Welcome Elisas_001! What you have so far looks great — and quite different to what we normally have on this board — so I’d encourage you to keep on working on it. I do have some feedback on what you’ve done so far, though. In particular:
Elisas_001 wrote: ↑Sun Jan 05, 2020 2:12 pm
Premise/Background
Everything was once "one" big combo of energy and matter which then split, a la Big Bang. Different flavors of energy and of matter now make up a "physical world" and a "spiritual/energetic world" and shards/souls which remained intact enough hold dominion over the other, smaller pieces which are similar to them -> these are the gods and their domains.
Most conworlds on this board tend to be more Earthlike, but what you have here looks very interesting. It would be particularly fascinating to see an in-depth treatment of this concept (à la
Ik'Thulu).
Goals
- I wanted a very simple phonology and was interested in getting a Polynesian sound, but a little harsher.
- I wanted an agglutinative language where some core ideas and concepts could be easily combined to express other ideas
- I wanted to have a lot of control over how perception, time, certainty are described, as well as ways to express the sense of completeness/isolation/part of a whole. All of these concepts seemed like they might be foremost in the main speakers' minds
As with your world, these goals look unusual, but very interesting. As you have noticed, that last point requires a lot of granularity in tense, aspect and mood, which you have already begun to describe. You may want to investigate
Ithkuil, which has a very similar goal.
Phonology
Vowels
| Written | Pronounced | English Exampled |
| a | ah | saw |
| e | ay | say |
| i | ih | big |
| o | oh | mow, sew |
| u | oo | moo, glue[/cell |
| y | ee | glee, tea |
Consonants
p,b,d,t,g,h,l,m,k,glottal stop (')
In general, this is not the best way to describe a phonology. The main problem is that, depending on the accent of the speaker, they will pronounce your given example words in different ways. For instance, I pronounce
moo as a central vowel, whereas many other English speakers pronounce it as a back vowel. I would
highly encourage you to learn
IPA, so you can unambiguously describe your phonemes. For now, here’s my best guess as to what your sounds actually are, and which letters they correspond to:
⟨p t k ʼ⟩ /p t k ʔ/
⟨b d g⟩ /b d g/
⟨h l m⟩ /h l m/
⟨a e i o u y⟩ /o e͡i ɪ ə͡u~o͡u u i/
It’s worth noting that this is a
very unusual phonology… for instance, it’s very rare to have /l/ as your only approximant (most languages have /j/ as well), or /h/ as your only fricative, and it’s
extremely unusual to have both of those at once. (
Pirahã does come close, but that language
is considered to be pretty weird.) The vowel system also seems very unusual, although a more fuller discussion of that will have to wait until you give proper IPA values for the vowels.
Verbs are conjugated for tense by adding a tense suffix to the end of the verb, directly after the stem.
| Tense Relative To Present | Continuing | Simple | Perfect |
| Far Past | -oga- | -oma- | -oha- |
| Undetermined/Intermediate Past | -ogi- | -omi- | -ohi- |
| Immediate Past | -ogo- | -omo- | -oho- |
| Permanent Present | -ego- (never was) -ega- (always is) | | |
| Now | -ege- | -eme- | -ehe- |
| Fleeting | -egi- | | |
| Immediate Future | -ago- | -amo- | -aho- |
| Undetermined/Intermediate Future | -agi- | -ami- | -ahi- |
| Far Future | -aga- | -ama- | -aha- |
I’ve always had a fondness for languages with more than three tenses — it’s nice to see someone else exploring this area! It would be nice to see a fuller discussion of the situations where each tense is used. I would note though that ‘continuing’, ‘simple’ and ‘perfect’ are in fact
aspects rather than tenses in linguistics, despite the way ‘tense’ is traditionally defined in English grammar. Given your goal of describing as many nuances of perception as possible, it would be interesting to have more than three aspects as well.
Verbs are given a mood by adding a mood suffix directly after the tense suffix. These can convey the speakers perception of the events in terms of certainty that a thing has/will happen or their desire for it to happen.
| Verbal Mood | Suffix | English Implication |
| Potential | -gi | That may happen/ That may have happened |
| Belief | -ga | I think that will happen/ I think that happened |
| Probable | -ha | That probably will happen/That probably happened |
| Unprobable | -ho | That probably did not happen/ That probably will not |
| Desire | -hu | I hope that happens/She hopes that is what happened |
| Conviction | -la | I know that happened/ They know that will happen |
| Positive Certainty | -le | That definitely happened |
| Negative Certainty | -lo | That definitely did not happen |
| Uncertainty (Lacking Conviction) | -lu | I’m not sure that happened |
What you call moods here are actually
evidentials.
Mood is different, although equally fascinating, and given the type of language this is, I would add some moods too.
