Conlang Random Thread

[chris_notts]

The Conlanger’s Thesaurus has this to say on the subject:

The range of senses between “and” and “but”can be divided into six senses, (1) sequential combination, “I shopped and came home,” (2) simultaneous combination, “she sang and danced,” (3) atemporal combination, “I shop here and they shop there,” (4) appositive contrast, “I bought a book, but my sister bought CDs,” (5) corrective contrast, “I didn’t buy a book but a CD,” and (6) counterexpectative contrast, “I bought the CD, but don’t like the band.” Each of the senses except (3), atemporal combination, may have an individual conjunction. Normally, the six senses are partitioned up,with contiguous senses having the same word, such as Hausa kuma covering 1–5 and amman for 6.

Several European languages have overlapping forms, with a general term covering several meanings while also having more specific forms available, such as Italian ma for senses 5–6, but bensì and però optionally usable for 5 and 6 individually.

So it sounds like a ‘but’ conjunction is pretty widespread, but it has a slightly different range of meanings depending on the language (as expected).

In Pñæk these would be, according to the chapter of my grammar on clause linkage and pragmatics:

1. Consecutive marking (for perfective events in temporal sequence without a pragmatically marked break)
2. Consecutive (if overlap is implicit as in "she sang and danced"), apposition of imperfective clauses
3. Apposition
4. Apposition
5. Apposition of clefted clauses (possibly with an adverb in the second cleft)
6. Apposition with counter-expectation marked with an adverb in the second clause

(5) though is clearly the odd one out in this typology because the rest involve two whole clauses, whereas in (5) the contrast is between possible arguments of a single clause. I'm pretty sure that in many languages (5) is skipped (e.g. "pero" in Spanish covers 4 & 6, but there is "sino" for 5, unless I'm confused).

[chris_notts]

Due to what reasons do you call them "apposed zero marked relative clauses"? I'd say it's definitely apposition, but wouldn't "the more" count as a marker or subordinator, and wouldn't the first clause (or both?) count as adverbial (as opposed to relative) clauses?

Because that's how I intuitively parse it and because, at least in my dialect, you can insert "that" after "the more", although it sounds a bit stilted if added to the second clause:

The more (that) I tried, the more (that) I failed

Any form "the X that Y" looks like an NP containing a relative clause to me.

Why do you seem to be aware of that non-standard construction of the Spanish of Spain, but not the more standard (also only in Spain) "cuanto más... más...", or the Latin American "entre más... más..."?

Because I have a Spanish native speaker in the family, and I guess I picked it up from them? That's just the form that popped into my head.

French, Italian, Standard Arabic, German, Latin and Ancient Greek do something similar to English and Spanish.
- French "plus... plus..."
- Italian "più... e più..."
- Standard Arabic ...كلما... كلما "kullamaa... kullamaa..." (kulla-maa being a compound that is literally "all" + interrogative-and-non-interrogative "what?/what")
- German "je [+comparative]..., desto [+comparative]"
- Latin "quō [+comparative]... eō [+comparative]..." (using an idiom with the normal relativizer and the normal anaphoric pronoun in the ablative singular, as correlatives; also "quō... hōc..." with proximal demonstrative hoc) and "quantō... tantō..." (same but using the words for "how much?" and "that much")
- Ancient Greek "ὅσῳ [+comparative]... τόσῳ [+comparative]..." (in the dative case, using the words for non-interrogative "how(ever) much" and "that much").

There definitely seems to be a more or less correlative structure behind many of these.

Standard Mandarin is still more interesting, using 越...越... "yuè... yuè...", in which 越 yuè is some sort of correlative adverb (or function word broadly) that can only modify a verb and marks continuous increments.

我越澆植，植越長大 wǒ yuè jiāo zhí, zhí yuè zhǎng dà
1S INCR water plant, plant INCR grow big
'the more I water the plant, the bigger it gets'

Mandarin adjectives are a type of verb, so there's not more to say about them. To modify nouns or adverbs ("the more people I consult, the more awkwardly the project gets handled"), you must reword the thing so that the predicates have verbs (possibly adjectival verbs, including 'be many/more': "the more ("INCR many") the people I consult are, the more awkward the handling of the project is").

So in Mandarin, is there any difference between this and "I water the plant more, the plant grows more", or is the causal link an implicature?

