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Another triconsonantal vowel-variant conlang

 
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Aert



Joined: 03 Jul 2008
Posts: 354

PostPosted: Fri Oct 08, 2010 12:27 am    Post subject: Another triconsonantal vowel-variant conlang Reply with quote

Hey hey,

It's been a while, and I've been working on and off on something I hope may end up moderately fleshed out and functional - another triconsonantal conlang.

It uses 38 base phonemes (some of which are rather uncommon), in somewhat of an abugida. What I wanted to try for this conlang's orthography was to write it without vowels, and at the same time not be burdened by accents. So I looked at what vowel sounds most easily keep the shape of the mouth as the listed consonants, and got this chart below:

(1st vowel is for the fricative, plosive, or nasal version of the consonant; the second is for approximant or lateral)
coronals: i, ɛ
palatals: i, ɛ
velars: e, a
uvulars: ɑ, a
labials: u, o
glottals: ə, ə

So: the series ftk in this orthography would indicate /futike/.

Morphology:

Verbs and nouns both conjugate/decline in a systematic way, with 5 options: rising (vowel quality, eg e->i); -i (eg e->ei); i- (e->ie); -u; and u-.

Verb tense is marked on the first vowel; aspect on the second; and number (including person number) on the third.
Grammatical noun case is marked on the first vowel (still have some kinks to work out here); motion on the second; and number on the third.

Person, including gender, formality, etc is marked after the third, and (I think) all other grammatical/etc markers are going to be suffixes (to reduce confusion in the orthography and etc.

Orthography:

In order to write the varying qualities of the vowels within the root morpheme, a few vowel indicators exist (similar, I suppose, to the soft marks of Russian): one for each declension/whatever the name should be.

The results are words like qvỉtṅ (that should display qv, i with ogonek above, t, n with dot above), pronounced /qɑvutin/

I haven't figured out how I'm going to assign/derive the meanings for the lexicon, but with 38 base phonemes I can get almost 55,000 combinations, each of which can be modified by verb/noun vowel changes, as well as suffixes.

I'm considering adding digraphs into this, but I'm kinda trying to avoid them. If they do end up getting integrated into the system though, that makes for 96 possible consonant clusters, which means for 885,000 combinations - a respectible number I think.

So - thoughts? Comments? Any blind alleys you foresee in this venture?

Thanks!
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Tolkien_Freak



Joined: 26 Jul 2007
Posts: 1231
Location: in front of my computer. always.

PostPosted: Fri Oct 08, 2010 2:21 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Interesting - so the consonants dictate the vowels (at least in the base uninflected form), and then inflections change those? A neat idea. You'd probably want to make sure to have some kind of mark to indicate no vowel (so you can have futike contrast with futke or futik or something).

It seems rather unique - my limited experience with Arabic and ancient Egyptian makes it seem like in 3cons langs the vowels are generally only there to facilitate pronunciation, and mostly change based on environment only. (Though I did play with a system a while back that had each base with the three consonants and a vowel, and that vowel went in a predetermined spot for each inflection.)
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Aert



Joined: 03 Jul 2008
Posts: 354

PostPosted: Sat Oct 09, 2010 6:05 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Quote:
Interesting - so the consonants dictate the vowels (at least in the base uninflected form), and then inflections change those?

Yep

Quote:
You'd probably want to make sure to have some kind of mark to indicate no vowel (so you can have futike contrast with futke or futik or something).

Yeah - I noticed that too; it's a dot above the consonant.

I was also considering adding another diacritic for non-root consonants, especially for suffixes and so on, to more easily distinguish them from the root (so that ftsk isn't taken as possibly f-tsk) but I decided against prefixes to eliminate this problem.
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Tolkien_Freak



Joined: 26 Jul 2007
Posts: 1231
Location: in front of my computer. always.

PostPosted: Sat Oct 09, 2010 4:11 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I think I meant to say in the last post that it might be better to write out the vowels in the romanisation, and just transfer all your diacritics and whatnot to the conscript. (whoops ^_^)

I'm generally against marking morphology as morphology in the script and not just implying it (it seems better that way), but don't rule out prefixes just because they would require marking. It's more naturalistic to be given a whole language and figure out what to do with it. (Feel free to rule out prefixes for other reasons though ^_^)
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Aert



Joined: 03 Jul 2008
Posts: 354

PostPosted: Wed Oct 13, 2010 10:52 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Quote:
think I meant to say in the last post that it might be better to write out the vowels in the romanisation, and just transfer all your diacritics and whatnot to the conscript.


That's what I'm doing - there's the Romanization with all the vowels and no diacritics (except for marking specific vowels), and then there's the (Roman) conlang orthography which marks the vowel mutations only; I might make an orthography that's Not based on the Roman alphabet just to get away from it, but it would simply be a cipher for the conlang orthography I've already got.

Maybe I could rule out prefixes by making the language SOV - the majority of their function words come After the topic, eg postfixes.
Thanks for the suggestion Smile
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