Aesthetics of a Proto-Language

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.
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Re: Aesthetics of a Proto-Language

Post by cerealbox »

sucaeyl wrote:We weren't being hostile; we were being skeptical, as is to be expected when such a claim as yours is made. I have to agree, however, that from a cursory glance at WALS, there seems to be slightly more synthesis in languages spoken by traditionally simple-technology societies. I don't believe that the trend is too great to be more than coincidence.
I would clearly class it as more hostile than skeptical. it was less "where did you hear that?" or "do you have a source for that" and more "you're wrong because I know of an example that counteracts your point" and "this is absurd because of such and such."

No one said "that's interesting, I haven't heard that, care to expand on that so I can verify it?" It was outright hostility. Which means I triggered some sort of emotional button for you guys. I'm guessing it's the suggestion that some societies exhibit more complexity or simplicity in certain areas which is blasphemy in liberal circles.

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Re: Aesthetics of a Proto-Language

Post by Salmoneus »

... oh good, you've progressed to patronising us. AND the inevitable bogeyman of "Liberals". It must be so useful for you not to have to think about things, but always to know you must be right because you're not a Liberal.

I'm not sure why you bother talking to us. Don't you already have a stereotype for what Liberals will say about the aesthetics of proto-languages?
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Re: Aesthetics of a Proto-Language

Post by cerealbox »

I AM a liberal for your information. Look who's assuming now.

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Re: Aesthetics of a Proto-Language

Post by Ollock »

vampyre_smiles wrote:Also, which Chinese? Mandarin? Cantonese? One of the other dozens of "dialects" that are basically distinct languages if they weren't all spoken in the same country?
When I say Chinese, I usually mean Mandarin, but your point is valid. The fact is that most of the Chinese languages have fairly similar structure -- tonal, analytic languages with heavy compounding. There is evidence that Wu is developing into a pitch-accent language, but that's all I can think of at the moment.
Ars Lande wrote:- Chinese languages likewise show no sign of morphological simplification through history. Old Chinese had some synthetic elements, but was still more analytic than English. If anything, Mandarin is acquiring synthetic features, not losing them.
It's hard to tell whether or not Old Chinese was more synthetic than modern Sinitic languages or not, given that the writing system would probably obscure grammatical inflections. I am now searching for a paper on the subject, unfortunately my Google-fu is not so good with scholarly articles.
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Re: Aesthetics of a Proto-Language

Post by Herr Dunkel »

The reason we did not say we didn't hear it before is because we have, more times than the total sum of years of you, your father and both your paternal grandparents.
We gave you counterexamples which encompass approximately two billion people. Accept that popular linguistics is worth shit and admit your defeat. You haven't even touched upon what I've said, and, also, it angers me to the depths of my core when people who are plainly new go around and attempt to armchair us into a stereotype and psychoanalyse us - reverse sociolinguistic Whorfianism isn't our emotional button, wannabe psychologists are.
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Re: Aesthetics of a Proto-Language

Post by Nortaneous »

shut up darkgamma

anyway to the extent that such an effect exists it is probably coincidence

and protolangs *are* different from conlangs in that, if you are not handwaving a lot, you are not making a protolang, you are making a conlang and deriving another conlang from it. this is a thing i learned when i tried to make a protolang for my main conlang and now that protolang is my main conlang and the original main conlang i haven't even started on. and now there is a protolang for the protolang but it is v. handwavey and basically consists of a few core affixes and some roots with very wide semantic meaning and some vague shape, and general sound correspondences. for example, proto-west-antipodean could have like c'oepaz meaning something like 'stomach', which is reflected in kannow as t'epŗ 'be hungry' and some other antipodean lang as like hövs 'haggis' or w/e, so there'd be a regular correspondence of PWE z to kannow r, PWE short a to kannow 0, PWE palatals to other-antipodean-lang h, etc. but the diachronics are also halfassed, at the same time, and the excuse is that Weird Shit Happens All The Time, In Natlangs Too, So Fuck It.
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Re: Aesthetics of a Proto-Language

Post by clawgrip »

Yeah, I did something similar, deriving a protolang that ended up becoming more developed than any of its descendants. I also added hints of an even older language by creating certain roots that only appear in derivations but are never used alone. I also added three vowels that only appear very sparingly and all vanish in both major families derived from this language.

