Zompist Bboard Again

I'll be adding terms for the challenge here
I think I'll make a new language for them and post grammatical details on the kårroť scratchpad.
June 1st:
guj ťoi
[ɡʊi̯ co̞.ʔi]
happy stand-NP
pride

June 2nd:
gaj
[ɡɐi̯]
love

Vi sala es guj ťoi in, pa vi gaj visa!
[β̞i sä.lä ʔɛs ɡʊi̯ co̞.ʔi ʔɪ̃ pa β̞i ɡɐj β̞isä]
1-s 2-pl good happy stand-NP vol and 1-s love 1pi
I wish you a happy Pride, and I love you all!

Akiatu has a fairly consequential pride concept, kaɲi, which currently has glosses pride, honour, strength, power. Nothing so far for love, words in that semantic neighbourhood are waiting for a fair bit of work on Akiatu society/culture.

akam chinjir wrote: ↑Sun Jun 02, 2019 9:18 am Akiatu has a fairly consequential pride concept, kaɲi, which currently has glosses pride, honour, strength, power. Nothing so far for love, words in that semantic neighbourhood are waiting for a fair bit of work on Akiatu society/culture.

One of the unnamed languages I'm working on also has a rather complex term for "pride." Etymologically it comes from a word meaning "possessions, wealth," and it caries such varied meanings as "pride (in a positive sense), confidence, fidelity, honor, wealth, (good) luck, (good) fortune, substantiveness." Worth noting that the culture in question regards pride as a positive quality, though it contrasts pride with arrogance (viewed as pride at the expense of someone else's pride or especially blasphemous pride at God's expense). A common greeting in the language is roughly "May your pride be immeasurable."

I've just decided that kaɲi starts out as a word for strong smells and flavours, especially in relation to food. Pungent?

One way it's extended is as a sort of mana concept, in the video game sense of mana, a least---in relation to ancestral powers and the ability to harness them, but also powerful consumables, including medicines and intoxicants and whatever.

Another way is in the direction of social power and worth---pride and honour, also strength of personality, charisma. It gets displayed in oratory, especially storytelling; in conspicuous feasting, dance, and ceremony; there's lore that implies it can also be displayed in some fairly vicious treatment of enemies.

So it's culturally important, and definitely promoted as a value and a virtue (and so undoubtedly gets paired with arrogance-like simulacra), but it can also be pretty ambivalent (which I think is pretty standard for pride/honour concepts).

I've been thinking about a conlang where most words have a C(R)VC template that can be plugged in with /a i u/ and suffixed with /ə/. Each root has a different pattern of vocalism (well, not each root, you could group them in classes or declensions) that could be described as a paradigm of case-number forms, but might be better thought of as simply being conditioned by morphosyntactic context (which I guess that’s what case forms are, but whatever, I just mean to emphasize the seeming independence of the vocalism from the root and the fact that it may not work exactly like an Indo-European case system)

These vocalic alternations would handle most morphosyntactic jobs; there would be compounding, often featuring /ə/ as an interfix like CVCəCVC(ə), but older compounds might be reduced to something like CVCCəC, with some reduced CəC compound elements becoming derivational affixes

Do you know any way to express "from" without adposition or ablative case? (I saw some african languages uses absence of applicative construction)

Serial verb constructions with "leave", "exit", or similar.

cedh wrote: ↑Tue Jun 11, 2019 3:13 am Serial verb constructions with "leave", "exit", or similar.

Too bad, my conlang's preposition works like SVC. The only difference is that aspect marking is nonexistent except for telicity. All preposition can even turn into verb by zero derivation (just conjugate it like verb).

Akangka wrote: ↑Mon Jun 10, 2019 9:05 pm Do you know any way to express "from" without adposition or ablative case? (I saw some african languages uses absence of applicative construction)

You could use the genitive case. Cf. Spanish and its use of the same preposition, de, for both possessive/descriptive "of" and the directional notion of "from".

You could also use a "locative" case for all three meanings of "from/out of", "in/on/at" and "to/towards" while encoding direction in the syntax. In Mandarin, stative locations and movements from a place are placed before the verb, whereas the direction of movement to a place is placed after the verb. Mandarin uses different coverbs for these notions, but they could conceivably be merged.

take-PST sword-ACC
'I grabbed the sword.'

Paris-LOC take-PST sword-ACC
'I took the sword out of Paris.'

take-PST sword-ACC London-LOC
'I took the sword to London.'

Paris-LOC take-PST sword-ACC London-LOC
'I took (or "brought") the sword from Paris to London.'

Anyone using portmanteau as a productive word process? Not much at https://www.reddit.com/r/conlangs/comme ... tmanteaus/ ... I think one of masako's langs had portmanteau or something similar, but I'dont remember the details.

