Re: Where are the African conlangs?
Posted: Wed Feb 19, 2014 1:19 pm
My conlang, Arroe, steals a lot from Yoruba.
Which?Risla wrote:Also, South Eresian is phonologically more Mesoamerican than anything else.
Well, there is a language spoken in an unlikely place at the southern edge of the Sahara desert calledBangime. It has no relation to any known language anywhere. That shows that even in the present Bantu homeland there was once another family of languages completely different than Bantu or its parent family or even the other families surviving in Africa.WeepingElf wrote:An entertaining question is: What was spoken in the large swath of land that is now Bantu-speaking before the spread of Bantu? There must have been a bewildering diversity of languages down there. Perhaps many languages with clicks? Languages of a type that has been completely lost due to the spread of Bantu? Plenty of stuff to be explored by lostlangers.
What? What is 'kinaesthesis'?Salmoneus wrote:One reason north american languages seem common is probably that any time you get a language with a lot of synthesis and big vowel clusters, it'll look pretty north american (or caucasian - so I guess kinaesthesis and verbyness probably help make it NA too).
A tendency to describe things through their motions or their tactile effect on the observer, which is supposedly much more common in NA polylangs than elsewhere (and which sometimes results in clearly-related words seem to have unrelated meanings from a visual or taxonomic point of view). Jeff used to have a lot of good examples of this, but he's not around anymore.Nortaneous wrote:What? What is 'kinaesthesis'?Salmoneus wrote:One reason north american languages seem common is probably that any time you get a language with a lot of synthesis and big vowel clusters, it'll look pretty north american (or caucasian - so I guess kinaesthesis and verbyness probably help make it NA too).
Most conlangs are presented with elements of grammar attached, glosses and the like, and not simply strings of letters. It's true that if your conlang is just a string of letters, it'll be harder to get much impression from it.
How does being verb-heavy contribute to the look of it? Verbs in unknown languages do not carry huge flashing neon signs above their heads that say "beep beep I'm a verb"; if you don't know the language well enough, you can't tell nouns from verbs.
Yes, I meant consonant clusters obviously. And I think both consonant clusters and large consonant inventories look quite stereotypically NA - of course, not all real NA languages conform to the stereotype, and indeed probably not even most of them. But that's not how stereotypes work.
Vowel clusters are hardly North American at all. Consonant clusters, maybe, but NWC langs rarely have clusters larger than two consonants.
That's not really so much of a North American thing as it is a Salishan-and-a-few-Penutian thing, even under the most generous definition of "stereotype". You don't even have to leave the general Pacific Northwest area to find languages with pretty bare-bones syllable structure, relatively speaking. And once you leave that area then what is there? Mixe-Zoquean, maybe some Mayan and Iroquoian, none of which are much more cluster heavy than English, if at all?Salmoneus wrote:Yes, I meant consonant clusters obviously. And I think both consonant clusters and large consonant inventories look quite stereotypically NA - of course, not all real NA languages conform to the stereotype, and indeed probably not even most of them. But that's not how stereotypes work.Vowel clusters are hardly North American at all. Consonant clusters, maybe, but NWC langs rarely have clusters larger than two consonants.
It seems to me that many are fusional.Nortaneous wrote:Are there any NAm langs that aren't agglutinative?
I see I'm a bit late to the party, but I'd like to add that interestingly this phenomenon is also found in Limburgish. Not very African, but still.Chengjiang wrote:Anyone know of a good resource on the morphological use of tone? I understand it's common in various African languages, it's something I'm not familiar with (I mostly know tone in the context of Chinese languages and those they've influenced), and I'm interested in using it.
Also late to the party, but it feels vaguely Mayan to me. Plain-ejective contrast in stops and affricates is almost uniquely Mayan (I think a few of the less-known Northwest Coast languages have it). A simple set of vowel qualities and no tone helps. Lateral affricates and a lack of complex nuclei aren't as Mayan, but not unexpected in Mesoamerica.Nortaneous wrote:Which?Risla wrote:Also, South Eresian is phonologically more Mesoamerican than anything else.
I just found a grammar of Yaitepec Chatino, and it is a very interesting language...
In terms of inventory, most of the western half of North America are much larger than we're used to - Salish, Athabascan, Wakashan, Penutian, Dakotan, Tanoan, among others generally have some combination of a high number of POAs, high number of plosive sets, or a set of glottalized and/or voiceless sonorants. For consonant clusters, while Salish are the ones with "unpronounceable" clusters, plenty of languages have clusters we're not used to dealing like kk- or -hnh- (both Iroquoian) that may make us think of them as clustery even if they're less frequent than in English.Xephyr wrote:That's not really so much of a North American thing as it is a Salishan-and-a-few-Penutian thing, even under the most generous definition of "stereotype". You don't even have to leave the general Pacific Northwest area to find languages with pretty bare-bones syllable structure, relatively speaking. And once you leave that area then what is there? Mixe-Zoquean, maybe some Mayan and Iroquoian, none of which are much more cluster heavy than English, if at all?Salmoneus wrote:Yes, I meant consonant clusters obviously. And I think both consonant clusters and large consonant inventories look quite stereotypically NA - of course, not all real NA languages conform to the stereotype, and indeed probably not even most of them. But that's not how stereotypes work.Vowel clusters are hardly North American at all. Consonant clusters, maybe, but NWC langs rarely have clusters larger than two consonants.
