Gomahgaa: My present Conlang project

[Burke]

I've decided to start a topic on my conlang called Gomah. I have much of it worked out, but I'm still hitting many parts. I hope that it will entertain you.

For those involved, I plan on using it over in the kool map game. It will be the language of Jaawi Ruusih, however, I only plan on lending it to the game, not constraining it there.

I'll start with a basic phonology. I'm going to do my best to keep this in both IPA and X-Sampa, but if I slip up, just tell me where to edit please. I think my Google doc will be neater to read, but for my own use it has no X-sampa. https://docs.google.com/a/bu.edu/docume ... i2oZ8/edit

BASIC PHONOLOGY
VOWELS
Qualities

X-SAMPA

High: i I\ u
Mid: e o
Low: a

IPA

High: i ɨ u
Mid: e o
Low: a

All of these will be identical in the romanization save the near close central unrounded vowel, which will imitate Polish in Romanization with the letter "y"

Length
Vowels are either long or short. Long vowels can be realized as two of the short ones concatenated, but often in rapid speech they are roughly 80% longer than short vowels. Orthographically, long vowels are represented by doubling the grapheme.

Tone
Each segment of vowels is either high tone or low tone. The basic realizations of the tones are that they are level. This leaves 4 basic options per vowel: long and high, long and low, short and high, short and low. Low tones are marked orthographically by placing an “h” after the vowel sequence. High tones are unmarked.


CONSONANTS

X-SAMPA

stops: p,t,k,*?
nasals: m,n, N
fricatives: s,h
tap: r
approximant: w, j

IPA


stops: p,t,k,*ʔ
nasals: m,n, ŋ
fricatives: s,h
tap: r
approximant: w, j

* The glottal stop is only present word initially as a form of hiatus.

The only note for romanization is that the velar nasal is always written with the letter g and the glottal fricative is always the letter x since h is used to denote low tones. I like this scheme later due to how allophones will work, but if this x - h thing really gets you, suggest a better way about it. As a note, this phonemic inventory is far to small to justify diacritics in my opinion.

Syllable Structure and some prohibitions

The only possible syllable is the basic CV syllable. If there is no apparent onset consonant, it is likely the glottal stop. There do exist a handful of impossible syllables still, however. They are:

w + u vowels
w + y vowels
j + i vowels
j + y vowels

Sound Changes


Short Vowel Lowering

Short vowels are subject to a shift in certain environments. In these environments, the vowels shift in this way:

X-SAMPA
a-/V/ y-/@/
e-/E/ i-/I/
o-/O/ u-/U/

IPA
a-/ʌ/ y-/ə/
e-/ɛ/ i-/ɪ/
o-/ɔ/ u-/ʊ/

For short high vowels, this occurs when it is directly preceded by a long high syllable. For short low vowels, which are generally the weakest vowels in the sonority hierarchy, this reduction occurs whenever it follows a high vowel. This shift does not occur across word boundaries. It can be most clearly observed when this situation occurs at the end of a word.

Tone Sandhi

Tone sandhi is a process in quick speech to make long vowels more distinct and to facilitate fast, clear speech. If a long vowel is followed by a syllable with a different tonic height, the long vowel will dip or rise slightly in tone towards the end of its timing in anticipation of the tonic step. Short vowels do not do this, thus illustrating the sharp contrast in the two levels possible. Due to this, it is possible to have complete sentences that have a soft almost musical gliding up and down.

Tone Terracing

Typical speech has a downward drift in pitch as an utterance continues. This is due to the tonal system being relative and downstepping, either by means of sandhi or simple tone shift, being more strong than upswings. This can lead to high tones actually being at lower frequencies than low tones at different ends of the utterance.

