Conlang relay [relocated] (aka "The Cursed Relay")

Substantial postings about constructed languages and constructed worlds in general. Good place to mention your own or evaluate someone else's. Put quick questions in C&C Quickies instead.
Cedh
Sanno
Sanno
Posts: 938
Joined: Tue Nov 14, 2006 10:30 am
Location: Tübingen, Germany
Contact:

Re: Conlang relay [relocated] (aka "The Cursed Relay")

Post by Cedh »

Hi dendana, welcome to Akana! I'm very pleased to see someone working on a descendant of my own language, and I like what you have so far. If you have any questions regarding the grammar of Buruya Nzaysa, don't hesitate to ask me!

A couple of comments:
dendana wrote:It will be situated in the river valley north of Buruya in about 1300-1500 YP. Does the river have a name?
Not yet, but something based on the Ndak Ta region name tali or on the Fáralo ethnonym talo would be suitable. NT aunti tali ‘Tali river’ would result in something like ɔstále in B.Nz., but that's a bit too close to ɔstáte ‘Milīr river’. NT saungwe tali ‘Tali water’ would probably give sɔntale, which I like better (with stress on the first syllable here, I think). Of course it could also just be tale. A modern Fáralo compound æti talo > B.Nz. ɛstalɔ or ɛtsalɔ would also work. My personal preference for B.Nz. would be sɔntale, but maybe you can run all the words through your sound changes to see which variant works best in VZ?

As for the setting, you should probably cooperate fairly closely with Arzena (because Wippwo has been said to be the dominant language in the region in the mid-second millennium), Dunomapuka & thedukeofnuke (the creators of the slightly earlier languages Namɨdu and Woltu Falla, and the main history-writers for post-Huyfárah events in the region), and Dē Graut Bur (the creator of the slightly later Namɨdu descendant Nåmúþ). I'm sure you can find a scenario that works out.

The only setting-related thing I have issues with is the number of speakers. I read an article about the Hanse in our world just a few days ago, and there it was said that Germany and Scandinavia combined (roughly comparable to Kasca plus Huyfárah plus the whole Siixtaguna subcontinent) had a total population of only ~12 million around 1340, right before the Black Death. Which means that we should probably revise the number of speakers for several languages in the area - Fáralo can't really have had 7.5 million native speakers even during the Golden Age, and 3 million for Delta Naidda, 3 million for Namɨdu, and 5 million for Wippwo are also a bit too much IMO. As for VZ, the area where it's spoken would probably be too small for 1 million speakers in a rural setting even today, so I'd go with maybe a third of that number.

The sound changes for VZ look good so far. I think I'd personally have a closer look at some of the B.Nz. consonant clusters though, especially the (in my opinion) too frequent /ps/.

Another thing to keep in mind would be the grammatical importance of some final (i.e. unstressed) vowel alternations, which mark e.g. case in articles and person in auxiliary verbs. I think it's likely that some of these morphological distinctions would easily get lost, if not through sound change, then through replacement by phonetically more distinct periphrastic constructions. See also Radius' ideas here.

Anyway, I'm looking forward to what you come up with!

User avatar
dunomapuka
Avisaru
Avisaru
Posts: 424
Joined: Tue Dec 30, 2003 11:42 pm
Location: Brooklyn, NY

Re: Conlang relay [relocated] (aka "The Cursed Relay")

Post by dunomapuka »

Good to see some activity on this thread. I haven't been conlanging much in the past couple years, but since I took a peek at Namɨdu a month or two ago I started thinking about Akana again. I think I need to continue building out the history of the Fáralo world and Miedu from where I left off, tie the loose threads together into a coherent story, but it's gonna take me some time to get re-oriented to all the details.

I also started sketching a variety of Fáralo spoken in the Dagæm Islands.

Early vocalic developments mirror Woltu Falla, with breaking of stressed /ɛ ɔ/:
pezə "shit" > [pjɛs]
dorač "breakfast, lunch" > [dwɔrʃ] "lunch"

Other developments like the breaking of stressed /æ/ suggest an early affiliation with Southern dialects:
pæn "bite, chew" > [pjan] "eat", compare Namɨdu pyen "bite, chew, kiss"

There are numerous doublets from loans from other Fáralo dialects and Komejech:
[xir] "goat" from Kom. chir, alongside [pratɛ] "goatherd" < pir-ate
[pyɔmip] "esoteric cult" < Namɨdu pyomyeb, alongside [pɛmɛp] "unknown" < peimæb "mystery"

Isles loanwords seem to be affiliated to Thokyunèhòta:
[vip] "peasant dress," compare Thok. mwipa "clothing"
[ru] "small island," compare Thok. ṭu "island"

The Isles roots mi "small" and ta "big" have been widely used from an early date as diminutive and augmentative prefixes:
mi dorač > [midɔrʃ] "breakfast"
ta gaos > [tagus] "sailing ship"

dendana
Niš
Niš
Posts: 2
Joined: Sat Dec 24, 2016 8:04 am

Re: Conlang relay [relocated] (aka "The Cursed Relay")

Post by dendana »

Thanks for the welcome!
Cedh wrote:NT saungwe tali ‘Tali water’ would probably give sɔntale, which I like better (with stress on the first syllable here, I think).
I like this option best too- it would become xontále [ʃɔ̃dálɛ] in Vuuyin Zayxa, which sounds very nice.

Thanks for the tips about the setting- I will have to include more influence from Wippwo and Woltu Falla in that case.

I changed the number of speakers of VZ to 350,000, reflecting your suggestions. I also made /ps/ clusters strengthen the f/v distinction by turning into creaky voice + /f/ in most cases. I'll keep going through the consonant clusters, but I think the sound changes are at a relatively stable point now.

Thanks for linking Radius' ideas too- I was planning to have mergers obscure the vowel alternations and result in more periphrasis.
Arzena wrote:Hi dendana, your language is spoken to the northwest and is a contemporary of Wippwo, a daughter of Naidda that I've created!
Awesome! I'll definitely take a closer look at Wippwo then.

User avatar
Arzena
Lebom
Lebom
Posts: 240
Joined: Sat Jun 14, 2008 1:19 pm
Location: ¡California, Tejas, Marruecos!

