Where are the African conlangs?

[Solarius]

My conlang, Arroe, steals a lot from Yoruba.

[Nortaneous]

Also, South Eresian is phonologically more Mesoamerican than anything else.

Which?

I just found a grammar of Yaitepec Chatino, and it is a very interesting language...

[Arzena]

Buried in my journals is a language named Vɔáko. Simple tonal system (three tones) and labial-velars. Inspiration was Yoruba, I think.

[Soap]

An entertaining question is: What was spoken in the large swath of land that is now Bantu-speaking before the spread of Bantu? There must have been a bewildering diversity of languages down there. Perhaps many languages with clicks? Languages of a type that has been completely lost due to the spread of Bantu? Plenty of stuff to be explored by lostlangers.

Well, there is a language spoken in an unlikely place at the southern edge of the Sahara desert calledBangime. It has no relation to any known language anywhere. That shows that even in the present Bantu homeland there was once another family of languages completely different than Bantu or its parent family or even the other families surviving in Africa.

There are some traces of languages that were once spoken by Pygmies, but only as placenames and loanwords.

[Nortaneous]

One reason north american languages seem common is probably that any time you get a language with a lot of synthesis and big vowel clusters, it'll look pretty north american (or caucasian - so I guess kinaesthesis and verbyness probably help make it NA too).

What? What is 'kinaesthesis'?

How does being verb-heavy contribute to the look of it? Verbs in unknown languages do not carry huge flashing neon signs above their heads that say "beep beep I'm a verb"; if you don't know the language well enough, you can't tell nouns from verbs.

Vowel clusters are hardly North American at all. Consonant clusters, maybe, but NWC langs rarely have clusters larger than two consonants.

It is entirely possible for there to be polysynthetic languages that don't look North American in the slightest: Ainu, Angami, Basque, Japhug, Qiang, Tiwi, Yimas. (Is Qiang properly polysynthetic? I have no idea. Japhug certainly is.)

I'd be interested to see a conlang that takes inspiration from some of the heavily agglutinative Sino-Tibetan languages.

[Salmoneus]

One reason north american languages seem common is probably that any time you get a language with a lot of synthesis and big vowel clusters, it'll look pretty north american (or caucasian - so I guess kinaesthesis and verbyness probably help make it NA too).

What? What is 'kinaesthesis'?

A tendency to describe things through their motions or their tactile effect on the observer, which is supposedly much more common in NA polylangs than elsewhere (and which sometimes results in clearly-related words seem to have unrelated meanings from a visual or taxonomic point of view). Jeff used to have a lot of good examples of this, but he's not around anymore.

How does being verb-heavy contribute to the look of it? Verbs in unknown languages do not carry huge flashing neon signs above their heads that say "beep beep I'm a verb"; if you don't know the language well enough, you can't tell nouns from verbs.

Most conlangs are presented with elements of grammar attached, glosses and the like, and not simply strings of letters. It's true that if your conlang is just a string of letters, it'll be harder to get much impression from it.

Vowel clusters are hardly North American at all. Consonant clusters, maybe, but NWC langs rarely have clusters larger than two consonants.

Yes, I meant consonant clusters obviously. And I think both consonant clusters and large consonant inventories look quite stereotypically NA - of course, not all real NA languages conform to the stereotype, and indeed probably not even most of them. But that's not how stereotypes work.

[Hallow XIII]

No Kinaesthesis is the perception of the relative location of your own body parts and the strength used to move them. Searches for a linguistic sense of the word have so far proven futile and a quick non-representative sample of people who have read a lot about North American languages has turned up zero recognition other than one or two "hey didn't Jeff Burke ramble on about that" so I am not convinced this is a sound concept.

[Chengjiang]

Anyone know of a good resource on the morphological use of tone? I understand it's common in various African languages, it's something I'm not familiar with (I mostly know tone in the context of Chinese languages and those they've influenced), and I'm interested in using it.

[----]

In Somali (and other Cushitic languages?) tone shift is the only way that grammatical gender is indicated for nouns. I have heard that tone is a part of other inflections but it's not indicated in the official orthography so I don't have enough expertise on the other things it does.

[roninbodhisattva]

I think in Somali you get different forms of definite marking on nouns as well based on gender. What I mean is not by tone, so it's notcompletely true to say that tone shift is the only marking of gender.

[Xephyr]

Vowel clusters are hardly North American at all. Consonant clusters, maybe, but NWC langs rarely have clusters larger than two consonants.

Yes, I meant consonant clusters obviously. And I think both consonant clusters and large consonant inventories look quite stereotypically NA - of course, not all real NA languages conform to the stereotype, and indeed probably not even most of them. But that's not how stereotypes work.

