zompist bboard

Posted: **Sun Jan 19, 2014 2:04 pm**

Subways are fun, non? Well here I made a thing on one.
I was largely inspired by Guaraní's nasal harmony and a more minimal phonology with different contrasts than what I'm used to, also implosives.

So without further ado, here's the proof I'm not dead:

Consonants:

/p t k q ʔ/ <p t k q ʔ>
/tʰ kʰ/ <th kh>
/ⁿb ⁿd ⁿɡ ⁿɢ/ <m n ŋ ň>
/ɓ ɗ/ <b d>
/s z h/ <s z h>
/ʋ ɾ j ɰ ʀ/ <v r y w x>

Vowels
/i u a/ <i u a>
Vowels also distinguish length, nasality and between plain and creaky phonation, they're transcribed with a macron, ogonek and tilde respectively.

Syllable structure
The basic syllable is CV with a maximum syllable of C(ʋ, ɥ, ɰ)V(s, z, ʀ) and roots tend toward monosyllabes.

Allophony

1. Palatalisation
t tʰ s h > t͡ɕ t͡ɕʰ ɕ ç / _(i,ɥ)
k kʰ ⁿɡ > c c͡ç ⁿɟ / _(i,ɥ)

2. Uvular dropping
i u > ɪ ʊ / U_ / _U

3. Progressive nasal harmony
V[-nasal-long-creaky] > V[+nasal] / V[+nasal]. . ._ / N_ (This Affects All Proceeding Plain Vowels / _N
ⁿb ⁿd ⁿɡ ⁿɢ > m n ŋ ɴ / _V[+nasal]

4. Lenition
tʰ kʰ > θ x / V_V
p t k q > b d ɡ ɢ / V_V / (z,ʀ)_

5. Vowel Fronting
a u > æ ʉ / (j)_

6. Vowel Rounding & Unrounding
i > y / C[bilabial]_
u > ɯ / (ɰ)_

7. Labialisation
j ɰ > ɥ w / #_(u) / C[bilabial]_
h > ɸ / _(u,w) / C[bilabial]_

EDIT: I figured I should go into a bit more detail into Nasal harmony.

At its core nasal harmony affects all vowels proceeding from the first nasal vowel or the first prenasalised stop.

Thus mapata /ⁿba.pa.ta/ becomes [ⁿbã.pã.tã] and kįxuki /kĩ.ʀu.ki/ becomes [cĩ.ʀʊ̃.cĩ].

Keep in mind, however, that long vowels and creaky-voiced vowels, & thus all vowels following them, are unaffected thus mapãta /ⁿba.pa̰.ta/ becomes [ⁿbã.pa̰.ta] and kįxukī /kĩ.ʀu.kiː/ becomes [cĩ.ʀʊ̃.ciː]. This does extend to morpheme boundries thus kųqazqus /kũ.qaz.qus/ becomes [kũ.qãz.ɢʊ̃s].

And that's all for today kids, next time we'll talk about nominal morphology, specifically how topic marking is separate from case marking.

Posted: **Mon Jan 20, 2014 5:11 am**

huh, I'm surprised prenasalized stops don't > nasals *before* nasal vowels, like in all those South American languages

ɥ in a phonology that small seems weird but maybe it came from a pharyngeal approximant?

Posted: **Mon Jan 20, 2014 8:25 am**

huh, I'm surprised prenasalized stops don't > nasals *before* nasal vowels, like in all those South American languages

Oh well damn, you're right. I'll switch that around then. I was going off memory when I did the allophony.

ɥ in a phonology that small seems weird but maybe it came from a pharyngeal approximant?

That'd be the most likely explanation. Honestly I didn't even think about it.

Posted: **Fri Jan 24, 2014 1:06 pm**

Welp, I still haven't come up with a name for the thing I made but here's some Nominal Morphology with special mention to its topic marking prefix.

And now to the main event:

Topic Marking

This language utilises overt marking of the topic noun by way of a prefix <ʔa-> appended to slot -2. This is used to disambiguate in speech when the object is the focus of the utterance or to reinforce the point when used on the subject. In that way it can also be seen as a type of intensifier, much in the same way that literally is used in English.

Syntactically the topic marked noun is brought to the fore of the utterance, though generally utterances are OVS(X).
Topic marking is obligatory in interrogatives but optional in other clauses.