Re: Conlang relay [relocated] (aka "The Cursed Relay")

Post by Arzena »

Hmu dendana, I haven't posted the grammar or word list for Wippwo yet (life comes at you fast and conlanging is a long art)
A New Yorker wrote:Isn't it sort of a relief to talk about the English Premier League instead of the sad state of publishing?
Abi wrote:At this point it seems pretty apparent that PIE was simply an ancient esperanto gone awry.
Shtåså, Empotle7á, Neire Wippwo

Dē Graut Bʉr
Avisaru
Avisaru
Posts: 593
Joined: Sun Jul 07, 2013 3:03 pm
Location: Nijmegen, Netherlands

Re: Conlang relay [relocated] (aka "The Cursed Relay")

Post by Dē Graut Bʉr »

I've created an alphabet for Fáralo. It's based on the proto-Oryziform glyphs that were created several years ago and it looks like this:
20170103_133248.jpg
20170103_133248.jpg (103.5 KiB) Viewed 7043 times
The ordering is based on the shapes of the letters. The letters are derived from the glyphs for the following Fáralo words:

ordo "eye" (glyph 43)
alóu "flower" (51)
neingə "leaf" (67)
oumu "mother" (73)
mabe "mouth" (77)
čaok "king" (64)
rud "man" (16)
ewa "snake" (101)
iəb "moon" (72)
pir "goat" (3)
gašu "rabbit" (87)
jæn "knife" (65)
ulgu "rope" (92)
wede "vegetable" (60)
kouwə "tongue" (2)
deing "finger" (46)
toun "hand" (1)
eioti "day" (40)
Fáralo (119)
lei "bird" (14)
ngæne "neck" (81)
æti "river" (90)
boéi "star" (5)
hiəm "cloud" (37)
Šišin (75)
silo "tooth" (111)
No roots begin with z or ə; z is a rotated variant of s and ə is just an insignificant little dot representing an insignificant little sound.

Here's the beginning of the Tsinakan text in Fáralo in this script:
20170103_133318.jpg
20170103_133318.jpg (109.74 KiB) Viewed 7043 times
So, what do you think?

Edit: don't know why the first file is rotated.

User avatar
Frislander
Avisaru
Avisaru
Posts: 836
Joined: Mon Feb 29, 2016 6:34 am
Location: The North

Re: Conlang relay [relocated] (aka "The Cursed Relay")

Post by Frislander »

Finally, more info on writing systems! Looks good, and I'd be interested to see how it develops. Is a cursive form planned for the future?
https://frislander.tumblr.com/

First known on here as Karero

Cedh
Sanno
Sanno
Posts: 938
Joined: Tue Nov 14, 2006 10:30 am
Location: Tübingen, Germany
Contact:

Re: Conlang relay [relocated] (aka "The Cursed Relay")

Post by Cedh »

Yes, it looks nice! Good work!

How would it have developed in-world though? If I understand correctly, the sound values are based directly on the Fáralo words for the concepts represented by the original Oryziform logograms? Because if that's the case, the Fáralo scribes that created this alphabet would presumably have to have had access (a) to a mostly logographic source script where all these meanings were still transparent, and at the same time (b) to the sound values of modern Fáralo. Such a scenario looks a bit anachronistic to me - as far as I remember, the Ndak adopted logographic writing from the Ngauro around -2200, changed it to a logosyllabic system by -2100 (with logograms for most content words, supplemented by a slightly defective syllabary for phonetic disambiguation and for words where no logogram was available), with the syllabic component of the script becoming more prevalent later on, so that by -1500 at the latest the system was basically a syllabary supplemented with only a handful of logograms for certain common words. On the other hand, the phonemic system of Fáralo was not quite like we know it until c. -200 YP.

So in my opinion it would be much more likely for the Fáralo alphabet to derive not from the logograms directly, but from the syllabic component of the script (which is also derived from the logograms, of course, but based on Ndak Ta words and sounds rather than Fáralo ones), and to exhibit some history in line with the Fáralo sound changes. (I have some suggestions for that, but it seems to me we may need to work out a few more specifics about the Ndak syllabary before...)

CatDoom
Avisaru
Avisaru
Posts: 739
Joined: Fri Sep 20, 2013 1:12 am

Re: Conlang relay [relocated] (aka "The Cursed Relay")

Post by CatDoom »

Awesome! Now we just need to know something about Xšali, so we can develop the Xšali writing system and its Lukpanic and Western descendants...

Dē Graut Bʉr
Avisaru
Avisaru
Posts: 593
Joined: Sun Jul 07, 2013 3:03 pm
Location: Nijmegen, Netherlands

Re: Conlang relay [relocated] (aka "The Cursed Relay")

Post by Dē Graut Bʉr »

Thanks guys!

As for the origin, I imagine the Fáralo scribes created their alphabet based on the contemporary pronunciation of the syllabograms, which would've changed slightly since Ndak times. Thus most of the characters could stay the same. I've come up with new sources and characters for a, č, e, f, š, s and z (a few of which conveniently end up looking the same as the old ones), though I'd like to hear your suggestions first before posting the revised version.

Cedh
Sanno
Sanno
Posts: 938
Joined: Tue Nov 14, 2006 10:30 am
Location: Tübingen, Germany
Contact:

Re: Conlang relay [relocated] (aka "The Cursed Relay")

Post by Cedh »

The most important part of my ideas can be summed up somewhat like this:

- The Ndak syllabary was at one point planned to be somewhat defective, but it was never decided in what way exactly. Ideas included (a) no voicing distinction, (b) no prenasalisation distinction, (c) no labialisation distinction, (d) no vowel nasality distinction, (e) no distinct glyphs for /ai au/ syllables, (f) no distinct glyphs for final CN clusters, (g) an incomplete representation of coda consonants, (h) multiple options for certain syllables, (i) redundantly overspecified spelling for certain syllables, and maybe more, plus of course various combinations of these. My own most recent idea has a prenasalisation distinction (which is also used to indicate vowel nasality before obstruents), but lacks most or all of the other distinctions. I'll write more about this tomorrow when I have more time.

- According to the Fáralo sound changes, you should probably use the glyphs for NT /i e a o u/ for Fá. /i ɛ a ɔ u/ i e a o u.

