Re: conlang servey

On Thursday 24 October 2002 20:16, Heather Rice wrote:
> Language name, creator's name, realative date of
> creation (just any old number will do), country and
> first language of creator, purpose of conlang
> (auxlang, conlang, loglang, . . . ).
Kélen
Sylvia Sotomayor
1980-ish, though it didn't really take off until the 90s
United States
English
artlang

> Phonetics:  number of consonants, number of vowels,
> presence of nasalization, tone and how many, where the
> accent generally falls.
http://home.netcom.com/~sylvia1/Kelen/writing.html
http://home.netcom.com/~sylvia1/Kelen/phono.html
the exact number depends on whether or not the long sonorants and the
palatalized l & r count as separate phonemes.

the "long" vowels may be high-tone rather than long, or maybe both.

> Morphemes:  presence of allomorphs, mutation,
> assimilation, prefixes, suffixes, infixes,
> suprafixation, dicontinuation, exclusion, total
> fusion, subtraction, reduplication.  Is the conlang
> agglutinating, isolating or fusional?
lots of affixes, mostly isolating with some agglutination & some
fusion. There are approximately 1-4 morphemes per word. Most nouns
are three morphemes, easily analyzed; and relationals are 1-2
morphemes for LA, 1 morpheme for PA, 1-3 morphemes for NI, and 2-4
morphemes for SE, not so easily analyzed.

> Nouns and such:  subclasses of nouns (common/proper,
> abstract, things that may not be expressed explicitly
> in affixes), presence of cases and how many and what
> kind, kind of possession (alienable, inalienable, no
> distinction, etc.) presence of gender, number,
> articles, demostratives, adjectives, quantatives.  Are
> comparatives expressed by affix, word order or both?
> Do pronouns express gender, number, declension?  Are
> there indefinite pronouns, possessed pronouns?
> Others?  Are prepositions bound, unbound?  How many
> prepositons (approximate).  Presence of clitics.  Is
> derivational morphology mostly by compounding words or
> by affix or both?
Nouns come in animate (sg, pl+collective, pl+partitive), inanimate
(sg, pl, collective, distributive/partitive, stative). Though,
collective and stative may be in a separate noun class.

Cases are governed by the relational - there are 16 or so of them,
not all used at once, of course.... They act like prepositions.

No on articles, at least in the main dialect. 4 demonstratives,
adjectives are a variety of noun, except for the various (less than 2
dozen) quantity and location modifiers (all, none, many, in, out, etc)

Pronouns come in personal+ full varieties for
1p-sg/dual/paucal/plural with inclusive/exclusive distinctions for
the dual, paucal, and plural. 2p and 3p also come in sg, dual,
paucal, and plural. Then there are 4 reduced pronouns - 1p, 2p, 3p
animate, and 3p inanimate. Also number & person of agent & patient
can be expressed on the relational NI and number & person of the
source & goal can be expressed on the relational SE.

Possession of body parts and actions (and maybe one or two other
things) is inalienable. All else is alienable.

All words are either nouns or grammar words. Turning a grammar word
into a noun requires adding noun affixes.

> Verbs and such:
> Are person, number, object expressed with the verb?
> Are there static verbs (to be)?  Is the object
> incorporated into the person marker (making a
> phonetically different affix like in the Native
> American languages)?  Is transitivity marked for
> transitive, intransitive, bitransitive or other?  Is
> the person inclusive, exclusive, no distiction?  Kind
> of gender.  Are past, present, future expressed?
> Recent, remote?  Is mode express, what kind?  Is voice
> expressed?  What kind?  Manner?  Aspect?  Please list
> what kinds of manner and aspect the conlang expresses
> in its verbs.  Presence of adverbs, pro-drop.  Can
> nouns, adjectives, adverbs be changed to verbs and
> vice versa?
No verbs.
There are, however, 4 relationals which could be considered copulae.
These are the relational of equivalence, LA, the relational of
partition, PA, the relational of causation, NI, and the relational of
transaction, SE. LA & SE can be "conjugated" for tense, NI & SE can
be "conjugated" for number. PA is always realized as 'pa'.

The tenses are: present generic, present progressive, past, future,
negative, possible, and obligative.

There are approx a dozen or so clausal modifiers that express aspect
and modality. There are also six moods - declarative, interrogative,
imperative, prohibitive, commissive, and exclamatory.

A clause consists of a relational and its objects. The non-topic
object can be another clause.

> Presence of adjective, adverbial clauses and relative
> pronouns.
>
> Sentences:
> Does the conlang have an ergative or accusative
> system?  Word order and is it free or strict?  Are
> adjectives, adverbs and prepositions before or after
> the modified word?  Is the word order changed in a
> question?  How many (approximately) conjugations are
> there?
>
> Other:
> What is the number base for the numeral system (10?
> 12?)?  Presence of idioms, irregular forms of nouns
> and verbs.  Is the language syntax very predictable,
> or are there many exceptions?  How much literature has
> been produced and what kind (I'm not talking about
> translations, but stuff you wrote yourself).  Is there
> a history and dictionary of the conlang?  Script
> invented?  Other conlangs produced by the creator of
> this one.
base 8 with a nod to base 12.
very little current literature.
scripts can be found at
http://home.netcom.com/~sylvia1/Kelen/writing.html
and its links

> If you could summarize your conlang in a sentence,
> what would you write?
If I could summarize it in one sentence, I wouldn't have a language.

That said, I'm still working on the latest reference grammar.

> Anything will probably do.  I'm writing a
> conlanging book, for goodness sakes!  I'm desperate
> for conlangs to write about!
I will, of course, like to see what you've written regarding Kélen
and myself, preferably pre-pub so I can correct any blatant
mistakes.:-) (That, and I might have changed something by then...)


--
Sylvia Sotomayor
sylvia1@ix.netcom.com

The Kélen language can be found at:
http://home.netcom.com/~sylvia1/Kelen/kelen.html

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