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Yaškik Yat-Vṛḵaẕīkam (alt. romanization: Vrkhazhian Language) is a highly fusional inflecting language with a triconsonantal root system. Nouns, Adjectives, and Verbs are formed by modifying roots consisting of three consonants using a variety of patterns and affixes. It's morphosyntactic alignment is Nominative Accusative.

Background Information
Vrkhazhian is divided into two languages: Ancient Vrkhazhian and Modern Verkhazhian. Ancient Vrkhazhian was a Sed'Ashiranian language that was spoken about 10, 000 years ago. Modern Vrkhazhian is a language that is spoken in the present day. (The information provided on this thread is Modern Vrkhazhian only.)
Ancient and Modern Vrkhazhian are both descendants of the family of languages known as Sed'Ashiran. The languages of Sed'Ashiran were first spoken by a race of humanoids with bony plating around their skulls. These creatures were called the Khsinesir [x'sinesir]. They could not produce bilabials or round vowels, so at first the languages did not have bilabials or rounded vowels. Due to the physiological nature of the Khsinesir they had little to no sexual dimorphism, so finding mates was difficult. This prompted them to incorporate complex gender systems into their languages to make up for this. With time, the Humans who learned the languages eventually included bilabials and rounding to vowels.

Phonology
Vowels

The vowels /a e i o u/ are also distinguished by length. Stress is always placed on the long vowel.
Consonants

The stops /p b t d/ are distinguished between normal and uvularized.
Not listed in the table is that the voiceless stops /p t k q/ are also distinguished by pre-aspiration.

Syllable structure:
The syllable structure is at minimum (C)VC, though there can be a maximum of (C)CVC.

Allophony:

• The palatal fricative [ç] is an allophone of /h/ when it's net to /j/
• The phonemes /x χ/ become voiced [ɣ ʁ] when next to voiced stops.
• The phonemes /ʃ ʒ ʧ ʤ/ palatalize next to front vowels and /j/ and become [ɕ ʑ ʨ ʥ]
• The phoneme /i/ becomes rounded [y] when it is next to /ɹ~ɾ/

Morphology
Verb Morphology
Verbs in Vrkhazian are inflected for seven aspects, though the imperative is used as a seperate morpheme.
The aspects are listed as below:

• imperfective
• perfective
• causative
• reflexive
• inchoative/inceptive
• cessative/terminative
• intensive

The auxiliary verb "ʾīzmet" is used for the imperative aspect.

Here is a chart listing the different verb stems:

Here's a bigger image

Along with aspects, verbs are also inflected for nine moods:

• stative/unmarked
• subjunctive
• jussive
• optative
• conditional
• obligation
• potential
• necessative
• energetic

The modal verb "ʾaht" is used to denote the affirmative in a verb.

Noun Morphology
Nouns in Vrkhazhian are declined for three genders, masculine, feminine and neuter, as well as two numbers, singular and plural.

To show examples of how the gender system works we will take the word ḵav ['xaβ] which means “human”
The suffix -ī turns the noun masculine, an example of this would be ḵavī “man”.
The suffix -ē turns the noun feminine, so ḵav would become ḵavē “woman”.
The masculine and feminine plural suffixes are -ot and am, whereas the neuter plural is -al.

Vrkhazhian also has five cases: nominative, accusative, dative, genitive, and locative.
The nominative is the unmarked case whereas the others are marked with particles.

Below examples also use the word "ḵav" along with a the diminutive affix ha-
Accusative:

• Tū haḵav - child
• Tō haḵavī - boy
• Ta haḵavē - girl
• Tū haḵaval - children
• Tō haḵavot - boys
• Ta haḵavam - girls

Though some nouns do not take gender such as "šīm" (house)
so we only have tū šīm and tū šīmal only.

Dative:

• Šen ḵav - human
• Šol ḵavī - man
• Šaf ḵavē - woman

Genitive:

• Nū ḵav - human's
• Nol ḵavī - man's
• Na ḵavē - woman's

The last case is the locative affix "yat-", which is rarely used, and is usually found in the names of places, country and overall popular places. An example of this is found in the name of the language itself "Yaškik Yat-Vṛḵaẕīkam".

Adjectival Morphology

That's all I have for now, what do you think?

reserved for space

I assume the last rule in your allophony means that /r/ induces rounding. It seems a little odd to me that this rounding only occurs in this one context, but on the other hand rhotics do weird things to vowels all the time.