On another note, I put a fair amount of effort into that language, but as I originally began designing it about 13 years ago, the phonology has some stupid stuff in it...but sadly, I have already derived multiple languages from it (in various states of development, most of them only somewhat), so I'm basically forced to live with it. What I'm trying to say is, if you create a protolang, make sure you are happy with the features you do decide to include in it, because it gets really hard to extract all the dumb stuff in it after you've derived 8 or 9 languages from it.

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Re: Aesthetics of a Proto-Language

Post by Ars Lande »

cerealbox wrote: I would clearly class it as more hostile than skeptical. it was less "where did you hear that?" or "do you have a source for that" and more "you're wrong because I know of an example that counteracts your point" and "this is absurd because of such and such."

No one said "that's interesting, I haven't heard that, care to expand on that so I can verify it?" It was outright hostility. Which means I triggered some sort of emotional button for you guys. I'm guessing it's the suggestion that some societies exhibit more complexity or simplicity in certain areas which is blasphemy in liberal circles.
Well, I entirely agree with the idea that some societies exhibit more complexities in certain areas than others.
I'm simply disagreeing with the idea that there is a correlation between two of these areas, strikingly different ones, that is:
a) the morphological feature of their languages.
b) their technological development.

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Re: Aesthetics of a Proto-Language

Post by Herr Dunkel »

Nortaneous wrote:shut up darkgamma
Ok you go squee and cry when he pushes your "emotional buttons"
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Re: Aesthetics of a Proto-Language

Post by Pthagnar »

Speaking of statistical linguistics theories with very small effect sizes, especially ones thought up by non-linguists who may even very well be Liberals and so worthy of all love due to those who follow such an adorable ideology, does anyone remember what happened to that paper which somebody [a biology person?] got published in Nature a year or so back?

It was the one which plotted "phoneme inventory size according to ????" against "going-over-land-distance between where omniglot says the language is spoken and the Great Rift Valley", observed a slight effect in that they got bigger/smaller as the distance increased and said that this was interesting. I remember, looking at the data, that it looked to me more like the New World datasets were just larger/smaller compared to Old World ones, and guessed it might be due to some methodological difference in describing phoneme sizes between Americanists and non-Americanists.

NE: if this turned out to be the case, i want a prize

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Re: Aesthetics of a Proto-Language

Post by Herr Dunkel »

So, what, Portugese is supposed to have a phonology to dwarf Ubykh?

And, describing phonemes is pretty precise business - as long as you can muster minimal pairs, it's allright. Of course, there are the minimalists and the maximalists, preferring to analyse certain phonemes as either clusters or pure phonemes (respectively), so it's not uncommon to see different phoneme counts in the same language.

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Re: Aesthetics of a Proto-Language

Post by Pthagnar »

[quote="Elector Dark"][/quote]
No, not *dwarf*, because as I said, the effect was very small indeed.

And a precise business in which there is rampant imprecision is called an imprecise business.

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Re: Aesthetics of a Proto-Language

Post by Kaenif »

I have a similar problem as cerealbox about deriving conlangs from a realistic language history, but
Anguipes wrote:My method is, if your proto-lang is a tool, not a project in and of itself where detailed knowledge of grammar and word use is important: be fuzzy. That way you can pretend there are greater details under your simple outline. Apply a series of related concepts to a root as meanings, and give a grand shrug as to what it meant precisely to the original speakers. Sometimes don't even bother defining whether some root was a noun, a verb, or whatever. Have a basic idea of word order and inflections (if any), but again don't detail it. Use terms like "broadly", "usually", "probably" and "tenuous". Then add or change details, or whole chunks your original sketch, as you work on daughter langs - just as long as you end up being able to derive all the features of each daughter somehow, it'll be fine.
Nortaneous wrote:you are not making a protolang, you are making a conlang and deriving another conlang from it. this is a thing i learned when i tried to make a protolang for my main conlang and now that protolang is my main conlang and the original main conlang i haven't even started on. and now there is a protolang for the protolang but it is v. handwavey and basically consists of a few core affixes and some roots with very wide semantic meaning and some vague shape, and general sound correspondences. for example, proto-west-antipodean could have like c'oepaz meaning something like 'stomach', which is reflected in kannow as t'epŗ 'be hungry' and some other antipodean lang as like hövs 'haggis' or w/e, so there'd be a regular correspondence of PWE z to kannow r, PWE short a to kannow 0, PWE palatals to other-antipodean-lang h, etc. but the diachronics are also halfassed, at the same time, and the excuse is that Weird Shit Happens All The Time, In Natlangs Too, So Fuck It.
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Re: Aesthetics of a Proto-Language

