New CBB

Hello CBB,

It is a pleasure, although mildly intimidating, to be here. I'm an aspiring conlanger and have been stalking these and ZBB boards for a few weeks now as I began my first conlong. My knowledge in linguistics is incredibly limited and so I thought I'd suck it up and post here to see just how much damage I had done.

I've constructed a phonology based primarily on what sounds I found aesthetically pleasing and have started attempting morphology.

I'm interested in ensuring everything I've done so far actually works, and will gladly accept any advice, corrections or suggestions you're willing to give.

Anyway, here goes. Aylæs aka “Væirian” is the language predominantly spoken on the largest island off the coast of Criax; “Væir”. The term “Væirian” was coined by Criaxians; however, native speakers of the tongue refer to it as “Aylæs”.

Phonology

Aylæs has very few consonant phonemes — only twelve: /p t k m n f v s l ɹ h dʒ/ <p t k m n f v s r l h j>. All Aylæs plosives are aspirated and are realized as [pʰ tʰ kʰ] in all environments.

Aylæs has one semi-vowel: /j/ <y>.

Aylæs has 6 vowel phonemes, counting diphthongs; there are no long vowels in Aylæs. They are /u i e ɑ ɑɪ̯ eɪ̯/ <u i e a æ ay>. Diphthongs are limited due to the inability to form double vowels within the same syllable. The only legal diphthongs are: /eɪ̯ ɑɪ̯/

Consonants
/p t k m n f v s l ɹ h dʒ/
p – /pʰ/, an aspirated voiceless bilabial plosive (as English pack).
t – /tʰ/, an aspirated voiceless alveolar plosive (as English tick).
k – /kʰ/, an aspirated voiceless velar plosive (as English kiss).
m – /m/, a bilabial nasal (as English him).
n – /n/, an alveolar nasal (as English nice).
f – /f/, a voiceless labiodental fricative (as English fill).
v – /v/, a voiced labiodental fricative (as English valve).
s – /s/, a voiceless alveolar sibilant (as English sand).
l – /l/, an alveolar lateral approximant (as English let).
r – /ɹ/, an alveolar approximant (as English red).
h – /h/, a voiceless glottal fricative (as English help).
j – /dʒ/, a voiced palato-alveolar affricate (as English jump).
Semi-Vowels
/j/
y – /j/, palatal approximant (as English yet).
Vowels
/u i e ɑ ɑɪ̯ eɪ̯/
u – /u/, a close back rounded vowel (as English boon).
i – /ɪ/, a near-close near-front unrounded vowel (as English sit),
e – /ɛ/, an open-mid front unrounded vowel (as English best),
a – /ɑ/, an open back unrounded vowel (as English calm),
æ – /ɑɪ̯/, diphthong (as English sky).
ay - /eɪ̯/, diphthong (as English day)

Stress
The stress in Aylæs is usually on the first syllable. The stress is weak, most words appear evenly stressed.

Phonotactics
Aylæs syllable structure is (C)(s)V(s)(C). There are no constraints on what single consonants or vowels may appear, so C is any consonant and V is any vowel with "s" representing the semi-vowel, though it can act as a lone vowel in some instances. Each vowel is pronounced separately; diphthongs do not form between vowels. Vowels cannot be consecutive within the same syllable, nor can consonants, should they appear it denotes a separate syllable (eg. Væir is pronounced [vɑɪ- ɪɹ]. The suffix “-ian” utilized by Criaxians would denote 2 syllables to a native Aylæs speaker: [ɪ-ɑn]). When a consonant is followed by a semi-vowel the semi-vowel is assimilated by the consonant (eg. <Vyæss>[vɑɪs-s]).

Running along with the “each vowel must be pronounced separately” rule, t here are no silent “e’s” within Aylæs: all final “e’s” must be pronounced.

Morphology

Aylæs is a fusional language, utilizing single affixes to denote differences in plurality, possession and tense. Inflections are placed on nouns. Tense and plurality are denoted via prefix; however, if possession is implied then the affix becomes a suffix.

Nothing = singular, present
A- = singular, past
U- = singular, future

Si- = plural, present
Sa- = plural, past
Su- = plural, future

-i = singular, present, possessive
-a = singular, past, possessive
-u = singular, future, possessive

-is = plural, present, possessive
-as = plural, past, possessive
-us = plural, future, possessive

Examples:

Væ = spirit
A-væ = past spirit
U-væ = future spirit

Si-væ = spirits
Sa-væ = past spirits
Su-væ = future spirits

Væ-i = spirit’s
Væ-a = past spirit’s
Væ-u = future spirit’s

Væ-is = spirits’
Væ-as = past spirits’
Væ-us = future spirits’

Pii atam tay sijir.
Pi-i Ø-atam tay Ø-sijir
1s.POS-PRS PRS-son be PRS-warrior
My son is a warrior.

Pii Uatam tay Usijir.
Pi-i u-atam tay u-sijir
1s.POS-PRS FUT-son be FUT-warrior
My son (who is not yet) will be a warrior.

Pii Aatam tay Asijir
Pi-i a-atam tay a-sijir
1s.POS-PRS PAS-son be PAS-warrior
My son (who is dead) was a warrior

Pia Aatam tay Asijir
Pi-a a-atam tay a-sijir
1s.POS-PAS PAS-son be PAS-warrior
My ex-son (who is dead) was a warrior

Personal Pronouns inflect just as other nouns do to denote plurality, possession and tense.

1st Singular - Pi
2nd Singular - Mu
3rd Singular - Ra

When transforming a verb into a noun ie. “cut” to “cutter” the verb does not stand alone, rather it is merged with an existing noun to give further meaning, it cannot stand alone and in this amalgamation the noun always precedes the verb.