Number Marking

This language utilises a five number system, number being used to disambiguate the amount of nouns.

Objects in parentheses denote epenthesised phonemes in case of an illegal cluster.

Code: Select all

Singular | Dual | Trial | Plural | Paucal

    -Ø-  | -bī- |  -kų- |  -pu-  | -s(a)-

Definiteness

The language also distinguishes between definite and indefinite nouns through the use of an optional suffix attached to slot +1 on the noun.

Code: Select all

Indefinite | Definite
      -ya- | -ti-

Case
This language has an Ergative-Absoolutive alignment with corresponding cases. The default case being the absolutive.

Code: Select all

Absolutive | Ergative | Genitive | Instrumental | Causative | Locative | Ablative | Vocative
        -Ø |  -(u)r   |   -pis   |      -mu     |   -(a)z   |   -ta    |  -upi    | -yu

And that's all for today, I think next time I might go into some syntactic stuff.

Posted: **Wed Feb 05, 2014 11:48 pm**

Welp, so I haven't died. . .or rather, this project hasn't died. And I come bearing gifts! One is a minor change in phonology, which you'll see in the intial post.

The next gift I'll give is some mild syntactics, and the tentative name of this project Chibasic (from tipas /ti.pas/ [tɕi.bas] "the language"):

I'll go into basic clauses and especially transitive and intransitive clauses and topic-marked clauses.

Alignment:

Alignment is typical Ergative-Absolutive with syntactic ergativity (think Dyirbal) as well as morphological ergativity.

Word order:

Word order in Chipasic is in general OVS(X) (for transitive clauses, intransitive is VS) and thus the basic (non-topic marked, non-subordinate) clause is such.

The basic, transitive clause looks like the following:

Code: Select all

Pumãr zakirur pukų.
pu-ⁿba̰-ʀ Ø-za-kir-ur pu-kũ-Ø
PL-human-ERG PRE-IND-eat-3rd PL-dog-ABS
Dogs eat humans.

While a basic, intransitive clause looks like:

Code: Select all

Zayikar tiyis.
Ø-za-jika-ʀ Ø-ti-jis-Ø
PRE-IND-shine-3rd SIN-DEF-sun-ABS
The sun shines

The third class of verbs, descriptive verbs, pattern like intransitive verbs in basic clauses giving sentences like:

Code: Select all

Hupar tibyu.
Ø-hupa-ʀ Ø-ti-ɓju-Ø
PRE-black-3rd SIN-DEF-bird-ABS
The black bird.

More complex descriptive clauses are handled through relativisation, but it's bed time for me and this is all my attention span can handle at the moment. Adieu.

Posted: **Thu Feb 06, 2014 9:44 pm**

Vidurnaktis wrote:Word order:

Word order in Chipasic is in general OVS(X) (for transitive clauses, intransitive is VS) and thus the basic (non-topic marked, non-subordinate) clause is such.
Code: Select all
PL-human-ERG PRE-IND-eat-3rd PL-dog-ABS

Are you describing the absolutive argument (the patient) as the subject and the ergative argument (the agent) as the object? Just wondering given the word orders you are showing.

Languages w/ syntactic ergativity make describing word order a little difficult. At least, it's hard to boil them down to "VSO" or whatever. The absolutive patient tends to have quite a few behaviors that are typical of a subject in a nom-acc language. I describe my own language as OVS, but I can easily make an argument that it's SVO. Perhaps a better way to describe your word order is SV intransitive and AVP (agent-verb-patient) transitive? Just something to think about.

Vidurnaktis wrote:The third class of verbs, descriptive verbs, pattern like intransitive verbs in basic clauses giving sentences like:
Code: Select all
Hupar tibyu.
Ø-hupa-ʀ Ø-ti-ɓju-Ø
PRE-black-3rd SIN-DEF-bird-ABS
The black bird.

I would have expected the translation to be "The bird is black".

Posted: **Fri Feb 07, 2014 12:53 pm**

Vardelm wrote:
Vidurnaktis wrote:Word order:

Word order in Chipasic is in general OVS(X) (for transitive clauses, intransitive is VS) and thus the basic (non-topic marked, non-subordinate) clause is such.
Code: Select all
PL-human-ERG PRE-IND-eat-3rd PL-dog-ABS
Are you describing the absolutive argument (the patient) as the subject and the ergative argument (the agent) as the object? Just wondering given the word orders you are showing.

