First post / Dzeom conlang / Questions

[Benturi]

Hello everyone, this is my first post in this forum.

I started recently a new conlang and have a couple of questions about real and constructed languages. But first a short introduction:

I've been constructing languages for more than fifteen years now. I like to create naturalistic conlangs, with some amount of redundancy and ambiguity. I know I have a tendency to use complex (but realistic, I think) phonological systems, but besides that, I like to experiment with different typologies, word orders, etc. Two years ago I began to draw the map of a conworld where some of my conlangs are spoken.

My most recent conlang started when I wrote on an empty area of the map a couple of place names, just as they came to my mind, with a certain East Asian flavour: Yeot-Cih, Tham-Geuk, Ssiziang, the Nhong River... At first it wasn't totally serious; then I decided to make at least a phonology and a couple of words and phrases; and now this marginal project is on the way to become a full-fledged new conlang -maybe a whole language family.

The Dzeom language is a tonal isolating language. It has a fairly rich phonology, based on several Southeast Asian languages (especially Sino-Tibetan and Hmong-Mien languages): It has a three way contrast of unaspirated / aspirated / voiced stops and affricates, plus voiceless and voiced fricatives (like the Qiangic languages among others); it has voiceless nasals (like Burmese, Hmong, Yi, etc.) and a voiceless lateral (like Tibetan, Burmese, Hmong, Yi, etc.). It has retroflex consonants, including a very uncommon voiceless retroflex nasal. Unlike most of those languages, it doesn't have -besides /j/ and maybe /j\/- palatal consonants as independent phonemes. I have also excluded uvulars (found in Qiangic languages, for example -have a look at them if you think I'm using too many consonants). I'd like to post more about it later.

Now I have some questions on these topics:

1. Morpheme boundary markers:
I mean those sounds inserted in some languages before morphemes with initial vowel. If I include them in a conlang, I tend to use the glottal stop (like German), or /h/. Do you know of other sounds that act as morpheme boundary markers in real languages, especally in East Asian languages? I think I read somewhere something about the insertion of a velar nasal in some Chinese dialect... Do you use morpheme boundary markers in your conlangs? If so, which sounds do you use?

2. Possible evolution of "murmured consonants":
I've been considering the possibility to make a proto-language for Dzeom with the four-way distinction of phonation among plosives found in Hindi-Urdu and other Indo-Aryan languages: voiceless unaspirated like /p/, voiceless aspirated like /p_h/, voiced unaspirated like /b/ and voiced "aspirated" or "murmured" (I don't know the X-SAMPA representation, but I'll use /b_h/ here). This proto-language would also lack voiced fricatives. Then, I would introduce a sound change by which the "murmured" plosives are lost and the voiced fricatives appear. What do you think is more likely to happen:
a) fricativization of /b d g/ > /B D G/ and then simplification of voiced aspirated /b_h d_h g_h/ > simple voiced plosives /b d g/?
b) or fricativization of voiced aspirated /b_h d_h g_h/ > /B D G/?

[rickardspaghetti]

Welcome! Have some pickles and tea.

You certainly seem to know much more about Asian languages than I. But I hardly know anything about them. Anyway...
As for your questions, I think "alternative b" on question 2 seems more likely. In a conlang I'm currently working on I have the voiced fricatives /v D G/ which come from /b_h d_h g_h/. If you look at some languages in India and around that area you can see how their aspirated stops became fricatives.

[Nortaneous]

I think I read somewhere something about the insertion of a velar nasal in some Chinese dialect...

I think some Uralic language (Nganasan?) had Ø > ŋ / #_V. (vowel-initial words get an initial consonant of ŋ) Not exactly a morpheme boundary consonant, but it could be. Also, intrusive r in some English dialects. (Isn't there one somewhere in England with intrusive l?) Basically any consonant that disappears everywhere but in front of a vowel can become a morpheme boundary, I think.

You could also get really interesting and have something like the Finnish x-phoneme (from loss of word-final /k/, I think), where only some words take the morpheme boundary consonant.

What do you think is more likely to happen:
a) fricativization of /b d g/ > /B D G/ and then simplification of voiced aspirated /b_h d_h g_h/ > simple voiced plosives /b d g/?
b) or fricativization of voiced aspirated /b_h d_h g_h/ > /B D G/?

Either. The first one is close to Grimm's Law.

[Astraios]

On Morpheme Boundary Markers:

The glottal stop is pretty common, AFAIK, and Lakota even goes so far as to mark a sentence-final boundary with a glottal stop, i.e.:

Táku he? - [t'aku heʔ] - "What is it?"
Lé é. - [l'e ʔ'eʔ] - "It is this."

I think that either Chinese or Japanese uses /ɰ/; I don't remember where I got that from, but I'm pretty sure one of them uses it as a boundary marker.

[roninbodhisattva]

Welcome to you! I like phonologies like the one you're describing so please, go ahead and post it!

1. Morpheme boundary markers:
I mean those sounds inserted in some languages before morphemes with initial vowel. If I include them in a conlang, I tend to use the glottal stop (like German), or /h/. Do you know of other sounds that act as morpheme boundary markers in real languages, especally in East Asian languages? I think I read somewhere something about the insertion of a velar nasal in some Chinese dialect... Do you use morpheme boundary markers in your conlangs? If so, which sounds do you use?

I would say you could really pick anything, though maybe keep it more sonorous? Mayhaps /n/ or /l/? Something of that sort?

I think some Uralic language (Nganasan?) had Ø > ŋ / #_V.