- The other Fáralo vowels originate mostly from the following sources, which should be reflected in the syllabogram choices somehow:
-- /e/ ei < NT /ẽ/ and /ai/ (maybe an AI ligature?)
-- /o/ ou < NT [õ] and /au/ (maybe an AU ligature?)
-- /æ/ æ < NT /ã/, /ãi/
-- /ə/ ə < NT /a/ (unstressed, mostly word-final)
-- /uə̯ iə̯/ uə iə < NT /ĩ ũ/

- If we go with my idea that the Ndak syllabary did not distinguish voicing, but did distinguish prenasalisation both word-initially and word-medially, then the Fáralo voicing distinction would end up partly predictable from the syllabary in word-medial position, where Fá. /p t k/ < NT /mp nt ŋk/ and Fá. /b d g/ < NT /p t k/ and /mb nd ŋg/. It seems reasonable that the Fáralo alphabet would use "plain" glyphs for the voiced series and "prenasalised" glyphs for the voiceless series.

- The Fáralo postalveolar affricates /tʃ dʒ/ č j should have their glyphs derive from NT velars followed by /i/ or /e/, because that's where most of these consonants came from.

- For Fáralo velar consonants /k g ŋ/ k g ŋ, you should probably only use glyphs for words that had the vowels /a/ or /o/ in Ndak Ta. (Velars before front vowels became postalveolars, and velars before /u/ as well as labiovelars became labials.)

- Fáralo has syllable-initial /f/ f only in loans. In native words, it occurs only finally, so it's not easy to find a suitable source glyph for this sound, except maybe a P syllable with a vowel-canceling diacritic to indicate coda position - but final /f/ in Fáralo is quite rare. A newly-created glyph for this sound could work though, or maybe better still, we could adapt a logogram for a commonly-written-about concept where the Faraghin word starts with /f/.

- Fáralo /ʃ/ š comes mostly from NT /ts/, but so does Fáralo /s/ s (the former word-medially, the latter word-initially). Since my proposed NT system would use the same glyphs for both /ts/ and /s/, we'd actually need to create four distinct glyphs (also Fá. /z h/ z h < NT /s/) from a single series, and I don't think there's any noticeable correlation with the vowels... :-/

As I said, more tomorrow!

Dē Graut Bʉr
Avisaru
Avisaru
Posts: 593
Joined: Sun Jul 07, 2013 3:03 pm
Location: Nijmegen, Netherlands

Re: Conlang relay [relocated] (aka "The Cursed Relay")

Post by Dē Graut Bʉr »

Cedh wrote:The most important part of my ideas can be summed up somewhat like this:

- The Ndak syllabary was at one point planned to be somewhat defective, but it was never decided in what way exactly. Ideas included (a) no voicing distinction, (b) no prenasalisation distinction, (c) no labialisation distinction, (d) no vowel nasality distinction, (e) no distinct glyphs for /ai au/ syllables, (f) no distinct glyphs for final CN clusters, (g) an incomplete representation of coda consonants, (h) multiple options for certain syllables, (i) redundantly overspecified spelling for certain syllables, and maybe more, plus of course various combinations of these. My own most recent idea has a prenasalisation distinction (which is also used to indicate vowel nasality before obstruents), but lacks most or all of the other distinctions. I'll write more about this tomorrow when I have more time.
Another possibility might be to not be consistent in making certain distinctions, so for example some syllables do distinguish voicing while others don't.
- According to the Fáralo sound changes, you should probably use the glyphs for NT /i e a o u/ for Fá. /i ɛ a ɔ u/ i e a o u.

- The other Fáralo vowels originate mostly from the following sources, which should be reflected in the syllabogram choices somehow:
-- /e/ ei < NT /ẽ/ and /ai/ (maybe an AI ligature?)
-- /o/ ou < NT [õ] and /au/ (maybe an AU ligature?)
-- /æ/ æ < NT /ã/, /ãi/
-- /ə/ ə < NT /a/ (unstressed, mostly word-final)
-- /uə̯ iə̯/ uə iə < NT /ĩ ũ/
I figured that out too, though my current æ comes from /ãu/, and /iə uə/ are currently written as digraphs.
- If we go with my idea that the Ndak syllabary did not distinguish voicing, but did distinguish prenasalisation both word-initially and word-medially, then the Fáralo voicing distinction would end up partly predictable from the syllabary in word-medial position, where Fá. /p t k/ < NT /mp nt ŋk/ and Fá. /b d g/ < NT /p t k/ and /mb nd ŋg/. It seems reasonable that the Fáralo alphabet would use "plain" glyphs for the voiced series and "prenasalised" glyphs for the voiceless series.
Interesting. It'll mean all stops will have to be written in a different way, but it makes sense to distinguish prenasalisation in Ndak Ta.
- The Fáralo postalveolar affricates /tʃ dʒ/ č j should have their glyphs derive from NT velars followed by /i/ or /e/, because that's where most of these consonants came from.

- For Fáralo velar consonants /k g ŋ/ k g ŋ, you should probably only use glyphs for words that had the vowels /a/ or /o/ in Ndak Ta. (Velars before front vowels became postalveolars, and velars before /u/ as well as labiovelars became labials.)
Minor correction here: ng doesn't front. Apart from that it's all in line with what I currently have.
- Fáralo has syllable-initial /f/ f only in loans. In native words, it occurs only finally, so it's not easy to find a suitable source glyph for this sound, except maybe a P syllable with a vowel-canceling diacritic to indicate coda position - but final /f/ in Fáralo is quite rare. A newly-created glyph for this sound could work though, or maybe better still, we could adapt a logogram for a commonly-written-about concept where the Faraghin word starts with /f/.
If it's fine to use a logogram, then we can keep the old f - surely "Fáralo" counts as a commonly-written-about concept.
- Fáralo /ʃ/ š comes mostly from NT /ts/, but so does Fáralo /s/ s (the former word-medially, the latter word-initially). Since my proposed NT system would use the same glyphs for both /ts/ and /s/, we'd actually need to create four distinct glyphs (also Fá. /z h/ z h < NT /s/) from a single series, and I don't think there's any noticeable correlation with the vowels... :-/
Right. I suppose š could come from si (=the old s), and the others will probably have to be picked at random.

User avatar
Arzena
Lebom
Lebom
Posts: 240
Joined: Sat Jun 14, 2008 1:19 pm
Location: ¡California, Tejas, Marruecos!

