolved ATR harmony.

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"Wait for the starvation of glaciers, chicken hamburger Noel Weber Arthur."

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Well, with the ZBB offline for the time being, I guess it's time to revive this thread.

I've been hard at work on Gomain over the past few months. Here are the highlights of what I've accomplished:

• After Christmas/Birthday #26, I was finally able to get my Pekrif font's OpenType features to correctly display the right contextual forms for each letter in the right places in MS Word, Photoshop and InDesign. (Also, the Pekrif won the ZBB Award for Best Script of 2011! )
• This allowed me to put together a parallel Pekrif-Romanized Gomain translation of the biblical Letter to the Romans, which you can read in this PDF. It's the longest Gomain text I've yet produced.
• Based on feedback from ZBBers, I changed the Romanization for Gomain from marking tense vowels with an acute to marking lax vowels with a diaeresis. Since tense vowels are far more common than lax vowels, the result has been a cleaner look to Gomain texts, since the words are no longer floating in a sea of acutes
• I've re-recorded (most of) my Gomain audio samples for the first time in six years; you can read and listen to them on this page.
• The Gomain lexicon now has over 3000 entries! I haven't yet finished updating the online dictionary into the new romanization, but you can check it out here.
• Finally, I've made a few updates to the Gomain Reference Grammar, including full descriptions of the irregular verb classes and a new pair of 2nd-person formal subject agreement prefixes. You can read about them in this PDF.

My next goals for Gomain are to create and describe a set of discourse particles, as well as to translate the Gospel of Matthew. If there's anything else you're curious about, feel free to ask! As usual, comments/feedback are welcome on anything at all.

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It's awfully quiet in this thread...

Anyway, with the orthography question settled, I've finished updating the reference grammar and all the online samples. I haven't updated the dictionary yet, however, because I'm completely redoing it as a database! I decided it was time to overhaul the online dictionary after looking at Sko's recently-published Vanga dictionary (which BTW is awesome). Since I'm a newb when it comes to PHP, and since it'll take a while to add all 3000+ Gomain words to the new database, it'll be a while before the new dictionary is public.

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Hi!

This is my first post on this forum. (I have been a lurker in the conlang community for quite some time though ...)

Did you know that your conlang is featured in episode 28 of the Conlangery podcast? They usually talk about the featured conlang about half-way through, but I heartly recommend you to listen to all of it (as well as the other episodes).

After skimming through the grammar, I have the following remarks:

• It is interesting that you have an indefinite article, but not a definite one. (This is a violation of universal #1163 by the way.) Implausible, but not impossible.
• I love that your numeral system is base-12! (It is, after all, the best base.
• Frankly, I think you have too many prepositions. You should have the more semantically complex ones be derived from the simpler ones. Also, adpositions usually develop from nouns. Since you seem to be interested in diachronics, why not create some nouns in the proto-language that developed into prepositions in Gomain?
• While your color system is interesting, it seems a bit too specific. I don't know how color terms usually work in agglutinative languages though.
• I like the kinship terms. Younger vs. older sibling is a nice distinction.
• The script seems impressive, but I have not looked at it in detail.

Some things I would like to see:

• Glossed texts (not only isolated sentences) to see the TAM system and the prepositions in action.
• Sound changes in an SPE-ish format from the proto-language to the various dialects, or a list of sound correspondences.
• Maybe reformat some of the sections, especially the ones about derivation. A table listing the various derivational affixes would be nice.

I hope I didn't (subconsciously) just repeat everything they said in the podcast.

Keep up the good work!

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Welcome, and thanks for taking the time to post such a thorough reply!

As a matter of fact, I suggested they recommend it (though, unfortunately, it seems that they read through the outdated HTML version of the reference grammar, which I've been meaning to replace). I've listened to the podcast since its beginning, and there honestly hasn't been a single episode I disliked.

As so many conlangers say, "universals are meant to be broken." More seriously, though, I tend not to put much stock in statistical universals, and the archive's list of counterexamples certainly doesn't make me any more likely to add a definite article to Gomain. (If you're interested, my explanation is that the old definite article was grammaticalized into [most of] the modern case prefixes and analogized onto nouns following the indefinite article.)

I couldn't agree more!

I'm inclined to agree with you on this; as I recall, in the podcast review, Will Annis had the very same critique. Part of the issue has been my not knowing much about "basic" adpositions (and Google is rather unhelpful on the subject) - what makes an adposition basic rather than complex, how many basic adpositions the average natlang has, which adpositions are most commonly basic, etc. I appreciate the diachronic advice, although at this point there really isn't a proto-language yet (I'm just getting started on reconstructing earlier stages of Gomain).

I'll admit that I have a weakness for specificity. The terms for tertiary colors used to be worse than they are - randomly mutated combinations of primary and secondary color terms. At least now, they're regularly derived...

Thanks! I was inspired to add that and other distinctions to the kinship term system after listening to the podcast's episode on kinship systems. I've always imagined Anhrushite society as being very interested in kinship, in addition to being strongly stratified, so the expansive kinship system is meant to fit in with those ideas.

I hope you will!

Are there any particular facets of the TAM system and prepositions you'd like to see demonstrated?

You mean something like a > b / c_d? I've been working on that (as I mentioned above), though I haven't gotten around to posting the sound changes here yet.

A table sounds like a great idea. In what particular ways could those sections be better formatted?

Thank you very much!

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Sorry for the delayed response.

I just thought you should know, if you weren't already aware of it. I agree that conlangs should break some universals (all natlangs do), but not without justification. I think your diachornic explanation justifies it, though If you have access to Describing Morphosyntax by Thomas E. Payne, there is some information about it on p. 87. It says that "the set of basic adpositions in most languages is rather small, consisting of perhaps five or six forms. Other, more complex, relational notions are expressed by complex adpositions bult up out of combinations of adpositions and nouns. English is unusually rich in basic prepositions." The book unfortunately does not list what these basic adpositions usually are. When thinking about prepositions, I usually just draw a box and think about where things can be in relation to that box. For instance, you can have something outside, inside, on top of, under, etc. Then you can also have movement toward and away from these points. In German and Latin, case indicates whether the there is movement toward a given point or something is located at that point. I think the easiest is to have a small set of spatial adpositions that can be extended to have more abstract meanings. For meanings such as 'on top of', 'by means of' it might even be better to translate (semi-)literally from English instead of arbitrarily inventing new basic prepositions.
How does tense work in subordinate sentences and indirect speech? E.g. in sentences like 'He said that they were supposed to have eaten the cake by noon' would tense be relative to the speaker, the present or would it simply follow the tense of the main clause? TAM always confuses me, so I'd like to see how you make it work in practice. Also, I'm curious as to whether you really use all the prepositions.Yes, that was what I was thinking about.
It looks a bit dense. Maybe you should consider using spaces instead of indents (if that is the right word) between paragraphs. This looks a bit messy:

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Sorry for the delayed response.


This is a great idea. Also, having examples outside of the text itself is must better than having them in text. It makes them easier to read and digest.

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Post your random ideas for grammatical features here, and your ideas for random phoneme inventories/phonologies here!

I haven't been able to read it all yet, but I'm very impressed with your reference grammar .pdf. I'm definitely going to be doing some reading over the next few days!

It looks like you have put a lot of time in this, and I'm so surprised it hasn't gotten a lot more attention. Your script is really awesome, by the way..very beautiful.

Oh, and the pdf of your very long Gomain text is very inspiring. You make me want to get my butt to work on my conlangs! Lol

Anyways, very awesome! Thanks for sharing