That's not really so much of a North American thing as it is a Salishan-and-a-few-Penutian thing, even under the most generous definition of "stereotype". You don't even have to leave the general Pacific Northwest area to find languages with pretty bare-bones syllable structure, relatively speaking. And once you leave that area then what is there? Mixe-Zoquean, maybe some Mayan and Iroquoian, none of which are much more cluster heavy than English, if at all?

I'm not sure if there's any characteristic that is justifiably "North American"-- personally I even think the whole polysynthesis thing has been a bit oversold. Phonologically the only shared feature I can think of is the higher-than-average occurrence of glottalized consonants. And even that doesn't apply, at all, east of the Mississippi.

And yeah, like what H13 said, this board's impression of "North American languages" still has the shadow of Jeff looming over it, which is pretty unfortunate since, although his knowledge was extensive, it was also much narrower than people seemed to have realized at the time. I don't remember him presenting himself as a pan-continental authority on North America, but it sure as hell was how he was received. Back when Native American languages were arcane and mysterious.

[Nortaneous]

Are there any NAm langs that aren't agglutinative?

As for morphological tone, I read an article a while back about how Burmese (at least I think it was Burmese) developed verb~adjective/noun tonal alternations which then fossilized into separate words -- zero derivation between the three in the protolang, but verbs came at the end of the sentence (SOV) and something about the prosody analogized them into a different tone-category than the adjective/noun versions.

[WeepingElf]

Are there any NAm langs that aren't agglutinative?

It seems to me that many are fusional.

[SomeUserToo?]

I do remember reading of Afrihili, a pan-African auxlang:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afrihili

[Grunnen]

Anyone know of a good resource on the morphological use of tone? I understand it's common in various African languages, it's something I'm not familiar with (I mostly know tone in the context of Chinese languages and those they've influenced), and I'm interested in using it.

I see I'm a bit late to the party, but I'd like to add that interestingly this phenomenon is also found in Limburgish. Not very African, but still.

[vokzhen]

Also, South Eresian is phonologically more Mesoamerican than anything else.

Which?

I just found a grammar of Yaitepec Chatino, and it is a very interesting language...

Also late to the party, but it feels vaguely Mayan to me. Plain-ejective contrast in stops and affricates is almost uniquely Mayan (I think a few of the less-known Northwest Coast languages have it). A simple set of vowel qualities and no tone helps. Lateral affricates and a lack of complex nuclei aren't as Mayan, but not unexpected in Mesoamerica.

Vowel clusters are hardly North American at all. Consonant clusters, maybe, but NWC langs rarely have clusters larger than two consonants.

Yes, I meant consonant clusters obviously. And I think both consonant clusters and large consonant inventories look quite stereotypically NA - of course, not all real NA languages conform to the stereotype, and indeed probably not even most of them. But that's not how stereotypes work.

That's not really so much of a North American thing as it is a Salishan-and-a-few-Penutian thing, even under the most generous definition of "stereotype". You don't even have to leave the general Pacific Northwest area to find languages with pretty bare-bones syllable structure, relatively speaking. And once you leave that area then what is there? Mixe-Zoquean, maybe some Mayan and Iroquoian, none of which are much more cluster heavy than English, if at all?

In terms of inventory, most of the western half of North America are much larger than we're used to - Salish, Athabascan, Wakashan, Penutian, Dakotan, Tanoan, among others generally have some combination of a high number of POAs, high number of plosive sets, or a set of glottalized and/or voiceless sonorants. For consonant clusters, while Salish are the ones with "unpronounceable" clusters, plenty of languages have clusters we're not used to dealing like kk- or -hnh- (both Iroquoian) that may make us think of them as clustery even if they're less frequent than in English.

Are there any NAm langs that aren't agglutinative?

It seems to me that many are fusional.

I think this is one of the places that splitting up "polysynthetic" as some authors do is useful, into one analytic-synthetic scale and a different agglutinative-fusional scale. Eskimo-Aleut and Wakashan languages are both clearly up there in synthesis, but Eskimo-Aleut is highly agglutinative (morphemes are either fixed or have entirely predictable phonological alternations) while Wakashan is fusional (lots of stem alternation with a large number of different stem classes, unpredictable irregularities in morphophonetic processes, some fusion of affixes, etc). More middle-of-the-road you have languages like Turkish and Finnish, which are both synthetic but Turkish is highly agglutinative while Finnish is strongly fusional.

[WeepingElf]

Are there any NAm langs that aren't agglutinative?

It seems to me that many are fusional.