Your verbs are more realistic than a lot of nonconcatenative conlangs (I approve of the use of affixes), but I find it weird that the prefix-marked classes have the same consonant in the non-present tenses but each have their own in the present. (Interpret that either as "it's weird they're differentiated in the present" or "it's weird the consonants are the same in 2/3 of the tenses.") Also, if you don't use some diacritics or matres lectionis in the native orthography, people might get their aspects mixed up in reading (though the old standard spellings of the Semitic languages apparently didn't care about this that much).

How do you plan to mark the 8th aspect and the moods?

Will you have stem consonants do weird things to your inflections? (cf. Hebrew verbs)

I added some background information and began details for noun morphology, you can see these in the OP.

Due to the physiological nature of the Khsinesir they had little to no sexual dimorphism, so finding mates was difficult.

This makes very-little-to-no sense.

Also how did all the different triconsonantal forms develop? And don't say it was always triconsonantal, because that's just a horrible copout.

Nessari wrote:

Due to the physiological nature of the Khsinesir they had little to no sexual dimorphism, so finding mates was difficult.

This makes very-little-to-no sense.

The whole story doesn't but it seemed to at the time...

Nessari wrote:Also how did all the different triconsonantal forms develop? And don't say it was always triconsonantal, because that's just a horrible copout.

Do we even know how triconsonantal forms developed in Semitic languages? I have never read anything that explained it. If not, it seems like a tall order to have someone explain it in their conlang.

Vardelm wrote:

Nessari wrote:Also how did all the different triconsonantal forms develop? And don't say it was always triconsonantal, because that's just a horrible copout.

Do we even know how triconsonantal forms developed in Semitic languages? I have never read anything that explained it. If not, it seems like a tall order to have someone explain it in their conlang.

Vowel deletion due to stress. Affixes altered where the stress fell and therefore which vowels deleted. Also, vowels affected the quality of nearby vowels eg height, rounding, backness. Combine these and you get a system where related words have the same three consonants, but the vowel quality and placement varies.

Nessari wrote: Also how did all the different triconsonantal forms develop? And don't say it was always triconsonantal, because that's just a horrible copout.

Why would I have to explain triconsonantal root origins when other people who make 3con root languages don't? What makes you think mine is any different to how a semitic 3con root developed?

Ahzoh wrote:

Nessari wrote: Also how did all the different triconsonantal forms develop? And don't say it was always triconsonantal, because that's just a horrible copout.

Why would I have to explain triconsonantal root origins when other people who make 3con root languages don't? What makes you think mine is any different to how a semitic 3con root developed?

Probably the fact that yours seem to work in a rather different way.

Dewrad wrote:

Ahzoh wrote:

Nessari wrote: Also how did all the different triconsonantal forms develop? And don't say it was always triconsonantal, because that's just a horrible copout.

Why would I have to explain triconsonantal root origins when other people who make 3con root languages don't? What makes you think mine is any different to how a semitic 3con root developed?

Probably the fact that yours seem to work in a rather different way.

I don't see how so... Hebrew and Arabic have masculine endings... Although they also have plural patterns...

I don't understand the logic semitic plural/singular forms.
Walad ---> awlad, but sayara and rejaal become something else. There is no consistent patterns of patterns!

Ahzoh wrote:

Dewrad wrote:

Ahzoh wrote:

Nessari wrote: Also how did all the different triconsonantal forms develop? And don't say it was always triconsonantal, because that's just a horrible copout.

Why would I have to explain triconsonantal root origins when other people who make 3con root languages don't? What makes you think mine is any different to how a semitic 3con root developed?

Probably the fact that yours seem to work in a rather different way.

I don't see how so... Hebrew and Arabic have masculine endings... Although they also have plural patterns...

I don't understand the logic semitic plural/singular forms.
Walad ---> awlad, but sayara and rejaal become something else. There is no consistent patterns of patterns!

Because you don't know much about Semitic languages beyond the superficial, it's going to seem like that. Would you like some recommendations on Semitic historical linguistics?

EDIT: In your OP, you say "What do you think?"- are you actually looking for genuine constructive criticism or mainly are you looking for "that's nice" and intend on responding defensively if confronted with anything else? If you're looking for constructive criticism, I'm actually willing to devote some time to this if you'd like.

Dewrad wrote:

Ahzoh wrote:

Dewrad wrote:

Ahzoh wrote:

Nessari wrote: Also how did all the different triconsonantal forms develop? And don't say it was always triconsonantal, because that's just a horrible copout.

