Rangyayo - an East Asian language of the elixir of life

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Rangyayo - an East Asian language of the elixir of life

Post by desmond »

Rangyayo - spoken on the islands of the elixir of life

Rangyayo audio sample 01 on Youtube
Rangyayo audio sample 02 on Youtube
Rangyayo featured in Conlangery #05: Scripts and Writing on Conlangery Podcast

Rangyayo on Conlang Wiki
Rangyayo/Word_List on Conlang Wiki
Rangyayo/Sample/Quickchat on Conlang Wiki
Kingdom of Rangya on Constructed World Wiki
Online Rangyayo Input Method

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Background

Rangyayo (or Anglicised name Rangyan) is the language spoken on Rangya Islands (no bigger than Luxembourg or roughly twice as big as Hong Kong) near Okinawa prefecture of Japan in East China Sea.
In Sinitic mythology, Rangya Islands hold the secrets of elixir of life. There are magical fruits growing on the islands that can heal any disease, grant eternal youth, and even raise the dead.
Historically, various emperors in ancient China sent their alchemists to the eastern seas to find the fabled elixir, but to no avail. Historical text stated that Rangya was found instead.

Overview

Rangyayo is an agglutinative, nominative-accusative and head-final language. It has no grammatical genders. Nouns are declined according to case but not number, gender or definitiveness. Verbs can be conjugated according to voice, tense and aspect.

Phonology

Consonants

Image

1. /ŋ/ appears only in the syllable coda.
2. /s, z/ are palatalised [ɕ, ʑ] before /i, j/
3. /h/ is palatalised [ç] before /i, j/; and is bi­la­bialised [ɸ] before /u, w/
4. /ts, dz, tsʰ/ are palatalised [tɕ, dʑ, tɕʰ] before /i, j/
5. /ɾ/ is an alveolar flap [ɾ] in the syllable onset; and is [l] in the syllable coda.

Vowels

Monophthongs
Image

1. /i/ is pronounced /ɪ/ before velar codas /ŋ, k̚/
2. /u/ is /ʊ/ before velar codas /ŋ, k̚/

Diphthongs
Image

1. /ju/ is pronounced /jʊ/ before velar codas /ŋ, k̚/
2. /uɪ/ is a falling diphthong [uɪ] after a consonant in an open syllable; and is a rising diphthong [wi] when it is a syllable of its own or in a closed syllable.

Triphthongs
Image

I will share more about Rangyayo here when I have more spare time as lately I have been busy editing the Rangyayo page at conlang.wikia.com

If anyone here is interested in East Asian conlang or linguistics, you are welcomed to join my East Asian Conlangs MSN group, or you can PM me your MSN contact so I can add you to the group.
Last edited by desmond on Fri Jul 28, 2017 8:31 pm, edited 12 times in total.
[b]Desmond[/b] - [url=http://conlang.wikia.com/Rangyayo][b]Rangyayo[/b][/url], spoken on the islands of elixir of life

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Post by desmond »

I am currently working on Rangyan verbs and I need some help with verb conjugations please.

Rangyan verbs can be conjugated according to tense, aspect, voice and polarity:
  • Tense: Present, Past (-usi), Future (-arai)
    Aspect: Progressive (-an-)
    Voice: Active, Passive (-it-)
    Polarity: Affirmative, Negative (-om-)
The table below is my first attempt of verb conjugations for this agglutinative conlang.

Image

So my questions are:
  1. Is there a universal order of verb conjugation suffixes? e.g. voice suffixes must come before tense suffixes but after negative suffixes...
  2. Is it plausible to have this kind of construction? i.e. the conjugation syntax is VC+VC+VC+VCV it+an+om+arai but it is actually pronounced/heard as V+CV+CV+CVCV i ta no marai
  3. Does it make sense to insert a dummy vowel e to the last verb conjugation suffix ending in a consonant? e.g. -ite, -ane, -ome while they are -it-, -an-, -om- if followed by other suffixes
[b]Desmond[/b] - [url=http://conlang.wikia.com/Rangyayo][b]Rangyayo[/b][/url], spoken on the islands of elixir of life

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Post by faiuwle »

