Guesque, PIE conlang scratchpad

Daedolon · Post by **Daedolon** » Mon Sep 28, 2015 8:20 pm

Guesque is PIE conlang, its just an info dump for now, to get ideas on how to do it and stuff.

Guesque (/gːesk/, Ggesk) is an independent branch of the Indo-European language by itself, sharing its branch with no other language. Guesque is spoken by over two million people on a region that spans from the north of Portugal, going through the northern Spain until the southwestern France.

For the verbs I though about something more or less like this.

Three persons: first, second, and third;
Three numbers: singular, dual and plural;
Three times: present, past, and future;
Three aspects: prefect, perfective and imperfective;
Four finite moods: indicative, subjunctive, optative and imperative;
Three non-finite forms: infinitive, gerundive and participle;
Three voices: active, medial and passive.

Sanskrit and tocharian(?) have a desiderative, causative and intensive, might give a look into it.

And for nouns, something like

Three genders: Masculine, Feminine and neuter. (maybe also an animancy distinction like in the slavic languages and tocharian(?));
Three numbers: single, dual and plural. (nothing new);
Seven cases: Nominative, Accusative, Genitive, Dative, Locative, Ablative and Instrumentative. (also)

The sounds changes are almost finished so here is Schleicher's fable in Guesque (not making any grammatical or lexical changes here !)

/'ijogː ek'aʦbe/

/ij'agːeʣ iʣ'uzejʣ 'iʣlːa 'ene 'este, zo 'eʣːag 'irte. zo bar'aweʣː g'ogːag g'eʣe; zo 'ejʣa 'orːag; zo gejn 'ijow 'ire. 'ijogː ebː'ubːeʣ g'eʣːe: “gejn z'eʣːa ek'aʦbe ij'agːed, ilː iʣː ij'uʦul”. 'eʣːag ʦu gː'eʦujd: “ir'uzi, 'iʣeʣ! odː z'eʣːag, zejʣ ij'urolː ilː: g'ejag, 'orːi, zej 'ijagː 'iʣlːa 'irːag gest'ererag get, ij'agːigː ʦu 'iʣlːa 'ene 'esti. odː ol'ugow 'ijogː ij'agrow ge./

Well at least that is my initial idea.

Haplogy · Post by **Haplogy** » Tue Sep 29, 2015 3:37 am

Whose version of Schleicher's Fable did you use?

hwhatting · Post by **hwhatting** » Tue Sep 29, 2015 3:41 am

What's the difference beteween the "perfect" aspect and the "perfective" aspect?

Daedolon · Post by **Daedolon** » Tue Sep 29, 2015 7:45 am

Haplogy wrote:Whose version of Schleicher's Fable did you use?

Byrd (2013)

hwhatting wrote:What's the difference between the "perfect" aspect and the "perfective" aspect?

Perfective, describes a finished action, like in Ancient Greek's Aorist. Perfect, describes a finished action that happened before, earlier than another action within the same tense, like Ancient Greek's pluperfect. That's what I think tho.

hwhatting · Post by **hwhatting** » Tue Sep 29, 2015 8:10 am

Daedolon wrote:Perfective, describes a finished action, like in Ancient Greek's Aorist. Perfect, describes a finished action that happened before, earlier than another action within the same tense, like Ancient Greek's pluperfect. That's what I think tho.

I'm asking because normally, perfective and imperfective form aspect pairs (as e.g. in Slavic), while "perfect" normally is the name of a complex tense which unites temporal and aspectual functions. I wouldn`t put them into the same category.

Daedolon · Post by **Daedolon** » Tue Sep 29, 2015 10:39 pm

The sound changes are based around Gianfranco Forni's hypothesis that Basque is a Indo European Language.