To account for this downdrift, a large upswing in the overall tone is often made mid sentence. These typically occur at the start of a clause, with more major clauses likely to receive the upswing while subordinate clauses get milder upswings if any. This upswing reset will never occur midword.
Statement Tonality

Though not mandatory, due to effects of tonal drift, certain statements will follow slightly different tonal patterns than others even though function words may otherwise denote the type of comment. For this we must understand the tonal levels. There are 9 tonal levels, named 1-9, where 9 is the high frequency end, and 1 is the lowest. All statements generally enter around 7 or 8. Serial high tones at the beginning will cause 9 to be reached, but this is not common. Different statements tend to end at a lower end of the register than others, such as is follows:

N.B. What follows was done on a whim. I intend to develop my tonal prosody features, but I need to dedicate more time. What follows is what I have for now, but it will change.

Simple informative sentence: 7-4
Yes-no question: 8-4
Information question: 7-5
Rhetorical question: 8-2
Statement of disagreement: 9-1
Affirmation: 9-9
Statement of strong conviction: 5-7
Most jokes: 8-6-8-6-8-6...

Consonant Mutations

Mutations of the /h/ morpheme

The /h/ morpheme is subject to a shift forward to /x/ depending on the following realized vowel quality. If the vowel quality following /h/ is /u/,/o/, or /a/, or one of their mutations, then the /h/ will mutate into its allophone /x/.

Intervocalic Voicing

The /k/,/t/,/p/,/s/and /x/ phones are subject to voicing to /g/,/d/,/b/,/z/, and /ɣ/ (X-Sampa G) if they are not word initial and the following vowel does not undergo a mutation. There is no voicing of the /h/ phone in these environments.


Devoicing of /r/

(to those who like X-Sampa, I apologize in advance, I don't know the devoced r graph)
In word initial positions before short vowels the /r/ phoneme will devoice to /r̥/. In rapid speech, if this occurs at a pitch reset, the devoicing will likely not occur.

That is the rough sketch of the sound I have at the moment. I'll jump into some basic grammar so if yall want to make sentences in this mess, you can. I'll have to find a dictionary online too...

Any way, simply put, Gomah is a fairly analytic language, howver it allows decent sized words to develop via compounding like Mandarin, but, unlike Mandarin, compounding is rarely used to disambiguate words. Some words clearly fused of two words do exist, but are a bit rare. It relies fairly heavily on serial verb structures to convey meaning. It is not thoroughly Topic-prominent. Relative clauses tend to be avoided, with preference to appositives, adjectives, participle structures, and possesive structures. More in depth to come, but for now.

Nouns

Nouns are tied only to what they semantically represent. Concepts like number, gender, definiteness, absence, or case are not found here. AS such, a word like "maahpi" (man) only means that. In translation, this could end up as "man" "a man" "the man" "men" or "the men". Other things like "three men" or "on the man" are indicated by means of structure.

Possession

Possession is shown by directly placing the correct pronoun in front of the possessed noun

koonih noomah - my food
muhtee poh - your shrubs
noo ruusih - its birth

For a specific noun, it simply uses the "noo" possession.

maahpi noo gaari - the man's friend (lit. man 3 friend)

Often, for common names or phrases, the "noo" is omitted. My country in the kool mao game does this

Jaawi Ruusih - Joy's birth (lit, Joy birth)

Basics on Verbs

Intransitive or non object verbs end the sentence.

nonih siihtah - berry shiny - The berries are shiny.
kaakoh jaajuu - Bird sing - The bird is singing.

transitive verbs separate subject and object

koonih tuwa gomah gaa - 1 speak gomah-language - I speak gomah.

I'll work on getting a sound sample up here tomorrow. I had made one before, but the grammar has since changed, and that recording sounds a bit too much like it is being chanted rather than spoken.

As for real conlang orthography, I've been working on a logography and have maybe around 50ish characters thus far. I'll upload a scan of that as well.

Any suggestions for what to cover next? I'm easy for jumping around.

[EDIT]; I'm a fat lazy potato and forgot the goodgle doc for phonology on round one.

[clawgrip]

Looks good so far. You can explain how verbs work maybe.
Looking forward to seeing the logography.