Heh, when I try to make heavily agglutinating verb systems, it always turns out horrible, but this looks pretty nice.
desmond wrote:Is it plausible to have this kind of construction? i.e. the conjugation syntax is VC+VC+VC+VCV it+an+om+arai but it is actually pronounced/heard as V+CV+CV+CVCV i ta no marai
Yes.
Does it make sense to insert a dummy vowel e to the last verb conjugation suffix ending in a consonant? e.g. -ite, -ane, -ome while they are -it-, -an-, -om- if followed by other suffixes
Maybe, but in this case it looks more natural to either analyze the -e as a present tense marking, or a part of the original stem that got overridden by the initial vowels in the other affixes.

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Post by desmond »

faiuwle wrote:Heh, when I try to make heavily agglutinating verb systems, it always turns out horrible, but this looks pretty nice.
Thanks for the appreciation.
Why so? Care to share your heavily agglutinating verb systems? Is it because yours are less vocalic than mine?
faiuwle wrote:Maybe, but in this case it looks more natural to either analyze the -e as a present tense marking, or a part of the original stem that got overridden by the initial vowels in the other affixes.
Yeah, I will make -ü as the present tense marking and change -ite, -ane, -ome to -itü, -anü, -omü respectively.

For my second question on verb conjugations, when I was reading materials on Austronesian languages later today, I found out that my Rangyan verb markings behave very much like the infixes in Tagalog language in the Philippines (sorry for my ignorance, what an amateur conlanger I am). For example, in Tagalog, a grammatical form similar to the active voice is formed by adding the infix -um- near the beginning of a verb. Tagalog has borrowed the English word graduate as a verb; to say "I graduated" a speaker uses the derived form grumaduate. Another example would be the word kumain "eaten", which is composed of the rootword kain "eat" and the infix -um-.

If I have not mistaken, the Rangyan verb form yabitanomarai "will be not being eaten" can be analysed as

yab-it-an-om-arai
verb stem+passive infix+progressive infix+negative infix+future suffix

However, the new questions raised are:
  1. A mix of infixes and suffix in a single verb form?
  2. Should a tense form (yabü, yabusi, yabarai) be analysed as one whole word (not suffixed) in order to allow other infixes to be added to it?
[b]Desmond[/b] - [url=http://conlang.wikia.com/Rangyayo][b]Rangyayo[/b][/url], spoken on the islands of elixir of life

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Post by faiuwle »

desmond wrote:
faiuwle wrote:Heh, when I try to make heavily agglutinating verb systems, it always turns out horrible, but this looks pretty nice.
Thanks for the appreciation.
Why so? Care to share your heavily agglutinating verb systems? Is it because yours are less vocalic than mine?
Mostly a combination of having phonotactics allowing a lot of clusters, and then trying to smoosh the agglutinated forms into variations and irregularities so that it's not just a cartesian product system, and then everything turns into sftehashjhs.
- A mix of infixes and suffix in a single verb form?
- Should a tense form (yabü, yabusi, yabarai) be analysed as one whole word (not suffixed) in order to allow other infixes to be added to it?
I think you could probably do that. I find the verb system starts to feel less complicated (to me, at least!) if you define separate individual morphological processes to turn, say, the root into a tensed form, and then the tensed form into a tense+aspect form, and then a tense+aspect form into a negative tense+aspect form, etc. (though it doesn't have to be in that order, obviously). Then you can reuse the intermediate forms in other parts of the grammar, like for participles or verbs in complement clauses, or nominalizations.

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Post by desmond »

faiuwle wrote:Then you can reuse the intermediate forms in other parts of the grammar, like for participles or verbs in complement clauses, or nominalizations.
Nice suggestion. Need to come up with some neat conversion rules for the four major parts of speech: verb, noun, adjective and adverb. If my calculation is right, I will need 3 x 4 = 12 rules to get them done. What a challenge!
[b]Desmond[/b] - [url=http://conlang.wikia.com/Rangyayo][b]Rangyayo[/b][/url], spoken on the islands of elixir of life

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Post by Cedh »

desmond wrote:Need to come up with some neat conversion rules for the four major parts of speech: verb, noun, adjective and adverb. If my calculation is right, I will need 3 x 4 = 12 rules to get them done. What a challenge!
Except that such rules don't need to be strictly one-to-one. For instance, look at English: There are multiple ways to form a noun from a verb, e.g. to employ > employer (agent), > employee (patient), > employment (resulting state); to talk > talk (instance of action). Conversely, IINM there's no productive way to create an adverb directly from a verb; you have to create an adjective first: to suppose > supposed > supposedly.