FROM PIE TO PROTO-BASQUE

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FROM PROTO-BASQUE TO PRE-BASQUE

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FROM PRE-BASQUE TO GUESQUE

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Daedolon · Post by **Daedolon** » Tue Sep 29, 2015 11:12 pm

The phoneme inventory should be something like this, if didn't do any mistakes.
/m mː n nː/
/b bː t tː d dː k kː g gː/
/ts tsː dz dzː/
/s sː z zː/
/r rː l lː/
/w j/

/i iː u uː e eː o oː a aː/

And here's a updated version of the fable, it reflects some new changes that I made:
/'ijogː ek'aʦbe:/
/ij'agːeʣ iʣ'uzeʣː 'iʣlːa 'ene 'este, zo 'eʣːag 'irte. zo bar'aːkeʣː g'ogːag g'eʣe; zo eʣːa órːag; zo genː 'ijoː 'ire. 'ijogː ebː'ugːag g'eʣke: “genː z'eʣge ek'aʦbe ij'agːeʣ, ilː 'iʣge ij'uʦul”. 'eʣːag ʦu g'eʣkund: “or'uzi, 'iʣeʣ! odː z'eʣːag, zeʣː ij'urolː ilː: geːk'ag, 'orri, zeː 'ijagː 'iʣlːa 'irːag gesr'arag geʦ, ij'agːibː ʦu 'iʣlːa 'ene 'esti. odː ol'ugoː 'ijogː ij'agroː ge./

WeepingElf · Post by **WeepingElf** » Wed Sep 30, 2015 3:51 pm

Daedolon wrote:The sound changes are based around Gianfranco Forni's hypothesis that Basque is a Indo European Language.

You are aware that this adventurous hypothesis is rejected by almost every relevant scholar, aren't you?

Nortaneous · Post by **Nortaneous** » Wed Sep 30, 2015 7:10 pm

who cares, it'd make an interesting conlang

...and now i'm tempted to do one also. i n d o - v a s c o n i c. (would be good practice for the tocharian thing that i've been meaning to do for ages)

Daedolon · Post by **Daedolon** » Thu Oct 01, 2015 2:54 am

WeepingElf wrote: You are aware that this adventurous hypothesis is rejected by almost every relevant scholar, aren't you?

Exactly, and as Nortaneous said, it seemed interesting enough.

Dewrad · Post by **Dewrad** » Thu Oct 01, 2015 3:31 pm

I'm a big fan of those soundchanges.

On the other hand, your initial thoughts on grammar are dull. It's essentially just PIE. Suggestion: don't think about grammar at all until you've run some PIE paradigms through your soundchanges and seen what mergers and analogies suggest themselves.

Daedolon · Post by **Daedolon** » Fri Oct 02, 2015 3:38 pm

I forgot to mention but stress changed, on words with three or more syllables it went to the second syllable, while on words with only two syllables it went to the first syllable.

Dewrad wrote:I'm a big fan of those soundchanges.

On the other hand, your initial thoughts on grammar are dull. It's essentially just PIE. Suggestion: don't think about grammar at all until you've run some PIE paradigms through your soundchanges and seen what mergers and analogies suggest themselves.

I wanted to talk about that. As one might have expected, since nearly half the consonants dropped off a lot of mergers happened. Locative, vocative, ablative and the instrumental merged with either nominative or genitive depending on the stem. Locative survived on some stems and some words but rarely on both numbers.

/'iʣlunː/, from *h₂wĺ̥h₁neh₂, "wool"

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So I still wanted to have those 8 cases, so I gave a look at Tocharian. As I read I learned that the etymology of most of the secondary case endings still are uncertain, however the theory behind the origin of the second cases, the "new" cases, is that they appeared to have arisen through productive suffixation of originally adverbial morphemes to the oblique case, old accusative from PIE. So I decided to the same and pick all the cases that tocharian "shared" with Basque.

The new cases are made with *(h₁)eti "out, away" (new ablative), *h₂noh₁ (new locative, cognate of Lith. nuõ, OCS na < PBS *nō, a PIE instrumental of spatial extension [Hackstein 2004]), *dʰi (new allative, semantically compatible to Greek "-δε" [Adams 1999]), *sem "together, one" (new comitative), *meh₂ǵ- "to knead, mix, make" (new causative), *ḱóm, "beside, near, by, with" (new Instrumental). Except for the locative and the allative which some people proposed a etymology PIE, the other I choose myself, most of them are rather sketchy specially the new comitative and the new causative, so I'm really open to any new suggestions on this.

a new tentative declension for /'iʣlunː/, from *h₂wĺ̥h₁neh₂, "wool"

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Daedolon · Post by **Daedolon** » Sun Oct 11, 2015 6:17 am

I decided to go ad follow the previous designs.