Re: Conlang relay [relocated] (aka "The Cursed Relay")

Post by Arzena »

For all interested parties, I have uploaded two lexicon lists for Wippwo to Google Drive. The first is a list of native words based on the original wordlist that Zompist began to create many moons ago. The second is a list of recent loan words that have entered the language. NB, both are living documents, and I will be adding words to them as the reports arrive back from our Akanaran philologist team.
A New Yorker wrote:Isn't it sort of a relief to talk about the English Premier League instead of the sad state of publishing?
Abi wrote:At this point it seems pretty apparent that PIE was simply an ancient esperanto gone awry.
Shtåså, Empotle7á, Neire Wippwo

Dē Graut Bʉr
Avisaru
Avisaru
Posts: 593
Joined: Sun Jul 07, 2013 3:03 pm
Location: Nijmegen, Netherlands

Re: Conlang relay [relocated] (aka "The Cursed Relay")

Post by Dē Graut Bʉr »

Fáralo alphabet version 2.0, incorporating some of Cedh's suggestions. I assumed the Ndak syllabary consisted of a set of (C)V glyphs where voicing, labialisation and nasality were not distinguished while prenasalisation was, and that the diphthongs /ai au/ weren't distinguished from /i u/. In addition there were some other syllabic signs which represented other types of syllables, or distinctions not made by the basic syllabary.
20170112_170531.jpg
20170112_170531.jpg (115.09 KiB) Viewed 6908 times
As in the previous version, the ordering is based on the letterforms.

Following Cedh's suggestion, I based the voiceless stops and affricates on the prenasalised stops and the voiced on the plain ones:
p < mpi < mpaiswa "fish" (glyph 49)
t < nti < ndai "tree" (112)
č < ngki < ngkai "egg" (12)
k < ngko < nggol "foot" (52)
b < pi < bwai "star" (5)
d < to < ton "hand" (1)
j < ke < kenla "teacher" (108)
g < ko < komwa "tongue" (2)

The vowels are derived pretty straightforwardly from the signs for V syllables, with a few coming from special signs for nasalised vowels.
a < a < asa "woman" (9)
æ < aN < ande "stand" (282)
e < e < esul "take" (288)
ei < eN < empi "grass" (19)
i < i < imbi "moon" (72)
o < o < okwa "ear" (20)
ou <oN < omo "mother" (73)
u < u < ulwo "rope" (92)
ə is just the same insignificant little dot as in the previous version.

As Cedh mentioned, somehow four signs had to be derived from the S-series. Before the alphabet was invented and Fáralo was still written in the syllabary. the same signs generally represented h s initially and š z medially. The Faraghin loanwords starting with š were written as si+V, thus si was chosen for š. H and s were picked randomly from the other S-glyphs, and z is a mirrored variant of s, pretty much like in version 1.0. Thus we have:
š < si < tsilâu "tooth" (111)
h < su < susi "mouse" (76)
s < so < tsondo "knee" (63)

Word-initial f appeared only in Faraghin borrowings, and a very important one, namely the word "Fáralo" itself, was written using a logogram that originally meant "Ngauro, people" (119). This became the source for the letter f.

The remaining sounds didn't cause such inconveniences for the scribes, so there's little interesting to say about them.
m < ma < mabm "mouth" (77)
n < ne < nenga "leaf" (67)
ŋ < nga < ngane "neck" (81)
l < li < lai "bird" (14)
r < ru < rud "man" (16)
w < we < wedn "herb" (60)

The original Fáralo alphabet lacked a sign for y, which in classical times was written as i instead. Later on a variant form with a horizontal stroke above it came to be used as a new letter for y, placed before i.

So, comments?

User avatar
dunomapuka
Avisaru
Avisaru
Posts: 424
Joined: Tue Dec 30, 2003 11:42 pm
Location: Brooklyn, NY

Re: Conlang relay [relocated] (aka "The Cursed Relay")

Post by dunomapuka »

Some ideas:

-Final /ə/ might be perceived as a variant of /a/ as opposed to other /ə/ which are mostly used to break up clusters in loanwords. If you split it up I would use the dot only for the latter, the first could be some variant of the /a/ glyph.
-Would also be interesting to have a separate letter for unstressed initial e-
-What if /b d g s š/ are written as variants of /p t k h w/ when they result from consonant mutation? Think Gaelic.
-I second Cedh in thinking that /iə uə/ should be separate letters derived from iN uN.
-/č/ from ngkai is not a good fit because the Fáralo reflex is ekéi.

EDIT: never mind the last one, I wasn't following the chronology. ngkai first gets recruited as a syllabary glyph ngki, which then reflects the palatalized pronunciation. Right?

Dē Graut Bʉr
Avisaru
Avisaru
Posts: 593
Joined: Sun Jul 07, 2013 3:03 pm
Location: Nijmegen, Netherlands

Re: Conlang relay [relocated] (aka "The Cursed Relay")

Post by Dē Graut Bʉr »

dunomapuka wrote: -Final /ə/ might be perceived as a variant of /a/ as opposed to other /ə/ which are mostly used to break up clusters in loanwords. If you split it up I would use the dot only for the latter, the first could be some variant of the /a/ glyph.
I'd prefer to use the same sign for all /ə/, though we could of course use a variant of a (probably just a vertical line).
-Would also be interesting to have a separate letter for unstressed initial e-
Perhaps, though I imagine they started to write down the initial e- soon after it appeared, which means that by the time the alphabet was invented, it was written the same as regular e.
-What if /b d g s š/ are written as variants of /p t k h w/ when they result from consonant mutation? Think Gaelic.
Certainly a possibility.
-I second Cedh in thinking that /iə uə/ should be separate letters derived from iN uN.
Perhaps you're right; it makes sense to analyse /iə uə/ as single units, and it'd also mean that all of the VN glyphs could be used. Though I'd like to point out that the Fáralo grammar doesn't mention these diphthongs at all, but instead it gives the pronunciation of ŋiəbu as ['ni ə bu], suggesting that sequences /iə/ and /uə/ actually consisted of two separate syllables. The sample on the wiki page transcribes those sequences the same way. This all could mean that they were either actually pronounced as separate syllables (at least originally), in which case they should be written as digraphs, or that Zompist made a mistake (apart from the [n]).
EDIT: never mind the last one, I wasn't following the chronology. ngkai first gets recruited as a syllabary glyph ngki, which then reflects the palatalized pronunciation. Right?
Yep, that's right.