I think this is one of the places that splitting up "polysynthetic" as some authors do is useful, into one analytic-synthetic scale and a different agglutinative-fusional scale. Eskimo-Aleut and Wakashan languages are both clearly up there in synthesis, but Eskimo-Aleut is highly agglutinative (morphemes are either fixed or have entirely predictable phonological alternations) while Wakashan is fusional (lots of stem alternation with a large number of different stem classes, unpredictable irregularities in morphophonetic processes, some fusion of affixes, etc). More middle-of-the-road you have languages like Turkish and Finnish, which are both synthetic but Turkish is highly agglutinative while Finnish is strongly fusional.WeepingElf wrote:It seems to me that many are fusional.Nortaneous wrote:Are there any NAm langs that aren't agglutinative?
Yep. It makes sense to arrange the dimensions "analytic-synthetic" and "agglutinating-fusional" in a polar coordinate system, where isolating languages are placed at the origin, the degree of synthesis is represented by the distance from the origin, and the agglutinating-fusional dimension by the azimuth. So you may have, for instance, Turkish to the right of the origin, and Ancient Greek in a similar distance to the top, and Finnish in a similar distance diagonally to the top right.vokzhen wrote:I think this is one of the places that splitting up "polysynthetic" as some authors do is useful, into one analytic-synthetic scale and a different agglutinative-fusional scale. Eskimo-Aleut and Wakashan languages are both clearly up there in synthesis, but Eskimo-Aleut is highly agglutinative (morphemes are either fixed or have entirely predictable phonological alternations) while Wakashan is fusional (lots of stem alternation with a large number of different stem classes, unpredictable irregularities in morphophonetic processes, some fusion of affixes, etc). More middle-of-the-road you have languages like Turkish and Finnish, which are both synthetic but Turkish is highly agglutinative while Finnish is strongly fusional.WeepingElf wrote:It seems to me that many are fusional.Nortaneous wrote:Are there any NAm langs that aren't agglutinative?
In what ways?Solarius wrote:My conlang, Arroe, steals a lot from Yoruba.
Where'd you read that?Theta wrote:In Somali (and other Cushitic languages?) tone shift is the only way that grammatical gender is indicated for nouns.
I have heard that tone is a part of other inflections but it's not indicated in the official orthography so I don't have enough expertise on the other things it does.
Kosi, my most-developed project was inspired by Finnish/Estonian, Hungarian, and Nenets in terms of cases and heavy verbal morphology: aspects, moods, and voices. But it has features from a variety of sources: e.g., a plural suffix meaning 'of each other' as in Amharic, so 'Are you two brothers?' is unambiguously asking, 'Do you share a fraternal relationship?' It also has features expected in polysynthetic natlangs: affixes for various shades of causation or non-causation, e.g., 'to help A do B', 'to prevent/forbid C from doing D', and specific affixes for creating verbs, e.g., 'to enjoy X activity' (such as reading), 'to look for/hunt for Y' (such as deer), 'to have cold Z' (such as one's ears).Nortaneous wrote:What general areas do y'all base your conlangs on? Seems like North America is the most popular one. There aren't any Mesoamerican conlangs either AFAIK, and that would be interesting. Only a few SE Asian, and that's all like Khmer and shit -- no one rips off Yi.
I've just started a Semitic-Bantu combo, a minority language somewhere in southern/central Africa (maybe Botswana?):(My usual method is to combine two different languages -- V'eng is Mwesen + Tibetan, Kett is a Hittite triggerlang, and so on. If I do another conlang it'll probably be Mayan + Bantu. Or just Yi. /a æ ɔ i ɯ u v̩ v̩̠ ɿ ɿ̠/ is a hell of a vowel system.)
wait, *i've* used labial flapsNortaneous wrote:haven't seen anyone use labial flaps
Me too, in a conlang that is under construction - a descendant of Old Albic.Nortaneous wrote:wait, *i've* used labial flapsNortaneous wrote:haven't seen anyone use labial flaps
On Madeira; so on the outermost fringes of Europe. The sound in question is a bilabial flap, coming from Old Albic /w/ and, in some contexts, from Old Albic /b/. The language also has an alveolar flap, resulting from Old Albic /d/ in similar contexts.Nortaneous wrote:^ in europe? the only way i could see getting away with that is making it come from /r/