I also think Standard Arabic provides a violations of that typology... Arabic uses a separate word for use #5 (بل bal) and doesn't allow the words for #4 and #6 (ولكن (wa-)laakin, (wa-)laakinna) to take that role. This word بل bal is otherwise only used, as far as I know, in the idiom "not only... but also..." ("laa... faHasb, bal... ayDan", or, "laysa faqaT..., bal... ayDan"), which also has a corrective connotation I suppose.

As I said in a previous post, putting 5 between 4 and 6 just seems wrong to me. It is not the same kind of construction, and I'm pretty sure many languages unite 4 & 6 but use a different strategy for 5.

Standard Mandarin is also interesting because it handles #5 by using coordinated or apposed copulas... and if apposed, the second one generally takes the emphatic adverb 就 jiù (literally 'then, right then, afterwards').

買的不是書而是光盤。mǎi de bú shì shū ér shì guāngpán
buy REL not be book and be cd ("what I bought is not a book and/but is a CD")
買的不是書，就是光盤。mǎi de bú shì shū, jiù shì guāngpán
buy REL not be book, EMPH be cd ("what I bought is not a book, really is a CD")
'I didn't buy a book, but a CD.'

This doesn't really violate the typological model there, but still, expecting apposed copulas?

Is this just a pair of clefts? This is basically what I would do in my conlang Pñæk. It makes sense because the cleft limits the focus to the single contrasted element and excludes the rest, which is non-focal.

[chris_notts]

I wouldn't be surprised either. But in this case, it's because I compiled the list of translations in order to provide inspiration, not as a source for statistical analysis, and so I purposefully didn't include any conlangs that used the English-type construction (of which there are quite a lot - but that again is probably an artifact of some (mainly novice?) conlangers tending to translate very literally).

Ah, OK.

[Kuchigakatai]

Any form "the X that Y" looks like an NP containing a relative clause to me.

Ah, I see. It does look like a relativization of an adverbial adjunct when you put it that way... I tried more. The more that I tried.

So in Mandarin, is there any difference between this and "I water the plant more, the plant grows more", or is the causal link an implicature?

越 yuè is pretty much a dedicated morpheme for this "the more... the more..." construction, so the causal meaning comes with it, which is why I didn't gloss it as "more". (多 duō is basically the main word that stands for both 'many' and 'more'.)

Is this just a pair of clefts? This is basically what I would do in my conlang Pñæk. It makes sense because the cleft limits the focus to the single contrasted element and excludes the rest, which is non-focal.

Yes, specifically the type that sometimes gets called by the term "pseudo-cleft", that is, some construction that utilizes what appears to be what the term "headless relative clause" often refers to (as opposed to the stereotypical European cleft of the "it was chris that clarified the question" type that tends to get discussed more often). And yeah, it neatly limits the focus to the thing being contrasted.

[Pabappa]

I found this...
https://condor.depaul.edu/mfiddler/hyph ... nivers.htm

I don't know where I was but its in my browser history. Interesting to make a culture, maybe, that keeps to all of the traits listed there but one.

A few real world cultures may even be violating this list, e.g. there's probably been at least one society that doesn't dance. But those are the boring ones .... I want a society entirely without weapons.

[bradrn]

I found this...
https://condor.depaul.edu/mfiddler/hyph ... nivers.htm

I don't know where I was but its in my browser history. Interesting to make a culture, maybe, that keeps to all of the traits listed there but one.

A few real world cultures may even be violating this list, e.g. there's probably been at least one society that doesn't dance. But those are the boring ones .... I want a society entirely without weapons.

Some of their linguistic ‘Universals’ aren’t actually universal, e.g.:

phonemes, range from 10 to 70 in number
vocalic/nonvocalic contrasts in phonemes
pronouns

Which makes me more suspicious about the rest.

On a related note, I saw this linked recently here, and thought it looked useful.

[Nortaneous]

A few real world cultures may even be violating this list, e.g. there's probably been at least one society that doesn't dance.

what "probably", we're all americans here

[Pabappa]

I saw the "vocalic/nonvocalic contrasts in phonemes" item and didnt understand what they meant by it. Definitely youre right about there being languages with more than 70 phonemes. But as for pronouns, Im not sure there's been a language that is completely agreed upon to lack pronouns ... I thought Inuktitut did, but their pronouns are there clear as day, they're just not atomic roots. It could be thus said that they aren't really pronouns, but that's a matter of definition. Likewise Pirahã is said to have borrowed its pronouns and to not use 3rd person referential pronouns like "he (who i previously mentioned)" but it does still have pronouns.

On a related note, I saw this linked recently here, and thought it looked useful.

