GitP Conworlding/Worldbuilding Project - Language Thread

[ufo]

Uh, sure? To be honest, I didn't make a rule for that, but okay.

Well, "adelletsat" is feminine, "nejen" is masculine and "adelletsatnejen" is feminine, so I assumed...

Really, I don't know a lot of grammatics 'n' sutff, but just in case I had spotted something, I might as well point it out

[Maximum Zersk]

No, no, it's cool. Sounds interesting, though, so we'll try it out.

ref: Right after the Sharlaq proto-langs. I'm guessing that the two language trees would have some form of mixing, the Gnomes and the Sharlaq knowing each other for so long. The humans would come later.

[ref]

Yeah, but while Sharlaq went agglutinative, Gnomish went a totally different direction. So now they're pretty different. Still, there's some quality that makes a Sharlaq and a Gnome, in the (rare?) occasions where they talk to each other, not having to strain much to translate from one to the other.

I envision that in both societies there are a few members that especialized in quick translation and they serve as interpreters when needed.

[Maximum Zersk]

Yeah, but what I meant is that history can affect language. For example, many East Indian Languages are technically Indo-European, the languages have since mixed with Dravidian Languages and such.

What I mean is that after years of history, some Sharlaq languages may have mixed a bit with others.

[ref]

Ah yes, of course. But we're going with the "pure" languages here, so to speak. One would have to look very hard to find the common roots of Gnomish and Sharlaq.

[Maximum Zersk]

You're looking the wrong way here.

Okay, another example; Modern English. It was made as a mixture of Old French and Old English. Something like that might happen to a language later right?

An In-World example. Sharlaq Area A has been taken over by the empire. The Area A Language gets mixed with Latin Gnoman to make Sharlaq Language B.

[ref]

Ah, you're talking dialects. Yeah, that can happen. Though the way I'm seeing Gnomish right now, the mixed language is gonna be a bit messy, hehe.

[Tulio d Bard]

Well, it's already messy, so no problem!

(yay, I'm back! Soon, I'll be completely back!)

[ref]

Welcome almost back, then, Tulio!

[Maximum Zersk]

Okay, to move on with this:

Adjectives will be inflected by gender and number, so we'll have to figure out how to inflect them.

My idea is after the adjective, you add a suffix indicating the gender, and a prefix indicating number. So it'd work like this.

[num]adj[gen]

So let's make it that -il is feminine, -al is masculine, and -ul is neutral. Then, sek- is singular, and naj- is plural. So let's say you're talking about two small houses (accusative). The Noun Phrase would look like so:

Najtotal-chokh-oudateqayniknijjal.

This is assuming that numerals come after the adjective, but before the noun.

Now, tenses. What we've got is either a Legendary-Ancient-Recent-Present-Recent-Prophesied system, or Ancient-Recent-Present-Future system. Personally, I think the latter system works better, since it isn't as complicated, and it doesn't have the whole "Sharlaq think of their beliefs as just myths" thing that the Legendary and Prophesied tenses sort of imply. I don't know. For now, I'll work on the latter. I'll let Tulio figure out the former one. Also, I think will use Perfect and Non-Perfect, but I'll worry about that later.

Anyhoo, I think I'll make the tenses--you guessed it--suffixes. So, Ancient = -Tjaj, Moderate = -Haj, Present = -Qan, Future = -Dan.

So let's say you were swimming earlier today, and you're the one talking. The verb phrase should look like so:

Jeqqat-haj

I put the hyphen so nobody pronounces it 'ye'athay'.

So how's that for now?

[ref]

You could borrow a small page from the (as of yet unpublished) Gnomish and use Legendary as a special affix added to Ancient, and Prophesied as a special affix added to Future.

Gnomish will also have many tenses in past and future (maybe even in present) since it's the catch of Gnomish to be absolutely clear of what one wants to say (students of Gnomish, don't worry. They're gonna be pretty regular), so you wouldn't want to step much on the toes of that (but then again, gnomes don't have a Legendary or Prophesied tense).

[Tulio d Bard]

...it doesn't have the whole "Sharlaq think of their beliefs as just myths" thing that the Legendary and Prophesied tenses sort of imply.

I never thought that way... Having different tenses for myths is the same than recognizing they're not truth (or almost that). The other option may be better.