Mepu v cut, slice, hack [mɛpʰu] + Ys n wood, forest [js] = Ysmepu n woodcutter [jsmɛpʰu]

Siva v eat [sɪvɑ] + Væ n spirit, soul [vɑɪ] = Væsiva n spiriteater [vɑɪsɪvɑ]

Syntax

Aylæs contains no definite or indefinite articles (no “the”, “a”, or “an”), the sense of a noun is determined from the context in which it appears.

Sentence structure is Subject-Verb-Object. Aylæs avoids subordinate clauses and uses possessive construction instead (e.g. Instead of “The book that Saren wrote is on the table”; “Saren’s book is on the table”).

Within the noun phrase adjectives precede the noun:

Ke fal
Ke Ø-fal
small PRS-house
The small house

Numbers for counting follow the noun:

Ke Sifal siya
Ke si-fal siya
small PRS.PL-house two
The two small houses

Questions are marked statements. In asking a question to which one assumes they know the answer the speaker states their expectation followed by “yæ”. I In forming a polar question the statement is followed by “yæ” and the verb is repeated once more denoting a yes or no answer. In forming content questions “yæ” is utilized as an interrogative pronoun or particle which can take tense. As “yæ” can serve as who, what, where, when or why its meaning is inferred by the context of the conversation as well as word order.

Mui atam tay sijir yæ?
Mu-i Ø-atam tay Ø-sijir yæ?
2n.POS-PRS PRS-son be PRS-warrior Q
Your son is a warrior, yes?

Mui atam tay sijir yæ tay?
Mu-i Ø-atam tay Ø-sijir yæ tay?
2n.POS-PRS PRS-son be PRS-warrior Q be
Is your son a warrior?

Mui atam tay yæ?
Mu-i Ø-atam tay yæ?
2n.POS-PRS PRS-son be Q
Your son is what?*

Further examples of content questions demonstrating word order:

Ayæ mepu Mui atam?
A-yæ mepu Mu-i Ø-atam?
PAS-Q cut 2n.POS-PRS PRS-son
Who stabbed your son?

Mui atam mepu Ayæ?
Mu-i Ø-atam mepu A-yæ?
2n.POS-PRS PRS-son cut PAS-Q
Your son stabbed who?

Sijir tay yæ?
Ø-Sijir tay Ø-yæ?
PRS-warrior be PRS-Q
A warrior is who?

Yæ tay sijir?
Ø-yæ tay Ø-sijir
PRS-Q be PRS-warrior
Who is a warrior?

*If talking about a son’s occupation: “yæ” acts as “what”, if in a marketplace trying to point him out it would serve as “who” or “where”, etc.

Conjunctions are implied by juxtaposition.

Pi Mepu Alasi Ara sumun
Pi-Ø mepu a-lasi a-ra sumun
1s-PRS cut PAS-lasi 3r.PAS die
I cut (the) lasi** (and) it died

**a “lasi” is a forest deer.

Orthography

The Aylæs alphabet has 18 letters: five vowels, twelve consonants and a semi-vowel. The diphthong /eɪ̯/ does not have its own letter.

Romanization: <p t k m n f v s r l j h y u i e a æ>.
IPA: /pʰ tʰ kʰ m n f v s ɹ l dʒ h j u ɪ ɛ ɑ ɑɪ/.

Numbers:
The Aylæs numeral system is based on ten different glyphs. To any below the sijir caste “saru” simply serves as “nothing”, however the concept of zero and infinity being one and the same is a central feature to sijir philosophy and thus can serve both roles.

saru - zero, infinity
alu - one
siya - two
tepe - three
palu - four
tayas - five
juru - six
fatu - seven
runi - eight
laris - nine

Hi and welcome.

I'll comment some later.

_________________
♀♥♀
Dotjen
Kotanese

Hello and welcome.






Then there seem to be at least two diphthongs - eɪ and ɑɪ.



A little note: orthographic representations (spellings) is usually written in <angles>, to separate it from phonemic representations in /slashes/.

_________________
constructedlanguages.net

Hi, Cassandyr!

EDIT: Ack, I have been ninja'd by Xing! Some of my comments are now redundant.

Your weeks of lurking show; this is definitely ahead of the usual "I have no knowledge of linguistics but here is my first conlang" curve. I don't have too much to comment on yet, but here are a few notes:

Your presentation of your phonology is currently somewhat confusing because of a notational error. Phonemes should be put between /slashes/, while graphemes should be put between <angle brackets>, and phones should be put between [square brackets]. You should never have one kind of brackets inside another kind, as in /ay [eɪ]/.

Graphemes are the symbols that you use to represent phonemes in your orthographic transcription (i.e., how you spell them). In your presentation, you use slashes for both phonemes and graphemes, which is very confusing. For example: in General American English, <shy> is pronounced /ʃaɪ̯/. In Aylæs, <j> represents /dʒ/ and <y> represents /j/. So, here:


The slashes make this inaccurate. /y/ is not a semivowel—it is a front closed rounded vowel (found in French and Mandarin). Also, unless I misunderstand, Aylæs does not in fact have the vowel /æ/, which in General American is the vowel in <cat>. What I'm pretty sure you meant to say was:

This brings me to another point of confusion, where I'm not actually sure what you intend. You say that:

1) Aylæs has only one legal diphthong, /eɪ̯/.

2) The phoneme written <æ> is an open front unrounded vowel...

3) ...or /ɑɪ̯/ as in English <sky>.

These cannot all three be true. /ɑɪ̯/ and the vowel sound in <sky> (which is /aɪ̯/) are diphthongs. An open front unrounded vowel is indeed written /æ/ using IPA, but that's the sound in General American <cat> and <plan>.

