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Well that's reassuring. :) Now that you mention Korean, I was actually planning on Mane Injsikut adjectives (root adjectives and adverbs are small closed classes, but there are suffixes to derive them from other words) only being able to be attributive, rather than predicative. And again, the constr...

So that was quite the hiatus... In any case, I have now returned to working on Mane Injsikut in earnest, and rather than posting about phonotactics and prosody, I hope to have a draft reference grammar soon to which I can post a link. In the meantime, there are a few aspects of the language that I a...

Is the in-world grammar of Caďinorian based on or heavily influenced by any specific Latin, or otherwise historical, grammars?

So after looking into it, I've decided against having Guaraní-style nasal harmony, for aesthetic reasons. Heck, I even considered getting rid of the nasal vowels altogether, but decided against doing that either. So in that case, the phonology is pretty much unchanged so far. Thanks for the feedback...

Max1461 wrote:

Mike Yams wrote:I for one find Classical Nāhuatl to be a "cellar door" language.

By which I assume you mean you find it's entire phonology inherently pleasing (as opposed to it having an usually high number of "nice sounding" words)? I would certainly agree, I absolutely love Nāhuatl.

Yeah, that.

I for one find Classical Nāhuatl to be a "cellar door" language.

So roots would only have vowels from one of these four sets Well actually, no; currently, roots can be disharmonic, although that's fairly rare in non-loans. I'm not really sure how naturalistic that is. Affixes do pretty much have to be harmonic, however. Also, why don't you make nasality more of ...

Vowels Oral: /i u e~ɛ ə o~ɔ ä/ <i u e y o a> Nasal: /ĩ ũ ẽ~ɛ̃ ә̃ õ~ɔ̃ ã/ <ĩ ũ ẽ ỹ õ ã> /i/ and /u/ have pretty much exactly the cardinal values. The same applies to the nasalized equivalents. As indicated, <e> varies between [e] and [ɛ], and <o> varies between [o] and [ɔ]. The same applies to the n...

Consonants Stops: /p t tʳ k kʲ/ <p t tr(dr) k kj> Fricatives: /s ʃ x/ <s c h> Nasals: /m n nʲ~ɲ ŋ ŋʲ/ <m n nj q qj> Liquids: /ɾ~r l/ <r l> Glides: /j w/ <j w> /tʳ/ is realized as [dʳ] in voiced environments. /x/ is either [x] or [h]; these allophones are in free variation. /l/ and /j/ only occur in...

So Mane Injsikut ([ˈmäne ˈinʲsikut] or [ˈmänɛ ˈinʲsikut]) is an artlang I've starting working on. It's set in a fantasy world/tabletop game setting, and serves as pretty much a Latin analogue. For context, the core area of the setting is largely made up of areas that speak what would thus be "Romanc...

Hmm that's interesting, because as pronouns tend to be higher up than nouns on, or be at the top of, animacy/saliency/empathy hierarchies, one'd expect them to have more "active" marking, rather than the reverse.

So as a side-note, does anyone know whether a split-ergative system like this one, with nom-acc nouns and erg-abs pronouns, is attested in any natlang?

Of course, whether or not it's attested isn't all that important, conlanging-wise.

One of my scripts uses symbols which indicate the initial consonants and vowels of a syllable. The finals are indicated by diacritics. None of the symbols bear any relation to each other, but they all use identical diacritics. What is this system called? A modified syllabary? Really, I'd just call ...

I was actually thinking about What Language Is: And What It Isn't and What It Could Be, but perhaps I'm mixing up my McWhorter books...

As for the original argument pertaining to "language complexity" and societies, John McWhorter, in one of his books, made the argument that the more isolated a society is, the more irregularity its language will have. The reasoning is that irregularity is easily learned in infancy by L1 speakers, bu...

Sumelic wrote:I think there's a difference between "lacking a copula" and "having a copula that is not a verb."

Indeed. Most/all of the posts seem to be discussing verbal copulae of some sort, but I don't think the scope of what was originally asked was limited to verbal copulae.

How uncommon is it for a language to have only two series of stops, where one is voiceless and the other is ejective? Specifically, I mean unaspirated voiceless, as, if I recall correctly, two-series aspirated voiceless and ejective stop contrasts are common in North America. What about three series...

So I'm assuming subject and object are marked with word order? There are other ways to do it without case marking. (For instance polypersonal agreement, where verbs are marked for both subject and object, or an animacy hierarchy and inverse marking, which I'm not going to explain here (mostly becaus...

Humans used war dogs. So following the human model, war birds would be widespread but not intensively used. Then again, war birds seem like they would be very useful, so I'd say they'd be a good deal more commonly used than war dogs on Earth. "The ones from beyond the desert, son, they are dangerous...

Is that mostly because they're head-marking?

Edit: (Well, reading your post again, Wappo just seems less synthetic. The others I mean.)

Siy Cweyith Carolinac. (pronounced "Seye Quay-ith Car-o-lin-ack") I live in South Carolina. (literally "I live in Carolina of the South") Are there noun cases or something like that? Because it looks to me like there's a genitive or locative or both in that example sentence. But I may very well be ...

Is the English past subjunctive like the present subjunctive in that it's used every now and then, if very rarely, or is it completely gone? (I can't actually think of an example of English past subjunctive off the top of my head.)

It is sometimes confusing to give languages the same name as historical people. For a moment there I thought you were saying the guy had a speech impediment... Totally forgot about the Greek philosopher; should have clarified "the Seneca language." depends on the environment. you'd prob have 4 syll...

I'll have to take a look at that too...

What are the subjective verbs? Did you perhaps mean subjunctive or do they have to do with marking dropped subjects or something like that?