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Vreleksá
The Alurhsa Word for Constructed: Creativity in both scripts and languages
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dusepo
Joined: 12 Feb 2008
Posts: 129
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 Posted: Wed Feb 13, 2008 9:49 am Post subject: Hello! Waya! |
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hey there everyone! a newbie to this forum here lol. i'd like to introduce my (as yet unfinished) conlang called Retfon. it started off completely independent of any language, and was created for miniature conworld i was building in my garden. it has since however borrowed (albeit not obviously because the transliteration is different) some words from english, german, sanskrit and tibetan.
apparently i'm not allowed to post the link to my Retfon blog until i have made 5 posts, lol, so i've put in my sig where u can see what i have done so far.
please suggest any improvements or ideas!
i am considering changing the vowels from a, e, i, o, u and oo to just having every vowel short unless with a 'lengthening' mark on it (maybe an umlaut). |
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Dhanus
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Joined: 06 Jul 2007
Posts: 192
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| Posted: Wed Feb 13, 2008 10:27 am Post subject: |
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Hello! Welcome to the forum. 
We hope you like it here.
Is this your first conlang? And is this your first Conlanging Community?
Also, could you post some stuff on here about your conlang, thanks. |
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yssida
Joined: 16 Sep 2007
Posts: 253
Location: sa jaan lang
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| Posted: Wed Feb 13, 2008 11:22 am Post subject: |
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Welcome!
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Aeetlrcreejl
Joined: 08 Jun 2007
Posts: 839
Location: Over yonder
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| Posted: Wed Feb 13, 2008 11:31 am Post subject: Re: Hello! Waya! |
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| dusepo wrote: | | i am considering changing the vowels from a, e, i, o, u and oo to just having every vowel short unless with a 'lengthening' mark on it (maybe an umlaut). |
Macrons are usually used for lengthening.
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[iocwa_H d`Z`Ot`_h~a_Hk] |
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yssida
Joined: 16 Sep 2007
Posts: 253
Location: sa jaan lang
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| Posted: Wed Feb 13, 2008 11:35 am Post subject: |
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Or the hat.
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langover94
Joined: 21 Aug 2007
Posts: 509
Location: USA
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| Posted: Wed Feb 13, 2008 9:18 pm Post subject: |
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Hi! Welcome to the board!
A couple of tips that I learned really fast.
NEVER EVER EVER SAY:
TOO MUCH. This you will learn very quickly. (Just thought that I would catch the issue before it was nurtured.) If you use it in moderation it's no problem, but using it after each sentence will get annoying to most people.
Also, capital letters where they should be are pleasing to the eye  While not necessary, they are nice to have.
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dusepo
Joined: 12 Feb 2008
Posts: 129
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| Posted: Thu Feb 14, 2008 11:56 am Post subject: |
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Yes, this is my first conlang, and although i visit many conlang communities, this is the first one i have signed up for and decided to contribute .
More info about my conlang as at my blog. Hopefully my sig will show up this time? Anything else you want to know, feel free to ask!
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eldin raigmore
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Joined: 03 May 2007
Posts: 1621
Location: SouthEast Michigan
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| Posted: Fri Feb 15, 2008 12:38 am Post subject: |
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The language seems like just a "re-lex" of English.
Not much work has been put into the grammar. It seems to be just English's grammar.
The phonology looks interesting to me, different from English's. But you haven't explained any of it yet. I'd like to see the sounds represented in some system everybody reads the same; IPA, or Z-SAMPA (ZBB's X-SAMPA), or CXS (CONLANG's X-SAMPA), for instance.
You should tell us Retfon's rules about which pairs of phonemes can occur one after the other in the same word. If some phoneme isn't always pronounced the same in all circumstances, you should tell us Retfon's rules for deciding how it's pronounced when.
You haven't said anything about syllable structure. Are there any syllables whose nuclei are consonants instead of vowels? If so, are there any restrictions on them? What about vowel-clusters in a word? Can a syllable have a cluster of two or more vowels as its nucleus? If so what are the allowable vowel-cluster syllable-nuclei? How can you tell how to divide a word into syllables? Must every syllable have an onset or can some not? In fact, may a syllable have an onset or must they all be "onset-less"? Same with syllable codas; may a syllable have a coda? Must a syllable have a coda? And how about consonant-clusters, in words and in syllables; which ones are allowed? How many consonants can appear in a cluster in a syllable-onset? How many consonants can appear in a cluster in a syllable-coda?