What I'm guessing you meant is that Aylæs in fact has two diphthongs, so its full vowel inventory is:

/u i e ɑ aɪ̯ eɪ̯/
<u i e a æ ay>


My last thought on phonology: this starts creeping into more advanced concepts, but phonemes (which are the things that go between /slashes/) have a lot to do with what phonological distinctive features your language recognizes. When you are giving a phonemic transcription, you should only indicate the distinctive features of those phonemes. If you want to give extra detail to show exactly how words are pronounced, then you're giving a phonetic description, which should go in [square brackets].

I mention this because of your consonant inventory:

/pʰ tʰ kʰ m n f v s l ɹ h dʒ/

Aspiration is clearly not a distinctive feature in the language, because you have no two phonemes that differ only in aspiration. (On the other hand, voicing is a distinctive feature, because you have the phonemes /f v/.) For this reason, you don't need to indicate the aspiration on your plosives in phonemic transcriptions. It may be the case that in almost all environments, Aylæs plosives are pronounced with aspiration, but since the aspiration isn't distinctive (or "phonemic"), you should only indicate it when giving a phonetic transcription in [square brackets].

The difference between "phonemic" and "phonetic" is somewhat tricky when you first come across it, so feel free to ask if that still seems muddy.

That's all I have to say about the phonology at this point.



Whoa, hold up! It looks like you're marking tense on nouns. That is very interesting! You should definitely devote some time to explaining what it means for a noun to be in past tense versus present or future tense. Don't forget to give examples!


I look forward to seeing more! Keep up the good work!

_________________
任何事物的发展都是物极必反，否极泰来。

Hello, thanks for the welcome. :)


Thanks!


Aha! I was wondering about that but I confused myself into thinking if I made it a "letter" it wasn't a diphthong. Thank you for pointing that out.



Thank you both for clarifying that. I'm still trying to break myself into recognising the differences between phonemes and letters. Now I know what a grapheme is this process will be much easier. A question on graphemes; do they also encompass digits and punctuation or do they solely serve to represent phonemes?


Hello! It's nice to meet you all.

It's alright, it just makes it clearer for me.

Well that is nice to hear, unfortunately my self teaching has been more practical than technical so I'm afraid as jargon is introduced I may begin to fall back.


Yes! You got my meaning exactly. Thank you for the in depth fix.

I think I was (and possibly still am) confused by the meaning of a diphthong. To clarify and ensure I've got this, a diphthong then is two vowel phonemes within the same syllable that meld into one.... phoneme? Is that the right wording? My dictionary is not very consistent in its usage of terms.


Well, it was quite thorough so thank you very much. I do wish I could respond further to this than I am about to, however, I will be honest the difference between phonemic and phonetic even with a dictionary to aid me is still pretty clouded. I would greatly appreciate any insight you can shed on the subject.


Yes! That was intentional. An example is a good idea. That would be the easiest way to see if this works.

Take the sentence "I want popcorn".

"I-present want popcorn-future" would then imply what it sounds; I would like to have some popcorn in the future.

"I-present want popcorn-past" would then imply I presently have just had popcorn and would like some (more).

"I-present want popcorn-present" would infer that I want popcorn now (and possibly am making it).

At least theoretically I'm hoping it works out like that. Please feel free to call me out if it doesn't, it'll save a whole convoluted mess. :P

That was as far as I got, however, as I became a bit confused as to the effect nominal (correct use?) tense would then have on verbs and on pronouns, such as if "I-past want popcorn-past" would then imply the same as "I wanted popcorn" and whether or not that would nullify the need for verb tense. My knee jerk assumption was that conversation would not be so formal as to maintain tense on pronouns anyway, but I'm not likely well versed enough in linguistics to make that assumption. Anyway, I got that far and decided I'd see if it was working or not before I went and made any rash decisions about how to deal with the rest of the language.


Thanks! I hope to do so.

Yep, graphemes include numerals, punctuation marks, Chinese characters, Japanese kana...


No worries! I basically got all of my training in linguistics from self-study and conlanger boards (and at this point I can hold my own in conversation with linguistics professors and researchers). Wikipedia is a great resource for terms you're unsure about, and a willingness to ask questions is worth a metric ton in gold.


Diphthongs are where you have a transition between two vowel qualities within one syllable. For example, in my dialect, <chaos> is /'keɪ̯.ɑs/. The word has two syllables; the "cha" and the "os." The first syllable has a diphthong, because it glides from /e/ to /ɪ/ without a syllable break. However, it is not a triphthong, because the /ɑ/ is in a separate syllable.

So yes, you're using the right wording, except that diphthongs are not necessarily phonemes; it's possible to have a phonetic diphthong that is not a phonemic diphthong. But more on that below.


I think part of the trouble people have with the phonetic/phonemic issue is that it's something of a mind-trip. You have to discover that what you perceive of reality is actually preprocessed; what you hear and what is actually there differ in vital and predictable ways.

Here's a common exercise to help it make sense.

Hold your hand in front of your mouth and say "Pit." Then say "spit." Notice that when you say "pit," you feel a puff of air against your hand, but when you say "spit," you don't (or at least, you feel less of one).

This difference is because when you say "pit," you make an aspirated p [pʰ], but when you say "spit," you make an unaspirated p [p]. Most English speakers aren't aware of this difference—they both sound like the same sound. Or if they are aware of it, they probably think of them as two "versions" of the same sound. And if you look at the language itself, you won't find pairs words that are exactly identical except that one has an aspirated p while the other has an unaspirated p. If you pronounce "spit" with aspiration on the p, it will still sound to other English speakers like you're saying the same word—it'll just sound kind of funny, like you're trying to spit while saying "spit."

On the other hand, if you're speaking Mandarin Chinese, it's a completely different issue. There are tons of words that are exactly identical except that one has an aspirated sound where the other has an unaspirated sound. If you say [pʰí], you're talking about criticizing someone. But if you say [pí], you're being extremely offensive.

