Conlang Diachronics Relay II (now with schedule!)

Radius Solis · Post by **Radius Solis** » Sat Oct 31, 2009 3:52 am

erm, Round 3. Turn 3. Sorry. >_>

Arzena · Post by **Arzena** » Sat Oct 31, 2009 8:21 pm

I think for my turn (round III), I will make a descendant of Cetazo. Would the time period of a Cetazo daughter be appropriate for an invasion of Xshalad by the Western peoples?

Nortaneous · Post by **Nortaneous** » Sat Oct 31, 2009 10:27 pm

I think I'll work from Iŋomœ́.

eodrakken: What are the aspirated nasals? Are they just unvoiced, like the "aspirated nasals" in Welsh? An UPSID search for aspirated nasals turns up no results.

eodrakken · Post by **eodrakken** » Sat Oct 31, 2009 11:04 pm

Nortaneous wrote:I think I'll work from Iŋomœ́.

eodrakken: What are the aspirated nasals? Are they just unvoiced, like the "aspirated nasals" in Welsh? An UPSID search for aspirated nasals turns up no results.

What I had in mind was the series in Hmong that's called either aspirated nasal or voiceless nasal, depending on what paper you're reading. I think it's the same as what they've got in Welsh. Unless someone jumps in and says they're different, I'd just assume it's the same thing.

Nortaneous · Post by **Nortaneous** » Sat Oct 31, 2009 11:17 pm

Wikipedia says voiceless for Hmong.

How would an aspirated nasal work? Whenever I try to pronounce one (/n_ha/), it comes out as something like [na_0~].

TzirTzi · Post by **TzirTzi** » Sat Oct 31, 2009 11:43 pm

I think you might get it closer if you tried to pronounce /hna/ and thus ended up with something like [hn_0a].

Nortaneous · Post by **Nortaneous** » Sat Oct 31, 2009 11:44 pm

TzirTzi wrote:I think you might get it closer if you tried to pronounce /hna/ and thus ended up with something like [hn_0a].

I can do [n_0a]. I can't get [n_ha]. Although I'll probably analyze <nh ngh> as /n_h N_h/ if I preserve them anyway, since I'm planning on adding full contrastive aspiration to most other phonemes. Even /s_h/ etc., which will probably end up surfacing as a syllabic fricative series.

Basically, I'm going to try to construct the phonology such that I can actually pronounce it without too much of a problem, which means a massive pile of syllabic consonants and dropped schwas because my dialect eats vowels like fuck.

eodrakken · Post by **eodrakken** » Sun Nov 01, 2009 1:03 am

What I understand the Hmong examples to be is a nasal stop with little-to-no voicing and an aspirated release, which is why they're at least sometimes called aspirated nasals. It looks like that's a rarer term for it.

I don't think there's any attestation of a language actually contrasting just aspiration for nasals, as in a series of voiceless non-aspirated vs. a series of voiceless aspirated. AFAIK the aspirated release is just a side-feature that tends to go along with voiceless nasal articulation.

Nortaneous wrote:Basically, I'm going to try to construct the phonology such that I can actually pronounce it without too much of a problem, which means a massive pile of syllabic consonants and dropped schwas because my dialect eats vowels like fuck.

I mentioned unstressed vowels reducing to schwas thinking someone might decide to do that. Looking forward to seeing what you do with it!

Radius Solis · Post by **Radius Solis** » Sun Nov 01, 2009 7:03 am

Arzena wrote:I think for my turn (round III), I will make a descendant of Cetazo. Would the time period of a Cetazo daughter be appropriate for an invasion of Xshalad by the Western peoples?

Hmm, well, they could invade if you wanted, but it seems unlikely they would stay. Or at least not in central Xshalad, which is going to be in the middle of its Second Empire in that era and plenty strong enough to repel anyone who invades the heartland.

(The big Western invasion that ruled central Xshalad heartland for a few centuries, happened a long while before Cetazo, with the original Western diaspora.)

But! There's certainly lots of peripheral land to account for - so there's room for another Western lang or two, up north in the same approximate region as Tjakori. That could definitely be worked in, including some war if that's what you wanted.