I think this is one of the places that splitting up "polysynthetic" as some authors do is useful, into one analytic-synthetic scale and a different agglutinative-fusional scale. Eskimo-Aleut and Wakashan languages are both clearly up there in synthesis, but Eskimo-Aleut is highly agglutinative (morphemes are either fixed or have entirely predictable phonological alternations) while Wakashan is fusional (lots of stem alternation with a large number of different stem classes, unpredictable irregularities in morphophonetic processes, some fusion of affixes, etc). More middle-of-the-road you have languages like Turkish and Finnish, which are both synthetic but Turkish is highly agglutinative while Finnish is strongly fusional.

Yep. It makes sense to arrange the dimensions "analytic-synthetic" and "agglutinating-fusional" in a polar coordinate system, where isolating languages are placed at the origin, the degree of synthesis is represented by the distance from the origin, and the agglutinating-fusional dimension by the azimuth. So you may have, for instance, Turkish to the right of the origin, and Ancient Greek in a similar distance to the top, and Finnish in a similar distance diagonally to the top right.

[Trebor]

My conlang, Arroe, steals a lot from Yoruba.

In what ways?

[Trebor]

In Somali (and other Cushitic languages?) tone shift is the only way that grammatical gender is indicated for nouns.

Where'd you read that?

I have heard that tone is a part of other inflections but it's not indicated in the official orthography so I don't have enough expertise on the other things it does.

This page should be informative: "Somali Noun Morphophonology".

[----]

I think I read it on wikipedia. lol.

[Trebor]

What general areas do y'all base your conlangs on? Seems like North America is the most popular one. There aren't any Mesoamerican conlangs either AFAIK, and that would be interesting. Only a few SE Asian, and that's all like Khmer and shit -- no one rips off Yi.

Kosi, my most-developed project was inspired by Finnish/Estonian, Hungarian, and Nenets in terms of cases and heavy verbal morphology: aspects, moods, and voices. But it has features from a variety of sources: e.g., a plural suffix meaning 'of each other' as in Amharic, so 'Are you two brothers?' is unambiguously asking, 'Do you share a fraternal relationship?' It also has features expected in polysynthetic natlangs: affixes for various shades of causation or non-causation, e.g., 'to help A do B', 'to prevent/forbid C from doing D', and specific affixes for creating verbs, e.g., 'to enjoy X activity' (such as reading), 'to look for/hunt for Y' (such as deer), 'to have cold Z' (such as one's ears).

A conlang I began a couple months ago was, in fact, inspired by North American indigenous languages, but also Caucasian and Finno-Ugric. It's hit some serious roadblocks that haven't been circumvented yet (if you can help with polypersonal agreement, fluid-S alignment, and morphophonology, please PM me), so is kind of stuck.

I actually started a West African- and, to a degree, East Asian-inspired project earlier this year, but it's also stalled. I have to figure out how to do an isolating language properly.

(My usual method is to combine two different languages -- V'eng is Mwesen + Tibetan, Kett is a Hittite triggerlang, and so on. If I do another conlang it'll probably be Mayan + Bantu. Or just Yi. /a æ ɔ i ɯ u v̩ v̩̠ ɿ ɿ̠/ is a hell of a vowel system.)

I've just started a Semitic-Bantu combo, a minority language somewhere in southern/central Africa (maybe Botswana?):

- implosive stops and lateral fricatives, inspired by southern Bantu languages;

- a small number of clicks, Sesotho-style;

- many prenasalized consonants, allowance of consonant/prenasalized consonant+semivowel series (e.g., /kw/, /mp_hj/), the standard /i e a o u/ system, vowel length, and tone, as in my dearly-loved Kinyarwanda;

- an anticipated large noun-class system, stereotypically Bantu;

- biconsonantal root morphology (which I don't believe any modern language generally employs), with lexical and grammatical vowel length and tone, as in Bemba, Lingala, Kinyarwanda, and surely others, on top of the prefixes, suffixes, and intrafixes found in Arabic, Hebrew, and Tigrinya;

- numerous TAM distinctions marked on the verb, such as past/future tenses for 'earlier/later today' vs. 'before/after today', borrowing heavily from Kinyarwanda.

Questions and advice are welcome. I'd like to pull off this idea in a naturalistic way.

[Nortaneous]

haven't seen anyone use labial flaps

wait, *i've* used labial flaps

edit: bantu + japhug / weird polysynthetic sino-tibetan languages could be interesting, but doesn't H13 already have one of those

[WeepingElf]

haven't seen anyone use labial flaps

wait, *i've* used labial flaps

Me too, in a conlang that is under construction - a descendant of Old Albic.

[Nortaneous]

^ in europe? the only way i could see getting away with that is making it come from /r/

[WeepingElf]

^ in europe? the only way i could see getting away with that is making it come from /r/

On Madeira; so on the outermost fringes of Europe. The sound in question is a bilabial flap, coming from Old Albic /w/ and, in some contexts, from Old Albic /b/. The language also has an alveolar flap, resulting from Old Albic /d/ in similar contexts.