Mane Injsikut Feedback and Scratchpad

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Mike Yams
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Mane Injsikut Feedback and Scratchpad

Post by Mike Yams »

So Mane Injsikut ([ˈmäne ˈinʲsikut] or [ˈmänɛ ˈinʲsikut]) is an artlang I've starting working on. It's set in a fantasy world/tabletop game setting, and serves as pretty much a Latin analogue.

For context, the core area of the setting is largely made up of areas that speak what would thus be "Romance" languages, although most of the known world uses "Esperanto" (known as Mane Takrekot, at least in Mane Injsikut) as a lingua franca. Except if Esperanto was expressly classicizing... And if it was made by Jan Sonja...

In brief, it's agglutinating (who would've guessed that about a conlang...), vehemently head-initial (and thus also VSO), largely double-marking, and marked nominative (with a few slight hints of ergativity here and there).

It has a fairly simple phonology, but exhibits vowel harmony (with two contrasts, one based on quality, copied from Moro (a natlang spoke by a Nuba ethnic group in Sudan), and the other being nasalization) and has a post-trilled alveolar stop.

So as far as the name is concerned, it's "language.ACC old-ADJ", or "the Old Jaw". If you're curious, zero-deriving (does that term even apply to noun -> noun semantic shift?) "language" from "jaw" (rather than, say, the more familiar "tongue") is taken from either Wiyot or Yurok, I can't remember which.

Next I'll post the phonology and romanization. At this point, nothing's set in stone, and I'll certainly consider modifying pretty much anything based on feedback I receive.
Last edited by Mike Yams on Wed Aug 10, 2016 8:16 pm, edited 3 times in total.

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Re: Mane Injsikut Feedback and Scratchpad

Post by Mike Yams »

Consonants

Stops: /p t tʳ k kʲ/ <p t tr(dr) k kj>
Fricatives: /s ʃ x/ <s c h>
Nasals: /m n nʲ~ɲ ŋ ŋʲ/ <m n nj q qj>
Liquids: /ɾ~r l/ <r l>
Glides: /j w/ <j w>
  • /tʳ/ is realized as [dʳ] in voiced environments.
  • /x/ is either [x] or [h]; these allophones are in free variation.
  • /l/ and /j/ only occur in loanwords.

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Re: Mane Injsikut Feedback and Scratchpad

Post by Mike Yams »

Vowels

Oral: /i u e~ɛ ə o~ɔ ä/ <i u e y o a>
Nasal: /ĩ ũ ẽ~ɛ̃ ә̃ õ~ɔ̃ ã/ <ĩ ũ ẽ ỹ õ ã>
  • /i/ and /u/ have pretty much exactly the cardinal values. The same applies to the nasalized equivalents.
  • As indicated, <e> varies between [e] and [ɛ], and <o> varies between [o] and [ɔ]. The same applies to the nasalized equivalents.
  • /ä/, while prototypically [ä], really varies anywhere between [a] and [ɑ]. The same applies to /ã/.
  • /ə/ is rather vaguely defined; really, it's any clearly non-low, clearly non-high central vowel. The same applies to /ә̃/.

Vowel Harmony

There are two types of vowel harmony. One harmony is between the oral and nasal sets, and the other is between /i u ə/ and /e o ä/. Roots are usually harmonic, but need not be. Compounds and loanwords are not adapted so as to be harmonic. Vowels in affixes harmonize to the nearest vowel.

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Re: Mane Injsikut Feedback and Scratchpad

Post by Frislander »

Mike Yams wrote:Vowels

Oral: /i u e~ɛ ə o~ɔ ä/ <i u e y o a>
Nasal: /ĩ ũ ẽ~ɛ̃ ә̃ õ~ɔ̃ ã/ <ĩ ũ ẽ ỹ õ ã>
  • /i/ and /u/ have pretty much exactly the cardinal values. The same applies to the nasalized equivalents.
  • As indicated, <e> varies between [e] and [ɛ], and <o> varies between [o] and [ɔ]. The same applies to the nasalized equivalents.
  • /ä/, while prototypically [ä], really varies anywhere between [a] and [ɑ]. The same applies to /ã/.
  • /ə/ is rather vaguely defined; really, it's any clearly non-low, clearly non-high central vowel. The same applies to /ә̃/.

Vowel Harmony

There are two types of vowel harmony. One harmony is between the oral and nasal sets, and the other is between /i u ə/ and /e o ä/. Roots are usually harmonic, but need not be. Compounds and loanwords are not adapted so as to be harmonic. Vowels in affixes harmonize to the nearest vowel.
Oo, height harmony! So roots would only have vowels from one of these four sets: /i ə u/, /e a o/, /ĩ ә̃ ũ/, and /ẽ ã õ/. I like that. Also, why don't you make nasality more of a word-level feature rather than a phoneme-level feature, with nasals in non-nasal words being denasalised?
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Re: Mane Injsikut Feedback and Scratchpad

Post by Mike Yams »

Frislander wrote:So roots would only have vowels from one of these four sets
Well actually, no; currently, roots can be disharmonic, although that's fairly rare in non-loans. I'm not really sure how naturalistic that is. Affixes do pretty much have to be harmonic, however.
Frislander wrote:Also, why don't you make nasality more of a word-level feature rather than a phoneme-level feature, with nasals in non-nasal words being denasalised?
Perhaps. I'll consider it. I mean nasal harmony is always fun. Hmmm... Would the nasalization of consonants only affect stops though?

Also, I was wondering about the diachronics of /tʳ/. Does anyone know how it might arise? For instance how it did in Fijian?