Arzena · Post by **Arzena** » Sun Nov 01, 2009 1:23 pm

My idea was along the lines of the Sea Peoples to Ancient Egypt--an occasional threat that needs to be dealt with, but which could not overthrow the central government of Xshalad, not something a la the Mongol takeover of China.
Interesting side thought: It would be cool if there were dynastic struggles in Xshalad that involved hired Western mercenaries and the occasional Western shogun-y lord in Xshalad.

EDIT: What linguistic info is there on Xshalad?

TomHChappell · Post by **TomHChappell** » Sun Nov 01, 2009 2:27 pm

Arzena wrote:EDIT: What linguistic info is there on Xshalad?

Xshalad

Arzena · Post by **Arzena** » Sun Nov 01, 2009 3:24 pm

TomHChappell wrote:
Arzena wrote:EDIT: What linguistic info is there on Xshalad?
Xshalad

That contained no linguistic information whatsoever, but I found a nice egg salad recipe for lunch.

WeepingElf · Post by **WeepingElf** » Sun Nov 01, 2009 5:25 pm

TomHChappell wrote:
Arzena wrote:EDIT: What linguistic info is there on Xshalad?
Xshalad

Not funny. You are never funny, Tom.

the duke of nuke · Post by **the duke of nuke** » Sun Nov 01, 2009 6:02 pm

Arzena wrote:My idea was along the lines of the Sea Peoples to Ancient Egypt--an occasional threat that needs to be dealt with, but which could not overthrow the central government of Xshalad, not something a la the Mongol takeover of China.
Interesting side thought: It would be cool if there were dynastic struggles in Xshalad that involved hired Western mercenaries and the occasional Western shogun-y lord in Xshalad.

I like the sound of that. There is clearly plenty of opportunity for Spring-and-Autumn- (I love that name) -style wars between petty kingdoms/abandoned provinces/barbarians in between Empires.

Arzena wrote:What linguistic info is there on Xshalad?

Well, the imperial language has clicks (in at probably 30-50% of syllables) including at least one lateral click, has at least the vowels /a e o i/ and consonants /n d S l/ plus the clicks, and has simple syllable structure (all this as of 300YP). Radius know more, as he's the officer i.c. Xshalad. Anything else is in this thread...

Radius Solis · Post by **Radius Solis** » Sun Nov 01, 2009 7:27 pm

IIRC, the phonology of imperial Xshali looks something like this:

plain plosives: p c k ?
affricates: ts tS tK
aspirated plosives: p_h c_h k_h
fricatives: s S K h
implosives: b_< d_< J\_< g_<
nasals: m n J N
approximants: l j w
voiceless clicks: ! | || =
aspirated clicks: !h |h ||h =h
nasal clicks: N! N| N|| N=
preglottalized clicks: ?! ?| ?|| ?=

(I can't actually look it up right now, it's on another computer, but I think this is pretty close to correct.)

-- The clicks ! | || = are dental, (post)alveolar, lateral, and palatal; these representations are the closest easy ASCII to the appropriate IPA symbols. I know it's ugly. But not anywhere near as ugly as SAMPA!

-- Don't let the lack of /t/ throw you. Rather, it distinguishes three kinds of /t/ by affricating them. Much as with English, Xshali affrication serves as a mechanism for contrasting multiple coronal POAs more easily, rather than truly forming an additional MOA dimension.

-- Somewhat similarly, the fricatives fill all the holes in the aspirated-plosive row. Fill the plain-plosive gaps with the affricates, and the aspirated-plosive gaps with the fricatives, and there are only two basic rows of voiceless obstruents in the Xshali sound system.

-- Vowels: don't know, don't care. There won't be many of them. Most of the functional load is on the consonants. BUT: there are two tones distinguished, with substantial tone sandhi play.

-- Grammar: I have very little idea, save for a broad conception of the language as fairly agglutinative, perhaps in a manner akin to Dravidian.

nebula wind phone · Post by **nebula wind phone** » Sun Nov 01, 2009 8:23 pm

You can see a little of Mərneša starting to go up here.