Cedh
Sanno
Sanno
Posts: 938
Joined: Tue Nov 14, 2006 10:30 am
Location: Tübingen, Germany
Contact:

Re: Conlang relay [relocated] (aka "The Cursed Relay")

Post by Cedh »

Nice! It looks a lot more historically plausible now. That said, a couple of glyph etymologies may still need additional work (see below), and there's also a more general point:

I'm strongly in favor of having the Fáralo alphabet containing more glyphs than strictly necessary - firstly because that'd give additional flavor, and secondly (importantly) because that'd give more letterforms to play with when creating descendant scripts. As a summary, I imagine the Fáralo alphabet to work like an alphabet in that every glyph stands for one sound, and also in that every sound of the Fáralo language can be represented more or less unambiguously, but not with a one-to-one correspondence with the phoneme inventory, instead containing a couple of variant spellings for certain sounds which may represent etymological spelling in some cases, and arbitrary tradition in others. All in all, I think we should be aiming for 35-40 letters rather than the 27½ we have now.
Dē Graut Bʉr wrote:
dunomapuka wrote: -Final /ə/ might be perceived as a variant of /a/ as opposed to other /ə/ which are mostly used to break up clusters in loanwords. If you split it up I would use the dot only for the latter, the first could be some variant of the /a/ glyph.
I'd prefer to use the same sign for all /ə/, though we could of course use a variant of a (probably just a vertical line).
A vertical line is a neat idea. Other options would be aunti "river" (90), giving something like <Z> or <Ƨ>, or âka "air, wind" (22), giving something like <∂ Ꭷ ᘐ ᖙ>.
-Would also be interesting to have a separate letter for unstressed initial e-
Perhaps, though I imagine they started to write down the initial e- soon after it appeared, which means that by the time the alphabet was invented, it was written the same as regular e.
Since this initial /ɛ-/ is usually epenthetic, it might have been [ə] early on. /ə/ doesn't appear word-initially in Fáralo, so unstressed /ɛ-/ could even be written as schwa, while other instances of /ɛ/ would be written with the E glyph. This would actually be my favorite option here.
-What if /b d g s š/ are written as variants of /p t k h w/ when they result from consonant mutation? Think Gaelic.
Certainly a possibility.
I like that idea a lot too. We could use turned or mirrored versions of the base letters (as with S~Z), the base letters plus a diacritic, or alternative syllable glyph sources. The first of these has the advantage that there's precedent within the script, even for indicating [+voiced], but we have lots of glyphs already that are in fact turned or mirrored versions of other letters, but unsystematically so (A~M, N~E, J~O, I~K, G~EI, H~F, B~Æ), so maybe this idea is not so workable. (Actually I'm not sure that many similarities is something we really want; maybe it would be a good idea to try and reduce them; then the variant glyph idea might work.) As for diacritics, it looks as if the script already contains a few (compare I~S~J to K~Z~O), but again it doesn't have any identifiable meaning. So maybe alternative syllables is the easiest source here, but maybe using less similar glyphs in the first place (and then having graphical space to rotate some of them) would be the most interesting way to go.

We could maybe add additional glyphs from simple *PV *TV *KI/KE *KA/KO syllables with voiceless values though, which would (at first?) be used only in word-initial position.
-I second Cedh in thinking that /iə uə/ should be separate letters derived from iN uN.
Perhaps you're right; it makes sense to analyse /iə uə/ as single units, and it'd also mean that all of the VN glyphs could be used. Though I'd like to point out that the Fáralo grammar doesn't mention these diphthongs at all, but instead it gives the pronunciation of ŋiəbu as ['ni ə bu], suggesting that sequences /iə/ and /uə/ actually consisted of two separate syllables. The sample on the wiki page transcribes those sequences the same way. This all could mean that they were either actually pronounced as separate syllables (at least originally), in which case they should be written as digraphs, or that Zompist made a mistake (apart from the [n]).
These sequences are disyllabic in Fáralo, yes, but their etyma were monosyllabic in Ndak Ta, so they would originally have been written as one syllable. And since you're already using *AN *EN *ON anyway, adding *IN *UN makes a lot of sense here. (Maybe individual writers may vary whether they use single glyphs IƏ UƏ or glyph sequences I.Ə U.Ə though, or these styles vary by region?)
-/č/ from ngkai is not a good fit because the Fáralo reflex is ekéi.

EDIT: never mind the last one, I wasn't following the chronology. ngkai first gets recruited as a syllabary glyph ngki, which then reflects the palatalized pronunciation. Right?
Yep, that's right.
It might work with that chronology, but... in the Ndak Ta syllabary, /ai au/ are supposed to have been written with two consecutive glyphs, so that ngkai would have been written NGKA.I, and the syllabic value of glyph 12 would therefore have been NGKA. Of course there's no word beginning in ngki, nggi, or ngge in the entire Ndak Ta lexicon. Maybe we could invent an oryziform glyph for ngket "wilt, wither, fade", or we could coin a phonologically suitable Ndak Ta word for a concept that we have an oryziform glyph but not a word for, e.g. "cloth, clothing" (117, might give something like <#>, <♊> or a mirrored <§>), "cart" (169), "dish" (172), "friend" ("gentle", 188, might give something like <ᕰ> or <⩁> or even <⏂>), "time"/"waterclock" (197), "plow" (198, might give something like <Δ> or <⎳> or <Ц>), "wool" (199, might give something like <Щ> or <ɰ> or <Ⲿ> or <ᙕ>), "milk" (200, might give something like <π> or <ϖ> or <ıYı>), "tear(s)" (222), "channel"/"ditch" (237, might give something like <Ũ> or <Ʉ>), "straw" (254), "claw" (271, might give something like <Y> or <У>), "needle" (274, might give something like <ᖻ> or <ᖿ> or <Ⴄ> or <T>), "juice" (281).

(The same objection also applies to your glyphs for P, T, and L, but there you can still use them for Fáralo, only the intermediate syllable value would have to change from PI TI LI to PA TA LA.)

Another problematic source is your glyph for B, because bwai "star" would usually have been KU.A.I in the Ndak syllabary. Better sources IMO would be pon "island" (62), pungwa "nose" (84), pap "shield" (97), or pumâ "smoke" (100); the first three of these have nice and fairly simple glyphs in Oryziform already.

Cedh
Sanno
Sanno
Posts: 938
Joined: Tue Nov 14, 2006 10:30 am
Location: Tübingen, Germany
Contact:

Re: Conlang relay [relocated] (aka "The Cursed Relay")

Post by Cedh »

On another note, I've been working on a new Lukpanic dialect, for which the phonology is now public: O Ayōndui, spoken on the Yōndui islands off the southwestern corner of the Lukpanic Coast. The dialect is fairly innovative phonologically and exhibits several unique developments (e.g. palatalisation of original velars, phonemic vowel length, consonant gemination, and a series of prenasalised voiced stops). The name Yōndui is a reflex of PL *Eaunutul, borrowed from the local Tulameya dialect (ultimately from Proto-Tulameya *yabnu-tula ‘bed of the sun’).

