My Avrelang

[vec]

So

Verbs
Verbs have the following structure:

Voice-Root-Tense-Aspect-Mood-Agent-Patient

The voices are causative, transitive and intransitive.
The tenses are past and non-past.
Aspects are simple, continuous and habitual.
The moods are indicative, situational necessitive, epistemic necessitive and imperative/hortative.

The causative is marked with the prefix fa-. The transitive is unmarked, the intransitive is sometimes unmarked (if there is no transitive) or marked with si-.
The past is marked with -u, the non-past is marked with -a.
The simple aspect is unmarked. The continuous is marked with -m in the past, -l in the non-past. The habitual is marked by reduplicating the root (without the tense suffix), followed by -i.
The moods and agent-patient situation is more complex:

These suffixes are used in the indicative and the two necessitives:

Code: Select all

       Me      Us      Thee    You    Him/her  Them
I      mo      mon     ma      man    may       mul
We     ko      kon     ka      kan    kay       kul
Thou   yo      yon     ya      yan    yaw       yul
Ye     le      leon    ye      yen    yew       rul
He/she ro      ron     ra      ran    ray       rude
They   re      reon    rea     rean   rey       ruden

Indicative is unmarked, situational necessitive is marked with -dey, epistemic necessitive with -awana.

The imperative is marked with:

Code: Select all

       Me      Us      Thee    You    Him/her  Them
Thou   yam     yamya   ya      yaya   yaki     yakiti
Ye     lam     lamya   la      layan  leki     lekiti

The same subject and object suffixes are used on intransitives and with reflexives. Reflexives do require a reflexive particle, however.

The hortative is marked with -deyam in the singular, -deyamya in the plural. It does not have object markers and needs objective pronouns to indicate them.

Next up... complex sentences.

[Civil War Bugle]

Looking good. When you get done/far enough, are you going to give us some stories or something in this language? I demand it.

[vec]

The final chunk of WALS features. Put yo pants one.

Features 122-123
These are about relativisation. Avrelang uses the gap strategy for both relativisation of subjects and objects (participles or some such).

Feature 124
Now we find out if the subject of a want clause is left implicit or expressed overtly when it is coreferential with the wanter. Well, implicit it is. This means that avrelang says: "I want to swim" while a language that expresses it overtly would say something like "I want that I swim". But not in avrelang cause avrelang is average.

Features 125-128
The last of the grammatical features. *sadface*. These deal with deranking or balance in complement clauses. In avrelang, purpose clauses use a deranked verb form. Reason clauses, 'when' clauses and utterance complement clauses use a balanced form. A deranked verbal form is one that cannot appear in a normal main sentence as a main verb, ie. a non-finite verb form. Balanced ones could be used in either a main clause or a complement clause. This and what we found in feature 124 tell us that avrelang has some sort of infinitive or participle like forms of their verbs.

So now we're done with grammar. What about the lexicon? Zamenhof didn't make average words and I probably won't be able to either. But hey, we can try. So let's delve in and finish this typological analaysis of avrelang.

129-130 Arms, hands, fingers
Hand and arm, finger and hand. These are all distinguished lexically.

131 Numbers
Numeral bases: decimal. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10. In feature 53, we learned that the ordinal for 'first' is irregular, but others are regularly formed.

132-135 Colours
There are 5 non-derived basic colour categories, and like in most languages, these are: white, red, yellow, grue, black. Green and blue are not distinguished. However, there are six basic categories, indicating that through derivation, these can be indicated. Red and yellow are distinguished.

136-137 M-T and N-M pronouns
Already covered. They don't exist but I decided to include an m pronoun because it seems so natural

138 Tea
The word for tea is derived from Sinitic cha. Since I don't intend to use this conlang in a Terran setting, this will have to be a major coinkydink.

139 Sign languages
Sure. There are five negative particles. Whatever. And yeah, no question particles. Moving on.

140 Writing system
Right, well, this chapter is incomplete, so the writing system will be alphasyllabic to appease WALS.

141
Finally, yes, there are affective clicks in avrelang. Tsk tsk tsk.

What's next? Well. Making something out of a lot of material. Fill in the gaps. Stay tuned!

[Civil War Bugle]

So anything new here?

[vec]

Soon. I was waiting for commentary but I guess anything beyond phonology is hard to comment on.

[vec]

This is a really convoluted way of making conlangs, guys. Don't ever try it. It makes no sense. But I'm going to soldier on and finish this thang.

So, nouns.

What have we learnt about avrelang's nouns so far?