Nominal Morphology

Guesque ended with PIE's athematic stem ablaut and accent shift, so most athematic nouns went by analogy to the thematic class.

The Guesque noun has three genders (masculine, feminine or neuter), two numbers (singular and plural) and ten cases (Nominative, Accusative, Dative, Allative, Ablative, Locative, Genitive, Comitative, Instrumental and Causative). There are basically five declensions in Guesque: o-stems, a-stems, i-stems, u-stems, and consonant stems, but due čop's law (nearly) each of these declensions split in two depending on whether the PIE accent fell on the stem, rhizotonic, or on the ending, oxytonic.

O-Stems

They comprise masculine and neuter nouns. Due a sound change earlier in Guesque, where all non-accented o became u, they may be only oxytonic.

Here's an oxytonic o-stem, /eniro/, /enirojiː/, "nest".

Singular

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Plural

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A-Stems

These are mostly feminine, there are both rhizotonic and oxytonic variants.

Here's an rhizotonic a-stem, /oloʦːa/, /oloʦːake/, "following, track; furrow".

Singular

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Plural

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Here's an oxytonic a-stem, /ʦaba/, /ʦabake/, "grain".

Singular

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Plural

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I-Stems

They can be any of the 3 genders. Now things get a little messy, "original" i-stems varied in accent placement in PIE, they (mostly) were rhizotonic in the nominative, accusative and vocative, and oxytonic elsewhere, while the new stems from athematic noun classes could be either one or the other. So I-stems have 3 subdeclensions, dynamic, rhizotonic and oxytonic.

Here's an dynamic i-stem, /iːndi/, /iːndijeʣ/, "mind".

Singular

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Plural

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Here's an rhizotonic i-stem, /obːi/, /obːijeʣ/, "snake".

Singular

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Plural

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Here's an oxytonic i-stem, /eri/, /erijeʣː/, "wealth".

Singular

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Plural

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Daedolon · Post by **Daedolon** » Sun Oct 11, 2015 10:24 pm

U-Stems

They can be any gender. U-stems have nearly the same subdeclensions that I-stems have but instead of an oxytonic u-stem they have the rhizotonic o-stems that came from that earlier soundchange.

Here's a dynamic u-stem, /zu/, /zuʣː/, "son".

Singular

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Plural

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Here's a rhizotonic u-stem, /orːu/, /orːuweʣ/, "tree".

Singular

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Plural

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Here's a "new" rhizotonic u-stem, /iʣru/, /iʣruwiː/, "field".

Singular

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Plural

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Consonant Stems

They can be any gender. Basically, everything else goes here. There are just two subdeclensions here: dynamic and rhizotonic.

Here is a dynamic consonant-stem, /irandas/, /irand/ "tooth":

Singular

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Plural

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Here is a rhizotonic, /onobːas, /onobːe/ "night"

Singular

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Plural

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And, uh, wow. I think that's more or less it for the nouns.

Next is pronouns.

Daedolon · Post by **Daedolon** » Sat Oct 24, 2015 8:15 pm

Pronominal Morphology

The pronouns are a lot more irregular than the nouns were.

Personal Pronouns

As in most other IE languages, the personal pronouns in the first and second person are preserved, but the third person ones came from demonstratives.

The personal pronouns differentiate three persons (1st, 2nd and 3rd) and two numbers (singular and plural). No gender distinction.

First Person Singular

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Second Person Singular

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First Person Plural

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Second Person Plural

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The nominative of the enclitic form, in all cases, is by analogy.

Here are the third-person pronouns. In the singular, it had a standard form derived usually from *is/im/es-, and there is no enclitic form for them.

Third Person Singular

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Third Person Plural

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The reflexive pronoun is numberless and has no nominative as well:

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That's it for now

Daedolon · Post by **Daedolon** » Wed Dec 09, 2015 3:22 pm

Definite Article

The definite article is derived from *so. No gender, number singular or plural.

