A community for conlangs and conlangers
The Dailies. April 19
Did you work on your language today? Create any new rules of grammar or syntax? New progress on a script? New words in your lexicon?
On the other hand, do any excavating or reading or enjoying stuff you've already created? Do you have any favorites to share?
How did you conlang today?




For Nahul:
got- 'to raise (up), to lift (up), to hold high' Past tense 1sg gotá, past tense 3rd sg gotó, present tense 1sg gotai, infinitiv lo-got, imperative ma-got.
Ma-got inek! 'Lift me up!' (child to adult)
Goteká gien. 'I will lift you up.'
re-got is the perfect participle.
re-got ra-maddon (n) 'High Learned One'. A very respected elite profession. A ra-maddon is a Learned One who knows all the official rules and a lot of the inofficial practice of the dominant thought-system on the South-West Continent. A re-got ra-maddon is a High Learned One who, in addition to all of the above, is supposed to be able to deal with the Spirit Realm when need be, both in important seasonal ceremonies and in emergencies. They are more "priest-like", or "high priest"-like, than regular Learned Ones.
By this point I realised I didn't know how to make plurals for the ra- type of construction, a kind of nominalised perfect participle that only works for persons, "the one who is Xed".
The normal plural prefix in Nahul for animate nouns is na-, or n- if the noun begins with a vowel. I decided that for the perfect participle, ra- changes to ran- in the plural.
Thus:
ran-maddon 'Learned Ones'; 'the Learned Ones'
re-got ran-maddon 'High Learned Ones'; 'the High Learned Ones'
ra-got refers to a notable elite person in general. Plural ran-got.
Love it, and how thoroughly you went through the different uses for the word. And it sounds good too!
Thank you! Incidentally, it's pronounced pretty much exactly how a Swede would pronounce English "got" if they haven't heard it said before :D (and assuming they're going for a short O): [got]. I've stopped being afraid of homonyms with natlangs by this point...!
EDIT: Except we'd use an aspirated T. /edit
Me too. It doesn't make sense to worry about natlangs I feel, not considering what I'm actually doing with mine.
Nice!
Inspired by @bbbourq and others, I have added Firen to CALS. http://cals.conlang.org/language/firen/
Not too much else today though.
Aww thanks @killerbee13! Speaking of which, I did the same, albeit a mere skeleton of my conlang.
Very, very nice!
Cool! Man, I wouldn't even know what to tag mine with. "Generally undetermined"?
I think the tags are all optional, I just chose some of the applicable popular ones on the main page for mine.
That makes sense.
I was just listening to a conlangery episode on isolating and analytic languages the other day and it made me realize I legitimately don't know what mine is classifiable as. Or possibly, there isn't enough info yet -to- know. lol.
Agglutination and ergative-absolutive casing are some of the things I decided early on for mine, so they seemed reasonable things to tag it with since they kind of define the "personality" of it for me.
There are lots of things (some of which are very important) I still don't know about Firen though. "I don't know yet" is a perfectly good answer to these questions.
True!
I feel like, syntax-wise, lɛ:sh-enne is closest to Arabic so far of the languages I know, due to the zero copula and probably having changeable word-order (compared to Swedish, for ex.) so it might classify kind of close to that. But derivationally it can't really resemble Arabic because it doesn't have a root system so... one of these days I need to look at that long list of derivational patterns I found and see if I can figure out how certain things are done.
You inspired me. :D And love how it's looking so far.
You'll have to tell me how you added notes to yours. I can't seem to figure it out.
click edit on an individual feature. :D it's kind of awesome.
I do not have any news for today other than I registered for Conlang Atlas of Language Structures (CALS). I will provide more information once I figure it out.
Looking forward to hearing it!
Despite my poking around myself, still looking forward to whatever you share. :D
Today i finally corrected my 3rd p of non-persons verbal ending from /a:t/ to /ɛ:t/. I realized a bit ago that I've been saying it like that all along.
I also had a thought earlier. I was listening to Conlangery and someone said "so that happened" and I got the notion to have some sort of fixed expression or exclamation with that sort of meaning: "that happened" or "so that's a thing". And I was thinking it might be fun to make that expression an impersonal verb meaning, essentially, "it exists". Or possibly "this/that exists".
And thinking of that made me think of a potential problem with my demonstratives. Namely that I'd posited that /um/ before a noun is a definite article, but after a noun it is a "this"-equivalent demonstrative. That's not a problem alone, but then I started thinking if /e:mam um/ is "this food" and /um e:mam/ is "the food", how do I say "this is food" (especially with zero coupla)? Is "the food" and "this is food" identical? Or are the demonstrative adjectives and demonstrative pronouns different? I'm thinking maybe yes, and that if so also that maybe the pronouns are standalone words whereas the adjectives are actually some kind of affix? Or if not affix, a sort of particle that can't be used independently?
A lot of thinking today.
Oooh! Language change and grammaticization in action! I love it. Also like the expression you're pondering. There are so many cliche stock phrases, and English is sooo metaphorical, it made me want Akachenti to be the same way.
It's funny how pronunciations do that. I'm constantly reanalyzing pronunciation to get at the in-use rather than prescribed pronunciation. Such is the substance of phonotactics and allophone discovery.
Really excited to see what you come up with!
Yes! I think after sleeping on it I like the idea of the pronoun demonstratives being standalone and different from the adjective versions.
Yeah, I like taking things that I say a lot, whether generally accepted expressions or just things that have become "stuff I say with friends" and giving them a specific counterpart in a conlang.
Yeah. Once I do audiofiles I will be taking people's feedback on whether my pronunciation and transcription line up. Because I'm not always aware.
The a: to ɛ: thing amuses me though because Lebanese Arabic has something called imala which is basically a tendency for vowels to lean forward and upward (so ka:n in standard becomes kɛ:n or possibly even higher in Lebanese). I told my prof (who's Lebanese) that less than 30 lexemes in, my conlang already has imala and he was very pleased, haha.
It's always fun to include stuff you like, even if it's on accident. :D
Regarding pronouns demonstratives vs demonstrative adjectives - that seems to be how it works in Nahul, that they're not the same thing. But in Nahul the enclitic demonstratives are used for 'here'/'there'/etc when standing on their own, and as pronouns they instead get fused with case endings and plural endings.
Neat!
Worked on sound changes and allophony/prosody, including tone marking and verb paradigms.
ETA: And that last one is supposed to contrast the murmured voiced velar fricative vs. stop. Updating my spreadsheet but too lazy to rescreenshot.
ETA2: Oh, and the tone markers are at the front of each syllable with the bar basically indicating how high or low the tone is.