They have no case or gender.
They have a mandatory plural.
They have possessive suffixes.
There is a definite article. It is postposed and not related to the demonstratives.

So, should I go for reduplication in the plural? We know that the language uses reduplication. The pronouns already used reduplication. But with the tests I've done with this phonology don't sound nice enough when the words have a more complex phonological structure than the pronouns. So I'm going to go with a suffix for the nouns. How about -(o)n?

baŋon
latyaron
ćihun

The possessive suffixes come after those:

1p -am (my), -emo (our)
2p -ay, -eśo (your)
3p -ar (his/her/its), -ero (their)

baŋam
baŋoneśo

The definite article is pye.

pye ćihun

Rule: Nouns with possessive affixes require pye:

pye ćihunar

Adjectives and adverbs
Avrelang's adjectives are fun because they can be freely changed into nouns or verbs by declining or conjugating them. As adjectives they have no inflexion. I'm going to say that many adverbs are formally identical to adjectives as well. In essence, adjectives are king.

They can be marked for degree with preposed words:

bo not
dyegye very
śi more
ʔana most
ʔaʔe too

Other adverbs in adjective phrases are postposed (analogous to the NP – AP word order rule).

I think that's it for morphology for now. I may go back and add some things later, don't consider any of this locked in. For reference: the pronouns are on page 2 of this thread and the verbs are on the top of this 3rd page.

Next up, some worked out syntax.

[vec]

Grammar

I changed the phonotactics a little bit, widening them slightly.

Also: this is for Janko:

1 pyir
2 in
3 may
4 ce
5 ul
6 troy
7 ar
8 ŋo
9 dun
10 xa

Courtesy of awkwords.

[vec]

And a short lexicon, courtesy of Awkwords and Swadesh and co. There are some peculiarities in there like breath and drink being homophones, I'll fix it later.

[Ulrike Meinhof]

There are some peculiarities in there like breath and drink being homophones, I'll fix it later.

Don't "fix" that! That kind of thing is cool.

[Civil War Bugle]

And a short lexicon, courtesy of Awkwords and Swadesh and co. There are some peculiarities in there like breath and drink being homophones, I'll fix it later.

homophones in general are fine, and I especially endorse this specific pair. I'm glad we are now getting some words.

[finlay]

Yeah, maybe they think of breathing as drinking the air. That's cool. I wanna use it now.

[vec]

Looking good. When you get done/far enough, are you going to give us some stories or something in this language? I demand it.

Hit me up with something to translate, Bugle.

Yeah, maybe they think of breathing as drinking the air. That's cool. I wanna use it now.

Yeah, now that I've slept on it, I'm totally for it. I won't fix it.

[Civil War Bugle]

Looking good. When you get done/far enough, are you going to give us some stories or something in this language? I demand it.

Hit me up with something to translate, Bugle.

How about one of Aesop's fables, that might be easy. I don't think this will involve making too much new vocabulary, and you can paraphrase if you want.

A Dog looking out for its afternoon nap jumped into the Manger of an Ox and lay there cosily upon the straw. But soon the Ox, returning from its afternoon work, came up to the Manger and wanted to eat some of the straw. The Dog in a rage, being awakened from its slumber, stood up and barked at the Ox, and whenever it came near attempted to bite it. At last the Ox had to give up the hope of getting at the straw, and went away muttering "Ah, people often grudge others what they cannot enjoy themselves."

[vec]

For the first translated bit of text into ʔafula the avrelang.

A Dog looking out for its afternoon nap jumped into the Manger of an Ox and lay there cosily upon the straw. But soon the Ox, returning from its afternoon work, came up to the Manger and wanted to eat some of the straw. The Dog in a rage, being awakened from its slumber, stood up and barked at the Ox, and whenever it came near attempted to bite it. At last the Ox had to give up the hope of getting at the straw, and went away muttering "Ah, people often grudge others what they cannot enjoy themselves."

ʔahe mi roeyji ay xarbyoar uŋano, siśin ay babraŋ sadu ...

New words:

roeyji - afternoon
ay - of
babraŋ - manger
siśin - ox
uŋano - look

That's as far as I can get for now because I realised I haven't figured out the participle forms, which we know exist and would be used here.

[vec]

So, I just put everything into CALS and I only get 85 of 143 being average. Hm. I was expecting 140.

[dhok]

Translate Schleicher's Fable.

[vec]

I have three issues right now.

