Tinasan, Ineshîmé, and other fantasy-Japonic curiosities
Posted: Wed Dec 23, 2020 10:41 pm
Edit 2: Everything in this post, and in every post with the title "A Little Dabbling in Japonic" or a response to it, will be very out of date, but it's still here if (for whatever reason) you want to read through it.
EDIT: To have a quick and easy link-heap, the project documents are given below:
Sound changes from Proto-Japanese to Old Ifsume.
A basic wordlist.
Morphology of six-stem (equivalent to yodan) verbs; this bearing a great deal of resemblance to Old Japanese.
Coalescing the particles into nominals.
I've been gathering what resources I can find on Japonic linguistics for a project (a language for a work of fiction set in a world not our own; I'm simply not good at inventing roots and morphemes, and I find Japanese a very interesting and euphonous language), and have managed to gather the following sources:
Vowels
Verbs
Particles
For my own language, however, I find I desire to do the following: (1) have far fewer Sinitic borrowings; (2) produce native roots with initial voiced stops and /r/; (3) have present a phonemic /l/; (4) have such sequences as the frequent (C)yō, ō, (C)ya, ei &c. which appear chiefly in Sino-Japanese words, to occur naturally in the "modern" language that will resolve from the project, again without recourse to large-scale Sinitic borrowing; and (5) produce something of roughly equal euphonousness (to my ear) to modern Japanese, and complexity to Bungo, but to do so in such a way as very directly copies neither.
Delving further into the matter, I feel I cannot ignore Francis-Ratte's assertions about the potential existence of Proto-Koreano-Japonic, and so will prefer to arrive at some of these by other means, including simply reversing the reason for the voicing (that meaning a low pitch, or the thing that most usually ends up being one in modern-day Tokyo, my sources on ancient pitch accents being rather lacking) conditioning voicing, and not the other way round, as well as /n/ > /r/ and /j/ > /l/ being conditioned sound changes. Analogical formation will also be a very dear friend in the coming developments, I believe.
As far as the desired imperative -/l/- form goes, I imagine it could be obtained from the */ju/ auxiliary used as a separate word, while where it fuses onto the word, it remains */ju/, leaving me with the -yu conjugation, which I desire to preserve.
In the interest of not having a very long post, I shall leave the current sound changes from Proto-Japanese here. Isn't that a rather cute font, too? I like it quite a lot — I found it going through the list of Japanese ones I had. I normally use Yu Mincho, but this one made me smile.
I do also very much like how Frellesvig reconstructs a vowel system that includes all of /i ɨ e ə u a o/, and will find such a reconstruction very useful to my ends.
(I'm rather sorry to see some of this go, but we still arrive at very nearly the same result.)
So the first stage of the language would look rather like this:
Nasal: /m n (ɴ)/ m n n
Stop: /p t k b d g/ p t k b d g
Affricate: /ts dz/ ts dz
Fricative: /f v s̪ z̪ s̺ z̺ h/ f v s z s z h
Resonant: /l r w j/ l r w y
Vowel: /i e ɘ a o ɤ u/ i e ĕ a o ŏ u
A pitch accent will begin to emerge during this period, generally with words of two morae or less having a "flat" pitch very regularly (though the vowels /ɘ ɤ/ will frequently trigger a drop in pitch morpheme-internally); a few random examples from the Swadesh list, showing a few other sound changes in places: link to a more thorough document.
It is, admittedly, not as tidy as I might like, but it may be at least interesting, I hope.
Still very much a rough draught, and not very much "native" orthography yet, but perhaps those who have more knowledge of Japonic linguistics than I do (or who simply like the idea) might care to comment? It would be much appreciated.
EDIT: To have a quick and easy link-heap, the project documents are given below:
Sound changes from Proto-Japanese to Old Ifsume.
A basic wordlist.
Morphology of six-stem (equivalent to yodan) verbs; this bearing a great deal of resemblance to Old Japanese.
Coalescing the particles into nominals.
I've been gathering what resources I can find on Japonic linguistics for a project (a language for a work of fiction set in a world not our own; I'm simply not good at inventing roots and morphemes, and I find Japanese a very interesting and euphonous language), and have managed to gather the following sources:
Vowels
Verbs
Particles
For my own language, however, I find I desire to do the following: (1) have far fewer Sinitic borrowings; (2) produce native roots with initial voiced stops and /r/; (3) have present a phonemic /l/; (4) have such sequences as the frequent (C)yō, ō, (C)ya, ei &c. which appear chiefly in Sino-Japanese words, to occur naturally in the "modern" language that will resolve from the project, again without recourse to large-scale Sinitic borrowing; and (5) produce something of roughly equal euphonousness (to my ear) to modern Japanese, and complexity to Bungo, but to do so in such a way as very directly copies neither.
More: show
As far as the desired imperative -/l/- form goes, I imagine it could be obtained from the */ju/ auxiliary used as a separate word, while where it fuses onto the word, it remains */ju/, leaving me with the -yu conjugation, which I desire to preserve.
In the interest of not having a very long post, I shall leave the current sound changes from Proto-Japanese here. Isn't that a rather cute font, too? I like it quite a lot — I found it going through the list of Japanese ones I had. I normally use Yu Mincho, but this one made me smile.
I do also very much like how Frellesvig reconstructs a vowel system that includes all of /i ɨ e ə u a o/, and will find such a reconstruction very useful to my ends.
More: show
So the first stage of the language would look rather like this:
Nasal: /m n (ɴ)/ m n n
Stop: /p t k b d g/ p t k b d g
Fricative: /f v s̪ z̪ s̺ z̺ h/ f v s z s z h
Resonant: /l r w j/ l r w y
Vowel: /i e ɘ a o ɤ u/ i e ĕ a o ŏ u
A pitch accent will begin to emerge during this period, generally with words of two morae or less having a "flat" pitch very regularly (though the vowels /ɘ ɤ/ will frequently trigger a drop in pitch morpheme-internally); a few random examples from the Swadesh list, showing a few other sound changes in places: link to a more thorough document.
It is, admittedly, not as tidy as I might like, but it may be at least interesting, I hope.
More: show