Yes, it was Nganasan, and that's what happened.

[MadBrain]

In Mandarin, 1 morpheme = 1 syllable. Like some other languages, Mandarin has a tendency away from V and/or VC syllables, so it tends to fill in a consonant - /j/ before /i/ (yi, yin, ying) and /y/ (yu, yun), /w/ before /u/ (wu), sometimes glottal stops for other vowels (a, ai, an, e, er...) but I'm really not sure how often it fills in a glottal stop or if there's a pattern.

Other languages that have a tendency to fill in a consonant to turn V into CV include German (/?/ at the beginning of words).

[Benturi]

I think there’s a difference between intrusive consonants inserted between vowels to avoid hiatus, and “real” morpheme boundary markers like the German /ʔ/, which appears also after consonants (in words like Abart, nachahmen, Halbinsel it appears after the prefixes Ab-, nach- and after Halb-). From the examples shown here (Lakota, Chinese...) and from what I’ve read (In Vietnamese, a glottal stop [ʔ] is inserted before words that begin with a vowel or the glide /w/) it seems that the most typical morpheme boundary marker is the glottal stop /ʔ/, while intrusive consonants tend to be more sonorous ones. I do like /ŋ/ as morpheme boundary marker, but since Dzeom allows final consonants like /m n ŋ p t k/, I think I’ll pick /ʔ/ (again), or no MBM at all.

By the way, this is the consonant inventory of Dzeom (with /ʔ/ as MBM):

Labials: /m̥ m p pʰ b f v/ (mh m p ph b f v/bh)
Alveolars: /n̥ n t tʰ d ts tsʰ dz s z ɾ l̥ l/ (nh n t th d ts tsh dz s z/dh r lh l) (maybe / r̥/ <rh> too)
Postalveolars: /ɳ̊ ɳ tʂ tʂʰ dʐ ʂ ʐ/ (jnh jn c ch j ss sz/jh)
Palatal: /j/ <y>
Velar: /ŋ̊ ŋ k kʰ g x ɣ w/ (ngh ng k kh g x gh w)
Glottal: /ʔ/ <q> or <’>

Postalveolars are retroflex before central and back vowels, and palato-alveolar before front vowels and /j/. Thus, <ci> is pronounced [tʃi], not *[tʂi]; and <ssa> is [ʂa] but <ssya> is [ʃa].

Old Dzeom /bʱ dʱ ɖʱ gʱ/ > Modern Dzeom /v z ʐ ɣ/, written <bh><dh><jh><gh>, but Old Dzeom had already /z/ and /ʐ/, written <z> and <sz>. Old Dzeom initial /w/ > Modern Dzeom /v/, written <v>. That’s why there are two spellings for /v/, /z/ and /ʐ/. For example, the words <dhan> and <zan> are homophones in Modern Dzeom.

PD: Maybe it has nothing to do with MBM’s, but: In Zhang Yimou’s film “Keep cool” there’s a scene where a man calls a girl’s name many times. The subtitles showed her name as “An Hong”, but he was saying something like “/ŋan/ Hong” or “/nan/ Hong”...

[Davoush]

PD: Maybe it has nothing to do with MBM’s, but: In Zhang Yimou’s film “Keep cool” there’s a scene where a man calls a girl’s name many times. The subtitles showed her name as “An Hong”, but he was saying something like “/ŋan/ Hong” or “/nan/ Hong”...

That's probably just a dialectal difference, many dialects retain the /N/ initial while standard Mandarin has lost it. Sichuan and Shandong Mandarin both retain the /N/ intial, as does Cantonese and various other dialects.

[Tropylium]

I think some Uralic language (Nganasan?) had Ø > ŋ / #_V.

Yes, it was Nganasan, and that's what happened.

All of North Samoyedic actually (this is IIRC the main reason to consider it a valid grouping). Also, before front vowels it's nʲ-.

[Benturi]

First of all, I must say that now that I re-read this thread, I feel ashamed that I never said thanks for your welcoming words and answers. Especially for a first post. I don’t know what I was thinking. Anyway, I thank all who answered, if a bit late.

Over these past three years, Dzeom has become a more or less usable conlang, and I would like to post a basic description of it and hear the opinion of experienced conlangers. Especially, I'd like to know if it feels natural.

Dzeom is my first isolating and tonal language. When I started it, I wanted it to have an East Asian or South-East Asian look. This is not my priority now, but I think the Asian influence is still visually noticeable. I've drawn a lot of ideas from different isolating languages, but I've also experimented a little with word order and morphosyntactic alignment.

Now, since Dzeom is not particularly original, I've been thinking of a presentation that could be more interesting than a typical outline of its phonology, phonotactics, syllable structure, grammar, syntax, etc.

A possibility is what I call a "field linguistics experiment". I wouldn’t be surprised if it has been done already, but I haven’t found a similar thread on this board. It requires a lot of involvement from other people, so I'm not sure if it will work. The basic idea is that I act as a native speaker of Dzeom and the board members who want to play as "field linguists" try to describe the language. Now, I have a very vague idea of how field linguists work, but I assume they'd try to find a bilingual subject and the process would involve translating sentences into the second language (English, in this case). Another possibility is that I post sentences with its translation (but no glosses) and the "field linguists" try to recognize the elements and sentence structure. If someone wants to give me something to translate, I'd prefer it not to be sequences like "I go", "you go", etc. nor lists of words like numerals, etc. Well, feel free to make suggestions.

Hopefully at least one person is interested. And I should probably start a new thread.