To a Chinese speaker, [pʰ] and [p] don't sound like two versions of the same sound; they sound like completely different sounds, as different as [f] and [v] sound to English speakers.

So. A phone (which is what we're talking about when we say "phonetic") is any sound that is objectively different on a mechanical level. [p] and [pʰ] are different phones, because one has aspiration and one doesn't.

But a phoneme (which is what we're talking about when we say "phonemic") is an abstract notion of a single distinctive sound for a particular language.

All of the phonemes in any language will actually include many, many different phones. All of the phones which are bundled under a single phoneme are called allophones. So in English, [p] and [pʰ] are both allophones of the phoneme /p/. But in Mandarin, [p] and [pʰ] are not allophones, because they belong to different phonemes.

There are a lot of tests you can do to figure out whether two phones are actually different phonemes in a particular language. (Another way to say this is "whether the difference between the two phones is phonemic." Aspiration is not phonemic in English, but it is phonemic in Mandarin.) One of the more intuitive ones is to just ask speakers (or for conlangs, imagine asking speakers) whether the two sounds seem like different versions of one sound or two different sounds (or whether they can hear the difference at all). A stronger, more scientific approach is to search the language for "minimal pairs," which are pairs of words that are exactly identical except that one is pronounced with phone A, while the other has phone B. If you can find a lot of these, then phone A and phone B are different phonemes.

So earlier when I said that it's possible to have a phonetic diphthong that isn't a phonemic diphthong, I meant that sometimes (e.g., when people are talking really fast) they may pronounce things mechanically as diphthongs even though diphthongs don't really show up distinctively in the language.

Does that make more sense?



Ooooh. This is a very interesting system. I would definitely want to see more details, to try and work out what general patterns are at play. Some questions I would ask:

How does the meaning change if you use the same structure with different verbs? For example, does anything interesting happen if you replace "want" for "eat" or "like" or "make" in the examples above?

Is there a correlation between particular parts of the meaning and the grammatical role that the tense is marked on? For example, is it possible to talk abstractly about what (subject)-PRESENT (verb) (object)-PAST would mean? (Maybe, "The subject has just finished doing the verb to the object and plans to continue"? Does this pattern hold for many different verbs and nouns?)

It sounds, at first glance, that this is a kind of aspect system. Would definitely like to see more of this!

_________________
任何事物的发展都是物极必反，否极泰来。

How would it work with other verbs? Like "Peter stabs John"?

What would be the meaning of the following sentences:

Peter-FUTURE stabs John-FUTURE
Peter-FUTURE stabs John-PRESENT
Peter-FUTURE stabs John-PAST

Does tense have to be marked on both subject and object? Is any combination of subject-tense and object-tense possible?

What about ditransitive clauses, like "Peter gave Mary a lollipop?" Can or perhaps must tense be marked on both "Peter", "Mary" and "lollipop"? What about nouns following an adposition? Like in "Mary drives to the town"? Would tense be marked on both "Mary" and "town"?

I think there are at least two different kinds of "nominal tense" that I am aware of. First, there are expressions like "ex-wife" and "bride-to-be", that refer to someone or something who either used to be or do, or will be or do something. This kind of nominal tense does not take away any of the work of verbal tense marking, but complements it. You can still say "my ex-wife drove to the town", "my ex-wife drives/is driving to the town", and "my ex-wife will drive to the town".

Then there is what may be called "clausal nominal tense", where the kind of tense that typically, at least in a language like English, marked on verbs, is marked in nouns instead. For example, in this sample sentence it's marked in the first word of the sentence, which happens to be the noun:

Peter.PAST stab John - "Peter stabbed John"
Peter.PRES stab John - "Peter stabs John"
Peter.FUT stab John - "Peter will stab John"

_________________
constructedlanguages.net

Good to know, that helps. Thank you.


Excellent so wikipedia is reliable then? That's good. I was using it before but was uncertain how much trust I should put in it.


Yes! It does! Thank you for the explanation, that was really in depth. I'll be certain to save this so I can ingrain it.

Alright so going back to the inventory and applying the difference between phones and phonemes.

What I think you're saying is when displaying my consonant inventory it isn't necessary to indicate whether or not /t/ is pronounced [tʰ] as it is uniform across all related plosives and so by indicating aspiration when there is no unaspirated plosives it would mean I was transcribing phones instead of phonemes for a phoneme inventory? However, assuming that Aylæs did recognise a difference between the two then I would transcribe them?

So then depicting aspiration would only come into play when explaining how to pronounce <tal> I'd then display it as /tʰɑl/, is that correct? (also testing if my understanding of slashes, brackets and angles is correct, sorry if I seem slow I don't like moving on until I'm certain I won't misapply it in the future)

If I've got that right, you mention voicing is a distinctive feature because speakers of Aylæs differentiate between the voiced [v] and unvoiced [f] is there more I should be doing when transcribing those phonemes to indicate that or has IPA already got me covered?


Alright I’ll run a few examples to see if it maintains consistency. Word order is SVO as was made apparent, there are no articles.

I-present eat meat-present (I am eating meat)
I-present eat meat-past (I “have eaten”/ate meat)
I-present eat meat-future (I will eat meat)

The subject is predominantly present tense, unless they cannot *be* present ie. If the subject is dead they would be spoken of in past tense, if the subject is not born yet they would be future.

Let me try an example in Aylæs. “My son will be a warrior”

My (singular, present, possessive) son (singular, future) (will be) is (a) warrior (singular, future)

My – pi
Son – atam
is – tay
Warrior – sijir

“Pii Uatam tay Usijir”

I suppose this means in practice the tense moves completely from the verb and onto the respective nouns so verbs would always be written as present tense. Running with the same example to describe a dead son who was a warrior...