The example words on the "Lukpanic languages" page come out as follows:
*toaba "cloud" > tuəbə
*kpugba "liver" > kugə
*eadami "death" > iədami
*gitib "whale" > zēte
*huəb "hair" > ō
*taəsa "rib" > taihə
*savu "white" > havo
*lukpani "facing towards the sea" > rukani

Dē Graut Bʉr
Avisaru
Avisaru
Posts: 593
Joined: Sun Jul 07, 2013 3:03 pm
Location: Nijmegen, Netherlands

Re: Conlang relay [relocated] (aka "The Cursed Relay")

Post by Dē Graut Bʉr »

Cedh wrote:Nice! It looks a lot more historically plausible now. That said, a couple of glyph etymologies may still need additional work (see below), and there's also a more general point:

I'm strongly in favor of having the Fáralo alphabet containing more glyphs than strictly necessary - firstly because that'd give additional flavor, and secondly (importantly) because that'd give more letterforms to play with when creating descendant scripts. As a summary, I imagine the Fáralo alphabet to work like an alphabet in that every glyph stands for one sound, and also in that every sound of the Fáralo language can be represented more or less unambiguously, but not with a one-to-one correspondence with the phoneme inventory, instead containing a couple of variant spellings for certain sounds which may represent etymological spelling in some cases, and arbitrary tradition in others. All in all, I think we should be aiming for 35-40 letters rather than the 27½ we have now.
With separate glyphs for /iə uə/ and the mutated consonants we end up with exactly 35 letters.
Dē Graut Bʉr wrote:
dunomapuka wrote: -Final /ə/ might be perceived as a variant of /a/ as opposed to other /ə/ which are mostly used to break up clusters in loanwords. If you split it up I would use the dot only for the latter, the first could be some variant of the /a/ glyph.
I'd prefer to use the same sign for all /ə/, though we could of course use a variant of a (probably just a vertical line).
A vertical line is a neat idea. Other options would be aunti "river" (90), giving something like <Z> or <Ƨ>, or âka "air, wind" (22), giving something like <∂ Ꭷ ᘐ ᖙ>.
I'll go for the vertical line.
-Would also be interesting to have a separate letter for unstressed initial e-
Perhaps, though I imagine they started to write down the initial e- soon after it appeared, which means that by the time the alphabet was invented, it was written the same as regular e.
Since this initial /ɛ-/ is usually epenthetic, it might have been [ə] early on. /ə/ doesn't appear word-initially in Fáralo, so unstressed /ɛ-/ could even be written as schwa, while other instances of /ɛ/ would be written with the E glyph. This would actually be my favorite option here.
Sure, writing it as ə is an interesting option.
-What if /b d g s š/ are written as variants of /p t k h w/ when they result from consonant mutation? Think Gaelic.
Certainly a possibility.
I like that idea a lot too. We could use turned or mirrored versions of the base letters (as with S~Z), the base letters plus a diacritic, or alternative syllable glyph sources. The first of these has the advantage that there's precedent within the script, even for indicating [+voiced], but we have lots of glyphs already that are in fact turned or mirrored versions of other letters, but unsystematically so (A~M, N~E, J~O, I~K, G~EI, H~F, B~Æ), so maybe this idea is not so workable. (Actually I'm not sure that many similarities is something we really want; maybe it would be a good idea to try and reduce them; then the variant glyph idea might work.) As for diacritics, it looks as if the script already contains a few (compare I~S~J to K~Z~O), but again it doesn't have any identifiable meaning. So maybe alternative syllables is the easiest source here, but maybe using less similar glyphs in the first place (and then having graphical space to rotate some of them) would be the most interesting way to go.
Well, myself I rather like how the glyphs are so similar to each other, and it could be interesting to see what ways people would come up with to make them less similar in descendant scripts. Though we could create different variant glyphs in different ways, something like mirroring for p t w, rotation for k and an extra vertical stroke for h.
We could maybe add additional glyphs from simple *PV *TV *KI/KE *KA/KO syllables with voiceless values though, which would (at first?) be used only in word-initial position.
Would these then be special glyphs for the unmutated consonants, or what exactly is your idea here? Or is this separate from the mutation?
-I second Cedh in thinking that /iə uə/ should be separate letters derived from iN uN.
Perhaps you're right; it makes sense to analyse /iə uə/ as single units, and it'd also mean that all of the VN glyphs could be used. Though I'd like to point out that the Fáralo grammar doesn't mention these diphthongs at all, but instead it gives the pronunciation of ŋiəbu as ['ni ə bu], suggesting that sequences /iə/ and /uə/ actually consisted of two separate syllables. The sample on the wiki page transcribes those sequences the same way. This all could mean that they were either actually pronounced as separate syllables (at least originally), in which case they should be written as digraphs, or that Zompist made a mistake (apart from the [n]).
These sequences are disyllabic in Fáralo, yes, but their etyma were monosyllabic in Ndak Ta, so they would originally have been written as one syllable. And since you're already using *AN *EN *ON anyway, adding *IN *UN makes a lot of sense here. (Maybe individual writers may vary whether they use single glyphs IƏ UƏ or glyph sequences I.Ə U.Ə though, or these styles vary by region?)
OK, so then we have (too lazy to upload a picture with handwritten glyphs)
< iN < imbi "moon" (72) (=the old i)
< uN < untai "to joke" (18), looks like <U>
i < i < itwam "arm" (17), looks like a mirrored e
-/č/ from ngkai is not a good fit because the Fáralo reflex is ekéi.

