If natlangs were conlangs...

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Re: If natlangs were conlangs...

Post by احمکي ارش-ھجن »

If natlangs were conlangs...
Newsflash: they are, technically.
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Re: If natlangs were conlangs...

Post by Xephyr »

... care to elaborate?
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Re: If natlangs were conlangs...

Post by ---- »

*Somebody* had to make the words up 10,000 years ago or whenever language was invented so I suppose you could say they are. Kinda silly to think of it that way though.

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Re: If natlangs were conlangs...

Post by Xephyr »

I don't think it works like that.
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Re: If natlangs were conlangs...

Post by Chagen »

Well, Theta does have a point with how the roots in any given language besides onomatopoetic ones appear to be completely arbitrary.
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Re: If natlangs were conlangs...

Post by Drydic »

Xephyr wrote:I don't think it works like that.
It does if you go back far enough, but it's not terribly useful to think of it that way.
Chagen wrote:Well, Theta does have a point with how the roots in any given language besides onomatopoetic ones appear to be completely arbitrary.
Natlangs are the holy grail of collaborative conlanging, in a way.
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Re: If natlangs were conlangs...

Post by ---- »

Xephyr wrote:I don't think it works like that.
I wasn't claiming that, I'm just explaining what I think Ahzoh might mean.

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Re: If natlangs were conlangs...

Post by clawgrip »

I find it unlikely that natural languages were designed consciously and intentionally, which makes it hard to call them "constructed", since typically this word implies some sort of intentionality.

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Re: If natlangs were conlangs...

Post by Drydic »

And that's why the comparison isn't useful.
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Re: If natlangs were conlangs...

Post by clawgrip »

Of course, which is why his statement was not a newsflash. Maybe it was meant to be a joke but it wasn't particularly funny. I remember a similar "if you ignore distinctions between things then they appear to be the same!" discussion from not too long ago.

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Re: If natlangs were conlangs...

Post by Buran »

To the guy who made Austronesian: it's great that you made such a huge number of languages spread over such a huge distance, but for fuck's sake why did you not back up your Proto-Austronesian file?! Why would you keep the only copy on a flash drive?! And how can you not even remember the phonology of the proto-language?!

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Re: If natlangs were conlangs...

Post by Salmoneus »

? Proto-Austronesian isn't that hard to reconstruct, is it?

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Re: If natlangs were conlangs...

Post by Drydic »

Proto-Austronesian has several phonemes which are certain, but what they are is by no means clear; I think that's part of what is being referenced.
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Re: If natlangs were conlangs...

Post by chris_notts »

Nessari wrote:Proto-Austronesian has several phonemes which are certain, but what they are is by no means clear; I think that's part of what is being referenced.
The thing that always seems weird to me about Austronesian reconstruction is, correct me if I'm wrong, but don't they reconstruct two stop series (say voiced/unvoiced) merging completely in one branch and then randomly splitting again into unvoiced and voiced prenasalised?

E.g

p, b -> p
p -> p, mb (no identifiable conditioning environments)
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Re: If natlangs were conlangs...

Post by linguoboy »

Xephyr wrote:I don't think it works like that.
I read it as a point about language planning. By definition, every standardised language has gone through some degree of monkeying about by planners. There were no native speakers of Standard German until at least a generation after Luther produced his Bible translation in it. And there still are none for such recently-promulgated standards such as Rumantsch Grischun or Brezhoneg standart.

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Re: If natlangs were conlangs...

Post by Šọ̈́gala »

chris_notts wrote: The thing that always seems weird to me about Austronesian reconstruction is, correct me if I'm wrong, but don't they reconstruct two stop series (say voiced/unvoiced) merging completely in one branch and then randomly splitting again into unvoiced and voiced prenasalised?

E.g

p, b -> p
p -> p, mb (no identifiable conditioning environments)
Logically, I can’t think what the evidence could be (besides audio recordings systematically covering a representative sample of the population) for a reconstruction that calls for two phonemes to merge and then split apart again. I would conclude that there was a difference of some kind between the phones all along again, even if we only have speculation as to what the difference was. Thus, something like:

b -> p1 -> p
p -> p1, p2 -> p, mp

One could speculate that perhaps it was something like

b -> pʱ -> pʰ -> p
p -> pʰ, p -> p, mp

I’m assuming that we’re assuming only endogenous sound changes. If there was outside influence from another dialect of the same family that retained the *b vs. *p distinction, that’s another story.

