Re: conlang servey

On Thu, 24 Oct 2002 20:16:11 -0700, Heather Rice <florarroz@...>
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, . . . ).
Language: Tirelat
Creator: Herman Miller
Date: 1999
Country: USA
First language: English
Purpose: time-consuming hobby :-)

>Phonetics:  number of consonants, number of vowels,
>presence of nasalization, tone and how many, where the
>accent generally falls.
Consonants: 23
Vowels: 6
Nasalization: none
Tone: none
Accent: first "long" syllable of a word (i.e., ending in a consonant or a
long vowel), or first syllable if all syllables are short.

>Morphemes:  presence of allomorphs, mutation,
>assimilation, prefixes, suffixes, infixes,
>suprafixation, dicontinuation, exclusion, total
>fusion, subtraction, reduplication.  Is the conlang
>agglutinating, isolating or fusional?
Tirelat is mainly agglutinating, with fusional elements in the verb
conjugation system. Person/number agreement on the verbs is expressed by
prefixes; everything else is suffixes.

>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 are categorized as countable vs. uncountable; inherently possessed
nouns are a subcategory of countable nouns. Tirelat has six genders of
nouns; adjectives (including numbers) agree in gender with the nouns they
modify. Cases of nouns: nominative, accusative, locative, dative,
comitative, oblique. True adjectives in Tirelat include words describing
quantity (such as numbers) and identifying one or more nouns from a larger
group (words like "first", "last", "left", "right"). Other concepts
expressed by adjectives in languages like English are expressed by stative
verbs in Tirelat.

>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?
Basic verb structure:
person/number + root + derivational suffixes (voice, causative, etc.)
   + mode + evidential/tense + negative/question + aspect
Verbs fall into three categories: stative, dynamic, and transitive. Stative
verbs are comparable to adjectives in English; dynamic verbs represent
motions and actions without an object. Word order is VS with stative verbs,
SV with dynamic verbs, and SVO with transitive verbs. Most intransitive
verb roots end in -i or -u, transitive verb roots in -a, and bitransitive
verb roots in -e, although there are exceptions.

Modes include intentional (I want to read a book), deontic (I have to go
now), optative (I wish I had more time), potential (I can speak Tirelat),
conditional (if you seek a pleasant peninsula), and imperative (walk!).

Probably the most unusual feature of Tirelat is the fusion of evidential
and tense. For instance, "-li" is the "hearsay, past tense" suffix, while
"-ma" is the "hypothetical, non-past tense" suffix. Use of this combined
evidential/tense suffix is obligatory on the main verb of a sentence
(except in highly informal contexts).

Aspects are pretty straightforward: perfective -n, imperfective -z.

>Presence of adjective, adverbial clauses and relative
>pronouns.
Relative pronouns follow the word described, and the part after the
relative pronoun has a pronoun referring back to the described noun; i.e.,
"the house that Jack built" ends up as "house that Jack built it".

>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?
Nominative/accusative. Word order can be varied for poetic usage or
emphasis, but is fairly consistently SVO (except stative verbs as noted
above, which are VS), adjective-noun, prepositional phrases after the
modified word. Word order in questions is unchanged (except that words like
"what?", "where?" come at the beginning of the sentence).

>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.
Numerals are base 12. Thus far I haven't used the language for much other
than translations. Tirelat has its own script and a font for it.

A few other notable conlangs:
Lindiga -- my newest language, still in the very earliest stages of
development.
Jarda -- the language I spent the most time with before Tirelat.
Ludireo (and its predecessor, Eklektu) -- a language with its vocabulary
collected from diverse languages from around the world.
Chispa -- language of Mizarian rat-people.
Olaetian -- my first conlang, begun sometime around 1978-1979.

>If you could summarize your conlang in a sentence,
>what would you write?
Quoting my web page: "Tirelat is a personal language with a complex
history, begun in the spring of 1999."

--
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