Consonant Mutation: Ideas on what to use it for?

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Duns Scotus
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Consonant Mutation: Ideas on what to use it for?

Post by Duns Scotus »

Hello!

I've made posts about the phonology in the past, but my conlang Fyrthir has an interesting property: almost all consonent phonemes, including sonorants, come in voice and unvoiced pairs. I'd like to make use of this somehow in the morphology, but I'm not quite what to use it for. Specifically, what I had in mind was some sort of derivational process. The first idea I had was rather obvious: opposites. However, this has a number of problems. 1) opposite words sound too much alike, and in whispered speech would be hard to distinguish (though like in English, the voicing distinction is more complex than a simple +/-voicing alternation). 2) for many, if not most, words it's not exactly clear what the opposite would be. What, exactly, is the opposite of "horse" for instance? 3) there are multiple kinds of opposites. This is especially problematic with verbs. For instance, "undo" doesn't mean sitting still, or "not-doing" but rather reversing an action such that the state of affairs are restored to their original. Untangle does not refer to the set of actions which are not members of the set of "tangle" but rather to an action which reverses the process of "tangle."

My second thought was that the voicing alternation might refer to some sort of literal-figurative distinction. For example, red<->angry, or green<->envious, to use two examples from English. I dunno how this would work in practice, but it might be interesting to play around with. The only problem I see here is what I call the Lojban problem in engelangs. In Lojban, we have attitudinal particles which mark metaphorical or non-literal utterances. The problem with this is that metaphorical statements are constructed identically to literal statements in natlangs is precisely what gives them their literary character. If we're writing poetry, it seems odd to have a grammatical feature that all but shouts THIS IS METAPHORICAL. On the flipside, these "metaphorical" readings could be lexicalized in really fun ways, that might add a lot of character to the language.


Finally, I suppose there is no reason why each lexical class (e.g. nouns, verbs, etc.) should utilize this feature either at all, or in the same manner.

Do you guys have any other ideas? I'd be really curious to hear what you all think.
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Re: Consonant Mutation: Ideas on what to use it for?

Post by Soap »

Someone here did a hihgly abstract "oligosynthetic" conlang a long time ago where words were built of morphemes whose concepts were simple enough that everything had an opposite. The word for horse might be a compound of four basic concepts, each of which could be flipped to change the meaning into something else. Another conlang with a similar idea is Ygyde.

It depends how naturalistic you want your language to be, though. Something like that would never arise naturally on Earth even given a million years of evolution, Im sure. If you want a naturalistic language, youll need to go into the past to see how the consonant mutation arose historically. For example, in my conlang, Poswa, the process I refer to as mutation arose originally from palatalization, although 3000 years of sound changes have messed up the pattern greatly. This is an extremely heavily inflected language, so consonant mutation appears in many grammatical processes, but there is no single unifying trait that ties them together. For example, polaputa means cat, and polapufem means "because of your cat". But the mutation isnt simply a marker of all inflected forms; a further inflected form, polaputappiem, means "because of the cat you just got" and restores the original -t-.
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Re: Consonant Mutation: Ideas on what to use it for?

Post by smii »

I feel like just a voiced/voiceless is unlikely to be the consonant mutation. Welsh for example has a radical (base) form (e.g. /p t k b d g/), a soft form (e.g. /b d g v ð ∅/), a nasal form (e.g. /m̥ n̥ ŋ̊ m n ŋ/) and an aspirate form (e.g. /f θ x/). Generally, I would say that for a consonant mutation to be anything more than allophonic, there would have to be more than 1 mutation.
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Re: Consonant Mutation: Ideas on what to use it for?

Post by Yng »

smii wrote:I feel like just a voiced/voiceless is unlikely to be the consonant mutation. Welsh for example has a radical (base) form (e.g. /p t k b d g/), a soft form (e.g. /b d g v ð ∅/), a nasal form (e.g. /m̥ n̥ ŋ̊ m n ŋ/) and an aspirate form (e.g. /f θ x/). Generally, I would say that for a consonant mutation to be anything more than allophonic, there would have to be more than 1 mutation.
plenty of welsh dialects have just the soft mutation, and even outside that the most common system is probably radical vs soft vs nasal where nasal only appears in two contexts both of which are following nasal consonants (i.e. you could see it as allophonic if you wanted)
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Re: Consonant Mutation: Ideas on what to use it for?

Post by Jonlang »

smii wrote:I feel like just a voiced/voiceless is unlikely to be the consonant mutation. Welsh for example has a radical (base) form (e.g. /p t k b d g/), a soft form (e.g. /b d g v ð ∅/), a nasal form (e.g. /m̥ n̥ ŋ̊ m n ŋ/) and an aspirate form (e.g. /f θ x/). Generally, I would say that for a consonant mutation to be anything more than allophonic, there would have to be more than 1 mutation.
Yes, but /b d g v ð f x θ/ occur in radical words as well as mutated forms, like the words plas mansion and blas taste, but these would yield:

Plas:
fy mhlas (p > m̥)
dy blas (p > b)
ei phlas (p > f)

Blas:

fy mlas (b > m)
dy flas (b > v)
ei blas (no mutation)

Welsh also kind of has fortition (hard mutation) which only occurs in final consonants when certain suffixes are applied, as far as I know, but Cornish has initial consonant hard mutation:

b > p; d > t; g > k; gw > kw.