Languages w/ syntactic ergativity make describing word order a little difficult. At least, it's hard to boil them down to "VSO" or whatever. The absolutive patient tends to have quite a few behaviors that are typical of a subject in a nom-acc language. I describe my own language as OVS, but I can easily make an argument that it's SVO. Perhaps a better way to describe your word order is SV intransitive and AVP (agent-verb-patient) transitive? Just something to think about.

Or rather VS, PVA?

Vardelm wrote:
Vidurnaktis wrote:The third class of verbs, descriptive verbs, pattern like intransitive verbs in basic clauses giving sentences like:
Code: Select all
Hupar tibyu.
Ø-hupa-ʀ Ø-ti-ɓju-Ø
PRE-black-3rd SIN-DEF-bird-ABS
The black bird.
I would have expected the translation to be "The bird is black".

That might be a better translation, methinks.

Posted: **Fri Feb 07, 2014 2:20 pm**

Vidurnaktis wrote:
Vardelm wrote:Languages w/ syntactic ergativity make describing word order a little difficult. At least, it's hard to boil them down to "VSO" or whatever. The absolutive patient tends to have quite a few behaviors that are typical of a subject in a nom-acc language. I describe my own language as OVS, but I can easily make an argument that it's SVO. Perhaps a better way to describe your word order is SV intransitive and AVP (agent-verb-patient) transitive? Just something to think about.
Or rather VS, PVA?

Ah, I just looked back at your original gloss and realized you have an issue there.

Vidurnaktis wrote:

Code: Select all

Pumãr zakirur pukų.
pu-ⁿba̰-ʀ Ø-za-kir-ur pu-kũ-Ø
PL-human-ERG PRE-IND-eat-3rd PL-dog-ABS
Dogs eat humans.

In an abs-erg language, the noun with the ergative case is the agent, while the absolutive case marks the patient. So, for the way your gloss is currently structured, the translation really should be "Humans eat dogs."

Your sentence is structured as ergative-verb-absolutive, which is why I labeled it as AVP.

What you are doing is treating the ergative case just like the accusative case from a nom-acc language, which is to have it mark the patient in the sentence. Basically, you have applied ergative terminology (incorrectly) to a nominative-accusative alignment.

Posted: **Fri Feb 07, 2014 2:36 pm**

Vardelm wrote:
Vidurnaktis wrote:
Vardelm wrote:Languages w/ syntactic ergativity make describing word order a little difficult. At least, it's hard to boil them down to "VSO" or whatever. The absolutive patient tends to have quite a few behaviors that are typical of a subject in a nom-acc language. I describe my own language as OVS, but I can easily make an argument that it's SVO. Perhaps a better way to describe your word order is SV intransitive and AVP (agent-verb-patient) transitive? Just something to think about.
Or rather VS, PVA?
Ah, I just looked back at your original gloss and realized you have an issue there.
Vidurnaktis wrote:
Code: Select all
Pumãr zakirur pukų.
pu-ⁿba̰-ʀ Ø-za-kir-ur pu-kũ-Ø
PL-human-ERG PRE-IND-eat-3rd PL-dog-ABS
Dogs eat humans.
In an abs-erg language, the noun with the ergative case is the agent, while the absolutive case marks the patient. So, for the way your gloss is currently structured, the translation really should be "Humans eat dogs."

Your sentence is structured as ergative-verb-absolutive, which is why I labeled it as AVP.

What you are doing is treating the ergative case just like the accusative case from a nom-acc language, which is to have it mark the patient in the sentence. Basically, you have applied ergative terminology (incorrectly) to a nominative-accusative alignment.

Ah, so if I switched that around and marked dog with the ERG and human with the ABS, it'd make more sense for what I'm trying (and failing) to do you mean?

Syntax was always the hardest thing for me, other than verbal morphology.

Posted: **Fri Feb 07, 2014 3:11 pm**

Vidurnaktis wrote:Ah, so if I switched that around and marked dog with the ERG and human with the ABS, it'd make more sense for what I'm trying (and failing) to do you mean?

Basically yes, depending on what you want to go for.