Reflexive/Imperative
This can be created by adding a pronoun as a prefix to the verb. Imperatives will often have the desire (-hu) or the conviction (-la) mood as well as the immediate present tense (-eme-), if no other tense is important to meaning. An exception might be an order for something to be completed in the far future. Example (speaking to a singular listener): uk-STEM-ahala -> uk’oahala (you will have done…)
Your first sentence here is a little vague — can you give an example please? As for the imperative, many natlangs have a special affix for that (often as part of their mood system); you might want to consider doing that.
________
Now, your word order. It seems you have a couple of questions about this, so I’ll do my best to try and answer them:
Elisas_001 wrote: ↑Sun Jan 05, 2020 2:32 pm
But then things started getting weird. I wanted to try something with adverbs and have them only exist as adjectives which modified the actor.
I’m not sure how you would do this. In a sentence like
You will go there tomorrow, the adverb
tomorrow is not modifying the actor (i.e.
you) in any sensible way; instead, it is modifying the action. Some highly agglutinative languages manage this by making adverbs into affixes attached to the verb; see below for more details on this.
Yellow daffodils nodded gaily
Gehotahelage'idiu babomoga
geh-otah-hela-ge'-idi-u bab-omo-ga
yellow-spring-flower-with-happy-PL nod-PSTSMP-PERCEIVED
So the -ga implies that the speaker is projecting happiness onto the daffodils as they nodded.
I don’t understand how this follows. Earlier in your description you describe -ga as meaning ‘belief; I think that will happen’. So surely this sentence would actually mean ‘I think yellow daffodils nodded gaily’?
ge' is used to suffix adjectives onto the end of a noun to describe how the noun is acting, otherwise adjectives are glommed onto the front of the noun stem (and I've yet to establish a specific order). Is that too much?
Personally, I do think this is too much. In fact, I think it is quite unplausible to ‘glom on’ adjectives to the noun like you describe here. Not even the most highly agglutinating languages in the world do this. If adjectives are separate words to nouns, then why would a speaker use a construction like
gehotahelageʼidiu ‘yellow-spring-flower-adj.joiner-happy-PL’ over the conceptually simpler
geh otahelau geʼ idi ‘yellow spring-flower-PL adj.joiner happy’?
(On the other hand, given the existence of
noun incorporation, I’m not going to rule this out entirely. Of course, one of the motivations of noun incorporation is that an incorporated noun has different semantics to a non-incorporated noun, so you could consider doing something similar for your ‘adjective incorporation’.)
I recited twice.
Ekitibi'omokomole
ek-iti-bi'-omok-omo-le
1S-two-times-spoke-PSTSMP-CERT
I figured instead of having ek hang out all on it's own when there was nothing else it would get attached to the verb, thoughts?
This is very, very normal. In fact, almost all agglutinative languages do this. Generally, what happens is that the verb has an affix showing what person its subject is. This is called
agreement For instance, here’s a random example from a grammar of Bororo I happen to be looking at:
- io-rɨdɨ-re
- 1s-see-neutral
- Maria
- Maria-referent
- jarɨji
- yesterday
I saw Maria yesterday.
Here, the verb ‘rɨdɨ’
see has a personal affix
io- ‘1s’ attached to it. If the subject had been Maria, the verb would instead have a ‘3s’ agreement marker to agree with the third person subject. Often, languages with personal agreement are
pro-drop; this means that if the personal affix is there, the subject pronoun is dropped as it is now redundant. This can be seen in the Bororo example; it’s also what you did in your example above.
(Another related phenomenon is
polypersonal agreement, which is where the verb agrees with two or more of its arguments. This is pretty interesting, and you may want to look into it)
Then I was like, wait, how do I show repetition. I could put a number down then affix it onto the verb with the multiplier bi'. But again, I'm worried this is becoming over complicated and illegible.
Basically, I really like the agglutinatve aspects of this language and I like trying to fill the adverb role in a different way, but I'm not sure how manageable it is in it's current form OR how on earth I'm going to deal with more complicated sentence structures and clauses. Also, I don't really know where to start because I'm new to this. Ideas, critique and suggestions are so incredibly welcome.
On adverbs, there are basically two approaches:
- Have adverbs as in English, separate from the verb. This is what the vast majority of languages do. I would recommend doing this.
- In some very, very agglutinative languages (called polysynthetic ones), the verb has a set of affixes which can convey adverbial meanings. For instance, Koasati has affixes like -mááli ‘in the same manner’, which can give you words like ááthimááli ‘[the cypress also] gives fruit in that same manner’.
And as for extreme agglutinativity/polysynthesis: you should really, really have a look at the
polysynthesis thread from the old board. It could give you a lot of ideas as to how agglutinative languages actually work, how they express the same concepts that you’re exploring here, and possibly some ideas on what to add to your language.
And by the way: despite my criticisms above, I do think this is one of the most interesting starts to a conlang I’ve seen! Your goals in particular look very different to those of most conlangs, and I will be looking forward to seeing how you achieve them.
