Imralu wrote:Soap wrote:/e/ is actually quite rare in my conlangs in general, but that's not due to any personal dislike of the sound, but rather is an artifact of them all having descended from a language with a vowel system consisting of /a i u ə/, with the scales tipped somewhat in favor of /o/ rather than /e/ in most of the daughter languages that developed larger systems. The situation was similar in Old Japanese.
Ah, I hadn't really noticed that about Japanese, but now that you mention it, in the few words that I know of Japanese, /o/ does seem to be pretty common. And am I right in assuming your langs ended up with more o because of your love of labials?
Possibly, but only subconsciously. I mostly derive /o/ from other vowels rather than sound changes like /awa/ > /ō/ that would get rid of my favorite sounds. I love /a/ so much that in most of my main conlangs, it is entirely immune to sound changes except those that affect all other vowels (i.e. loss of an entire syllable). I love /a/ even more than I love back vowels like /o u ɤ ɯ/. Having said that, I dont really like front rounded vowels for some reason.
For Khulls I did /u/ > /o/ except after a labialized consonant, and then /ə/ > /u/ unconditionally. /e/ can only arise from diphthongs, and these were rare to begin with.
Poswa uses similar sound changes, but they're much more conditional. Poswa spread from /a i u/ with a marginal /ə/ to /a e i o u ə/ (schwa is spelled "y") with all six vowels being well represented by having lots of polyconditional sound changes. My other conlangs aren't great at filling gaps like this except when they massively reduce their phonologies.
For Pabappa I did /ə/ > /o/ in most words, and to /i/ in a smaller number, while later deleting all word-final /e/.
Pogostick Man wrote: Next: will, command to do something
I hesitated on this because I dont really have a word that unifies these two concepts. I could see a way through, though if I think of "will" as self-determination, in the sense that one is commanding oneself to do something.
For Poswa I have two words listed for "command",
barpla and
wišu, with no difference in meaning listed. The first one feels more military to me, and I might unify its etymology with a word for "captain, commander" that is right now not related to it. Simple sentences with these words could be
Barpšabo labompepi pabwepažwi, pappies!
I command you to clean your room, now!
Wišubom!
Because I said so!
Sorry if these sentences sound harsh, it's just the mood I seem to be in, I think.
Also, I'm not sure if the first sentence should have subjunctive mood or not. I used imperative for the "to clean; to pick things up" verb but subjunctive might make more sense. Poswa does not have an imperative subjunctive and I'm not sure such a thing is even attested in natlangs, so I figure I have to choose one or the other. The subjunctive form of "clean-2p.TR" would be
pabwepažabwep. This would also change the word for "your bedroom" from
labompepi to
labompepep, since Poswa marks direct objects for the person and tense of the subject whenever the subject is not explicitly stated before the object (as is the case in almost all 1st and 2nd person verbs).
(The page on FrathWiki says that Poswa
does have an imperative subjunctive, but it's marked "*STILL* WRONG, WILL FIX SOON".)
In Pabappa the corresponding words are
parabla and
wisir. The second would almost certainly die out in common usage because in inflected forms it would collide with the theoretical verbal inflections of a word meaning "pornography". The word for porn is a noun and the word meaning command is a verb, but I still think people would be uncomfortable with the collision. So I will stick with
parabla. A sentence similar to the above could be
Poma parablaba labombebidip publisabu, poppis!
I command you to clean your room, now!
I used the imperative mood again here; the subjunctive would perhaps be
publisabop but I'm not sure about this since it derives from the imperative and therefore rests on the proposition that a subjunctive imperative must have existed at one point in the past.
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