Re: New language under development

On Fri, 27 May 2005 16:46:40 +0300, Julia "Schnecki" Simon
<helicula@...> wrote:

>Hello!
>
>This week I went to a one-day course which was about 50%
>interesting/relevant to my work and 50% boring; and I've been involved
>in a project that required about 10 minutes of enthusiastic scripting
>and several days of watching the script process a ton of files and
>occasionally pressing the right key... so I've had lots of time to
>think and doodle.
>
>Long story short: I've started working on a new conlang, and this one
>looks like it could actually go somewhere. :-) (All my other, er,
>embryonal conlang projects consist of a phoneme system *or* some
>syntax patterns *or* some morphology *or* whatever; this one has a
>phoneme system, some assimilation phenomena, and what I hope to be a
>solid base for a morphology. Yay. I figure the syntax will come along
>later.)
Sounds like a good start.  Good luck! :)

>Since I've had Nahuatl stuck in my head for a week, this as of yet
>unnamed conlang started out as a Nahuatl clone, and then I made some
>desperate moves to transform it into something different and original.
>;-)
I think that's a good thing. :P

>I hope I'll find some time on the weekend to put my scribbles and
>notes into some kind of order... here are just a few random points:
>
>
>- phonetics: six vowel phonemes (/i/, /E/, /@/, /a/, /O/, /u/) and
>oodles of consonants. My original phoneme system had an amount of
>consonants that any Pacific-Northwestern (is that a word?) language
>would be proud of; now I'm trying to get that amount to below 30 or
>so, possibly lower. I'll probably spend at least part of the weekend
>playing with assimilation and dissimilation phenomena, in order to
>reclassify some of those consonant phonemes as allophones of something
>else...
Any phonemic or allophonic vowel lengthening?

It seems like /@/ and /a/ could have arisen partly from allophony.  Same
with /i/ ~ /E/ and /u/ ~ /O/... plus there may have been some earlier
diphthongs that were smoothed.  Lots of possibilities, from an internally
historical linguistics point of view. :P

>In any case, I'm planning to stick to my original four main places of
>articulation (bilabial, postdental/alveolar, palatal, velar/uvular). I
>probably won't have either /h/ or /?/ at all... well, maybe as
>allophones of something, but nothing more.
Any ideas yet for the contrasts within articulation points?  Voicedness,
glottalization, etc.?

>I haven't decided yet whether or not to have phonemic length. But even
>if I can't make up my mind now, I guess it's something that will come
>to me once I get around to making up some actual morphemes, and
>morphophonemics starts to happen... ;-)
Damn, you answered my question already!  Hehe...

>I'm sure, though, that I won't have phonemic tone. Or ablaut or vowel
>harmony, for that matter.
What about sandhi?

Oh, oh... what about... umlaut?!

>I've also come up with a number of assimilation rules for vowels.
>Basically, when a high vowel (/i/, /u/) and a non-homorganic non-high
>vowel meet, the place of articulation of the non-high vowel moves
>closer to that of the high vowel (e.g. /a/+/i/ -> [Ei];
>/i/+/O/ -> [i@]). I hope to be able to find some simple rules to
>describe this; I'd hate to have to list all possible vowel pairings
>separately... -- Also, interesting things will happen to consonants
>adjacent to an assimilated vowel... I hope. ;-)
Labialization and/or palatalization?  Phonemic or phonetic?

>- morphology: Reading up on Nahuatl was what triggered this explosion
>of linguistic creativity in my mind; so, as I mentioned, I started out
>with the idea to have a morphology similar to that of Nahuatl, but not
>too much so. I eventually decided to keep some of the good stuff
>(person agreement all over the place; and of course that old favorite,
>noun incorporation) and change the rest.
Subject and object affixes on verbs?

>The first, radical step away from having a Nahuatl clone was the
>decision to use mostly suffixes instead of mostly prefixes like in
>Nahuatl. ;-)
>
>I also added the concept of noun classes (I'm thinking of something
>Bantu-ish -- or rather, something along the lines of animate-male,
>animate-female, plus a number of nonanimate classes like those found
>in Bantu languages). This means that, like in Bantu languages, some of
>the things we achieve in "standard average European" languages with
>derivational morphemes will happen by inflecting a noun stem with
>affixes from a noun class that's not its "own, natural" one. (Of
>course, in a language that does this extensively, most nouns probably
>wouldn't have their "own, natural" class. But you get the idea.) And I
>hope I'll end up with a system that allows the forming of (at least
>some) deverbal nouns by simply adding an appropriate noun class's
>inflectional affixes to a verb stem. ("Writer" would be the verb stem
>"write" with affixes from one of the animate classes; "book", "pen",
>"literature" etc. would be the same stem with various appropriate
>nonanimate class affixes.)
>
>I have some doodles about number and case categories, but that's all
>still very sketchy. I mean, even sketchier than the rest. ;-)
>
>I do have some ideas on person categories -- basically, besides the
>usual 1st and 2nd persons, 3rd-person agreement will probably pretty
>much boil down to noun class agreement, and 3rd-person pronouns will
>bear a suspicious resemblance to demonstratives.
>
>But so far I have no thoughts whatsoever on verb morphology (tense and
>such), or on syntax, and I don't have a single morpheme or lexeme
>either (not much sense in making up a lexicon before one has a proper
>phoneme system). And I haven't decided on lots of other things... But
>then again, at least there are scripts to generate as many morphemes
>and lexemes as I need... which gives me more time for the other things
>that *can't* be generated by scripts. :-)
Scripts can only do so much, though.

Finally, what... about... accentuation?  Stress or pitch?  Free or fixed?

>Oh well. After the weekend I hope to have more...
Likewise. :)

- Rob

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