Theres a very similar questionnaire on FrathWiki that Ive filled out for two different cultures Ive made ... it's not exactly the same one, but the wording of some of the questions is exactly the same so I'm sure they derive from the same original source.

edit: okay, wow, that is quite an expansion on the document Im familiar with. If I fill that out the result is going to be longer than a book. And I might just do it. Thanks for the link.

[bradrn]

I saw the "vocalic/nonvocalic contrasts in phonemes" item and didnt understand what they meant by it.

I think it means a voiced/voiceless contrast.

Definitely youre right about there being languages with more than 70 phonemes. But as for pronouns, Im not sure there's been a language that is completely agreed upon to lack pronouns ... I thought Inuktitut did, but their pronouns are there clear as day, they're just not atomic roots. It could be thus said that they aren't really pronouns, but that's a matter of definition. Likewise Pirahã is said to have borrowed its pronouns and to not use 3rd person referential pronouns like "he (who i previously mentioned)" but it does still have pronouns.

For a language with no pronouns, I was thinking of Japanese. (Although admittedly I’m not entirely sure — I don’t know much about Japanese.)

[Pabappa]

I could certainly see a case to be made for Japanese lacking pronouns, since you can't translate "I", "you", etc into Japanese one-to-one without knowing more information than you'd need to in English. It really comes down to definition. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_pronouns shows how complicated it is, and gives a different reason than mine why the language could be analyzed as having no pronouns ... but then, we'd have no convenient term for what it *does* have.

I consider my main conlang, Poswa, to be entirely without pronouns, but I could certainly see a case to be made that Poswa has pronouns too, just in a very odd way ... person marking on nouns. This is what I once thought Inuktitut did, and at least one natlang, Elamite, also puts person markers on its animate nouns ... though I dont know if that means they used those nouns the way we would use pronouns. (edit: it seems they didnt .... Elamite had proper pronouns like /u/ "I".)

We could also take an even narrower definition and say that person markers are pronouns, and say that the only way to truly have a language without pronouns is to have all the speakers say e.g. "one speaking" for 1st person, "one listening" for 2nd person, "one seen/heard/etc" for 3rd person, with the terms used for 3rd person changing depending on where they are and perhaps also who they are. If somebody makes a language like that I would say that there is no argument that it's a language without pronouns. And perhaps that extremely narrow definition is what the researchers were intending when they wrote up that list.

one more edit .... i like this:

In Japanese, a speaker may only directly express their own emotions, as they cannot know the true mental state of anyone else. Thus, in sentences comprising a single adjective (often those ending in -shii , it is often assumed that the speaker is the subject. For example, the adjective sabishii (寂しい) can represent a complete sentence that means "I am lonely." When speaking of another person's feelings or emotions, 'sabishisō (寂しそう) "seems lonely" would be used instead. Similarly, ''neko ga hoshii'' (猫が欲しい) "I want a cat," as opposed to ''neko ga hoshigatte iru'' (猫が欲しがっている) "seems to want a cat," when referring to others. Thus, the first-person pronoun is usually not used unless the speaker wants to put a special stress on the fact that they are referring to themselves or if it is necessary to make it clear.

I had the same idea .... my person markers are in fact derived from evidentials, and the language later evolved a second set of evidentials.

[bradrn]

I could certainly see a case to be made for Japanese lacking pronouns, since you can't translate "I", "you", etc into Japanese one-to-one without knowing more information than you'd need to in English. It really comes down to definition.

I don’t agree with this argument — you could use it to say that Hebrew has no pronouns, since you can’t translate those words into Hebrew one-to-one without knowing more information than you’d need to in English!

We could also take an even narrower definition and say that person markers are pronouns, and say that the only way to truly have a language without pronouns is to have all the speakers say e.g. "one speaking" for 1st person, "one listening" for 2nd person, "one seen/heard/etc" for 3rd person, with the terms used for 3rd person changing depending on where they are and perhaps also who they are. If somebody makes a language like that I would say that there is no argument that it's a language without pronouns. And perhaps that extremely narrow definition is what the researchers were intending when they wrote up that list.

I believe this is usually what’s claimed for Japanese: Japanese ‘pronouns’ are an open class, are morphologically and syntactically treated the same as nouns, and I believe they are often fairly transparent in meaning (e.g. Wikipedia lists otaku ‘your house’ for 2s).

[Whimemsz]

I saw the "vocalic/nonvocalic contrasts in phonemes" item and didnt understand what they meant by it.

I think it means a voiced/voiceless contrast.

