Munutuni: The Ugly Language

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Chengjiang
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Re: Munutuni: The Ugly Language

Post by Chengjiang »

As for the language's native writing system, I'd like it to be something that's rather poorly suited to representing it while still being functional. Given the small number of legal syllables, a syllabary is the natural choice, but of course that means it's the one I wouldn't want to use. Same goes for an abjad, which would be similarly tempting due to the smallish vowel inventory.

An alphabetic system, on the other hand, has the nice (dis)advantage of words being many characters in length, and I could make it ill-suited by having it come from a language that didn't have anything like the linguolabials and have them not be distinguished from bilabials in writing. (This would have the odd effect of making written Munutuni somewhat resemble pre-revised phonology Munutuni.)

Another possibility is a logographic system. While I have a fondness for hanzi, I can't deny that logographic systems are cumbersome to learn, and, as others have noted, they're poorly suited to representing fusional morphology.
[ʈʂʰɤŋtɕjɑŋ], or whatever you can comfortably pronounce that's close to that

Formerly known as Primordial Soup

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Re: Munutuni: The Ugly Language

Post by mèþru »

Even better:
Originally, roots were written in logographs with various affixed characters to express inflection and common derivations. Later, a poorly adapted alphabetic system is used to represent borrowed roots. This would wreck complete havoc on writing if used in tandem with infixing.
ìtsanso, God In The Mountain, may our names inspire the deepest feelings of fear in urkos and all his ilk, for we have saved another man from his lies! I welcome back to the feast hall kal, who will never gamble again! May the eleven gods bless him!
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Re: Munutuni: The Ugly Language

Post by Αυτοβοτα »

Have an abugida/mixed alphabet where the vowel-changing symbols may appear as letters in their own right (they take up space in line as a full consonant letter would) and some, like in the Brahmic scripts', would appear before the consonant letter instead of after. For even more fun, have suppletive forms (partial syllabary) and/or one series has a different inherent vowel.

You could also consider a proto-logographic system or something similar to Aramaic in the Persian Empire, where certain spelled words are derived from the language the alphabet was borrowed from and act as logographs, and some "words" are never pronounced but act as determinatives.
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Re: Munutuni: The Ugly Language

Post by Chengjiang »

Here's what I've decided I want to do for Munutuni's orthography. As cumbersome as a mixed system can be, I've decided I don't really want to do one. The reason is that a, say, mixed logographic and alphabetic system reminds me too much of Japanese orthography, which despite its lack of user-friendliness I like because the different types of character create (to me) visually pleasing contrasts in a line of text. I want Munutuni's script to be repetitive and made of characters of uniform dimensions. So I think what I'm going to do is a purely alphabetic system that happens to be asininely implemented in certain specific ways.

Munutuni uses (or will use, anyway) an alphabet developed for a language that didn't have linguolabials but did distinguish voicing on obstruents and had two mid vowel qualities. Its letters are as follows:

<O B T M S V K L E I N A F D U P Z G>

Rather as Latin and early Greek did with their equivalents to the letter qoph, Munutuni retained the characters for voiced obstruents and the liquid despite pronouncing them identically to the characters for voiceless ones and /n/ respectively: Each of the pairs <P B> <T D> <K G> <F V> <S Z> <N L> is a pair of homophonous consonants. These are supposed to be used etymologically in loanwords, but in practice they're used wrong about as often as right. In native words, traditionally <B T G V S N> are favored over <P D K F Z L>, but there are numerous exceptions, most often used to spell homophonous morphemes differently. This makes it quite possible to write passages that are unambiguous when read but confusing when spoken.

The vowels /i a u/ are (usually) written <I A U>. /ə/ may be written <E> or <O>, with the choice again being theoretically etymological but not so much in practice in loanwords, and favoring <E> but using <O> to distinguish homophones in native words.

The representation of the linguolabial consonants is tied to the representation of vowels. This is because the linguolabials derive historically from palatalized labials, archaic Munutuni having a more or less Micronesian consonant inventory. By default, the letters <M P B F V> denote linguolabials before <I E> and labials before <A O U>. To indicate the other value, linguolabials are spelled <MI PI BI FI VI> before /a u/ and <MU PU BU FU VU> before /i/. This practice wasn't applied entirely uniformly, though; some instances of labial consonant letters before a front vowel still represent labials, especially in more recent borrowings or coinages. Relatedly, some instances of /s/ derive from an old palatalized /t/, and so some but not all <TI DI> represent /si/ and some but not all <TE DE> represent /sə/.