"Pii Aatam tay Asijir" “My son (who is dead) was a warrior”

So the complication that arises is that even the slightest inflection can alter the entire meaning of the sentence, for example if "pi-a" is used for past possessive it becomes:

“Pia Aatam tay Asijir” “My ex-son (who is dead) was a warrior”

This isn’t really a problem as I’m trying to condense as much information as possible into the affixes; however, it is something that will take time getting used to for a layman as myself. I suppose I need to keep playing with these examples to see if there are any impossible constructions that may result. "My ex-son who is not born yet is a warrior" comes to mind. But that would just be mixing tenses without purpose akin to “I’d going to the store tomorrow”. I'm unsure how to address that. Hrm.


Okay, that’s a good question. I think I may have inadvertently answered it above in reply to Trailsend,

If the subject is future then they do not exist yet. So in the first example you’d be saying “Peter (who is not yet) will stab John”, in the second example “Peter (who is not yet) stabs John”, and in the third “Peter(who is not yet) stabbed John” I may be making a mistake. I find it confusing trying to sort these sentences out in English so I’ll have to lapse into Aylæs to check… Mepu is the closest to stab with "cut or hack" so:

Upeter mepu Ujohn “Peter who is not yet born will stab John”

Upeter mepu John “Peter who is not yet born stabs John”

Upeter mepu Ajohn “Peter who is not yet born stabbed John”

Yes. Okay so the second two would be impossible sentences to construct. Is there a way of phrasing rules that would help avoid people doing so? Or was that caused by my foolishly giving the popcorn example in English?


Yes. Um, such as in this example:

“Pii Uatam tay Usijir” "My son (who is not yet) will be a warrior"

"Pii Aatam tay Asijir" “My son (who is dead) was a warrior”

“Pia Aatam tay Asijir” “My ex-son (who is dead) was a warrior”

Since singular present has no inflection at all in Aylæs you could say that unless denoting possession, tense or plurality the subject would largely be unmarked but it'd be safer to just state that it is always marked.


As your examples displayed - no they wouldn't always be possible within English. I'm going to need to try running a few example sentences through all the affixes to see if that holds for Aylæs.


Oh wow, I'm afraid I don't know what a ditransitive clause is. Tense would be marked on all of them in relation to what the sentence needed to convey. This is also the part where I admit I haven't decided how to tackle prepositions yet. The word "to" has utterly defeated me. As for tense in the second example, it would be placed on both Mary and town, as would possession and plurality.


This is very useful to have, thank you. I believe I'm utilizing both forms, perhaps I need to define clearly when each is applicable.

Since it's not distinctive, it's often easier to just write <t> /t/ [t] in all situations, but making sure that you note somewhere that Aylæs plosives are aspirated. Unless you have some allophonic rules that result in /t/ being realized as [tʰ] in most situations but [t] in some situations, indicating it would just be a hassle.



This is correct--however, /f/ and /v/ should be between slashes since they are phonemes.



This might be a bit too much to digest at the moment, but it's often easier for others to understand your morphology and syntax if you follow 'standard' glossing rules found here.

For example, using a sample sentence provided above:

Pii Uatam tay Usijir.
pi-i u-atam tay u-sijir
1s.POS-PRS FUT-son be FUT-warrior
My son will be a warrior.



This is a simplified explanation, but:
Intransitive clauses are clauses in which the verb takes one argument: He is walking.
Transitive clauses have a subject and direct object: He hit me.
Ditransitive clauses have a subject, direct object, and indirect object: He gave a present to me.

Remember that your conlang doesn't necessarily need a direct translation for the word 'to', or even have prepositions at all. Many languages use case marking to denote subject (nominative case), direct object (accusative case), and indirect objects (varies, often dative). Maybe you differentiate the three by using a different set of tense prefixes for each.

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力在公蝦米????

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In general, the linguistics articles on Wikipedia are reliable. It never hurts to confirm things in multiple places though, especially since there are differing views on a lot of issues in linguistics.


More or less. If you tell me that /tʰ/ is a phoneme, then I think that aspiration is a distinctive feature in the phonology, which means that /t/ (specifically without aspiration) would have to be a phoneme as well. But that is not the case.

So what you want to say is that your phoneme inventory is /p t k/, and they are realized (= pronounced) as [pʰ tʰ kʰ] in all environments*.

You can compare this to English's inventory, which is /p t k/ because, although these phonemes are often realized with aspiration, this difference is not phonemic. On the other hand, Mandarin's inventory is /p pʰ t tʰ k kʰ/ because the presence or lack of aspiration is phonemic. The aspiration has to be mentioned in the phonemic inventory because it is a distinctive feature of phonemes.


Correct! Except that you wanted square brackets there:

The orthographic transcription of the word is <tal>. This is how you spell the word "normally," when you aren't talking about phonology.

The phonemic transcription of the word is /tɑl/. This, in some sense, is how speakers "hear" the word. This transcription provides enough detail to tell the word apart from all the other words in the language, but unless you know the particular allophony rules for the language, it doesn't tell you precisely how to pronounce the word.

The phonetic transcription of the word is [tʰɑl]. This tells you the precise details of how the word is actually pronounced.


This...sounds a little strange, and makes me think that English may be influencing your thinking about this more than you want. There's nothing about verbs that says they have to have tense. If you mark your tense exclusively on nouns, then it isn't the case that "verbs would always be written as present tense"; your verbs don't have tense at all. Or are you just talking about how you gloss the language in English?

("Glossing" is a more technical way of "literally translating" something from one language into another. There are standardized ways of doing it that provide people who know how to read glosses with a lot more detail about how a language works.)