Cornish also soft-mutates /x/ to /j/ which Welsh does not. Breton also soft-mutates /d/ to /z/ and /ð/ but I don't know when each occurs.
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Re: Consonant Mutation: Ideas on what to use it for?

Post by mèþru »

One thing that frustrates me is that when people think of mutation, they immediately think of grammatical purposes and Celtic languages. In Khásoitoi, one of my conlangs, mutation is simply a phonological process that occurs across word boundaries and within compound words, with certain complications regarding various classes of words. This is how grammatical mutations began. Also, you can invent your own mutations. Khásoitoi has the following:
  • Hard mutation turns fricatives and nasals into stops. It is triggered by a preceding ejective stop. It has special rules regarding the uvular fricatives.
  • Glottalic mutation changes the phonation. It is triggered by a preceding glottalised (actually creaky voice) stop.
  • Palatal mutation turns any consonants which contrasts with a palatalised version of itself into that version. It is triggered by a preceding palatalised consonant or /i/.
  • U-mutation changes depalatalises consonants. It is triggered by a preceding /u/.
  • Nasal mutation changes plain palatalised stops (which are actually partially voiced) as well as glottalised (again, actually creaky voice) stops. It is triggered by a preceding nasal.
  • Soft mutation turns stops into fricatives. It is triggered by a preceding tenius affricate.
  • Uvular mutation changes the place of articulation of most consonants. It is triggered by a uvular stop.
Some of these use the same names as well known Celtic mutations Other than sharing a name, they have no relation.
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Re: Consonant Mutation: Ideas on what to use it for?

Post by hwhatting »

Well, the way I normally have seen "consonant mutation" used is exactly for cases when it's not a phonological process anymore but has non-phonological triggers (e.g. in Celtic the word-final nasals that triggered the nasal mutation have gone, but their effect persists and is now tied to certain gramatical categories and trigger-words). What you describe looks just like sandhi.

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Re: Consonant Mutation: Ideas on what to use it for?

Post by Jonlang »

I guess in the conlanging world the most famous example of consonant mutations would be Tolkien's Sindarin, which according to David Salo are:

Soft mutation

t > d
p > b
k > g
d > ð
b > v
g > (disappears)
m > v
nd > n
mb > m
ɬ > l (Salo incorrectly analyses Sindarin 'lh' as /hl/ and not /ɬ/)
r̥ > r
s > h
h > x
hw > !xw

Nasal mutation

t > θ
p > f
k > x
d > n
b > m
g > ŋ
ɬ > !l
r̥ > !r
h > x
hw > !xw
Also /n/ becomes /ð/ when preceded by /r/ caran + ras = caradhras.

Stop mutation

t > !th
p > !ph
k > !x
ŋ > !n-g
ɬ > !l
r̥ > !r
h > !x
hw > !xw

Liquid mutation

t > !θ
p > !f
k > !x
d > !ð
b > !v
g > !(disappears)
m > !v
nd > !d
mb > !b
ng > !g
ɬ > !l
r̥ > !r
h > !x
hw > !xw

Mixed mutation

t > d
p > b
k > g
ɬ > l
r̥ > r
s > h
h > !x
hw > !xw

Seeing as there are no attested examples of the liquid mutation or stop mutation I'm not sure where Salo got them from.
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Re: Consonant Mutation: Ideas on what to use it for?

Post by Hallow XIII »

dyolf wrote:Salo incorrectly analyses Sindarin 'lh' as /hl/ and not /ɬ/
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Re: Consonant Mutation: Ideas on what to use it for?

Post by KathTheDragon »

Why are there !s everywhere?

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Re: Consonant Mutation: Ideas on what to use it for?

Post by Jonlang »

KathTheDragon wrote:Why are there !s everywhere?
The ! shows that the change is poorly or not at all attested in extant examples of Tolkien's writing, but Salo included them based off what he analysed in the history of Sindarin. Whether he's right or wrong to make these assumptions is up to the individual, but this is the Neo-Sindarin of the movies.
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Re: Consonant Mutation: Ideas on what to use it for?

Post by Whimemsz »

smii wrote:I feel like just a voiced/voiceless is unlikely to be the consonant mutation. Welsh for example has a radical (base) form (e.g. /p t k b d g/), a soft form (e.g. /b d g v ð ∅/), a nasal form (e.g. /m̥ n̥ ŋ̊ m n ŋ/) and an aspirate form (e.g. /f θ x/). Generally, I would say that for a consonant mutation to be anything more than allophonic, there would have to be more than 1 mutation.
Just because Welsh/Celtic does it this way, there's absolutely no reason mutation can't happen other ways. And we don't need to just theorize about it, because there's plenty of real-world examples! I'll give two:

(1) Koshin (Bantu). Proto-Bantu marked class 3 (singular) nouns with *u- and their plurals (=class 4) with *i-. In some Southern Bantoid languages, the *u- prefix caused labiovelarization of the following consonant, and then the initial prefixes were lost. A language which has not lost the prefixes is Aghem: ó-kwɨ́ŋ "mortar," é-kɨ́ŋ "mortars"; ó-kwâʔ "hill/mountain," é-káʔà "hills/mountains." In Noni, the prefixes have been lost, leaving just an infixed -w- as the singular marker: kwen "firewood," ken "firewood (pl.)"; mbwesɛm "grasshopper sp."; mbesɛm "grasshoppers"; fwɛ́w "thorn," fɛ́w "thorns." Finally, in Koshin, velar + w sequences have become labiovelar stops (and the *i- prefix also led to affrication of initial velar stops), so for historical velars, at least, the singular-plural distinction is marked purely through initial consonant mutation:
  • k͡pə̄n "firewood" : tsə̄n "firewood (pl.)"
  • g͡bɨ́ŋ̀ "root" : dzɨ́ŋ̀ "roots"
  • g͡bēà "house" : dzāà "houses"
  • "eye" : "eyes"

(2) Burmese (Sino-Tibetan). This is even closer to what duns_scotus was envisioning. The Sino-Tibetan causative prefix *s- is no longer productive in Burmese, but its vestiges remain as devoicing or aspiration of initial consonants in about 50 verb pairs. For example:
  • tɕò "be broken" : tɕʰò "break"
  • souʔ "be torn" : sʰouʔ "tear"
  • yɔ́ "be slack" : ɕɔ́ "slacken"
  • eiʔ "sleep" : θeiʔ "put to bed" (n.b., Burmese had a sound change *s > θ)

So, diachronically, this would not be a difficult system to have develop. Just say there was a former prefix *s- or *h- or what have you, marking whatever it is you want the contrast to be. Opposites is certainly possible (the prefix could mean "un-" or be a general verbal negative), or a nominalizer, caustivizer, pluralizer, whatever. Words that historically began with already voiceless consonants -- and which therefore would not be expected to show any change, once the prefix was lost -- could acquire the same alternation by simple analogy.

Now, one thing that's probably unrealistic is having every word show this contrast. There would be many that for grammatical or semantic reasons would not have an alternate form.


[sources: Juliette Blevins and Andrew Garrett (1998) "The Origins of Consonant-Vowel Metathesis," Language 74:3; Julian K. Wheatley, "Burmese," in The Sino-Tibetan Languages, ed. Graham Thurgood and Randy J. LaPolla (2003)]


NE:
mèþru wrote:One thing that frustrates me is that when people think of mutation, they immediately think of grammatical purposes and Celtic languages. In Khásoitoi, one of my conlangs, mutation is simply a phonological process that occurs across word boundaries and within compound words, with certain complications regarding various classes of words. This is how grammatical mutations began. Also, you can invent your own mutations. Khásoitoi has the following:
  • Hard mutation turns fricatives and nasals into stops. It is triggered by a preceding ejective stop. It has special rules regarding the uvular fricatives.
  • Glottalic mutation changes the phonation. It is triggered by a preceding glottalised (actually creaky voice) stop.
  • Palatal mutation turns any consonants which contrasts with a palatalised version of itself into that version. It is triggered by a preceding palatalised consonant or /i/.
  • U-mutation changes depalatalises consonants. It is triggered by a preceding /u/.
  • Nasal mutation changes plain palatalised stops (which are actually partially voiced) as well as glottalised (again, actually creaky voice) stops. It is triggered by a preceding nasal.
  • Soft mutation turns stops into fricatives. It is triggered by a preceding tenius affricate.
  • Uvular mutation changes the place of articulation of most consonants. It is triggered by a uvular stop.
Some of these use the same names as well known Celtic mutations Other than sharing a name, they have no relation.
The reason people don't think of that when they think of "mutation" is because it IS different. As hwhatting says, you're describing sandhi. To over-simplify, consonant mutation/gradation is what happens when sandhi becomes phonemicized.

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Re: Consonant Mutation: Ideas on what to use it for?

Post by Nesescosac »

just gonna drop this here
I did have a bizarrely similar (to the original poster's) accident about four years ago, in which I slipped over a cookie and somehow twisted my ankle so far that it broke
What kind of cookie?
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Re: Consonant Mutation: Ideas on what to use it for?

Post by Whimemsz »

Nesescosac wrote:just gonna drop this here
Thank you! I knew I'd seen a paper on this but could not for the life of me remember where.

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Re: Consonant Mutation: Ideas on what to use it for?

Post by Jonlang »

Whimemsz wrote:
Nesescosac wrote:just gonna drop this here
Thank you! I knew I'd seen a paper on this but could not for the life of me remember where.
It's probably a very good paper, but it has a few typos in within the first three pages :roll:

I retract that. I misread it due to being an over-tired fuckwit. :(
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Re: Consonant Mutation: Ideas on what to use it for?

Post by Yng »

what typos
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Re: Consonant Mutation: Ideas on what to use it for?

Post by Jonlang »

Yng wrote:what typos
Doesn't matter, I fixed it.
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