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Post by desmond »

cedh audmanh wrote: Except that such rules don't need to be strictly one-to-one. For instance, look at English: There are multiple ways to form a noun from a verb, e.g. to employ > employer (agent), > employee (patient), > employment (resulting state); to talk > talk (instance of action). Conversely, IINM there's no productive way to create an adverb directly from a verb; you have to create an adjective first: to suppose > supposed > supposedly.
Thanks for the inspirations!

While I was editing my Rangyayo page on conlang.wikia.com, I came across an awesome page related to word derivations: The List of Derivation Methods!

This list contains so many derivation methods from as simple as "un- Opposite (quality)" to as bizarre as "Name of bacteria, virus, parasite etc > name of disease caused by same"...
[b]Desmond[/b] - [url=http://conlang.wikia.com/Rangyayo][b]Rangyayo[/b][/url], spoken on the islands of elixir of life

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Post by desmond »

Continue with the phonology of Rangyayo...

Positional allophones

Rangyan consonants have two principal positional allophones: initial and final. The initial form is found at the beginning of a syllable and the final form is found at the end of a syllable.

Image

All plosives [p, t, k] are unreleased [p̚, t̚, k̚] at the end of a syllable. Final [ɾ] is a liquid [l].

Phonotactics

Rangyan syllable structure is maximally CgVC, where the first C is the initial consonant; g is a semivowel glide /j/ or /w/; V is a vowel; the second C is a coda. Any consonant but /ŋ/ may occur initially, whereas only /m, n, ŋ, p, t, k, l/ may occur finally.

Below is the table of all syllable finals (gVC) in Rangyan.

Image

1. pronounced [wi] when it is a syllable of its own or before codas /n, t̚, l/; and pronounced [wɪ] before codas /ŋ, k̚/
2. pronounced [uɪ] after an onset in an open syllable.

Additional finals /wam/, /wɛm/, /wim/, /wap/, /wɛp/, /wip/ can be found in foreign loanwords.
[b]Desmond[/b] - [url=http://conlang.wikia.com/Rangyayo][b]Rangyayo[/b][/url], spoken on the islands of elixir of life

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Post by desmond »

Vowel harmony

Traditionally, the Rangyan language has had strong vowel harmony; that is, in pre-modern Rangyan, not only did the inflectional and derivational affixes change in accordance to the main root vowel, but native words also adhered to vowel harmony. However, this rule is no longer observed strictly in modern Rangyan. In modern Rangyan, it is only applied in certain cases such as onomatopoeia and interjections.

There are three classes of vowels in Rangyan: positive, negative and neutral. The vowel classes loosely follow the vowel heights. Exchanging positive vowels with negative vowels usually creates different nuances of meaning, with positive vowels sounding fast, hot, dry, hard, solid, focused or aggressive, and negative vowels sounding slow, cold, wet, soft, insubstantial, diffuse or tranquil.

Image
[b]Desmond[/b] - [url=http://conlang.wikia.com/Rangyayo][b]Rangyayo[/b][/url], spoken on the islands of elixir of life

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Post by desmond »

Regarding this post on omniglot forum, I will post some sample texts for Serali here.

The three samples below are taken from my Rangyayo page at conlang.wikia.com, so nothing too fancy here:

Image
fupi-no ko'i karü
bear-TOPIC big COPULA
"The bear is big."

Image
ne iku-no i hapi-ei ko'i karü
that dog-TOPIC this bird-COMPARATIVE big COPULA
"That dog is bigger than this bird."

Image
ne iku-no itban ko'i karü
that dog-TOPIC most big COPULA
"That dog is the biggest."
Last edited by desmond on Sun Apr 11, 2010 2:06 am, edited 1 time in total.
[b]Desmond[/b] - [url=http://conlang.wikia.com/Rangyayo][b]Rangyayo[/b][/url], spoken on the islands of elixir of life

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Post by Serali »

That is cool!