So, what exactly marks the end of a protolanguage creation? (So that we can give Gnomish a try)

[Maximum Zersk]

I never thought that way... Having different tenses for myths is the same than recognizing they're not truth (or almost that). The other option may be better.

So, what exactly marks the end of a protolanguage creation? (So that we can give Gnomish a try)

I was sorta curious about that one. Ah well.

The protolanguage creation ends when we think we have enough words and the grammar is finished. At least to the point where you can have a conversation with someone.

[Maximum Zersk]

Well, let's see if I can make a proper sentence. If I can, maybe we can move to grammar constructions. How about the sentence, "It's mine!"?

First, we need to get the word's into position. The sentence structure (VSO) means that it will look like so:

Is it mine!

But that's still not right. We don't have a possessive pronoun, so instead, we do this:

Is it of I!

But that's still not right, because the preposition is in the wrong place! So we move that to get:

Is it I of!

That's good. Now we figure out which declensions to put on the nouns. There are two of them. of them, Accusative and Genitive, right? So we get this.

Is it[gen] I[acc] of!

That seems right. So now, we add the inflections to the verb. It's third person, so the proper ending would be -at. Then, it's in a present tense, so you add -qan after that. So the sentence is:

Is[1st][pres] it[gen] I[acc] of!

Whew, complicated! Now we can translate it. I'll keep the speaker's gender undefined.

Shulatqan shuronguk tet-hokh...

And now I just noticed that I didn't make a possessive postposition. No matter, I'll use from. So the sentence will be:

Shulattqan shuronguk tet-hokh toroin.

There.

EDIT: Funny how a phrase that' two syllables long becomes five times larger in another language.

And you can start the Gnomish, ref.

[Tulio d Bard]

Shouldn't it be third person?

I believe ref has a ton of ideas stored for Gnomish.

[Maximum Zersk]

Yeah, he sent me the file too.

Ah yes, now that you mention it. Let me fix that.

Turns out I used the wrong person in the first place, so it's fine.

[ref]

OK, Let's start with Gnomish. I will start with the concept I had with this language.

As gnomes are to be the highly technological race, their language reflects on that. One thing they want to avoid is miscomunication, so the language has evolved as to avoid all sort of ambiguities, while still being something that could have evolved naturally, even if needing a conscious effort for the first speakers of the language that became modern Gnomish to do that.

This avoiding of ambiguities works in all levels of the language. Lexically, care is taken that no two words are close enough that they can be confused. Since that is not really possible once the language grows past a certain point, what they do is add disambiguators if they think it is needed. It would be like saying "ship-transport" vs "sheep-animal" in English. The writing helps to do that more transparently.

Morphologically, the sentences are structured fairly well to show what role every part of our sentence is playing, but where Sharlaq is agglutinative, gnomish makes extensive use of particles to show parts of speech (Japanese speakers will know that concept). Sentences also include mood indicators (Is what I'm saying a question, a statement, an order, a wish, a warning?) and certainty indicators (do I know what I'm saying because I saw it, because I deduced it from obvious aftermath, because I was told by someone?)

Phonetically, the language has ended with a relatively short number of consonants (twelve, including two semivowels) that hopefully are distinct enough so that mishearings are not likely. Because of this, the language allows any reasonable approximation as an allophone. As an example, all the following words would mean the same thing to a gnome: Tim, team, tin, dean, ding, thin, and dim.

[ref]

I'm double-posting because I didn't want to make a wall of text.

Gnomish alphabet: The twelve consonants are like follows:

• P, as in Pan
• T, as in Tan
• K, as in Can
• N, as in paN
• S, as in Saint
• F, as in Faint
• C, as CH in CHurch
• X, as German CH or Spanish J (velar fricative)
• R, always vibrating, as in Room
• L, as in Loom
• Y, as y or ll, as in Yield (semi-consonant)
• W, as in Want (semi-consonant)

The vowels are the five vowels you may know, but they're not pronounced like in English. Speakers of pretty much any Latin language or Japanese, will know those by heart.

• A, as in pAn
• E, as in pEn
• I, as in pIn
• O, as in pOng
• U, as double o in tOOn

[Maximum Zersk]

Interesting, though you may want to change the explanation for the vowels. As far as I can remember, those aren't like Japanese vowels.

[ref]

They're out of order, but they're the right vowels.

[Maximum Zersk]

Huh. Then that means I've been pronouncing pen, pin, and pong wrong.