Why would I have to explain triconsonantal root origins when other people who make 3con root languages don't? What makes you think mine is any different to how a semitic 3con root developed?

Probably the fact that yours seem to work in a rather different way.

I don't see how so... Hebrew and Arabic have masculine endings... Although they also have plural patterns...

I don't understand the logic semitic plural/singular forms.
Walad ---> awlad, but sayara and rejaal become something else. There is no consistent patterns of patterns!

Because you don't know much about Semitic languages beyond the superficial, it's going to seem like that. Would you like some recommendations on Semitic historical linguistics?

EDIT: In your OP, you say "What do you think?"- are you actually looking for genuine constructive criticism or mainly are you looking for "that's nice" and intend on responding defensively if confronted with anything else? If you're looking for constructive criticism, I'm actually willing to devote some time to this if you'd like.

I would like anything I can read for free on the internet, I have no money.

I was looking for constructive criticism...
Mostly with everything else not regarding my verbs, I think they are fine, however my main issues are:
1) How to apply moods to the conjugations while making the verbs compact (x <= 3)
2) Finding productive noun patterns and plurals.

Dewrad wrote:Would you like some recommendations on Semitic historical linguistics?

Yes, please! (Even if the OP isn't interested...) Short(-ish) summaries would be particularly welcome if they exist, just to make it more digestible.

That'd definitely help my own tri-con root lang.

Ahzoh wrote:I would like anything I can read for free on the internet, I have no money.

Uz-translations.net is your best friend then. Here's four for starters:

1. Lipinski: Semitic Languages: Outline of a Comparative Grammar - this is a hefty tome, but worth reading.
2. Moscati et al.: An Introduction to the Comparative Grammar of the Semitic Languages - not as in-depth as Lipinski, but probably a bit more accessible.
3. Fufa:
   A Typology of Verbal Derivation in Ethiopian Afro-Asiatic Languages - you might just like this.
4. Comrie: Aspect - you should read this and then tell me if you think your verbs are still fine. Frankly, they're probably the least fine bit of your language.

I was looking for constructive criticism...

OK, I'll start with the criticism first, and then go on to the constructive (give me some time to comment your OP for that)- frankly, your language isn't great. It's pretty poor, in fact. But don't feel bad about this! Triconsonantal nooblangs generally are. Hell, triconsonantal languages made by experienced conlangers generally aren't that great: personally I feel that Old Skourene is by far the weakest of Zompist's languages. They're hard. I have a triconsonantal language myself that I've never made public because I am deeply unhappy with it, and have been for some five years. I keep on returning to it, but I've never gotten it to a state where I'm satisfied with it.

Dewrad wrote:

Ahzoh wrote:I would like anything I can read for free on the internet, I have no money.

Uz-translations.net is your best friend then. Here's four for starters:

1. Lipinski: Semitic Languages: Outline of a Comparative Grammar - this is a hefty tome, but worth reading.
2. Moscati et al.: An Introduction to the Comparative Grammar of the Semitic Languages - not as in-depth as Lipinski, but probably a bit more accessible.
3. Fufa:
   A Typology of Verbal Derivation in Ethiopian Afro-Asiatic Languages - you might just like this.
4. Comrie: Aspect - you should read this and then tell me if you think your verbs are still fine. Frankly, they're probably the least fine bit of your language.

I was looking for constructive criticism...

OK, I'll start with the criticism first, and then go on to the constructive (give me some time to comment your OP for that)- frankly, your language isn't great. It's pretty poor, in fact. But don't feel bad about this! Triconsonantal nooblangs generally are. Hell, triconsonantal languages made by experienced conlangers generally aren't that great: personally I feel that Old Skourene is by far the weakest of Zompist's languages. They're hard. I have a triconsonantal language myself that I've never made public because I am deeply unhappy with it, and have been for some five years. I keep on returning to it, but I've never gotten it to a state where I'm satisfied with it.

Now I'm going to have to start at square one again

My commentary on your post is in red.

Yaškik Yat-Vṛḵaẕīkam (alt. romanization: Vrkhazhian Language) is a highly fusional inflecting language with a triconsonantal root system. Nouns, Adjectives, and Verbs are formed by modifying roots consisting of three consonants using a variety of patterns and affixes. It's morphosyntactic alignment is Nominative Accusative.

Its, not it's. Sorry, this is just something that bugs me.