First of all:

I haven't made the participle and I'm wondering what form it's going to take. Does it mean there is no relative pronoun or is it used in conjunction with a relative pronoun or what? What is possible here with gap strategy; while staying highly differentiated from adjectives and genitives?

Another is the genitives themselves. The possessor is marked, rather than the possessed, and yet there are possessive affixes. What does this mean? I feel like what I have up right now doesn't quite work.

Third is causatives. What are sequential and purposive periphrastic causatives? Can someone help me with that?

Finally, if anyone is familiar with CALS, can they tell my why this language is not almost completely average?

[qiihoskeh]

WALS and CALS have different statistics, based on different sets of languages, as I understand it, and different WALS articles use different subsets. A CALS bug is also possible.

[qiihoskeh]

Also, I think you made a mistake with #57 possessive affixes -- CALS and WALS have very different results there.

I'm afraid I don't understand article #110 periphrastic causatives either, although the 'sequential' part is simple enough.

[vec]

Also, I think you made a mistake with #57 possessive affixes -- CALS and WALS have very different results there.

What do you mean?

[qiihoskeh]

Also, I think you made a mistake with #57 possessive affixes -- CALS and WALS have very different results there.

What do you mean?

In CALS, 'no possessive affixes' is the leading choice and consistent with dependent marking, while in WALS, it's the 3rd choice (which seems to be a discrepancy!). Does that help?

[vec]

Yeah, I getcha. So inputting it in CALS is never going to show how consistent this is with WALS. That's OK.

Either way, anyone care to explain those pesky causatives?

[TomHChappell]

I searched for sequential periphrastic causatives. The first hit was the WALS.info feature 110 description.

The periphrastic causative construction is biclausal in that the predicate of cause and the predicate of effect occur in different clauses. There are two types of periphrastic causative construction: the sequential type and the purposive type. In the sequential type, the clause of cause and that of effect are juxtaposed strictly in that order, with or without a linking element between them. In other words, the first clause denotes the causing event and the second clause the caused event (hence the term sequential). The purposive type also involves two clauses, one representing an event carried out for the purpose of realizing another event denoted by the other clause (hence the term purposive). The sense of purpose or goal present in this subtype can be signaled by (i) verbal markings such as future tense, irrealis, subjunctive mood, incompletive aspect, etc., (ii) dative, allative or purposive case markers or (iii) purposive particles.

What about that is still unclear?
Apparently every language has one type or the other or both.
I'd imagine some periphrastic causative sentences in some languages could equally well be considered "sequential" and/or "purposive", but that the mere presence or possibility of such sentences doesn't affect the feature-value in WALS.info/feature/110 .

But if it's unclear to you, maybe here's the reason:

For the past three decades the causative construction has been a recurrent research topic in linguistics. Most research has focused on the nonperiphrastic causative construction with respect to the grammatical relation of the causee noun phrase, and on the causative as a valency- or grammatical-relation- -changing operation. Thus, previous theories of causative constructions have dealt mainly with the nonperiphrastic causative construction, as a result of which the variety of the periphrastic causative construction has been understated.

http://wals.info/feature/combined?id1=110&id2=111, http://wals.info/feature/combined?id1=110&id2=125, and http://wals.info/feature/combined?id1=111&id2=125 may be of interest.

Or http://www.dogpile.com/dogpile/ws/resul ... Relevance/.

[tezcatlip0ca]

*bumpy bumpety bee*

[Qwynegold]

Ah, I've been thinking myself to make one language that would be as average as possible in CALS, and one that is as unaverage as possible. Especially the latter kind would probably lead to a lot of interesting conflicts between various features.

I'm not sure if I understood right or if any of this matters, but you can still mark genitives with a suffix. For example English is reported as not having any case affixes while also having dependent marking on possessive noun phrases, simply because the genitive doesn't constrast with any other case.

Noun — numeral is more common (515, 51%), but numeral — noun (430, 42%) would be more expected.

Why? Noun-numeral should go well with your noun-adjective order.

So to conlude we have a negative particle, that can affect the marking of the verb in certain cases and whenever a negative determiner appears in the sentence, the negative particle must appear with it. We laso know that prohbitives are in some manner different from imperatives.

Maybe you can combine feature 114 with the prohibitive, because the prohibitive is a verbal category, and it must be marked in a different way than the imperative, thus adding asymmetry to negation. If I've understood things right. @_@

Finally, if anyone is familiar with CALS, can they tell my why this language is not almost completely average?

Because conlangs are very atypical compared to natlangs.

Also, in Soviet Russia, copula zeros you.

No, in Soviet Russia zeros copulate you.