It's often quite possible to grammatically say things that don't make any semantic sense; Chomsky's famous example is "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously." Ideas can't really be green, and even if they could, it doesn't make sense for something to be both green and colorless, and even if it did, ideas can't sleep, and even if they could, nothing can sleep furiously. And yet the sentence is quite grammatical in English. So it isn't really a problem that your grammar rules make it possible to say things that don't make sense.

However, you do want to keep checking back with your design principles. If Aylæs is intended to actually be used for daily communication, then you want to consider the powerful force of efficiency that drives natural languages. People will not exert useless effort; if a structure or other paradigm doesn't provide useful information, then it will eventually collapse.


* Note that this is a little peculiar. It's very abnormal for a phoneme to always have exactly the same realization; usually, you get different phones depending on neighboring sounds and other factors. (For example, the /p/ in English <spit> is realized as unaspirated [p] because it comes immediately after /s/, and the /p/ in <pit> is realized as aspirated [pʰ] because it is the onset of a stressed syllable.) However, working out what all the allophones of the different phonemes are and when they occur is a more advanced process—most conlangers put that off until later on, and many beginners just skip it entirely.

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任何事物的发展都是物极必反，否极泰来。

Understood. Thank you.

Woops.


!! That is exactly what I was looking for! Thank you so much, that is an amazing resource.

That helps, thank you. I guess I'll need to do some research into the varying sentence structures to ensure I can portray, or at least convey their information.

That is an interesting point. With my verbs freed up of tense would it be possible to attach an affix that served as a preposition? EDIT: I have been informed my perception of verbs as the domineering conveyors of tense was incorrect.

Haha, yes I'm discovering that more and more. Are there any other useful online resources to "balance" Wiki?

That is beautiful. Thank you. I'm going to save this explanation as well.

Aha! Alright, you're correct on both counts. I was referring to how I gloss the language in English, however, my misunderstanding about tense and verbs came from the fact that I was referred to a doctor of linguistics through a series of friends and favors to ask about potential noun tense in languages, they told me that was a contradiction in terms, but did give several examples in Tagalog and Greek of "de-verbal nominal constructions that carry some tense/aspect with them, as well as plurality and case". I suppose I misinterpreted his dislike for the idea.

So yes, I was confused about that, but I was primarily referring to how it literally translated in English.

Understood, that is good to know. Thank you Trailsend.

I see. Well that is good to keep in mind. How does this carry over with the whole "Aylæs can't have 2 consecutive consonants in the same syllable" rule? I'll be honest the main reason I went for universal aspiration was because I assumed as they wouldn't be assimilated (correct term?) by prior consonants my plosives would lead the respective syllable they were in. But even if that is wrong it isn't a big deal I will look into working out different allophones and phonemes later anyway because I'm far from done with the language. I had originally only started it to try and devise a naming language but then discovered I was having fun with it, so I won't likely be stopping any time soon.

"Traditional" tense-marking, as found in a languages like English - pertains to the clause as a whole. If we take a clause like "Peter stabs John" , the tense-marking (which in English and many other languages is put on the verb) applies to the whole clause, or the event (the stabbing) it refers to. The tense-marking tells when the stabbing takes place (at the moment of the utterance, some time in the past, or in the future). The task of such traditional tense-marking is not (primarily) to give any information about the participants of the events (Peter or John, the subject and object).

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constructedlanguages.net

You can find a lot of great papers via Google Scholar. A lot of them get very, very technical though, so what worked for me was to start with Wikipedia, figure out what the terms meant, and then read bits of academic papers at a time (reading one all the way through would burn out my brain). Gradually I accumulated the background I needed to tackle full papers at once. (A key trick here is to only look at papers on things that you personally find really really interesting. They're already pretty dry, so if you aren't excited about the topic you're just needlessly torturing yourself.)


Xing covered this pretty well. In terms of where tense is marked, though, there's certainly attested cases of tense marking on nouns.

To clarify the point I was making: verbs, by virtue of being verbs, are not inherently tensed crosslinguistically. In Mandarin, for example, you don't mark tense on verbs, so it wouldn't make any sense to say that the verb 去 is somehow "inherently" present tense. It has no tense whatsoever.

In terms of how you do the gloss, most linguists will use a bare "lemma" form of the word for the English gloss, even when the verb does mark tense. For example, from Spanish:

comí
com-í
eat-1.PAST
I ate.

Note that the stem of the verb is glossed as eat, even though the verb is conjugated in past tense.


Ah, that is the related but separate issue of phonotactics.


Ha! Don't you love it when a project grabs you and refuses to let go?

There are tons of conditioning factors besides adjacent consonants that can cause phonemes to be realized as different allophones. For example, in General American English, /t/ and /d/ are both realized as [ɾ] when they occur between vowels and before an unstressed syllable. (If you speak General American, listen carefully to how you pronounce <latter> and <ladder> in rapid speech.)

Also, consonants can be conditioned by adjacent vowels. For instance, in my main WIP, /ʃ/ is realized as [ʂ] when followed by /a u o/ and [ʃ] when followed by /e i/.

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任何事物的发展都是物极必反，否极泰来。

I am impressed by this thread.

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I am not responsible for the accuracy of my sources; they're responsible for their own mistakes, if any, and also responsible for defending their own statements if you disagree with them.

I know, right?? Newbie of the year!

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任何事物的发展都是物极必反，否极泰来。

Yes, and I've also been impressed by the advisors' posts.

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I am not responsible for the accuracy of my sources; they're responsible for their own mistakes, if any, and also responsible for defending their own statements if you disagree with them.

Hmmm. That is good to know, I think English was affecting my perception of tense quite drastically. I'll have to pay special attention. Thank you for the explanation Xing.


Alright, I'll do that. Thanks. I have a few papers from SIL that I was weeding through to try and figure out how to devise an orthography for an unwritten language.