Does Retfon have any rules restricting clusters of three consonants in a syllable, that aren't just a result of the rules about which consonants can appear together?
Here on this board the one thing that interests us most about a conlang is the writing-system. Do you have one yet for Retfon?
Are you planning a featurography, or an alphabet, or an abjad, or an abugida, or a syllabary, or a logography?
The vocabulary/lexicon could become interesting. What you have so far looks different from English, that is, the words look different. (But you seem to divide up semantic space just the same -- each of English's words has an exact Retfon translation.) I'd like to see some morphology; maybe some morphotactics. Do you have a layout of what a typical verb looks like? A typical noun? A typical adjective? A typical adverb? A typical word? A typical noun-phrase? A typical adjective-phrase? A typical verb-phrase? A typical clause?
What kinds of morphemes does it have? Are there any morphemes that are just parts of syllables? Maybe just a consonant or two, or just a vowel or two? What kinds of affixes does it have? Prefixes, suffixes, infixes, circumfixes, transfixes, suprafixes? Does it have tonemes or chronemes or "stressemes"? Does it have any morphemes that are more than one syllable? If so, are all, or almost all, of these more-than-one-syllable morphemes, roots of open-class words like verbs or nouns or adjectives or adverbs?
How do you make one part of speech out of another? Like, making a noun out of a verb, or making an adjective out of a verb, or making a verb out of an adjective, or making an adverb out of an adjective, etc.?
Does Retfon have adpositions? If so, which kind are most common -- prepositions, or postpositions, or inpositions? Or is no kind "most common"? What kinds does it have other than the most common kind?
Is Retfon more of an isolating language, or more of a synthesizing language? Is it more agglutinating, or more fusional?
I assume common or dominant word-order is SVO, like English.
I can't tell if Retfon is accusative or ergative. For one thing the first-person singular pronoun seems to occur in only one case; nominative=accusative, or absolutive=ergative. What is Retfon's morphosyntactic alignment?
How does Retfon distinguish the various "deep cases", or semantic roles, that a noun-phrase may occupy? It needn't distinguish all of them, but it's awfully unlikely it would only have the two sets -- before-the-verb and after-the-verb.
What about nouns' case, definiteness, gender (or concordial noun-class), grammatical number, referentiality, and specificity? And do any of these apply to adjectives as well as nouns?
What about verbs' aspect, modality/mode/mood, polarity, tense, and grammatical voice? What about evidentiality, mirativity, and validationality?
What about the "degree-of-comparison" of adjectives and/or adverbs? For instance: positive, equative, comparative, and superlative?
What does Retfon express lexically, what morphologically, and what syntactically? What typically requires suppletion, and what typically requires an auxiliary word? What about derivation and inflection? What about irregularity?
Can you (or must you) distinguish between "perfective" and "imperfective" in Retfon? How about "realis" and "irrealis"? For tense, is the "anterior/simultaneous/posterior", or the "past/present/future", distinction, more basic? Or can you express both at once? How about degrees-of-remoteness -- for instance, is the immediate past distinguished from the distant past?
Is Retfon subject-prominent or not? (I'm guessing "Yes, because it's a copy of English.") Is Retfon topic-prominent or not? (I'm guessing "No, because it's a copy of English.")
Do you have ditransitive clauses? If so, how do they line up with the monotransitive ones? Is Retfon dative or dechticaetiative or something else?
Is Retfon head-marking, dependent-marking, or something else?
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halyihev
Joined: 23 Apr 2007
Posts: 175
Location: Vermont, New England / Vrïtálá Kritsensá, Álurhná
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| Posted: Fri Feb 15, 2008 11:39 am Post subject: Re: Hello! Waya! |
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| Aeetlrcreejl wrote: | | dusepo wrote: | | i am considering changing the vowels from a, e, i, o, u and oo to just having every vowel short unless with a 'lengthening' mark on it (maybe an umlaut). |
Macrons are usually used for lengthening. |
For what it's worth, I use the acute accent in Alurhsa because circumflex was needed for nasals and I wanted to stick to Latin-1 characters (well, originally to the IBM-PC character set, since back when I was designing this version of romanization for computers, Unicode wasn't even a gleam in someone's eye, and Latin-1 wasn't available on any machine I had access to...).
