Re: Q (Caucasian Elf)

Jörg Rhiemeier writes:

> Danny Wier <dawier@...> writes:
[Q phonology clipped]

> Whoah!  128 consonants, 132 if one also counts the local variants!
> (Unless I have mis-counted, of course.)  AFAIK, no natlang has that many
> consonants.  Not even Ubykh, which had 80 or so.  I wonder how they
> write them.  LOTS of diacritics?  Must look cool!
Actually, the language with the most consonants is !Xu~, a Khoisan language,
with 95.  But 48 of them are clicks, leaving 47 non-clicks.  The UPSID list
of largest consonant inventories of living languages (Ubykh is now extinct),
from Larry Trask in an article on Basque and Nostratic:

1)  !Xu~ (Khoisan) 95
2)  Lak (North Caucasian) 60
3)  one dialect of Arabic (Afro-Asiatic) 56
4)  Panjabi (Indo-European > Indo-Aryan) 59
5)  Kabardian (North Caucasian) 48
6)  Haida (Na-Dene) 46
7)  Nazahua (?) 45
    Shilha (Afro-Asiatic) 45
9)  Irish Gaelic (Indo-European > Celtic) 6
10) Igbo (Niger-Congo) 43
    Tlingit (Na-Dene) 43
12) Sui 42
13) Otomi 41
14) Hindi-Urdu (Indo-European) 40

Most of these include palatized, geminate, lenited and other altered
consonants.

> Another question: how did Q evolve, and in which time?  I take it that
> the Q Elves are the result of fairly recent Soviet genetics
> experiments.  When is the "present" of your conworld?  Does the language
> predate the experiments, and if yes, who spoke it?
The humans mutated into Elves between 1950 and 2000, vaguely.  They came
from many locations, tongues and ethnicities, mostly in Siberia and the
western half of North America.  After the mutation, they were forced to
become nomads, but their interconnectivity (via the Internet by the way)
allowed them to develop their own culture, including their own language.
Bear in mind that they are highly advanced intellectually, and their
language reflects that, in phonology and other elements.

Most of the Elves lived in the Caucasus region and came in contact with
Chechens, Daghestanis, Kabardians, Georgians, Armenians and Ossetes.  They
studied the languages of the region and came up with a secret language of
their own.  At first "Q" was unwritten (and in fact may not even had a real
name, so I just call it "Q" for now); attempts of adapting Cyrillic, Latin
and possibly Arabic.  There is no standard script, but the Elves are leaning
more and more towards the Georgian alphabet.  They may have developed their
own version of Kartuli script, resembling the old two-case Khutsuri script
instead of the modern one-case Mkhedruli writing.

Starostin's reconstructed phonology for North Caucasian is very large,
especially if you include secondary features such as labialization,
"gemination" (which becomes pharyngealization/"emphasis" in Q), palatals,
ejectives, aspirates and so on.

> I see that this language has fairly little to do with what we are used
> to see as "Elvish" since Tolkien.  There's nothing wrong with that, of
> course.  Feel free to invent what you feel right, that is what
> conlanging is all about after all. Regarding my own "Elvish" languages,
> I prefer sticking closer to Tolkien.  I use a mixture of Tolkienian,
> Indo-European, Kartvelian, "Old European" (apparently non-IE roots
> occuring in several European IE languages, such as *abal "apple"), and
> freely invented roots, and the languages sound similar to Tolkien's.
> Here, for comparison, the phoneme inventories of Proto-Quendian and
> Nur-ellen:
I'm trying to imitate Tolkien as little as possible.  The mutant races, both
Elves and Orcs, are closer to human than those in other concultures, and can
have offspring from humans which in turn can have children of their own (in
other words, they're not sterile like mules are, though half-Orcs are
pejoratively called "mules").

In my underworld conculture based in Antarctica and many islands throughout
the globe, the "pimps" are typically Human, while "thugs" are Orcish and
many prostitutes (the "hoes") are generally Elven and Human.  But many of
all three races gave up their life of crime and joined the Australian
Legion, the main rebel camp against the tyrannical Covenant empire spanning
the whole Western Hemisphere.

Georgian just happens to be one of my favorite languages, though I don't
know it well.  As y'all can easily tell, many of my conlang projects involve
large phonologies with the "holy trinity" of stops/affricates found in
languages from Navajo to Georgian to Korean: voiced, voiceless aspirate,
voiceless glottalized/ejective.

Yes, I did read your phonology; the seven vowel system of Nur-ellen is a lot
like my nine vowel system of Tech (my other conlang-in-progress with a bunch
of consonants but based on Afro-Asiatic and Nostratic), and also Q if you
ignore short-long vowel distinction.  My canonical nine-vowel system:

With diacritics, may not come out right with some e-mails:
i ü u
e ö o
a ä å

ASCII-friendly version:
i  u" u
e  o" o
a  a" a.

A diaeresis or umlaut above a, o and u indicate fronted vowels, while a-ring
(a-period in ASCII) is a rounded a.  Another variation of my nine-vowel
square replaces front rounded vowels with central unrounded vowels:

i  i- u
e  @  o
ä  a  å

This just happens to be the same nine vowel qualities of Thai and Middle
Korean.

I could also combine these two systems to make an eleven-vowel chart, and
even add a twelfth vowel: low front rounded.

Danny Boy


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