Background Information
Vrkhazhian is divided into two languages: Ancient Vrkhazhian and Modern Verkhazhian. Ancient Vrkhazhian was a Sed'Ashiranian language that was spoken about 10, 000 years ago. Modern Vrkhazhian is a language that is spoken in the present day. (The information provided on this thread is Modern Vrkhazhian only.)
Are your speakers particularly long-lived, because otherwise this is a rather implausible time depth.

Ancient and Modern Vrkhazhian are both descendants of the family of languages known as Sed'Ashiran. The languages of Sed'Ashiran were first spoken by a race of humanoids with bony plating around their skulls. These creatures were called the Khsinesir [x'sinesir]. [ˈxsinesir], unless [x] constitutes a separate syllable. They could not produce bilabials or round vowels, so at first the languages did not have bilabials or rounded vowels. How did they arise then? Due to the physiological nature of the Khsinesir they had little to no sexual dimorphism, so finding mates was difficult. This prompted them to incorporate complex gender systems into their languages to make up for this. This is extremely implausible. You would be shocked at how little impact sexual biology has on natlang gender systems. With time, the Humans who learned the languages eventually included bilabials and rounding to vowels. How? Just spontaneously? Did the bilabials and rounded vowels replace a separate distinction made bny the Khsinesir? What was the conditioning factor?

Phonology
In general, phonology bores me to tears, so I'm not going to offer any in-depth commentary on this, just point out the really egregious bêtises
Vowels

The vowels /a e i o u/ are also distinguished by length. Stress is always placed on the long vowel.
Consonants

The stops /p b t d/ are distinguished between normal and uvularized.
Not listed in the table is that the voiceless stops /p t k q/ are also distinguished by pre-aspiration.

I have little to say here on the plausibility or otherwise of your phoneme inventory, but I do think it would be helpful for you to detail precisely how this is Romanised, particularly the vowels.

Syllable structure:
The syllable structure is at minimum (C)VC, though there can be a maximum of (C)CVC.

Allophony:

• The palatal fricative [ç] is an allophone of /h/ when it's net to /j/
• The phonemes /x χ/ become voiced [ɣ ʁ] when next to voiced stops.
• The phonemes /ʃ ʒ ʧ ʤ/ palatalize next to front vowels and /j/ and become [ɕ ʑ ʨ ʥ]
• The phoneme /i/ becomes rounded [y] when it is next to /ɹ~ɾ/

Morphology
Verb Morphology
Verbs in Vrkhazian are inflected for seven aspects, though the imperative is used as a seperate morpheme.
The aspects are listed as below:

• imperfective
• perfective
• causative
• reflexive
• inchoative/inceptive
• cessative/terminative
• intensive

At least two of these aren't aspects. The causative and reflexive are, for want of a better word, voices: they indicate how many participants there are in an action, while aspects describe the temporal structure of an action. How would your language distinguish between I shaved myself, I was shaving myself, I have shaved myself recently, I just finished shaving myself and I'm starting to shave myself? Under your current schema, it can't. Also, the aspects and voices you have chosen don't make sense as a system: aspectual systems are often quite complex and intricate, and frequently made up of a number of branching oppositions. As an example, my own conlang Chaziat distinguishes stative, imperfective, "aoristic", perfective and retrospective: this might just seem like I've thrown a bunch of terms together, but I've actually built them together as a holistic system, and it branches. All it seems that you've done is cherry-picked a list that interests you and thrown them all together for no thought about how they work together.

The auxiliary verb "ʾīzmet" is used for the imperative aspect. The imperative is not an aspect, it is a mood.

Here is a chart listing the different verb stems:

Here's a bigger image
It is worth mentioning here that in spite of first appearences, a natural triconsontal root system isn't simply a matter of plugging any three consonants into a template of three vowels: it's difficult to explain precisely what I mean, but your system feels remarkably unnaturalistic and almost engineered.

Along with aspects, verbs are also inflected for nine moods:

• stative/unmarked
• subjunctive
• jussive
• optative
• conditional
• obligation
• potential
• necessative
• energetic

The modal verb "ʾaht" is used to denote the affirmative in a verb. It is unusual to have the affirmative marked. Is the negative the unmarked form of the verb? Do both modal (recte: auxiliary- the affirmative is not a mood) verbs and lexical verbs inflect? Does the use of an auxiliary trigger any particular morphological changes on the main verb?