Tiamat · Post by **Tiamat** » Sun Nov 01, 2009 8:53 pm

Ok the grammar for Gaadràmarneš is complete. All i have left is translating the text and the new vocab. But I have one question, do we have to give the updated version the entire vocab list that was given for the proto-lang?

4pq1injbok · Post by **4pq1injbok** » Sun Nov 01, 2009 9:39 pm

I was just thinking about the way I'm hacking away at my Proto-Peninsular daughter and meanwhile so are (or have been) two other folks, and I haven't been talking to them at all: and presumably (unless the other two did better) we're going to end up with three languages which are more or less independent random daughters, not the situation you'd expect if these daughters are supposedly growing up right next to each other. Realistically we should see common developments etc. all over the place. (Zhen Lin's notes in the PPen description on developments of daughters helps; but such notes are very much a beyond-the-call-of-duty thing to put in one's language sketch.)

That said, although I wouldn't've minded designing in particular common developments from the beginning, I'm not so eager to go back and make more than minor design changes now that I've put some effort (and some of my precious fourteen days) into them, and I imagine the others feel likewise. So I guess I'm not saying anything constructive except that this is a shortcoming of sorts to watch out for in the diachronic relay format / timescale (though if I'm not mistaken the original two reconstruction games for Isles and Edastean were better this way). Wellaway.

[Well, one concrete thing. nebula wind phone, could you tell me the developments you envisage leading to your trigger system? I was also intending to do something in that general area (also much increasing the role of applicatives), and I haven't sat down and drawn out the details of mine yet. Edit: and whence the innovated location-type statives?]

On a related note, are there any (more than just notional) Sprachbünde on Akana yet?

Tiamat · Post by **Tiamat** » Sun Nov 01, 2009 9:43 pm

4pq1injbok wrote:I was just thinking about the way I'm hacking away at my Proto-Peninsular daughter and meanwhile so are (or have been) two other folks, and I haven't been talking to them at all: and presumably (unless the other two did better) we're going to end up with three languages which are more or less independent random daughters, not the situation you'd expect if these daughters are supposedly growing up right next to each other. Realistically we should see common developments etc. all over the place.

We could move them farther apart distance-wise and have them represent three main groups for the PPI daughters and one made later on be made closer to ours depending on location.

Nortaneous · Post by **Nortaneous** » Mon Nov 02, 2009 12:08 am

How would I handle things like rounding and palatalization in a sound change applier, and what's a good sound change applier to use for things like this? I'm transferring a lot of properties from vowels to consonants, so I'm going to have rounded and palatalized versions of every consonant in the inventory and I need something that can do that well.

krinnen · Post by **krinnen** » Mon Nov 02, 2009 12:22 am

Given the small lexicon, I'd say learning to use a sound change applier would be unproductive for this game... Last time I did this I did my SCs by hand.

EDIT: On the other hand, I now realize I didn't answer you questions

IPA Zounds allows you to use IPA (duh!

), which will make it easier than, say, zompist's. I haven't used it much, though.

The other one... Muba's was it? Looks pretty cool, but I'm afraid I haven't tried it. Neither have I tried Geoff's.

Nortaneous · Post by **Nortaneous** » Mon Nov 02, 2009 12:40 am

krinnen wrote:Given the small lexicon, I'd say learning to use a sound change applier would be unproductive for this game... Last time I did this I did my SCs by hand.

I have a lot of sound changes, and the order is important. I'd fuck up massively if I did it by hand.

Although I guess that would be a good way to implement sound changes occurring irregularly...

(edit: fuck, one of my sound changes is damn near impossible to implement in a SCA. (it's like the yer dropping laws, but with reduction instead of deletion.) gah.)

And since I don't feel like sleeping, I slammed out a few sound changes, so, assuming I applied all the changes right:

Ingomoe si:kavogosý: -> ʃihvokʷʃʷy
Ingomoe jaudu:kaɯiusá -> jœʐʷugaɯvysəː
Ingomoe palucéudo -> pʰalʷʃœːdʷ
Ingomoe sígunhadɯca -> ʃɪːfn̥aʂʰa
Ingomoe tɯluse:usí -> tʰɯlʷʃeːfʃɪː
Ingomoe ɯtatóɡoz -> ɯtʰəːhɤ

And I also want to kill vowel clusters (probably add /h/ between them before the /h/-fuckery that I have) and have a massive vowel shift. Somewhere I need to do something with the consonants also. This will be fun.