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Re: If natlangs were conlangs...

Post by clawgrip »

linguoboy wrote:
Xephyr wrote:I don't think it works like that.
I read it as a point about language planning. By definition, every standardised language has gone through some degree of monkeying about by planners. There were no native speakers of Standard German until at least a generation after Luther produced his Bible translation in it. And there still are none for such recently-promulgated standards such as Rumantsch Grischun or Brezhoneg standart.
This is a good point, and one that I hadn't considered, but there is a huge difference between "natlangs" and "every standardised language". Also, I'm not convinced that "some degree of monkeying" counts as making something a constructing a language, since I imagine these standardized languages draw the vast majority of their content from one or two existing dialects, with a few other things thrown in or taken out.

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Re: If natlangs were conlangs...

Post by Drydic »

Šọ̈́gala wrote:
chris_notts wrote: The thing that always seems weird to me about Austronesian reconstruction is, correct me if I'm wrong, but don't they reconstruct two stop series (say voiced/unvoiced) merging completely in one branch and then randomly splitting again into unvoiced and voiced prenasalised?

E.g

p, b -> p
p -> p, mb (no identifiable conditioning environments)
Logically, I can’t think what the evidence could be (besides audio recordings systematically covering a representative sample of the population) for a reconstruction that calls for two phonemes to merge and then split apart again. I would conclude that there was a difference of some kind between the phones all along again, even if we only have speculation as to what the difference was.
You're leaving out a key part of the changes: they randomly split again. so you have descendants of lexemes with PA *p, but have either p or mp, and the same of PA *b, ostensibly with no pattern in the split. Now it's possible there's conditioning environments that haven't yet been identified, yes, but these sort of sound changes do happen in languages. Polish provides a great example: Common Slavic had two nasalized vowels & , but Polish merged them and then later re-split them, so ę and ą do not always correspond to & (and both nasalization and denasalization are rampant in the language anyways, so even ę/ą are not guarantors of a nasal vowel, and neither are VN sequences always not nasalized).
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Re: If natlangs were conlangs...

Post by linguoboy »

clawgrip wrote:
linguoboy wrote:
Xephyr wrote:I don't think it works like that.
I read it as a point about language planning. By definition, every standardised language has gone through some degree of monkeying about by planners. There were no native speakers of Standard German until at least a generation after Luther produced his Bible translation in it. And there still are none for such recently-promulgated standards such as Rumantsch Grischun or Brezhoneg standart.
This is a good point, and one that I hadn't considered, but there is a huge difference between "natlangs" and "every standardised language".
But if you buy into the popular "language vs dialect" dichotomy, then anything without a standard form is "merely a dialect".
clawgrip wrote:Also, I'm not convinced that "some degree of monkeying" counts as making something a constructing a language, since I imagine these standardized languages draw the vast majority of their content from one or two existing dialects, with a few other things thrown in or taken out.
It really depends what your definition of "constructed" is. There are plenty of a posteriori conlangs which draw from a few related varieties or even just one--that's how we're able to speak of "Romlangs", for instance. Obviously there's a cline here from "a priori totally invented" to "natlang with modifications". Under board guidelines, even suggestions for the reform of English orthography get posted in the Conlang forum rather than L&L.

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Re: If natlangs were conlangs...

Post by Nortaneous »

Nessari wrote:Polish provides a great example: Common Slavic had two nasalized vowels & , but Polish merged them and then later re-split them, so ę and ą do not always correspond to & (and both nasalization and denasalization are rampant in the language anyways, so even ę/ą are not guarantors of a nasal vowel, and neither are VN sequences always not nasalized).
How did that work?

There are a few languages in North America with marginal phonemes that are usually, but not always, allophones of other sequences -- there's some language IIRC where [o:] is in free variation with [awa] *except* in a few words where [awa] isn't acceptable and it's always [o:], and the language is otherwise /a i u/.
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Re: If natlangs were conlangs...

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Nortaneous wrote:
Nessari wrote:Polish provides a great example: Common Slavic had two nasalized vowels & , but Polish merged them and then later re-split them, so ę and ą do not always correspond to & (and both nasalization and denasalization are rampant in the language anyways, so even ę/ą are not guarantors of a nasal vowel, and neither are VN sequences always not nasalized).
How did that work?
Well, to show it the simplest way:
*ę → [ʲã] → [ʲã], [ʲãː] → Cʲ + ę ą
*ǫ → [ã] → [ã]. [ãː] → ę ą
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Re: If natlangs were conlangs...