Shuleln, dusepo! (Welcome, dusepo!)
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Álurhsá Ólevár/Alurhsa Website: http://alurhsa.org
Sehályensá Víláren/Bilingual Blog: http://blog.alurhsa.org
Álurhsá Ásálqáren/Alurhsa Board: http://forum.alurhsa.org |
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Serali
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Joined: 18 Apr 2007
Posts: 929
Location: The Land Of Boingies
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| Posted: Fri Feb 15, 2008 12:47 pm Post subject: |
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I love diacritics!
And welcome to Vreleksá! Does Retfon have a script?
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StrangeMagic
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Joined: 18 Apr 2007
Posts: 640
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| Posted: Fri Feb 15, 2008 7:12 pm Post subject: |
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I use macrons for the lengthening of my vowels.
And welcome to the guild! |
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dusepo
Joined: 12 Feb 2008
Posts: 129
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| Posted: Sat Feb 16, 2008 7:48 pm Post subject: |
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Some interesting points there, eldin raigmore, although I have to admit I don't understand some of the technical linguistics terms. The grammar is somewhere between English and German (the two languages i speak so it made sense).
As for vowels, i have come to the conclusion that is best to keep the transliteration simple to make it easier and just use lengthening marks in the conscript which will be coming soon! I have also decided to simplify the use of them to reduce ethno-centrism, and in effect have only 3 vowels left. Here is what i have settled on:
a = a
aa / ar = ?
e = e
ee = i
o = o
oo = u
or and er could also be separate letters.
Retfon is very much still under construction, but it's great to be able to discuss it with u lot. Such a nice warm welcome, too .
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Last edited by dusepo on Sat Feb 16, 2008 8:58 pm; edited 2 times in total |
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dusepo
Joined: 12 Feb 2008
Posts: 129
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| Posted: Sat Feb 16, 2008 8:50 pm Post subject: |
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| eldin raigmore wrote: |
Not much work has been put into the grammar. It seems to be just English's grammar. |
It is a mixture of English and German grammar. The words are in the same order as both of these for present tense, but switch round to the German order for past tense, even though past tense is 'inferred' as in some eastern languages. for instance:
"I went here yesterday" would be "I here go yesterday". Similar to German, but with yesterday (or any 'inferring' phrase at the end rather than the beginning, as would be the case in German.)
| Quote: | | The phonology looks interesting to me, different from English's. But you haven't explained any of it yet. I'd like to see the sounds represented in some system everybody reads the same; IPA, or Z-SAMPA (ZBB's X-SAMPA), or CXS (CONLANG's X-SAMPA), for instance. |
I have heard of the IPA, and here is the transliteration:
(The Retfon alphabet is in the order Hard Consonants, Soft Consonants, Vowels. However, for ease of use, here it is in the Western order)
a = [a]
aa = [aː]
ch = [tʃ]
d = [d]
e = [e]
f = [f], [ɸ]
g = [g]
h = [h]
i = [eː]
k = [k]
l = [l]
m = [m]
n = [n]
ng = [ɲ]
o = [o]
p = [p]
q = [q], [ç], [x]
r = [ɹ]
s = [s]
sh = [ʃ], [ʂ]
t = [t]
u = [u], [øː], [uː]
v = [v]
w = [w]
y = [ʎ]
I have however not heard of the other two. Got any links or further info?
| Quote: | | You should tell us Retfon's rules about which pairs of phonemes can occur one after the other in the same word. If some phoneme isn't always pronounced the same in all circumstances, you should tell us Retfon's rules for deciding how it's pronounced when. |
Some hard and soft consonants can be used toegther (e.g. imsens, tra) and two soft ones can be used together (e.g. galf, arthasop), but two hard ones cannot be used together.
| Quote: | You haven't said anything about syllable structure. Are there any syllables whose nuclei are consonants instead of vowels? If so, are there any restrictions on them? What about vowel-clusters in a word? Can a syllable have a cluster of two or more vowels as its nucleus? If so what are the allowable vowel-cluster syllable-nuclei? How can you tell how to divide a word into syllables? Must every syllable have an onset or can some not? In fact, may a syllable have an onset or must they all be "onset-less"? Same with syllable codas; may a syllable have a coda? Must a syllable have a coda? And how about consonant-clusters, in words and in syllables; which ones are allowed? How many consonants can appear in a cluster in a syllable-onset? How many consonants can appear in a cluster in a syllable-coda?