With all that said, here is each syllable in Munutuni, followed by all of its common spellings:

/mi/ <MUI MI>
/mu/ <MU>
/mə/ <MO ME>
/ma/ <MA>
/pi/ <PUI BUI PI BI>
/pu/ <PU BU>
/pə/ <PO BO PE BE>
/pa/ <PA BA>
/fi/ <FUI VUI FI VI>
/fu/ <FU VU>
/fə/ <FO VO FE VE>
/fa/ <FA VA>
/n̼i/ <MI>
/n̼u/ <MIU>
/n̼ə/ <ME>
/n̼a/ <MIA>
/t̼i/ <PI BI>
/t̼u/ <PIU BIU>
/t̼ə/ <PE BE>
/t̼a/ <PIA BIA>
/θ̼i/ <FI VI>
/θ̼u/ <FIU VIU>
/θ̼ə/ <FE VE>
/θ̼a/ <FIA VIA>
/ni/ <NI LI>
/nu/ <NU LU>
/nə/ <NE LE NO LO>
/na/ <NA LA>
/ti/ <TI DI>
/tu/ <TU DU>
/tə/ <TE DE TO DO>
/ta/ <TA DA>
/si/ <SI ZI TI DI>
/su/ <SU ZU>
/sə/ <SE ZE SO ZO TE DE>
/sa/ <SA ZA>
/ki/ <KI GI>
/ku/ <KU GU>
/kə/ <KE GE KO GO>
/ka/ <KA GA>

Bear in mind that these are only the base spelling rules. There are numerous semi-regular spelling correspondences limited to specific contexts and many other just plain irregular spellings.

In addition, I think I will take the suggestion to have some morphemes be used logographically despite being made of letters, as in the Persian use of Aramaic.

Later on I'll supply the actual letterforms. For now I've decided that the script is written horizontally from left to right, and that all letters are the same height; there are no descenders or ascenders. There are no spaces and the only punctuation is a single mark indicating pauses in speech or sentence boundaries. Overall it's a lot like early European alphabets graphically, albeit with more standardized usage.
[ʈʂʰɤŋtɕjɑŋ], or whatever you can comfortably pronounce that's close to that

Formerly known as Primordial Soup

Supporter of use of [ȶ ȡ ȵ ȴ] in transcription

It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a 青.

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Re: Munutuni: The Ugly Language

Post by Chengjiang »

Here's a small aside on culture. I haven't thought much at all about the culture that speaks this language; it's mainly concerned their attitudes toward the language itself. This culture strongly believes that "right speech means right thoughts means right morals/character", and so command of all the arbitrary rules of the spoken and written language is an important part of social standing, with an element of "noble equals moral and common equals corrupt". Their culture also values "purity" a lot, and so despite the language actually containing plenty of loanwords, there is a persistent nativist sentiment among a lot of its speakers leading to frequent flame wars among the educated about diction, and since loanwords are often heavily altered to fit Munutuni's phonology people are often mistaken about what's actually native versus foreign. "Pure" and prescriptively correct use of the language has a strong element of social signaling, even moreso than it does for many languages.

That said, I'm not interested in making the speakers' culture aggressively horrible, or even particularly unusual. I mainly just want it to have elements that encourage the preservation of lots of shibboleths and grammatical or orthographic arguments between its speakers.

I don't have much else on culture, but for whatever reason I imagine the language's main group of speakers living on a temperate archipelago that's quite distant from all major landmasses. I imagine their clothing and architecture evoking Cartoon Ancient Greece, with a lot of drab white shapeless clothing and colorless buildings. This might come from the culture strongly valuing conformity and purity. I have no thoughts as yet as to the speakers' physical appearance beyond that they're human; no particular racial characteristics have suggested themselves to me.
[ʈʂʰɤŋtɕjɑŋ], or whatever you can comfortably pronounce that's close to that

Formerly known as Primordial Soup

Supporter of use of [ȶ ȡ ȵ ȴ] in transcription

It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a 青.

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Re: Munutuni: The Ugly Language

Post by Soap »

Chengjiang wrote:

In addition, I think I will take the suggestion to have some morphemes be used logographically despite being made of letters, as in the Persian use of Aramaic.
I like this idea, and have contemplated using it in my conlangs. I didnt know it had a name or that it was attested in natural languages beyond the special cases of Japanese borrowing the whole Chinese writing system and other Asian languages doing the same to a lesser extent.

The basic idea behind the system in my writing is that people traveling in other nations where they didnt speak the language. might want to be able to at least recognize placenames and certain universal words that they would know from their home country. so e.g. the road to from Tŏli to Blop would spell the city name "Blop" in the native language of Blop, and perhaps underneath supply a transliteration in the language of Tŏli. Bathrooms, hospitals, etc would likewise get universal symbols (the alphabet is quite elaborate and can produce glyphs that are detailed enough to suggest a specific object while still remaining "letters".)

But I also wanted to take it further and start loaning words, at least in some languages, that were not really helpful at all, such that e.g. the word for coffee never gets transliterated into the native script, and is therefore effectively a logogram, which I know now is called in this case a heterogram.

