zompist bboard

Looks like I've been gone for most of 7 years now (holy shit!) but I figured I'd poke my head in and share the link to a new conlang project I've started to post.

It's just a phonology sketch so far. Tiny consonant inventory, minimal segmental allophony, and a tone system I'm pretty proud of: tone evolved from mobile stress and glottalization, which interacted in interesting ways and led to some fun grammaticalized tone shifts.

Hopefully I'll be back with a few more chapters over the next few weeks — I've got inflectional and derivational morphology pretty close to ready, and verb serialization and compounding (necessary to compensate for the tiny inventory!) in the pipeline eventually.

Nice to see you around again. The language looks good so far. Just curious about a couple of things:

Can word-initial glottal-stop be distinguished from word-initial vowels? It looks like it can, but are there minimal pairs?


Are there any allophonic differences between the /a/'s in /ai/ and /ae/, or /au/ and /ao/?

The language seems to be entirely (C)V, but some words with asterisks seem to allow a glottal stop where a vowel would be required in a true CV language. Was the glottal stop the only consonant allowed to pair with other consonants in the proto language?

Lastly Im just curious what language is denoted by (Sk.) in one of the glosses. Is that another conlang? It doesnt look like Sanskrit.

Can word-initial glottal-stop be distinguished from word-initial vowels? It looks like it can, but are there minimal pairs?

Yup! I mean, I don't think I've got any minimal pairs in my lexicon yet (ọ́mo 'wash' and ‘ọ́lo 'say' are close) but I do intend to.

Are there any allophonic differences between the /a/'s in /ai/ and /ae/, or /au/ and /ao/?

Ooh, that would be a good place to sneak a little bit of vowel allophony in. Thanks.

Was the glottal stop the only consonant allowed to pair with other consonants in the proto language?

That's the idea, yeah — the earlier stage of the language had CV, CVV, and CVˀ syllables.

Lastly Im just curious what language is denoted by (Sk.) in one of the glosses. Is that another conlang? It doesnt look like Sanskrit.

Yeah, it's another conlang. But, er, one that doesn't exist yet. I want Nēa to have a bunch of loanwords, because I have Ideas about how words from languages with more consonants would change when they were borrowed, but I haven't really fleshed out the languages that it will be borrowing from, beyond like "this one has closed syllables and voicing contrasts everywhere so Nēa-speakers really mangle the shit out of it."

Now with a bit of inflectional morphology. It's sort of bizarro-Maya, with all hierarchical agreement all the time and some fun hairy interactions between affix shape and clitic placement.

Very cool. Thumbs up!

What are you using to typeset this? It looks like LaTeX with a template. It looks really nice.

Yeah, it's LaTeX. Custom page layout using the memoir documentclass, Minion Pro for body text and Linux Biolinum for titles and IPA.