Post by R.Rusanov »

Length came from iota contraction in unstressed syllables and yer loss, primarily. It was also left behind in cases when the original stress fell on a non initial syllable, afaik. This secondary length phenomenon bears no relation to original PIE length, either.
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Re: If natlangs were conlangs...

Post by Šọ̈́gala »

Nessari wrote:
Šọ̈́gala wrote:
chris_notts wrote: You're leaving out a key part of the changes: they randomly split again. so you have descendants of lexemes with PA *p, but have either p or mp, and the same of PA *b, ostensibly with no pattern in the split. Now it's possible there's conditioning environments that haven't yet been identified, yes, but these sort of sound changes do happen in languages. Polish provides a great example: Common Slavic had two nasalized vowels & , but Polish merged them and then later re-split them, so ę and ą do not always correspond to & (and both nasalization and denasalization are rampant in the language anyways, so even ę/ą are not guarantors of a nasal vowel, and neither are VN sequences always not nasalized).
Maybe I misunderstood, but that wasn't what I thought the Original Poster meant. I would've notated the scenario you're talking about as:

b -> p -> p, mp
p -> p -> p, mp

(admittedly, either version is a bit of a shorthand, so there's definitely some vagueness).

if one writes

b -> p -> p
p -> p -> p, mp

that implies that all initial instances of *b have the reflex p in the current language, while original *p can develop either into p or mp. Thus, the split of mid-era *p into p and mp is not altogether random; it never affects mid-era *p that resulted from earlier *b.

If data is scarce (perhaps initial *b is a very rare phoneme), there may be random patterns that give the appearance of this scenario, but that just means we don't have enough data to draw firm conclusions.

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Re: If natlangs were conlangs...

Post by Salmoneus »

Are you talking specifically about the rise of prenasalised consonants in Proto-Oceanic? You might not be, because prenasalisation is a thing in a lot of Austronesian languages even outside of POc.

But if you are, my understanding is that the theory goes that initial prenasalised stops (which can then become plain voiced stops in some daughters) arise from affixation, probably from a definite article or determiner that ended in a nasal. POc reanalysed all nasal+homorganic stop clusters as prenasalised stops, which involved shifting the syllabification, including across morpheme and word boundaries. So, **ton.tan would become **to.ntan, and likewise **kan ton.tan would become **ka nto.ntan. This gives definite and indefinite forms of nouns (and maybe equivalent variation on some other wordtypes, I'm not sure?). Then the article goes away, either because it's not needed (due to the initial mutations) or because it's been eroded away (eg if it was @n to begin with - not sure if we know what it was). Then some other way of marking definiteness arises, at which point the definite and indefinite nominal forms become interchangeable. Sometimes one form survives, sometimes another, sometimes both with slightly different meanings.
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Re: If natlangs were conlangs...

Post by chris_notts »

Salmoneus wrote:Are you talking specifically about the rise of prenasalised consonants in Proto-Oceanic? You might not be, because prenasalisation is a thing in a lot of Austronesian languages even outside of POc.

But if you are, my understanding is that the theory goes that initial prenasalised stops (which can then become plain voiced stops in some daughters) arise from affixation, probably from a definite article or determiner that ended in a nasal. POc reanalysed all nasal+homorganic stop clusters as prenasalised stops, which involved shifting the syllabification, including across morpheme and word boundaries. So, **ton.tan would become **to.ntan, and likewise **kan ton.tan would become **ka nto.ntan. This gives definite and indefinite forms of nouns (and maybe equivalent variation on some other wordtypes, I'm not sure?). Then the article goes away, either because it's not needed (due to the initial mutations) or because it's been eroded away (eg if it was @n to begin with - not sure if we know what it was). Then some other way of marking definiteness arises, at which point the definite and indefinite nominal forms become interchangeable. Sometimes one form survives, sometimes another, sometimes both with slightly different meanings.
That would explain it - although wouldn't there be a remaining predisposition towards roots with a prenasalised initial consonant being nouns, assuming that initial vowels don't get dropped? It's odd that the book I read which mentioned this didn't mention the article explanation, unless it is a speculative explanation with no firm evidence for it.
Try the online version of the HaSC sound change applier: http://chrisdb.dyndns-at-home.com/HaSC

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