Post by Nortaneous »

clawgrip wrote:On another note, I put a fair amount of effort into that language, but as I originally began designing it about 13 years ago, the phonology has some stupid stuff in it...but sadly, I have already derived multiple languages from it (in various states of development, most of them only somewhat), so I'm basically forced to live with it. What I'm trying to say is, if you create a protolang, make sure you are happy with the features you do decide to include in it, because it gets really hard to extract all the dumb stuff in it after you've derived 8 or 9 languages from it.
You can't extract the dumb stuff, but you can add bits to make it not dumb: just add things that disappear in all the daughterlangs.
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Re: Aesthetics of a Proto-Language

Post by cerealbox »

So what exactly is it you're trying to go for in a proto-language? Just another idea for a language, or do you need to come up with a few rough ideas of outcomes first and then see how that might be derived or do you look at other proto-languages and become inspired by those or what?

For me, the history of deriving a language family from a pidgin is interesting and it gives me a basic starting point to work outwards from. Additionally it solves many problems of creating something new and unique while trying to plausibly fit a new civilization into the existing world. However, it seems hard as fuck so far, especially with a simple phonology (it's hard to imagine how a stable system could evolve into a more interesting unstable system).

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Re: Aesthetics of a Proto-Language

Post by Vuvuzela »

cerealbox wrote:So what exactly is it you're trying to go for in a proto-language?
Usually just a language, although it's fun to give it an unstable as fuck phonology. Like my conlang proto-Ludlami,which has voiceless nasal clicks, a typologically super-rare feature, which every language that descends from it is going to find some way to get rid of. Or Proto-Indo-European, a natlang which had breathy voiced stops but no aspirated stops. Every branch gets rid of that feature in a totally different way (Hellenic just turns them into aspirated stops, Indo-Aryan brings in aspirated stops to get some symmetry, and Germanic does, uhh, it Grimms Laws them out of existance)
However, it seems hard as fuck so far, especially with a simple phonology (it's hard to imagine how a stable system could evolve into a more interesting unstable system).
As your pidgin becomes a creole, have it grammaticalize all of the clever ways your conpeople come up with to express ideas as either inflectional or derivational morphology. Do this to such a degree that you have an unstably huge system of derivational morphology.
Design another language with a somewhat more complicated phonology, have it act as a substrate to your creole. The language will likely lose some of it's many derivational processes, but will keep some common words formed by those processes.
If your creole has some clunky way of forming, for instance, plurals, like full-word reduplication, then the people whose L1 is the substrate could bring in the pluralizing morpheme from their language, except in certain common words.
There might be some sound changes that make some of the phonemes found in the substrate phonemic in the language itself. This reduces the need for long words, and allows you to shorten the words, including inflected forms. Using regular sound change, turn the a whole series of suffixes into just one.
Congratulations! You've just turned a pidgin into a fusional inflecting language, full of irregular plurals and cranberry morphemes.
that's just one way to introduce irregularities into a language. If you don't like it, I'm sure you could think of others.

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Re: Aesthetics of a Proto-Language

Post by Imralu »

Vuvgangujunga wrote:Pisin gatim samting no isi tasol, olsem long tok no pisin. Empela nogatim traipela namba long tok, empela nidim tok bilong tingting toktok long samting.
"Gat" i no yusim "-im"
"Nogat" em i min "no" long Tok Inglis. Tripela wod "i no gat" i min "doesn't have" long Tok Inglis.
Na no lusim tingting long "i" bihain long planti subject.

Pisin gatim samting ...
=> Pisin (em) i gat (ol) samting ...


Empela nogatim ...
=> Ol i no gat ...

Sori, mi tu mi no saveman long Tok Pisin tu.
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Re: Aesthetics of a Proto-Language

Post by Vuvuzela »

Sori, nau mi no yusim lo bilong tok pisin gut. Traim lain tok pisin bipo long taim, tasol nau yusim taim bilong malolo traim lain narapela tok, olsem tok Spen.

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Re: Aesthetics of a Proto-Language

Post by Okuno »

Wow, I had to return to the first page to cleanse my palette of all the troll-face. I will say I'm amazed at the amount of certitude some people have here, in favor of or against linguistic claims. But then, what do I know? I guess I know the fine structure constant to within 0.32 parts per billion...