I think you're the first AFAIK to use Korean Hangul and Hanja like this in a conlang.

Awesome!

Image
[quote="Zereskaoate"]I am, however a slave to the boingies. [img]http://i181.photobucket.com/albums/x180/Wapo_Gipo_Frogs88/Boingies/th_thsau222jpg-2.gif[/img][/quote]

[img]http://i181.photobucket.com/albums/x180/Wapo_Gipo_Frogs88/th_1-1.gif[/img]

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Post by desmond »

Serali wrote:That is cool!

I think you're the first AFAIK to use Korean Hangul and Hanja like this in a conlang.

Awesome!

Image
Thanks Serali!

Yeah, Imbecilica's conlang Yondae'eo is written in a mixed script of Chinese characters and Korean Hangul as well, but from the text sample he provided, very likely that he only uses Chinese characters for Sinitic loanwords, but not for Yondae'eo native words as well.

I always fancy the way how the Japanese language uses Chinese characters to write the stems of both native and Sinitic words, and leave the grammatical particles/suffixes handled by hiragana; so I decided to the same in Rangyayo, guess it might be fun to assign native readings to Chinese characters that also bear their own middle Chinese readings (Rangyanised of course). I think the Korean language has not put this into practice before. (Someone please corrects me if I'm wrong)
[b]Desmond[/b] - [url=http://conlang.wikia.com/Rangyayo][b]Rangyayo[/b][/url], spoken on the islands of elixir of life

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Post by Serali »

I like Yondae'eo alot. It also at one point had a script reminiscent of Korean Hangul with some of the letters of imbecilica's own invention.

I didn't know it was changed. Korean is my favorite language and I'm always messing around with the writing system it seems. I had made several "ciphers" for English using Hangul ( with additions of course ).

One of which I'm trying find again since I can't remember which of my conlanging books I put it in. *Is frustrated*

I also did something with Japanese Hiragana too. It's on my blog somewhere. When I find it I'll post it.

The Korean language was originally written with Hanja. So you're not too wrong on that part. There's also a sample on Omniglot that uses Hanja and Hangul along with the "normal" text. IMO English should have Hangul too as it's simpler IMO. XD

Plus it's waaaay prettier. Idk WTH they were thinking when they decided to write English with the Latin Alphabet when there are so many simpler less complicated and more prettier ways of doing so.

Hangul all the way! YAY! :mrgreen: And your welcome!

Image
[quote="Zereskaoate"]I am, however a slave to the boingies. [img]http://i181.photobucket.com/albums/x180/Wapo_Gipo_Frogs88/Boingies/th_thsau222jpg-2.gif[/img][/quote]

[img]http://i181.photobucket.com/albums/x180/Wapo_Gipo_Frogs88/th_1-1.gif[/img]

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Post by desmond »

The language name "Rangyayo" in Chinese seal script.

Image
[b]Desmond[/b] - [url=http://conlang.wikia.com/Rangyayo][b]Rangyayo[/b][/url], spoken on the islands of elixir of life

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Post by Serali »

PRETTY SCRIPTY!

Image
[quote="Zereskaoate"]I am, however a slave to the boingies. [img]http://i181.photobucket.com/albums/x180/Wapo_Gipo_Frogs88/Boingies/th_thsau222jpg-2.gif[/img][/quote]

[img]http://i181.photobucket.com/albums/x180/Wapo_Gipo_Frogs88/th_1-1.gif[/img]

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Post by desmond »

Pitch accent

Rangyan pitch accent can be presented with a two-pitch-level model. In this representation, each syllable is either high (H) or low (L) in pitch.

1. If the accent is on the first syllable, then the first syllable is high-pitched and the others are low: HLL...
2. If the accent is on a syllable other than the first, then the first syllable is low, the following syllables up to and including the accented one are high, and the rest are low: LHLL..., LHHLL..., LHHHLL...
3. If the word does not have an accent, the first syllable is low and the others are high: LHH... This high pitch spreads to unaccented grammatical particles that attach to the end of the word, whereas these would have a low pitch when attached to an accented word.