Im still definitely interested in this project, I'll keep checking back for more updates.
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Re: Munutuni: The Ugly Language

Post by Chengjiang »

Nominal declension preview

Here's a rundown of the categories for which nominals (nouns, pronouns, adjectives, determiners including articles) inflect:
  • Case (several; forthcoming)
  • Gender (masculine vs. feminine)
  • Number (singular vs. plural)
  • State (non-construct vs. construct)
There are at least ten fully implemented cases and traces of a few more*, for over 80 possible states for the fusional prefix marking the noun to take. For most nominals, a fair number of these 80+ are homophonous; as noted above, different letters are used to distinguish some of these homophones. As in many IE languages, there are multiple declensions. Many nominals will also show changes to the stem via vowel or consonant substitution or straight-up infixing; these must be considered properties of the stem, since different nominals in the same declension may show different stem alterations.

Although some nouns (both masculine and feminine) have a zero form for their declensional prefix in the non-construct absolutive singular (and sometimes in other inflectional states as well), none below a certain length do. Munutuni has a "three syllable rule" as follows:

No content word (noun, adjective, non-copula verb) may be shorter than three syllables.

Thus, any nominal with a stem shorter than three syllables, other than a handful of determiners, has an explicit prefix (or more) in all situations. And yes, this does mean that the sample nouns from earlier that are two syllables in length are actually not complete words and will have to have inflections added to their citation form later.

*I realize plenty of languages have more than ten cases. I think it's pretty rare for fusional languages to distinguish this many states on a noun in one morpheme, though.

Inspirations

Some of you may be curious about what inspired various features of this language. Much of it is inspired by features of various real languages (or behaviors of their speakers) that have frustrated me over the years.
  • As noted before, the phonology is largely shaped around never letting me have certain things I normally want to put in a language, a monotonous staccato rhythm, and the inclusion of a specific group of consonants that I find awkward to pronounce at natural speech speed.
  • The sheer ubiquity of grammatical gender is inspired by my disliking how certain languages make gender-neutral language difficult in certain situations, and it's binary masc/fem because two genders means more arbitrary, unpredictable gender assignment that speakers are still likely to claim makes intuitive sense, citing culture- and language-specific "masculine" or "feminine" qualities of the entity in question. It is marked more consistently than any other inflectional category because, fairly or unfairly, I tend to think of it as "less important" information than number or case, and so gender being distinguished when one or more other things aren't (e.g. the second person feminine pronoun) sounds backwards to me.
  • Many aspects of this project are designed to riff on prescriptivism and the use of language as a social marker, such as the obtuse spelling system and the large amount of memorization needed to speak even basic sentences "properly". In particular, there's a fair amount that's in there for speakers to call "natural" and "logical", e.g. verbs conjugate for actionality but not the number of the agent/patient because, from a native speaker's perspective, you show the number of things on a noun, so why shouldn't a verb show the number of actions?
  • The spelling system is designed to have tons of faux-etmological spelings like the <s> in island due to the ease of confusing native and non-native vocabulary and the number of phonological convergences that are applied to non-native words.
  • The amount of "dead weight" morphology, is oddly enough, inspired by English! I've always hated how English marks third person singular present indicative verbs, the most common form and cross-linguistically the most likely to have zero marking, with a special suffix when nothing else in the present indicative gets a suffix, so that the verb does conjugate for person but subject pronouns cannot be dropped. I also dislike how in English many verbs occur more often in a progressive construction than in something simpler.
  • Various other features are just things that, despite my experience with various languages, I find unintuitive. For example, I get split ergativity based on animacy. It makes perfect sense to me that some entities would default to being agents and others would default to being patients. Split ergativity based on tense or aspect, while I do understand intellectually how it can arise in a language, doesn't make intuitive sense to me synchronically. I don't get why the default agentivity of entities should change based on the time frame under discussion.
  • The three-syllable rule is inspired by the supposed English spelling rule (which, like many incorrect things, I was taught as an actual rule in grade school) that content words must be at least three letters in length.
[ʈʂʰɤŋtɕjɑŋ], or whatever you can comfortably pronounce that's close to that

Formerly known as Primordial Soup

Supporter of use of [ȶ ȡ ȵ ȴ] in transcription

It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a 青.

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Re: Munutuni: The Ugly Language

Post by Chuma »

Surely this language must need reduplication.

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Re: Munutuni: The Ugly Language

Post by Chengjiang »

Chuma wrote:Surely this language must need reduplication.
Oddly, despite it being a form of repetition I actually like reduplication, so I'm not sure.
[ʈʂʰɤŋtɕjɑŋ], or whatever you can comfortably pronounce that's close to that

Formerly known as Primordial Soup

Supporter of use of [ȶ ȡ ȵ ȴ] in transcription

It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a 青.

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Re: Munutuni: The Ugly Language

Post by Ryan of Tinellb »

Chengjiang wrote:
Chuma wrote:Surely this language must need reduplication.
Oddly, despite it being a form of repetition I actually like reduplication, so I'm not sure.
What about reduplication? (Sorry, couldn't resist :D)
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