Presumably it means all languages have both phonemic vowels and phonemic consonants, which is true.

[bradrn]

I saw the "vocalic/nonvocalic contrasts in phonemes" item and didnt understand what they meant by it.

I think it means a voiced/voiceless contrast.

Presumably it means all languages have both phonemic vowels and phonemic consonants, which is true.

This does sound like a more likely interpretation. (I’m not too familiar with the terms ‘vocalic’ and ‘non-vocalic’, which is probably why I misinterpreted it.)

[masako]

I've had this idea rolling around for a few weeks now;



So, given CVC roots, the above endings would indicate parts of speech...

tsak- - "dwelling, residing, living"

tsak-a - "house, home"
tsak-ya - "neighborhood"
tsak-i - "a homestead"
tsak-o - "to build a home"

I'm not sure about how far I wanna go with it, but I think it's a nice idea.

[linguistcat]

I know where I'm starting from for my current conlang (certain reconstructions of Old Japanese) and I know what I want things to generally sound like when I'm done (more fricatives, long consonants like Japanese later had plus /r:/, possibly an r/l distinction, more nasal sounds), but I'm having a hard time figuring out how to get there.

I know I want to involve the V1/V2 distinction for i, e, and o in these sound changes, and maybe even merge them differently than Japanese did, but I'm still not sure what exactly I want to do with them

[Pabappa]

my idea for the OJ vowel system is:
ji ɨ je e a o wo wu
So basically there were six vowels .... one low, two mid, three close .... but the mid-vowels can either have an onglide or no onglide, while the close vowels basically just glide on with themselves.

Ive used this in a few conlangs, usually deriving the on-gliding mid vowels from earlier /ja wa/ which i think is the likely source of much of the /je wo/ in OJ as well. Given the gaps on the chart at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Japanese#Syllables , my reconstruction is at odds with the claim that /t d/ were not palatalized, since i would assume that if only one of /ji ɨ/ exists it must be /ji/.

If the gaps are real and you choose that as your starting point, I dont really see any path forward that doesnt end up pretty much the same as what Japanese did, since having gaps in the distribution of /e i/ after coronals almost guarantees that the gaps will spread to all the other consonants, and to a lesser extent the gaps with /po bo/ suggest that the other /o/ sequences will collapse as well.

Some people reconstruct the extra three vowels all with /w/: /we wi wo/, which fits the syllable chart better than my setup, but its hard to see how pre-OJ /ai/ could have shifted unconditionally to /we/.

And theres still the problem of /jwo/. I asked about it here before and I get that its phonetically possible to say but Im still skeptical and wonder if maybe they were just using that as a spelling convention for etymological reasons after what had earlier been /jə jo/ had collapsed into just /jo/.

Anyway, I guess what Im saying is that a lot depends on *which* reconstruction you start from.

[Nortaneous]

And theres still the problem of /jwo/. I asked about it here before and I get that its phonetically possible to say but Im still skeptical

why?

[Pabappa]

The fact that they dropped syllables gradually and irregularly from the table rather than, for example, just ditching whole rows all at once, suggests that it was never a perfect snapshot of the phonology of the language at the time of writing. Spelling lags pronunciation in many languages, perhaps a majority. If we assume that what was once /ə wə/ became /o wo/ and then both merged as /o~wo/ (an allophonic contrast, not phonemic), it seems reasonable to me to assume that the syllable we spell yo₁ may have become identical with yo₂ in pronunciation before it was dropped from the syllabary.

Yes, i accept that /ɥ/ exists, but for the purposes of creating conlangs, I am going with my theory rather than setting up a language that has a /ɥ/ phoneme that only occurs in one specific environment, and indeed, in only one syllable in the whole language.

also, consonant dropping .... if you find the vowel system too boring you could just drop one of the consonants, either conditionally or unconditionally, and then youll have a bunch of vowel sequences to work with. i do this too with most of my CV languages.

[Knit Tie]

Are there attested language with both implosives and ejectives at the same places of articulation, with the main contract being the mode of glottalic articulation? That is, as opposed to Hausa, which has implosive b and d but ejective ts and k.

[Knit Tie]

Are there attested language with both implosives and ejectives at the same places of articulation, with the main contract being the mode of glottalic articulation? That is, as opposed to Hausa, which has implosive b and d but ejective ts and k.

Nevermind, there's Me'enit.

https://www.academia.edu/23703870/Sketc ... of_Me_enit

So ANADEW is a fair claim, I'd say.