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Re: Mane Injsikut Feedback and Scratchpad

Post by Frislander »

Mike Yams wrote:
Frislander wrote:So roots would only have vowels from one of these four sets
Well actually, no; currently, roots can be disharmonic, although that's fairly rare in non-loans. I'm not really sure how naturalistic that is. Affixes do pretty much have to be harmonic, however.
Oh that is definitely natural. In fact, there probably isn't a language with vowel-harmony out there without exceptions in its lexicon.
Mike Yams wrote:
Frislander wrote:Also, why don't you make nasality more of a word-level feature rather than a phoneme-level feature, with nasals in non-nasal words being denasalised?
Perhaps. I'll consider it. I mean nasal harmony is always fun. Hmmm... Would the nasalization of consonants only affect stops though?
Maybe, maybe not: do some searching around for natlang-examples (west Africa is a good place to start).
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Re: Mane Injsikut Feedback and Scratchpad

Post by Max1461 »

May I just say, "The Old Jaw" might just be the coolest name for a language I've ever heard. Also, for nasal harmony, you might want to check out Guaraní
Last edited by Max1461 on Wed Aug 10, 2016 7:28 pm, edited 2 times in total.

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Re: Mane Injsikut Feedback and Scratchpad

Post by ---- »

Mike Yams wrote:Also, I was wondering about the diachronics of /tʳ/. Does anyone know how it might arise? For instance how it did in Fijian?
Fijian /ⁿdr/ is not an innovation really--it's a phoneme that existed all the way back in Proto-Oceanic. But to answer your question, it arises from the clusters *nd and *nr.

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Re: Mane Injsikut Feedback and Scratchpad

Post by Mike Yams »

So after looking into it, I've decided against having Guaraní-style nasal harmony, for aesthetic reasons. Heck, I even considered getting rid of the nasal vowels altogether, but decided against doing that either.

So in that case, the phonology is pretty much unchanged so far.

Thanks for the feedback.

I'll post prosody and phonotactics next, and then move on to morphology.

Also, I was planning on including diphthongs, but I don't know how they should work given the current harmony system...

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Re: Mane Injsikut Feedback and Scratchpad

Post by Mike Yams »

So that was quite the hiatus...

In any case, I have now returned to working on Mane Injsikut in earnest, and rather than posting about phonotactics and prosody, I hope to have a draft reference grammar soon to which I can post a link.

In the meantime, there are a few aspects of the language that I am unsure are naturalistic or tenable.

The first of these issues involves demonstratives. I was planning on having demonstrative determiners (ie, "that house"), but not demonstrative pronouns (ie, "it's that"). In place of demonstrative pronouns, I would simply have personal pronouns with demonstrative determiners (ie, "that it"). Does this sort of construction occur in any natlang? Would it be reasonable to include it in Mane Injsikut?

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Re: Mane Injsikut Feedback and Scratchpad

Post by Frislander »

Korean apparently only has adnominal demonstratives, and in order to use a deminstrative pronominay you have to have it modify the noun 'thing'. I think this is in keeping with other features of Korean, as I don't think it allows adjectives to appear without nouns either.

Other languages apparently do what you propose, and I wouldn't be surprised if that is the strategy for those languages where the demonstrative forms are affixes (as they frequently are in the Pacific Northwest).
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Re: Mane Injsikut Feedback and Scratchpad

Post by Mike Yams »

Well that's reassuring. :)

Now that you mention Korean, I was actually planning on Mane Injsikut adjectives (root adjectives and adverbs are small closed classes, but there are suffixes to derive them from other words) only being able to be attributive, rather than predicative. And again, the construction would be along the lines of, for instance, "X is a red it." (Well, the gloss would actually be "noun-COP it red")

So that brings me to my next issue. Copulative case! What I mean by that is that I was going to mark copular constructions with a case suffix, or at least a nominal suffix that patterns with the case suffixes. Furthermore, in order to handle negation in copular clauses, I would have another case suffix as the negative copula. Once again, I fear that this is wildly unnatural.

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Re: Mane Injsikut Feedback and Scratchpad

Post by Frislander »

Mike Yams wrote:Well that's reassuring. :)

Now that you mention Korean, I was actually planning on Mane Injsikut adjectives (root adjectives and adverbs are small closed classes, but there are suffixes to derive them from other words) only being able to be attributive, rather than predicative. And again, the construction would be along the lines of, for instance, "X is a red it." (Well, the gloss would actually be "noun-COP it red")

So that brings me to my next issue. Copulative case! What I mean by that is that I was going to mark copular constructions with a case suffix, or at least a nominal suffix that patterns with the case suffixes. Furthermore, in order to handle negation in copular clauses, I would have another case suffix as the negative copula. Once again, I fear that this is wildly unnatural.
Ah, with the talk of "adjectives without nouns", I meant attributive adjectives being able to appear as the heads of their own clause (e.g. "the good, the bad and the ugly"), not predicative adjectives, which strictly speaking do have a noun associated with them in the form of the copulative "subject". In the Korean case it appears to be like English in that there needs to be some sort of thing following it (see WALS chapter 61).

With the "copulative case" idea, that's not something I've heard of, but then my personal preference is for more head-marking strategies, particularly placing verbal subject markers on the predicated "adjective" (more likely to just be a stative verb in my languages.). As for your particular strategy, marking the copula-structure on the "subject" seems odd to me: surely since it is the adjective which is being treated as the "predicate" it should be the one to get the marking, which would be the same as with predicative nouns? This particular concern most leaps out to me when suggest having a "negative copulative case", which in my view would be even more better served on the predicative than on the "subject" (in case the terminology throws you, what I mean is that I'd expect more "noun red-COP" than what you put).

For more on that front see WALS chapter 118.
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