As for the spelling, at least as it applies to the kool map game, since English (or Fungl'isc, as Izambri called it) is obviously one of the standard languages of that world, it is fine multiple Romanizations to exist.

Maybe I should make a thread for Yiyenmore as well, the language of Yiyenmenyon.

[Burke]

Topics for this post:

-Basics of verbs (for clawgrip)
-Intransitive & adjectives
-Transitive
-Verbs of motion
-Some copulas
-More on nouns
-Modification
-Sentence topics
-Instrumental noun usage
-Numbers (For Janko)
-Some Orthography samples

VERBS

Verbs cover actions and statuses of the subject presented, essentially the meat of the predicate. This can range from everything to running to being red. In sentences with no direct object, it follows the subject. In those with objects, it separates the subject and object.

Simple Intransitive sentences

Adjectival predicate

koonih nonih puuhsa.
1st-berry round.
My berries are round

Verbal predicate

kaakoh jaajuu
bird sing.
The birds (sings/ is singing)

With a simple direct object

muhtee siisa koonih saah.
2nd write 1st name.
You're writing my name.

Essentially the architecture breaks down to NP V (NP) for simple sentences.

Verbs of motion

Most verbs that indicate motion like "nuri" to go or "pyyhni" to come from, can accept a direct object of sorts. Nouns and noun phrases put into that slot have the direction understood.

Noo nuri Jaawi Ruusih
3rd go Jaawi Ruusih
He's going to Jaawi Ruusih

Koonih pyyhni woohki.
1st come mountain.
I come from the mountains.

Nominal copulas

There are two main copulas to equate one noun (phrase) to another.

ka - the gnomic copula, used for denoting various facts or things perceived to naturally occur or have permanance
jaah - the stative copula, used for describing fleeting equivalencies, conditions of the moment, or states expected to change.

muhtee ka gomah.
2nd COPULA person
You are a person.

noo jaah ty.
3rd COPULA child.
He is a child. (implying expectation he will not be someday)

Back to noun stuff

MORE ON NOUNS

Modification

One noun can modify another by means of being placed before the noun being modified. The most flagrant use of this is essentially already in the title.

Gomah + gaa = Gomahgaa
person + language = Gomah (language)

similarly

maahli + gomah = maahligomah
island + person = islander

The equivalent of relative clauses in English will be discussed later. At that time, how a noun phrase can modify or be modified will be discussed.

MORE SENTENCE TOPICS

Instrumental phrases

Later, we will see this to be a subset of preverbs, but gomah has a strict pattern to follow to show usage of things to accomplish actions. Generally, the verb "guu" + the instrument will preceed the main verb to indicate usage.

Koonih guu siitih kaanu noo.
1st use-knife kill 3rd.
I kill him with a knife. (Hello government overlord spies. I have committed no crime. This is not a confession. Have a nice day and have a nice day)

NUMBERS

Prepare thyself, Janko, here are the base numbers in gomah. it uses a base 12 system, mainly because it makes head math very smooth:

1 - xuu
2 - to
3 - piih
4 - kuu
5 - teeh
6 - syy
7 - gare
8 - poonah
9 - hee
10 - maa
11 - wagyh
12 - tawe

Orthography

Gomah makes use of a system of logograms. This is slowly being developed. These images provide some examples.

I'll put it in the following post since I have a case of the dumbs.

[EDIT] Tidied stuff.

[Burke]

Sample of the Gomah writing system. Numbers included. Go crazy Janko.

Going to tidy the last post a little

As a fun side note, most of the numbers are based at least loosely on picture on the hand finger counting. 1-3 are clearly abstracted pictograms. 6 is meant to look like a small 12 and 12 is loosely related to the hand. The heart character is based on the fact that there are two halves to the heart (hence the snake line in the middle) and 4 quadrants (thus the 4 marks); that was a shameless rob from Hanzi, which may or may not be based on this knowledge, but I remember noticing this one day in Chinese class and thinking it was pretty cool at least for remembering it. Foot is the hand upside-down because I am clearly a chimp.