EDIT: never mind the last one, I wasn't following the chronology. ngkai first gets recruited as a syllabary glyph ngki, which then reflects the palatalized pronunciation. Right?
Yep, that's right.
It might work with that chronology, but... in the Ndak Ta syllabary, /ai au/ are supposed to have been written with two consecutive glyphs, so that ngkai would have been written NGKA.I, and the syllabic value of glyph 12 would therefore have been NGKA. Of course there's no word beginning in ngki, nggi, or ngge in the entire Ndak Ta lexicon. Maybe we could invent an oryziform glyph for ngket "wilt, wither, fade", or we could coin a phonologically suitable Ndak Ta word for a concept that we have an oryziform glyph but not a word for, e.g. "cloth, clothing" (117, might give something like <#>, <♊> or a mirrored <§>), "cart" (169), "dish" (172), "friend" ("gentle", 188, might give something like <ᕰ> or <⩁> or even <⏂>), "time"/"waterclock" (197), "plow" (198, might give something like <Δ> or <⎳> or <Ц>), "wool" (199, might give something like <Щ> or <ɰ> or <Ⲿ> or <ᙕ>), "milk" (200, might give something like <π> or <ϖ> or <ıYı>), "tear(s)" (222), "channel"/"ditch" (237, might give something like <Ũ> or <Ʉ>), "straw" (254), "claw" (271, might give something like <Y> or <У>), "needle" (274, might give something like <ᖻ> or <ᖿ> or <Ⴄ> or <T>), "juice" (281).

(The same objection also applies to your glyphs for P, T, and L, but there you can still use them for Fáralo, only the intermediate syllable value would have to change from PI TI LI to PA TA LA.)

Another problematic source is your glyph for B, because bwai "star" would usually have been KU.A.I in the Ndak syllabary. Better sources IMO would be pon "island" (62), pungwa "nose" (84), pap "shield" (97), or pumâ "smoke" (100); the first three of these have nice and fairly simple glyphs in Oryziform already.
I thought you said the details of how the Ndak script worked hadn't been worked out yet... Using the same glyph for ngkai and ngki might be problematic as ngkai doesn't palatalise while ngki does, but then again the Ndak obviously wouldn't have considered this, so we don't necessarily have to, either.

Also, I know /bʷ/ was /gʷ/ historically, but wouldn't it make sense if they started writing it using the P-series after this change had occurred, regardless of how it was pronounced when the Ndak developed their syllabarly? I realise that even then they would probably not have used words starting with /bʷ/ for their P-glyphs, so I'll take pon "island" (62) and turn it into a character looking exactly the same as the glyph for ei in the first version.

User avatar
Frislander
Avisaru
Avisaru
Posts: 836
Joined: Mon Feb 29, 2016 6:34 am
Location: The North

Re: Conlang relay [relocated] (aka "The Cursed Relay")

Post by Frislander »

Cedh wrote:On another note, I've been working on a new Lukpanic dialect, for which the phonology is now public: O Ayōndui, spoken on the Yōndui islands off the southwestern corner of the Lukpanic Coast. The dialect is fairly innovative phonologically and exhibits several unique developments (e.g. palatalisation of original velars, phonemic vowel length, consonant gemination, and a series of prenasalised voiced stops). The name Yōndui is a reflex of PL *Eaunutul, borrowed from the local Tulameya dialect (ultimately from Proto-Tulameya *yabnu-tula ‘bed of the sun’).

The example words on the "Lukpanic languages" page come out as follows:
*toaba "cloud" > tuəbə
*kpugba "liver" > kugə
*eadami "death" > iədami
*gitib "whale" > zēte
*huəb "hair" > ō
*taəsa "rib" > taihə
*savu "white" > havo
*lukpani "facing towards the sea" > rukani
Nice!
https://frislander.tumblr.com/

First known on here as Karero

Cedh
Sanno
Sanno
Posts: 938
Joined: Tue Nov 14, 2006 10:30 am
Location: Tübingen, Germany
Contact:

Re: Conlang relay [relocated] (aka "The Cursed Relay")

Post by Cedh »

Dē Graut Bʉr wrote:
Cedh wrote:
Dē Graut Bʉr wrote:
dunomapuka wrote: -What if /b d g s š/ are written as variants of /p t k h w/ when they result from consonant mutation? Think Gaelic.
Certainly a possibility.
I like that idea a lot too. We could use turned or mirrored versions of the base letters (as with S~Z), the base letters plus a diacritic, or alternative syllable glyph sources. The first of these has the advantage that there's precedent within the script, even for indicating [+voiced], but we have lots of glyphs already that are in fact turned or mirrored versions of other letters, but unsystematically so (A~M, N~E, J~O, I~K, G~EI, H~F, B~Æ), so maybe this idea is not so workable. (Actually I'm not sure that many similarities is something we really want; maybe it would be a good idea to try and reduce them; then the variant glyph idea might work.) As for diacritics, it looks as if the script already contains a few (compare I~S~J to K~Z~O), but again it doesn't have any identifiable meaning. So maybe alternative syllables is the easiest source here, but maybe using less similar glyphs in the first place (and then having graphical space to rotate some of them) would be the most interesting way to go.
Well, myself I rather like how the glyphs are so similar to each other, and it could be interesting to see what ways people would come up with to make them less similar in descendant scripts. Though we could create different variant glyphs in different ways, something like mirroring for p t w, rotation for k and an extra vertical stroke for h.
I'm not sure. If the scribes consider the mutated sounds variants of the unmutated ones, I would think they'd be aware of the morphophonological regularity of the alternation, and tend to always mark the alternation in the same way. At least that'd be more likely than just modifying each glyph differently, I believe. And if a general turning or mirroring operation is not available because there are already other glyphs of that shape (and you're not willing to revise the glyph shapes to such an extent that turning or mirroring becomes viable), then maybe a diacritic would be the way to go?

(But see below...)

We could maybe add additional glyphs from simple *PV *TV *KI/KE *KA/KO syllables with voiceless values though, which would (at first?) be used only in word-initial position.
Would these then be special glyphs for the unmutated consonants, or what exactly is your idea here? Or is this separate from the mutation?
The idea here is that these glyphs would be used for word-initial /p t tʃ k/, whereas word-medial /p t tʃ k/ would be written using the "prenasalised" glyphs. Since the most salient environment for the consonant mutation in Fáralo is word-initially, the mutation variants would be derived from the new word-initial glyphs. This idea would enable you to keep the old glyphs as you have them, and add new ones that may be shaped in such a way that rotating or mirroring could work. It might also become the basis of an uppercase-lowercase distinction in descendant scripts, since the alphabet would already contain distinct word-initial variants for several common sounds.

I thought you said the details of how the Ndak script worked hadn't been worked out yet... Using the same glyph for ngkai and ngki might be problematic as ngkai doesn't palatalise while ngki does, but then again the Ndak obviously wouldn't have considered this, so we don't necessarily have to, either.