Singular Definite Article

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Plural Definite Article

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Interrogative Pronoun

The interrogative pronoun is derived from *kʷis and *kʷos. No gender, number singular or plural.

<βι> /bi/, <βιι> /biː/ "who"

Singular

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Plural

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<βυ> /bu/, <βυγ> /bug/ "which, what"

Singular

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Plural

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Daedolon · Post by **Daedolon** » Wed Dec 09, 2015 3:23 pm

There was two primary ways through which Guesque was expressed: "Priestly" and "Common".

The earliest "Priestly" abecedarium dates to 600 BC, it was used for writing administrative documents, accounts, legal texts, as well as mathematical, medical, literary, and religious texts. After 300 BC, the alphabet evolved, adjusting to the phonology of the Guesque language, and the "Common" script was the result of it. "Common" was mainly used to write letters, documents and other types of everyday writing. "Common" started to effectively replace "Priestly" after 100 BC, but "Priestly" survived in religious texts and in some more rustic regions of the Guesque homeland until 500 AD.

"Common" was not a internal development of Guesque, it was highly influenced, based and made through continuous contacts with the Greeks, Etruscans and italic peoples over time.

"Priestly"

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The other letters that were not used in writing were kept and used as numerals, as in most other non-Greek languages using the Greek script. It was common for the glides /j, w/ to not be expressed in writing, voiceless/aspirate greek letters were constantly confused for one another, and the Guesque writers didn't consistently represented vowel and consonant length.

Common

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The differences in the script are pretty straightforward, (nearly) all the aspirate consonants were ditched alongside letters representing phonemes nonexistent in Guesque. The long phonemes were represented by doubling the letter, a practice that was used inconsistently during the usage of the "Priestly" script.
The <φ> was used to represent the glide /j/, in a somewhat similar way to how the romans adapted <ϝ> to represent /f/.

hwhatting · Post by **hwhatting** » Thu Dec 10, 2015 12:25 pm

Not much to say.

You are probably aware that many languages (non-IE as well) that don't have gender or an animacy distinction elsewhere still maintain an animate - inanimate distinction on the interrogative pronoun (e.g. Turkic kim "who" vs. ne "what"), while a number distinction on the interrogative pronoun is relatively rare?

Daedolon · Post by **Daedolon** » Thu Dec 10, 2015 7:34 pm

hwhatting wrote:Not much to say. You are probably aware that many languages (non-IE as well) that don't have gender or an animacy distinction elsewhere still maintain an animate - inanimate distinction on the interrogative pronoun (e.g. Turkic kim "who" vs. ne "what"), while a number distinction on the interrogative pronoun is relatively rare?

Now I am, to be honest.

Daedolon · Post by **Daedolon** » Sun Dec 13, 2015 8:05 pm

VERBS

Guesque, following Forni's hypothesis about Basque, is a member of the Italo-Celtic family which brings forth some considerations.

The ā-subjunctive, the r-passive and the collapsing of the PIE aorist and perfect into a single past tense.

And I desired to have the following:

A Indicative with past perfect, past imperfect, past pluperfect, present and future. A subjunctive with past, present and future. A simple conditional, imperative, participle and infinitive. Only active voice.

To achieve them I thought this:

The past pluperfect is achieved through the suffixation of *steh₂- to the past imperfect of the verb
The indicative future is achieved through the suffixation of *bʰuh₂- to the indicative present imperfect of the verb, and the subjunctive present + *bʰuh₂- is used for the subjunctive future.

The subjunctive became conditional and optative became subjunctive.
I have no idea on how to get a infinitive . . .

The Cowgill-Rix system was heavily simplified, so basically all verbs became thematic (some survived as irregulars) and the "standard" for the past tense is the sigmatic aorist/perfect.

So, that was my idea. I would really enjoy a feedback on it, specially due my rather basic understading of the Cowgill-Rix system.

KathTheDragon · Post by **KathTheDragon** » Mon Dec 14, 2015 2:09 am

Daedolon wrote:I have no idea on how to get a infinitive . . .

Verbal nouns.

zompist bboard

Guesque, PIE conlang scratchpad

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