zompist bboard

The Orisiyan language is my first attempt at a conlang in many years. It is spoken by an ancient civilization that I wrote about in notebooks when I was about 12. Very few words and only a fraction of the alphabet survive from then (most of what survived were names of people or of places). So now I am recreating the language. The language relies heavily on prefixes and suffixes. Now, this is the first time that I will be making a language that isn't heavily based of either English or Spanish, so it may seem a little noobish. Please forgive me for not understanding the universal phonetic symbols.

I've been working on verbs lately and I came up with the idea of the Orisiyan version of verb conjugation. In Orisiyan prefixes are used to tell the person and number or verbs. Take the verb Iy (pronounced "eye") which means to live in or to dwell:

siy-I dwell
tiy-you dwell
piy-he dwells
miy-she dwells
niy-it dwells
riy-we dwell
liy-you all dwell
diy-they dwell

suffixes are used to indicate tense, for instance, siyul means I will dwell.

An example of an Orisiyan sentence would be:

Siy Cweyith Carolinac. (pronounced "Seye Quay-ith Car-o-lin-ack") I live in South Carolina. (literally "I live in Carolina of the South")

I really don't have much of the language developed yet, but I am adding more to it every day. Any feedback/constructive criticism would be appreciated.

What is the IPA? I have trouble reading that without IPA.
Here is how pronunciation of the IPA goes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:IPA

This looks good. Having a three-way gender contrast between "he/she/it" is rather English-like, but not necessarily a bad thing.

I wouldn't worry too much about presenting the IPA. I mean, it probably would be helpful to learn it at some point, and it shouldn't take too long to learn enough for your purposes, but your orthography seems fairly self-explanatory and as long as you're talking about points of grammar then the exact details of pronunciation aren't really relevant.

Birdlang wrote:What is the IPA? I have trouble reading that without IPA.
Here is how pronunciation of the IPA goes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:IPA

Thanks for the link. These are the approximate sounds:

A-ä or æ
B-b
C-k
D-d
E-ɛ
F-f
G-g
H-ɦ
I-i or iː
K-x
L-ɫ
M-m
N-n
O-oː
P-p
R-ɹ
S-s
T-t
U-ʊ
V-v
W-w
Y-j

Sh-ʃ
Th-θ
Kh-tʃ
Ah-ɐ
Ao-a̯
Ey-e
Iy-I can't find the sound for "eye"
Uy- I can't find the sound for "oy"

Curlyjimsam wrote:This looks good. Having a three-way gender contrast between "he/she/it" is rather English-like, but not necessarily a bad thing.

I wouldn't worry too much about presenting the IPA. I mean, it probably would be helpful to learn it at some point, and it shouldn't take too long to learn enough for your purposes, but your orthography seems fairly self-explanatory and as long as you're talking about points of grammar then the exact details of pronunciation aren't really relevant.

Thanks. Some of this linguistic terminology is very confusing but I think I'm getting the hang of it.

I've simplified your vowels a bit because you seemed to have some imbalance in the short/long pairs, but otherwise this is what you have:

/m n/ <m n>
/p b t d k g/ <p b t d c g>
/tʃ/ <kh>
/f v θ s ʃ x ɦ/ <f v th s sh k h>
/l ɹ/ <l r>
/w j/ <w y>

/ʊ o a~æ ɐ ɛ e i/ <u o a ah e ey i>
/a̯/ <ao>
/ɔɪ aɪ/ <uy iy>

I would suggest dropping /v/ from this inventory (or making it an allophone of /w/), and possibly raising /ʊ/ to /u/. Is /a̯/ supposed to be a full vowel or does it only appear in a vowel sequence?

Pogostick Man wrote:I would suggest dropping /v/ from this inventory

/v/ being the sole voiced fricative in a language is far from unheard of.

It's a little bit unusual here, in that it contrasts with both /f/ and /w/, but it's certainly not an impossible inventory.

I've been pretty busy this week.

To be honest, I'm kind of confused about a lot of the phonetics and orthography.

Pogostick Man wrote:I've simplified your vowels a bit because you seemed to have some imbalance in the short/long pairs, but otherwise this is what you have:

/m n/ <m n>
/p b t d k g/ <p b t d c g>
/tʃ/ <kh>
/f v θ s ʃ x ɦ/ <f v th s sh k h>
/l ɹ/ <l r>
/w j/ <w y>

/ʊ o a~æ ɐ ɛ e i/ <u o a ah e ey i>
/a̯/ <ao>
/ɔɪ aɪ/ <uy iy>

I would suggest dropping /v/ from this inventory (or making it an allophone of /w/), and possibly raising /ʊ/ to /u/. Is /a̯/ supposed to be a full vowel or does it only appear in a vowel sequence?

Using ey for /e/ is kinda Englishy. Maybe ȧ (like German ä but with one dot) would be better, and using non Englishy spellings.

Haplogy wrote:

Pogostick Man wrote:I would suggest dropping /v/ from this inventory

/v/ being the sole voiced fricative in a language is far from unheard of.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nias_language

Regardless of the conlang, I praise you for not doing the fucking "a as in father" bullshit and actually learning IPA.

cntrational wrote:Regardless of the conlang, I praise you for not doing the fucking "a as in father" bullshit and actually learning IPA.

. Because different dialects have different sounds for certain vowels.

Carolina Conlanger wrote:Siy Cweyith Carolinac. (pronounced "Seye Quay-ith Car-o-lin-ack") I live in South Carolina. (literally "I live in Carolina of the South")

Are there noun cases or something like that?
Because it looks to me like there's a genitive or locative or both in that example sentence. But I may very well be simply parsing it wrong...

Mike Yams wrote:

Carolina Conlanger wrote:Siy Cweyith Carolinac. (pronounced "Seye Quay-ith Car-o-lin-ack") I live in South Carolina. (literally "I live in Carolina of the South")

Are there noun cases or something like that?
Because it looks to me like there's a genitive or locative or both in that example sentence. But I may very well be simply parsing it wrong...

That would be correct. There is a genitive, dative, and locative. Nominative and accusative are the same.

So I'm assuming subject and object are marked with word order? There are other ways to do it without case marking. (For instance polypersonal agreement, where verbs are marked for both subject and object, or an animacy hierarchy and inverse marking, which I'm not going to explain here (mostly because I'm unsure of the details of how such a system actually works).) But anyway, what is the unmarked (as in, default) word order in Orisiyan?

Mike Yams wrote:So I'm assuming subject and object are marked with word order? There are other ways to do it without case marking. (For instance polypersonal agreement, where verbs are marked for both subject and object, or an animacy hierarchy and inverse marking, which I'm not going to explain here (mostly because I'm unsure of the details of how such a system actually works).) But anyway, what is the unmarked (as in, default) word order in Orisiyan?

Word order is how you differentiate nominative and accusative. The unmarked word order in Orisiyan is Subject Verb Object. The genitive always goes before the noun it is modifying. Adjectives that don't show possession go in front of the noun they modify.

Example:

Ris racarest sahanon un rist alnimuy rasel.

literally: We bought presents for our friend good.

cntrational wrote:Regardless of the conlang, I praise you for not doing the fucking "a as in father" bullshit and actually learning IPA.

Thanks for the appreciation!