Late Andanese latiki "play" from lati "play" + tiki "spin". None of my other languages do this. Late Andanese grammarians may explain this as reanalysis: the second word is reanalyzed as just /ki/, with the first syllable being a classifier prefix. Or, they might just accept portmanteau as a valid process of its own, despite the parent language not having it.

Late Andanese has only 30 syllables, all (C)V, so any two random words have a 1 in 15 chance of forming a portmanteau in each order. (Slightly under 2 in 15 if either order is permitted, but this would not always make sense.)

Is it wrong if in my language, the noun to be relativized becomes proximate? For example:

a koɬ dex

DEF man die.PFV

no khaar stoúm a koɬ

INDEF car hit.PFV DEF man

Becomes:

a koɬ sunzdoum no khaar dex

DEF man REL-4SG-hit.PFV INDEF car die.PFV

Pabappa wrote: ↑Thu Jun 13, 2019 10:38 pm Anyone using portmanteau as a productive word process? Not much at https://www.reddit.com/r/conlangs/comme ... tmanteaus/ ... I think one of masako's langs had portmanteau or something similar, but I'dont remember the details.

Late Andanese latiki "play" from lati "play" + tiki "spin". None of my other languages do this. Late Andanese grammarians may explain this as reanalysis: the second word is reanalyzed as just /ki/, with the first syllable being a classifier prefix. Or, they might just accept portmanteau as a valid process of its own, despite the parent language not having it.

Late Andanese has only 30 syllables, all (C)V, so any two random words have a 1 in 15 chance of forming a portmanteau in each order. (Slightly under 2 in 15 if either order is permitted, but this would not always make sense.)

compounding + regular haplology?

Pabappa wrote: ↑Thu Jun 13, 2019 10:38 pm Anyone using portmanteau as a productive word process? Not much at https://www.reddit.com/r/conlangs/comme ... tmanteaus/ ... I think one of masako's langs had portmanteau or something similar, but I'dont remember the details.

Late Andanese latiki "play" from lati "play" + tiki "spin". None of my other languages do this. Late Andanese grammarians may explain this as reanalysis: the second word is reanalyzed as just /ki/, with the first syllable being a classifier prefix. Or, they might just accept portmanteau as a valid process of its own, despite the parent language not having it.

Late Andanese has only 30 syllables, all (C)V, so any two random words have a 1 in 15 chance of forming a portmanteau in each order. (Slightly under 2 in 15 if either order is permitted, but this would not always make sense.)

Passol will use it -- though I still have to work out the details. Basically, Passol tends to restrict words to a maximum of three syllables, or less if at all possible -- and it's a "future conlang", devised and spoken by people with experience of portmanteau and acronyms as a productive process.

begiyú tama ta dulíshak ilha
be-giy-ú tam-a ta dul-ísh-ak il-ha
/bɛɣiːju tamaː ta duliːʃak ɪlɦaː/
PROX-wear-ACC be.good-3sg.INAM and cost-DIM-COM 3sg-COP
This outfit is good and inexpensive.


Toying with an adaptation of the Mongolian script for Amal.

masako wrote: ↑Sun Jun 16, 2019 10:27 am
begiyú tama ta dulíshak ilha
be-giy-ú tam-a ta dul-ísh-ak il-ha
/bɛɣiːju tamaː ta duliːʃak ɪlɦaː/
PROX-wear-ACC be.good-3sg.INAM and cost-DIM-COM 3sg-COP
This outfit is good and inexpensive.


Toying with an adaptation of the Mongolian script for Amal.

Looks lovely! How does it differ from the original Mongolian script?

I just realized i accidentally made the words for to die and to exist phonetic palindromes -___________-

bbbosborne wrote: ↑Tue Jun 18, 2019 4:21 pm I just realized i accidentally made the words for to die and to exist phonetic palindromes -___________-

In one language family I'm working on, to die and to live alliterate in most of the daughter languages.

bbbosborne wrote: ↑Tue Jun 18, 2019 4:21 pm I just realized i accidentally made the words for to die and to exist phonetic palindromes -___________-

For a moment, I thought you said you'd made them homophones. Which would be so much better.

Was totally gonna steal that, but it turns out one of my languages is almost there already. Panaka has papa "be, exist" and paka "die, perish". Even allowing for the highly limited phonology, I can probably have some fun with this.

"Sick" & "healthy" are right now homophones in Poswa, but the realistic thing to do is to just disambiguate them by adding more morphemes....I just haven't gotten to it yet. Palindrome? By that do you mean each is the other spelled backwards, or that they are both palindromes intenrally? If the former, honestly I could see analogy spreading from that to allow the speakers to spell other words backwards too.