If you do that, you'd get:

Code: Select all

Transitive:
patient verb agent  (PVA)
noun.ABS verb noun.ERG
PL-human-ABS PRE-IND-eat-3rd PL-dog-ERG
Dogs eat humans.

Intransitive:
verb subject  (VS)
verb noun.ABS
PRE-IND-shine-3rd SIN-DEF-sun-ABS
The sun shines.

This would work fine, but keep in mind the word order is no longer ergative in nature. That's because the subject of the intransitive verb is NOT in the same position as the patient of the intransitive verb. That means the word order is accusative.

If having ergative word order is more important to you than having PVA / OVS word order for transitives, then you could do this:

Code: Select all

Transitive:
agent verb patient (AVP)
noun.ABS verb noun.ERG
PL-dog-ERG PRE-IND-eat-3rd PL-human-ABS
Dogs eat humans.

Intransitive:
verb subject  (VS)
verb noun.ABS
PRE-IND-shine-3rd SIN-DEF-sun-ABS
The sun shines.

Otherwise, if you want to keep PVA / OVS word order for transitives and also have ergative word order, you'll need to change your intansitive word order.

Code: Select all

Transitive:
patient verb agent  (PVA)
noun.ABS verb noun.ERG
PL-human-ABS PRE-IND-eat-3rd PL-dog-ERG
Dogs eat humans.

Intransitive:
subject verb  (SV)
noun.ABS verb
SIN-DEF-sun-ABS PRE-IND-shine-3rd
The sun shines.

This last option is what my conlang happens to use.

Also, take a look at the following PDF. I provide a link to it quite often for people who are struggling a bit with ergativity. I found it immensely helpful when I was first learning about ergative languages.

Typology of Ergativity by William McGregor

Posted: **Sat Feb 08, 2014 2:47 pm**

what is sort of happening here is, you are listing Things and how the language marks them without saying what those Things are

What exactly are 'definite' and 'indefinite'? What is 'topic' (this is briefly but not very interestingly or descriptively discussed, give us some more details!) What do the cases do? What does the paucal do? and so on. The names are suggestive but it would be a lot more interesting if instead of just presenting a list of morphemes you gave us some of the meat of the language.

That said I appreciate that it is a discussion of nominal morphology - at the same time, if you're not going to present e.g. allomorphy then something would be nice!

Posted: **Tue Feb 11, 2014 2:07 pm**

Well firstly I'd like to apologise for my absence, I've been battling a terrible sickness this past week.

And secondly @Vardelm, thanks for all that. Your second option is more what I was trying to go for and the book will be a great read.

@Yng I dunno, description is probably one of my biggest weaknesses when it comes to this (which is probably terrible given that I'm in university for linguistics) I'll definitely go over my posts, and my notes and see where I can expand things.

Posted: **Tue Feb 11, 2014 4:27 pm**

Vidurnaktis wrote:Well firstly I'd like to apologise for my absence, I've been battling a terrible sickness this past week.

No apology needed.

Vidurnaktis wrote:And secondly @Vardelm, thanks for all that. Your second option is more what I was trying to go for and the book will be a great read.

My pleasure, glad it helped! I had a feeling the VS / AVP order might be what you were interested in, but figured I'd give some options. I still refer to that article from time to time. It's the best overview of ergativity I've seen.

Posted: **Thu Feb 13, 2014 9:47 pm**

Vardelm wrote:
Vidurnaktis wrote:Well firstly I'd like to apologise for my absence, I've been battling a terrible sickness this past week.
No apology needed.

Vidurnaktis wrote:And secondly @Vardelm, thanks for all that. Your second option is more what I was trying to go for and the book will be a great read.
My pleasure, glad it helped! I had a feeling the VS / AVP order might be what you were interested in, but figured I'd give some options. I still refer to that article from time to time. It's the best overview of ergativity I've seen.

Yeah definitely. I need to stop being lazy tho and post some of the revisions I've been doing. I've been trying to expand my descriptions, which is definitely hard for someone who's direct like myself.

Posted: **Thu Feb 13, 2014 10:02 pm**

Vidurnaktis wrote:Yeah definitely. I need to stop being lazy tho and post some of the revisions I've been doing. I've been trying to expand my descriptions, which is definitely hard for someone who's direct like myself.