Examples are given in the table below. The number before each pitch pattern tells you the syllable where the last high pitch is.

Image
[b]Desmond[/b] - [url=http://conlang.wikia.com/Rangyayo][b]Rangyayo[/b][/url], spoken on the islands of elixir of life

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Post by Serali »

ImageImageImage ImageImage......

줌줌 다리! :mrgreen:

Image
[quote="Zereskaoate"]I am, however a slave to the boingies. [img]http://i181.photobucket.com/albums/x180/Wapo_Gipo_Frogs88/Boingies/th_thsau222jpg-2.gif[/img][/quote]

[img]http://i181.photobucket.com/albums/x180/Wapo_Gipo_Frogs88/th_1-1.gif[/img]

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Post by Mbwa »

This is a really cool project.

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Post by Zaris »

Mbwa wrote:This is a really cool project.
I agree. I'm very interested in this lang.

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Post by desmond »

Serali wrote:ImageImageImage ImageImage......

줌줌 다리! :mrgreen:

Image
Is this your conlang? Does it use obsolete Hangul letters? I spotted that the triangle shaped and Z shaped ones are no longer in use in Modern Korean.

And the second sentence is chumchum tari? What does it mean?

I know there's one more conlang, Kala, using Hangul as well.
[b]Desmond[/b] - [url=http://conlang.wikia.com/Rangyayo][b]Rangyayo[/b][/url], spoken on the islands of elixir of life

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Post by Serali »

desmond wrote:Is this your conlang? Does it use obsolete Hangul letters? I spotted that the triangle shaped and Z shaped ones are no longer in use in Modern Korean.

And the second sentence is chumchum tari? What does it mean?

I know there's one more conlang, Kala, using Hangul as well.
It's Käläli. 줌줌 다리 = awesome

Käläli has multiple writing systems now that I think about it. There's the traditional one for everyday use, then there's "Käläli Esukibo" or "Ornamental Writing" Then there's the Hangul one which I haven't thought of a name for yet but it uses all the Hangul characters as well as some of the obsolete ones and ones of my own invention.

Käläli also has a Latin Alphabet too. I forgot to mention it. Such a shame Korean doesn't use these anymore. They're awesome. I also have a number of other languages that use it and I've adapted it to English so many times it's not even funny.

I say out with English's shitty orthography and bring in the Hangul! :mrgreen: I love it. I love it's simplicity and it looks so kawaii.

Image
[quote="Zereskaoate"]I am, however a slave to the boingies. [img]http://i181.photobucket.com/albums/x180/Wapo_Gipo_Frogs88/Boingies/th_thsau222jpg-2.gif[/img][/quote]

[img]http://i181.photobucket.com/albums/x180/Wapo_Gipo_Frogs88/th_1-1.gif[/img]

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Post by desmond »

Verbs are the most complex lexical category in Rangyan. Their structure when used as the predicate of a clause is prefix + verb stem + up to four infixes + suffix, and can be illustrated with this table.

Image

This is a conjugation table for the verb yabü (食쁘; /ja.bɨ/) "eat". Honorific and modality are not included to keep the table shorter.

Image
[b]Desmond[/b] - [url=http://conlang.wikia.com/Rangyayo][b]Rangyayo[/b][/url], spoken on the islands of elixir of life

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Post by TzirTzi »

In what sense are the mood, voice, aspect and polarity affixes infixes? They appear to be suffixes to me. A suffix follows the stem (regardless of whether or not it precedes other affixes) - an infix appears inside the stem.
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Post by desmond »

TzirTzi wrote:In what sense are the mood, voice, aspect and polarity affixes infixes? They appear to be suffixes to me. A suffix follows the stem (regardless of whether or not it precedes other affixes) - an infix appears inside the stem.
Oh, I misunderstood what an infix is. Thanks for the correction.
But then it raises back the old question...

Is it plausible to have this kind of construction? i.e. the conjugation syntax is VC+VC+VC+VCV it+an+om+arai but it is actually pronounced/heard as V+CV+CV+CVCV i ta no marai

I really like this construction myself.
[b]Desmond[/b] - [url=http://conlang.wikia.com/Rangyayo][b]Rangyayo[/b][/url], spoken on the islands of elixir of life

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