Alright, that makes sense. It may take a while for me to pick up on what the correct lemma forms of words are to use. But you did say "most" so perhaps it isn't required?

I suppose I'll try updating the opening post with glosses and morphology. I hope I get this right.


Understood.


It is quite... exhilarating. I would never have thought constructing a language could keep me so excited as to make me unable to sleep. Surprising doesn't do it justice, though, I am loving every minute of it.


That is useful, I'm unsure if I'll tackle allophones yet, but it is good to know. Thanks.

I feel like I'm missing out on some great pronunciation trick here. I suppose I'll have to bribe some American friends into using latter in a sentence several times.


That's cool. At first I was curious how it would work but your example makes a lot of sense. It also seems... dare I say, natural? I suppose a laymans insight is rather useless, but it does inspire me to attempt some of this within Aylæs as it shows complexity serving a purpose beyond mere complexity.


Everyone has been incredibly polite and in depth in their help. It's unusual on the internet, though certainly not unwelcome, and greatly appreciated.

:) Breaking out of my English brain was one of my main motivations when I got into conlanging. I remember talking with someone about a project I was working on that had seven tenses, and they responded, "But everything happens in the past, or the present, or the future! That's just the way time works!"



A general rule in glossing is that you should fudge the gloss according to what you're trying to show. Here's an extreme example from my WIP:

Take the two words:

lukkàorhxáxkoshokwkw, the meat is over the fire
lukkàorhkúxkoshokwkw, the meat was put over the fire

If I wanted to gloss them in highest-possible detail, it would look like this:

lukkàorhxáxkoshokwkw
l<u-kk<ào>rh-x-á-xk;o-sh<o>kw>kw
place<LEADING-fire<ABLATIVE.INAN>-STAT-INTRANSITIVE-meat;INAN.SG-space_above<LOC.INAN>>
the meat is over the fire

lukkàorhkúxkoshokwkw
l<u-kk<ào>rh-k-ú-xk;o-sh<o>kw>kw
place<LEADING-fire<ABLATIVE.INAN>-PRFV-CAUSATIVE-meat;INAN.SG-space_above<LOC.INAN>>
the meat was put over the fire

Which is a little bit , right? But what if I'm just trying to use these examples to explain how causatives and intransitives work in the language? Then all of this detail is not actually helpful, and it's just going to distract people from what is actually important in the example. So I can do something like this:

lukkàorhxáxkoshokwkw
lukkàorh<xá>xkoshokwkw
there_is_meat_over_fire<STATIVE.INTRANSITIVE>
the meat is over the fire

lukkàorhkúxkoshokwkw
lukkàorh<kú>xkoshokwkw
there_is_meat_over_fire<PERFECTIVE.CAUSATIVE>
the meat was put over the fire

Notice how I collapsed all the information from the first version into the lemma. The "true" lemma for this word is the base root, l*kw, place/located. But in the second version, I pretended that the root was actually lukkàorh*xkoshokwkw, which means something like there is meat over the fire.

So for your glosses, if you really want to separate out as much detail as possible, a good rule of thumb for lemma forms is to get the barest form of the English word you can find. For verbs this is typically the one you find in infinitives (to eat); for nouns it's typically the singular form. But, you can also collapse things onto the lemma to better focus on the specific feature you're actually talking about.


Looks great! I only see one thing amiss: the second and third lines of your glosses should always have exactly the same number of hyphens.

Pii atam tay sijir.
Pi-i atam tay sijir
1s.POS-PRS PRS-son be PRS-warrior
My son is a warrior.

The second line has only 1 hyphen, but the third line has 3. So the gloss is telling me that the word atam should be segmentable into one piece meaning PRS, and one piece meaning son. But the second line doesn't show me what that segmentation is.

It looks like the problem is that your present marking for non-pronouns is actually to leave the word unmarked, right? For future you would add u-, for past you would add a-, but for present you add nothing at all.

There are a couple of ways to deal with this, but it looks to me like the best one to use in this case is the "null" symbol, Ø, which linguists use to represent nothing. So the gloss would look like this:

Pii atam tay sijir.
Pi-i Ø-atam tay Ø-sijir
1s.POS-PRS PRS-son be PRS-warrior
My son is a warrior.

Now all of the hyphens match up, and I can quickly see that the "present" form of nouns is unmarked.


Phonotactics is a little easier to handle than allophony because it typically deals just with phonemes rather than specific allophones. It's also more important early on in the sense that it guides how you actually build words. Allophony you can totally put off until later, because you can still invent words even if you don't know exactly how to pronounce them. But phonotactics governs how you put those words together in the first place.

(Granted, it's perfectly possible to put off the phonotactics as well. I still, after several years, can't give you a clear answer about the phonotactic restrictions in my WIP. I just have a sense of what words look like they fit in the language and what words don't—the way dobble looks like it could fit in English, but ngibr doesn't. One of these days I'll sit down and actually translate those impressions of mine into clear phonotactic rules, but that day is not today.)





Good call. Allophony is a bottomless rabbit hole of potential detail; you could go in and never come out. (For some conlangers, phonology and phonetics are their favorite parts of conlanging, so this is precisely what they prefer to do.) Fortunately, having no or minimal allophony sketched will almost never cause problems for you as you develop the morphology or syntax of the language.


Ha! My coworkers had to get used to getting lots of weird questions from me. The trick is that you can't just say "Hey Bob, say 'ladder'!" because now you've primed his pronunciation. You have to trick him into saying the word without actually saying it yourself. "Hey Bob, strange question. What do you use to climb up on a roof?" "Hey Bob, fill in the blank: It's not the former, it's the..."

What dialect do you speak?