Cedh · Post by **Cedh** » Mon Nov 02, 2009 4:19 am

eodrakken wrote:All right, I'm done and it's up: Iŋomœ́

Cool stuff.

Curlyjimsam wrote:Presenting Çetázó's descendant: Šetâmol (PDF).

Ditto.

nebula wind phone wrote:You can see a little of Mərneša starting to go up here.

This one looks promising too, especially the grammar developments (statives, trigger system).

Vortex wrote:Ok the grammar for Gaadràmarneš is complete.

Cool.

But I have one question, do we have to give the updated version the entire vocab list that was given for the proto-lang?

You don't have to include the full protolang lexicon - some words will likely get lost, while others may simply not be known to be included in the daughters. However, it would be good to try and create a rather large, realistic wordlist - at least, enough to translate the sample text and any examples in your grammar. Optimally, you should include more than that, add in some derivations, compounds, and/or loanwords, and apply some semantic shifting as well. (One group in the last relay suffered from vocab shortage because the first person included only the words needed for the sample text, and some later participants didn't dare to create new words.) If you don't have the time to write a large lexicon right now, it would be appreciated if you could do a basic wordlist now, and keep working on an extended lexicon while the next person has already started to derive a daughter from your language.

Nortaneous wrote:How would I handle things like rounding and palatalization in a sound change applier, and what's a good sound change applier to use for things like this? I'm transferring a lot of properties from vowels to consonants, so I'm going to have rounded and palatalized versions of every consonant in the inventory and I need something that can do that well.

Geoff's SCA is very flexible, can handle IPA, and allows for complex environment definitions. A context-sensitive yer reduction rule is definitely possible with it, even if you may still need to resort to placeholder characters (i.e. <i u> unreduced, <ɪ ʊ> reduced, <ĭ ŭ> reduced but still triggering etc.)

Cedh · Post by **Cedh** » Mon Nov 02, 2009 4:31 am

I reply to this in a separate post because it's an important issue that 4pq1injbok raises:

4pq1injbok wrote:I was just thinking about the way I'm hacking away at my Proto-Peninsular daughter and meanwhile so are (or have been) two other folks, and I haven't been talking to them at all: and presumably (unless the other two did better) we're going to end up with three languages which are more or less independent random daughters, not the situation you'd expect if these daughters are supposedly growing up right next to each other. Realistically we should see common developments etc. all over the place. (Zhen Lin's notes in the PPen description on developments of daughters helps; but such notes are very much a beyond-the-call-of-duty thing to put in one's language sketch.)

That said, although I wouldn't've minded designing in particular common developments from the beginning, I'm not so eager to go back and make more than minor design changes now that I've put some effort (and some of my precious fourteen days) into them, and I imagine the others feel likewise. So I guess I'm not saying anything constructive except that this is a shortcoming of sorts to watch out for in the diachronic relay format / timescale (though if I'm not mistaken the original two reconstruction games for Isles and Edastean were better this way). Wellaway.

All of you are highly encouraged to talk about your languages while working on them. I know not everyone likes to present unfinished stuff, and of course you don't have to, but in order to get as realistic results as possible it would definitely be a huge advantage to include shared developments, borrowing, sprachbunding, and other contact phenomena in contemporary daughter languages. And this is easiest to achieve by communication.

This thread may not be the best place for this if you're going into the details, but there is the [url=irc://irc.sorcery.net/akana]#akana IRC channel[/url] for real-time talk and the AkanaForum for more thorough discussion of individual languages and their relation to each other. Every relay participant is welcome to open a thread there in order to discuss his/her WIP and to integrate it into the conworld setting!

If you feel like discussing your lang would take up too much of the two weeks of your turn, we could probably extend that period to three weeks...

Nortaneous · Post by **Nortaneous** » Mon Nov 02, 2009 9:22 am

Okay, I'll keep my notes here.

Hopefully they make some sort of sense somehow.