Noun Morphology
Nouns in Vrkhazhian are declined for three genders, masculine, feminine and neuter, as well as two numbers, singular and plural. What you describe below seems rather to be a system for indicating the biological sex of a referent: are genders lexical (like in French, Arabic or German, for example, where they're an inherent property of the noun and frequently not at all related to biological sex) or more like the English system wherein "natural" gender agreement is used?

To show examples of how the gender system works we will take the word ḵav ['xaβ] which means “human”
The suffix -ī turns the noun masculine, an example of this would be ḵavī “man”.
The suffix -ē turns the noun feminine, so ḵav would become ḵavē “woman”.
The masculine and feminine plural suffixes are -ot and am, whereas the neuter plural is -al.

Vrkhazhian also has five cases: nominative, accusative, dative, genitive, and locative.
The nominative is the unmarked case whereas the others are marked with particles.

Below examples also use the word "ḵav" along with a the diminutive affix ha-
Accusative:

• Tū haḵav - child
• Tō haḵavī - boy
• Ta haḵavē - girl
• Tū haḵaval - children
• Tō haḵavot - boys
• Ta haḵavam - girls

Though some nouns do not take gender such as "šīm" (house)
so we only have tū šīm and tū šīmal only.

Dative:

• Šen ḵav - human
• Šol ḵavī - man
• Šaf ḵavē - woman

Genitive:

• Nū ḵav - human's
• Nol ḵavī - man's
• Na ḵavē - woman's

The last case is the locative affix "yat-", which is rarely used, and is usually found in the names of places, country and overall popular places. An example of this is found in the name of the language itself "Yaškik Yat-Vṛḵaẕīkam". Does the locative prefix not inflect for gender?

Adjectival Morphology

That's all I have for now, what do you think?

These are my thoughts on what you have written already. Please ask for clarification or examples if you don't understand what I'm saying. Next I'll try to come up with some questions which might help you formulating something less kitchen-sinky.

Y'know, this sort of thing (the constructive criticism) would help an awful lot more if it happened more often.

Yay... I'm starting over too... But this time will be different!

Dewrad wrote:Are your speakers particularly long-lived, because otherwise this is a rather implausible time depth.

yes, in the dimension they live in, humans live an average of 140 years or so.

It is worth mentioning here that in spite of first appearences, a natural triconsontal root system isn't simply a matter of plugging any three consonants into a template of three vowels: it's difficult to explain precisely what I mean, but your system feels remarkably unnaturalistic and almost engineered.

Odd, I was looking up Hebrew verb conjugations and I made mine rather similar to it...

It is unusual to have the affirmative marked. Is the negative the unmarked form of the verb? Do both modal (recte: auxiliary- the affirmative is not a mood) verbs and lexical verbs inflect? Does the use of an auxiliary trigger any particular morphological changes on the main verb?

the affirmative is equivalent to the "do" verb, as in "I did go to the store yesterday"

What you describe below seems rather to be a system for indicating the biological sex of a referent: are genders lexical (like in French, Arabic or German, for example, where they're an inherent property of the noun and frequently not at all related to biological sex) or more like the English system wherein "natural" gender agreement is used?

Nouns do not have an inherant gender, that is why there are verb endings, in regards to lexical, I think it's stupid that a rock should be a man and a feather a woman...

Does the locative prefix not inflect for gender?

places cannot have genders, so there is no point. Well I can't say it's a locative, but it's used for places and areas, and not necessarily the locations of people; There is no "He is next to yat-Sara"


I feel altogether lost... and unsure where to begin...

I'd recommend beginning with syntax and the like. Is it VSO? How do intransitive arguments behave? What tenses are distinguished, and what aspects go with (apparently, tenses and aspects can't really be segregated)?

KathAveara wrote:I'd recommend beginning with syntax and the like. Is it VSO? How do intransitive arguments behave? What tenses are distinguished, and what aspects go with (apparently, tenses and aspects can't really be segregated)?

I decided it was SOV...

The links from UZ-Translations don't help me at all, they just show the picture of the book a summary and nothing else.

You have to download them.

There is too much red in this thread...

Also, Hebrew verbs have a lot more to them than you might think from looking at the 'regular' binyanim, and they're generally not robotically derived from a root (e.g. the intransitive verb 'X rusts' uses the causative heħlīd, the causative verb 'X makes Y strong' uses the intensive ħizzēq while the causative heħzīq means 'X holds Y still', etc.).