Direct can be good for writing about grammar. It can be hard to read through someone's conlang when they're too wordy. Focus on explaining more aspects/features of the language and more details of how they work. The explanations of each feature & situation don't need to be very long at all. I've been writing a new grammar for my 'lang as drafts for posts on the ZBB. That makes me focus on keeping it short & concise, which in turn makes me procrastinate less on writing.

Posted: **Fri Feb 14, 2014 12:18 pm**

Well, it's not really 'direct' to not explain something. Directness and conciseness are good, of course, but saying 'my language has a genitive' and assuming that is anything other than a vaguely suggestive category label, on the other hand, is not. These things can be tricky to write and talk about in detail, but that's because they're what distinguish an interesting, well-thought out conlang from another tedious sketch cobbled together from half-read Wikipedia articles. Ultimately, of course, it's up to you how you want to develop your conlang - but I personally am very interested in these sorts of details, especially in syntax (which is an underdescribed feature of languages on this board, probably because the people who write interesting things about it rarely share their work).

Posted: **Thu Mar 20, 2014 12:56 pm**

Today I'll be reintroducing the Noun in Pasic as I've been busy making changes to the language as a whole and expanding my skills of description. This will be part one of three, focusing on describing Pasic nouns as well as introducing number. Anywho, without further ado here goes nothing.

Pasic itself is a highly agglutinative language mostly using suffixes to derive meaning but also with a few prefixes as well. Derivation is mostly done through compounding though derivational suffixes exist as well as other methods (such as reduplication to create collective nouns).

Its alignment is Ergative-Absolutive with a combined morphological and syntactic (more on this one later) Ergativity.

Now that that's out of the way let's get on to Nominal Morphology.

Number
Pasic marks four different numbers; Singular, Dual, Plural & Collective as prefixes going ahead of the noun. The differences between each will be illustrated (not actually, I don't have any pencils) below:

The Singular is the unmarked number it marks a single (one) of an object with a null-morpheme:

Ø-

for example "one dog" would be <kwų>.
The singular also acts as a Singulative for Collective nouns for example <surā> for a blade of grass.
And that concludes the Singular.

Now if you want to mark more than one of a thing we have two more prefixes to talk about.
First up is the dual:

bī-

which is used when talking about two things. To use our previous example "two dogs" would be <bīkwų>. The dual is often seen as an archaism amongst some speakers and is rapidly being lost amongst those trendy hipsters in favour of a periphrastic construction, but more on that eventually.

Finally for denoting multiples we have the far more widely used Plural:

hu-

The plural is used for denoting anything with more than two, so for a whole "army of dogs" one would use <hukwų>. Now that's a whole lotta dogs, eh?

Now that I've outlined the basic numbers we'll get to a special category of mass, or collective, nouns for which their existence is pluralised and indistinguishable. We saw one earlier in the form of <surā> or "grass" which despite being in singulative (remember the singular also acts as a singulative) is a collective noun.

When you want to express these nouns in their natural state however you must append the following:

tya-

that will mark your collectives, though most folks nowadays don't mark their collective instead using a periphrastic construction to denote a singulative.

And that's all for parte uno. Next time I have some drive I'll discuss topic marking, again!

zompist bboard

Pasic- NP: Morphology Redux

Pasic- NP: Morphology Redux

Re: The "I Made A Thing on the Subway" Scratchpad- NP: Fonol

Re: The "I Made A Thing on the Subway" Scratchpad- NP: Fonol

Re: Vidlang Scratchpad- NP: Morfología Nominal

Re: Vidlang Scratchpad- NP: Morfología Nominal

Re: Vidlang Scratchpad- NP: Morfología Nominal

Re: Vidlang Scratchpad- NP: Morfología Nominal

Re: Vidlang Scratchpad- NP: Morfología Nominal

Re: Vidlang Scratchpad- NP: Morfología Nominal

Re: Vidlang Scratchpad- NP: Morfología Nominal

Re: Chipasic- NP: Syntax

Re: Chipasic- NP: Syntax

Re: Chipasic- NP: Syntax

Re: Chipasic- NP: Syntax

Re: Chipasic- NP: Syntax

Re: Chipasic- NP: Syntax

Re: Pasic- NP: Morphology Redux