Cool story aside:
I take it that your goal is both historical as well as dealing with synchronic variations (sister langs)? I might suggest, though I haven't done this, that you actually use your main conlang and, through sound correspondences, derive sister langs directly. Then you can go back and make a reconstruction of the proto-lang. I'm sure Ollock will hate the idea of working backwards, but I think it depends on the mind at work. I know I'm much better at working backwards than forwards.

Which brings me to Likaaku'a, which I've been working on recently. I built some nice ideas, but implementation of the grammar (affixes? separate words? syntax? in what balance? any (irr)regularities?) was giving me pains. So, I'm currently working to work out a protolang from what I know I want to keep in the daughterlang. I've been focused on phonology and phonotactics, since that's largely what I'm keeping, but here's my methodology:

I varied the phoneme chart and basic syllable structure. For each change, I wrote down what would need to happen (just the start and end points, not the route: call it a goal). I also considered whether changes could be linked (rounded vowels could be introduced with a loss of /w/ , for example). Anyway, only after I had all the goals listed, I devised several sound changes directed towards each one, though some changes I copy-pasted into other goals, when applicable. Thus, I keep the target aesthetic I first devised, while also creating a reasonable amount of change over time. You can influence the aesthetic of the protolang as well, simply by filling in the route after the endpoints. I'm about to sit down and linearize the changes, and then add a little detail, maybe. The thing that's helped me is that I've managed to separate out what I want from how to do it (and also split the how into several distinct modules and stages).

You sound like you want a pretty in-depth protolang, though, and I have no idea about that. I would offer this wisdom, though: be satisfied with a simple, sketchy lang at first. The details aren't going to fill themselves in overnight. In painting, for example, you might do a simplified underpainting before putting down the shapes and colors better, which lets the artist get an idea of the beast they're wrangling with before jumping in the ring.
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Re: Aesthetics of a Proto-Language

Post by shanoxilt »

Pole, the wrote:I want to see a language family based on Volapük! :P
That would require that people speak Volapük and successfully reproduce. :P

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Re: Aesthetics of a Proto-Language

Post by Pogostick Man »

shanoxilt wrote:
Pole, the wrote:I want to see a language family based on Volapük! :P
That would require that people speak Volapük and successfully reproduce. :P
You've necro'ed an almost four-year-old thread just to make a joke.
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Re: Aesthetics of a Proto-Language

Post by shanoxilt »

Pogostick Man wrote:
shanoxilt wrote:
Pole, the wrote:I want to see a language family based on Volapük! :P
That would require that people speak Volapük and successfully reproduce. :P
You've necro'ed an almost four-year-old thread just to make a joke.
I mean, I would like some serious discussion on it, but that's unlikely to happen given the ideological climate here.

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Re: Aesthetics of a Proto-Language

Post by Matrix »

shanoxilt wrote:I mean, I would like some serious discussion on it, but that's unlikely to happen given the ideological climate here.
"Ideological climate"? You mean the fact that necroing is a faux-pas almost everywhere on the internet?
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Re: Aesthetics of a Proto-Language

Post by mèþru »

I made the same mistake when I joined the board and used the same counterargument to support my necroing. shanoxilt, for future information, necroing is considered okay only when it offers fresh insight on a topic. Repetitive necroing is like crying wolf - if you are shouting wolf, there better be actually be a wolf or you are wasting everyone's time. If you post on a thread that has been abandoned because no one had anything interesting to say, your post better be something interesting enough to be worth revitalising a thread.
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Re: Aesthetics of a Proto-Language

Post by Salmoneus »

Matrix wrote:
shanoxilt wrote:I mean, I would like some serious discussion on it, but that's unlikely to happen given the ideological climate here.
"Ideological climate"? You mean the fact that necroing is a faux-pas almost everywhere on the internet?
Another part of the "ideological climate" here, shanoxilt, is that I don't appreciate you ringing the alarm bell by reporting every post that challenges you as "off-topic".
Matrix's comment toward you was no more "off-topic" than your own (rather strange) complaint about ideology (but of course, feel free to start a topic about the ideological bias of the board in the 'Ephemera' forum).

FWIW, you'll find we're actually much more sympathetic to necroing than most of the internet is, ALIME.
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