Does Retfon have any rules restricting clusters of three consonants in a syllable, that aren't just a result of the rules about which consonants can appear together? |
Vowel clusters are not allowed in Retfon, and neither are consonant clusters of more than two consonants.
| Quote: | Here on this board the one thing that interests us most about a conlang is the writing-system. Do you have one yet for Retfon?
Are you planning a featurography, or an alphabet, or an abjad, or an abugida, or a syllabary, or a logography? |
The conscript will be coming soon, and so will a font to write it with. It will be an alphabet.
| Quote: | | The vocabulary/lexicon could become interesting. What you have so far looks different from English, that is, the words look different. (But you seem to divide up semantic space just the same -- each of English's words has an exact Retfon translation.) I'd like to see some morphology; maybe some morphotactics. Do you have a layout of what a typical verb looks like? A typical noun? A typical adjective? A typical adverb? A typical word? A typical noun-phrase? A typical adjective-phrase? A typical verb-phrase? A typical clause? |
Every verb ends in an S. The semantic space will be divided up differently as i work in my conworld's "holy book" which will be based on a series of sayings by an ancient wise king.
| Quote: | | What kinds of morphemes does it have? Are there any morphemes that are just parts of syllables? Maybe just a consonant or two, or just a vowel or two? What kinds of affixes does it have? Prefixes, suffixes, infixes, circumfixes, transfixes, suprafixes? Does it have tonemes or chronemes or "stressemes"? Does it have any morphemes that are more than one syllable? If so, are all, or almost all, of these more-than-one-syllable morphemes, roots of open-class words like verbs or nouns or adjectives or adverbs? |
I'm afraid i don't understand all of the terminology used here. Sorry.
| Quote: | | How do you make one part of speech out of another? Like, making a noun out of a verb, or making an adjective out of a verb, or making a verb out of an adjective, or making an adverb out of an adjective, etc.? |
Still working on this, but here is an example of what I have in mind:
Ngushis = To debate / reason with
Ngushi = Reasoning ability
As said above, all vowels end in an S. Therefore, any word could be made a verb by adding an S. This creates interesting possibilities of dividing up the semantic space differently.
| Quote: | Does Retfon have adpositions? If so, which kind are most common -- prepositions, or postpositions, or inpositions? Or is no kind "most common"? What kinds does it have other than the most common kind?
Is Retfon more of an isolating language, or more of a synthesizing language? Is it more agglutinating, or more fusional?
I assume common or dominant word-order is SVO, like English.
I can't tell if Retfon is accusative or ergative. For one thing the first-person singular pronoun seems to occur in only one case; nominative=accusative, or absolutive=ergative. What is Retfon's morphosyntactic alignment?
How does Retfon distinguish the various "deep cases", or semantic roles, that a noun-phrase may occupy? It needn't distinguish all of them, but it's awfully unlikely it would only have the two sets -- before-the-verb and after-the-verb.
What about nouns' case, definiteness, gender (or concordial noun-class), grammatical number, referentiality, and specificity? And do any of these apply to adjectives as well as nouns?
What about verbs' aspect, modality/mode/mood, polarity, tense, and grammatical voice? What about evidentiality, mirativity, and validationality?
What about the "degree-of-comparison" of adjectives and/or adverbs? For instance: positive, equative, comparative, and superlative?
What does Retfon express lexically, what morphologically, and what syntactically? What typically requires suppletion, and what typically requires an auxiliary word? What about derivation and inflection? What about irregularity?
Can you (or must you) distinguish between "perfective" and "imperfective" in Retfon? How about "realis" and "irrealis"? For tense, is the "anterior/simultaneous/posterior", or the "past/present/future", distinction, more basic? Or can you express both at once? How about degrees-of-remoteness -- for instance, is the immediate past distinguished from the distant past?
Is Retfon subject-prominent or not? (I'm guessing "Yes, because it's a copy of English.") Is Retfon topic-prominent or not? (I'm guessing "No, because it's a copy of English.")
Do you have ditransitive clauses? If so, how do they line up with the monotransitive ones? Is Retfon dative or dechticaetiative or something else?
Is Retfon head-marking, dependent-marking, or something else? |
I'm afraid I don't understand all of this terminology either. Sorry.
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