Also, I know /bʷ/ was /gʷ/ historically, but wouldn't it make sense if they started writing it using the P-series after this change had occurred, regardless of how it was pronounced when the Ndak developed their syllabarly? I realise that even then they would probably not have used words starting with /bʷ/ for their P-glyphs, so I'll take pon "island" (62) and turn it into a character looking exactly the same as the glyph for ei in the first version.
The details of how the Ndak script worked were never finalized, that's true, but there was quite a lot of detail in the earlier forum discussion already, and there seemed to be a consensus emerging (between everyone except Legion, who wanted to cling to his abugida concept). At one point there was the idea of treating /ai au/ as variants of /i u/, but that was tied in with the abugida system, which was later dropped. In a syllabary-based system, composite A+I and A+U is much more likely, especially if labiovelars are also represented as U+V, and all the more so because there's no justification for "a special type of /i u/" in the phonological history of Ndak Ta. And regarding /bʷ/, the sound change /gʷ/ > /bʷ/ actually postdates the adoption of the script, so established orthographic tradition can surely justify to keep writing this as KU.

And as I hinted a few days ago, I plan to write a description of the Ndak syllabary soon, as my next project actually. But I think we've reached a point now where you can probably safely post the next version of your Fáralo alphabet without having to worry too much about what I write about the Ndak script. The only remaining problem I see is the lack of a good source for NGKI, but how about I'll posit a word ngkilba and let you decide whether it means "cloth", "plow", "wool", "milk", or "needle"?

Dē Graut Bʉr
Avisaru
Avisaru
Posts: 593
Joined: Sun Jul 07, 2013 3:03 pm
Location: Nijmegen, Netherlands

Re: Conlang relay [relocated] (aka "The Cursed Relay")

Post by Dē Graut Bʉr »

Next, and hopefully final version:
20170119_114127.jpg
20170119_114127.jpg (119.04 KiB) Viewed 6776 times
Some glyphs have two versions; number 1 is the "normal" version while number 2 is the word-initial (for voiceless consonants)/mutated one (for voiced consonants).

Origins of the new glyphs:
p2 < pa < pap "shield" (97)
t2 < ta < daing "mountain" (75)
k2 < ka < gan "knife" (65)
č2 < ki < kil "barley" (31)
b2 d2 g2 j2 are mirrored variants of these.
č1 < ngki < ngkilba "plough" (198)

After I'd made this picture I realised that since č doesn't actually mutate j2 perhaps shouldn't exist, though it might exist as a (regional) word-initial variant or as a post-classical letter or something.

Although it isn't indicated in the table, unstressed initial /ɛ/ is written as ə.

Cedh
Sanno
Sanno
Posts: 938
Joined: Tue Nov 14, 2006 10:30 am
Location: Tübingen, Germany
Contact:

Re: Conlang relay [relocated] (aka "The Cursed Relay")

Post by Cedh »

Looks great now!

There are only a few very minor things I'd still like to suggest. Feel free to accept or dismiss any of these suggestions as you see fit:

- I'm still not fully happy with the fact that the three characters E, Æ, and UƏ are derived from verbs, and thus from rather complex original ideographs. For E we could alternatively use eplain "ball" (has no Oryziform glyph so far, but would probably look something like <O> anyway), or possibly glyph 211 "hundred" in the reading ege "everyone, everything", giving something like <X> or <⊗>. For Æ we could alternatively use anai "empty" (138), giving <U> (the current character for UƏ), or âka "air, wind" (22), giving something like one of <∂ Ꭷ ᘐ ᖙ>. However, for UƏ we probably have no choice, as all Ndak Ta words starting with [ũ] are verbs. unma "play" has a nice glyph (259) that would give the same character as that which is currently used for G1, but I'm not sure that's better (although we do have other options for G1).

- kenla "teacher" (108) for J1 also derives from a fairly complex original glyph, although it's a noun and the result looks good. A nice alternative glyph could be ginig "iron" (176) though, giving something like <≙>.

- If we keep the current origin for Æ, the simplification process for that character might look more believable if it had two vertical strokes instead of one, looking more like one of <╫ H Π>. That'd also make it more visually distinct from Č2 and J2.

- The character for W might look better and more in place if it had a shape more like one of <∈ Y ♀> or like the N character but with two vertical strokes.

Dē Graut Bʉr
Avisaru
Avisaru
Posts: 593
Joined: Sun Jul 07, 2013 3:03 pm
Location: Nijmegen, Netherlands

Re: Conlang relay [relocated] (aka "The Cursed Relay")

Post by Dē Graut Bʉr »

I figured that the Ndak would be fine using verbs or adjectives for deriving their syllabic glyphs, though they'd still prefer using nouns. The complexity of some of the source glyphs isn't much of a problem, I think - several real-world syllabaries were also derived from rather complicated glyphs.

As for the shape of W, you're right - <∈> looks better indeed, so I'll use that as the definitive character. Æ may have an archaic/regional variant with two vertical strokes, though going from two vertical strokes to one doesn't seem like a particularly odd simplification to me, so I'll keep the current character as the standard form.

Dē Graut Bʉr
Avisaru
Avisaru
Posts: 593
Joined: Sun Jul 07, 2013 3:03 pm
Location: Nijmegen, Netherlands

Re: Conlang relay [relocated] (aka "The Cursed Relay")

Post by Dē Graut Bʉr »

I have now uploaded the definitive version of the Fáralo alphabet to the wiki: http://akana.conlang.org/wiki/F%C3%A1ralo_alphabet.

User avatar
Arzena
Lebom
Lebom
Posts: 240
Joined: Sat Jun 14, 2008 1:19 pm
Location: ¡California, Tejas, Marruecos!

Re: Conlang relay [relocated] (aka "The Cursed Relay")

Post by Arzena »

Is there a wordlist of Proto-Habeo floating around? All I see on the wiki is the Proto-Xoronic lexicon. I realized that the Anheshnalaks, over the course of their eastward migrations, could intersect and even live alongside speakers of Habeo languages. From them the Anheshnalaks would learn stories of a great and mighty empire (the Ndak) but be misdirected to the south, hence their collision with the Gezoro and Xšalad.
A New Yorker wrote:Isn't it sort of a relief to talk about the English Premier League instead of the sad state of publishing?
Abi wrote:At this point it seems pretty apparent that PIE was simply an ancient esperanto gone awry.
Shtåså, Empotle7á, Neire Wippwo

Post Reply