[Tulio d Bard]

Consonants

Can these be used at any place in the words? Like:

• P, as in caP?
• T, as in aT?
• K, as in looK?
• N, as in Nope?
• S, as in doeS?
• F, as in oF?
• C, as in ouCH?
• X, as in... I don't think our known languages match... (I believe that's the hardest sound in Portuguese for English speakers to learn)
• R, as in... can it be somehow at the end of any word?
• L, as in... same as above...
• Y, as in saY?
• W, as in coW?

The vowels are the five vowels you may know, but they're not pronounced like in English. Speakers of pretty much any Latin language or Japanese, will know those by heart.

Interesting, though you may want to change the explanation for the vowels. As far as I can remember, those aren't like Japanese vowels.

Huh. Then that means I've been pronouncing pen, pin, and pong wrong.

I don't know if the vowels are like that in Japanese, but in Portuguese an Latin (Latin languages) that's pretty right.

[ref]

Yes, consonants can be at the end, but there's no clusters, when two consonants are together, to avoid mispronunciation they tend to add a small pause: "ap-titude", to make it clear. When writing, there is no necessary addition. However, I don't think Y and W can be at the end. At that position it seems better to make them a full vowel... What do you guys thing?

[Maximum Zersk]

Looks good so far. Don't stop!

[ref]

Sorry, I've been quite busy these days. Any way.

Sentence construction and word order: Thanks to the particle system, the word order is quite flexible. However, there are guidelines in what is the expected word order, and deviating from that is usually done for emphasis.

Since you want to remove ambiguity, the idea is giving the most important info from the start, and as the sentence goes, the importance diminishes. Thus, the verb is the first thing to go. For emphasis on some other part, however, the verb can come second. (This verb-first order matches Sharlaq, which helps us define the proto-language a bit, if/when we get to this).

The different parts of speech will be preceded by a particle which shows its function. Particles are short words that make the Gnomish sentences go into sort of a rhythm.

Example (with English words). How would the sentence "You ate apples yesterday" look?

Verb first. Verbs have an optional particle, which is only used in case something comes first. The next important thing is deemed the subject. Then the direct object (apples). Then the time. Therefore:

Ate (sub) You (direct) Apples (time) Yesterday. That is the standard form. (Note that the verb is in past form, so "yesterday" is only especificating, as opposed to "you ate apples [some time in the past]" (more about verbal tenses in a later post.

(direct) Apples (verb) Ate (sub) You (time) Yesterday. => You ate apples yesterday (not oranges).
(time) Yesterday (verb) Ate (sub) You (direct) Apples. => You ate apples yesterday (not past week). And so on.

[Maximum Zersk]

That's pretty good! One thing, though. Are you going to make it Nominative-Accusative, or Ergative-Absolutive, or something else?

[ref]

(splitting post to make it more readable)

Mood and Certainty indicators. These are two special sets of small words (though not technically particles) that give more information about our sentence. What if I didn't know whether you ate apples yesterday? I would just needed to ask the mood indicator of question. (i.e., Interrogative) at the beginning of the sentence. The most common ones are the stating facts (often omitted during speak, as it is the default), looking for information (interrogative), denying what is said next (that's how you do the negative) or showing surprise about something, but of course, there are several more.

Certainty indicators can be added to the end of the sentence if one thinks that it is important to show the certainty (or lack thereof) one has about the sentence just spoke. They range from absolute certainty (for instance, because I saw the thing myself), to almost absolute (a deduction: Streets are wet, so it must have rained), to not so good certainty (for instance, by hearsay. I heard someone say that there was a fire in the north forest, but I don't know for sure), to stating a mere opinion (I think that this book is great), to no certainty at all (Well, if I have to make a stab in the dark, I'd guess that...)

Well, since I don't want to make long posts, I'm waiting now for more comments and questions and stuff.

[ref]

Well, since the particles are the one carrying the cases, the system goes with them, and since the main drive is resolving ambiguity, the result is that Gnomish becomes "ergative-accusative".

[Maximum Zersk]

That sounds great!

Well, the whole thing looks good. I like it, really.

[Tulio d Bard]

I know nothing about particle languages, so, how are verb times, persons, numbers, genders, etc. defined? Do they use particles to specify that, or some letter(s) in the end/beginning of the word?