One of the benefits of allophony for actual conversation is that it builds in informational redundancy. This isn't something that people consciously think about, but because sounds condition nearby sounds, we have a much easier time correctly hearing words even in noisy environments. (The "source-filter theory" of speech production even suggests that what we really use for information exchange is just vowels, and how those vowels have been modified by other sounds.) If we're in a crowded room and one of your consonants gets blurred by noise, my brain is so good at recognizing patterns that it can use what it heard of the nearby sounds to work out what the blurred sound must have been—and all of this happens so quickly, I don't even consciously notice. It just sounds to me like you made the sound my brain thinks you must have made. Brains are really cool.


It helps when the person asking for help has done their own research in advance, is open to feedback, and asks good questions about the information they receive

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任何事物的发展都是物极必反，否极泰来。

Hahaha, that is an amazing quote. Though I'm quite certain a couple of weeks ago I'd have said the same thing.







Just... a tad. That is quite the intense language. Are you conveying entire sentences within singular words?



That does help target my glossing approach. So, how would I denote questions then? The glossing rules I'm reading say:
"Q - question particle/marker" so following my syntax would I gloss like this?



Mui atam tay sijir yæ?
Mu-i Ø-atam tay Ø-sijir yæ?
2n.POS-PRS PRS-son be PRS-warrior Q
Your son is a warrior, yes?

Mui atam tay sijir yæ tay?
Mu-i Ø-atam tay Ø-sijir yæ tay?
2n.POS-PRS PRS-son be PRS-warrior Q be
Is your son a warrior?

Mui atam tay yæ?
Mu-i Ø-atam tay yæ?
2n.POS-PRS PRS-son be Q
Your son is what?

Does that work? I suppose I should check if my syntax rules work first, huh? Hrm. I'll edit the OP.



Ah, okay so the hyphens need to match, that is useful. Thanks for the null symbol that will prove incredibly handy. I was testing glosses earlier and kept getting confused with denoting PRS without an affix. That helps a lot. Thank you.

I must admit I am a bit confused as to the periods (Or full stops I guess) within the glossing. Is this the correct usage?

Ke Sifal siya
Ke si-fal siya
small PRS.PL-house two
The two small houses

The glossing rules were a bit murky to me.



Haha, well you're obviously far more versed in linguistics than I am. I wouldn't want to think of what would happen to my conlang if I didn't transcribe it all. Dobble. I like that word.

On a potentially related note I'm finding as I pronounce certain terms I have a tendency to alter the pronunciation of [j] when preceded by /l m n/ to more of a [ɪ] (or perhaps it is when followed by /s/?). Looking them up that means its changing around nasals and a lateral (or a sibilant)? Would that be a case of allophone or am I just not abiding by my own language rules strictly enough?

Examples are; <Ilys> from [ɪl-js] to [ɪl-ɪs] and <Lamys> from [lɑm-js] to [lɑm-ɪs]



Eh, well it seems depending on the above, I may have accidentally stumbled into said hole earlier than intended. >_>;;



That is quite a sly method. I'll be sure to remember that.

Oh boy, my dialect... I imagine its a mangled mix of Philippine/American/New Zealand English. Though to be perfectly honest I have no idea.



Haha, that is cool. Is that related to "mishearing" as well? Our brains misapplying a pattern?

:) My favorite thing about learning different languages is the way they teach me to put ideas together in different ways, and not take concepts for granted.


Hah! Thanks. There are many natural languages that are even worse. (In general, languages that can say in a word what takes a whole sentence in English are called "polysynthetic". A lot of conlangers try their hand at a polysynthetic language at some point, probably because they're often quite different from English.)

One of my favorite words in Feayran (<-- my WIP) so far is from a myth I'm working on:

Nawiwàosjikásnoòzudùisnite.
I will fetch the waters from (the house of the sun) and deliver them to you, elder.


Ooooh, that is also fun! I kinda want to bunny trail and ask you more questions about these structures (What do you mean when you say content questions always put <yæ> after the verb functioning as object? How would you ask questions like Who is a warrior? or Who stabbed your son?), but to first answer your question, yes, these glosses look beautiful. You caught on quick!


This gloss tells me that the <si> prefix on <sifal> indicates both that the noun is in present tense, and that it is plural. If that's correct, then this is perfect!

Periods only appear in the third line of the gloss (which is called the "metalanguage"). They indicate that a particular morpheme is fusional, which means that one morpheme gives you multiple pieces of information. Again, looking at the Spanish example:

Comí.
com-í
eat-1.SG.PAST
I ate.

The hyphens line up correctly, so I can see that the morpheme <com-> means eat, and the morpheme <-í> means 1.SG.PAST, i.e., first person, and singular number, and past tense. Because those three pieces of information are all contained in a single, unsegmentable piece, they're connected with periods.

Compare that to these two examples from English:

painted
paint-ed
paint-PAST

ate
ate
eat.PAST

<painted> is segmentable—it is composed of two distinct morphemes, <paint-> and <-ed>. That's why you separate them with hyphens, and each gets translated in the metalanguage.

But <ate> is not segmentable. You can't split off the piece that means "past tense." The word is a single morpheme that means "eat" and "past tense" together. So, in the metalanguage you connect the two pieces of information with a period. Does that make more sense?


Nice! Like everything else, this is entirely up to you. If you like that difference, you can make it an allophony rule (it's a perfectly valid one). Or if you don't, you can try to train yourself out of it.

(Notation fix: You would want to say, "I have a tendency to alter the pronunciation of /j/ when preceded by /l m n/ to more of a [ɪ]." You want slashes around that /j/ because you're talking about how you actually pronounce an underlying phoneme.)

So your rule would be:

/j/ is realized as [ɪ] when preceded by /l m n/. (If the same thing happens when it's proceeded by /r/, then you could just say "/j/ is realized as [ɪ] when preceded by a sonorant consonant.")




Shiny!


Exactly!

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任何事物的发展都是物极必反，否极泰来。