Conlang relay [relocated] (aka "The Cursed Relay")

[zompist]

So, am I making a minority language (the descendent of Fáralo that survived in the upper Oltu Valley where the origina Edák didn't have as many advantages) or something else? Or is this out of date?

I'm a bit confused, schwatever... are you deriving a descendent of Fáralo? Fáralo was spoken in the entire Oltu valley, as well as points south and east. It already is an Edak language.

The Feråjin conquest seems a bit of an anachronism... they were an people existing in the time of the Ndak, and were long ago conquered by the Faralo. Some descendents could rebel and then overrun the Oltu, but they're not likely to have a numerical advantage (and thus their language probably won't replace Faralo). To do this right you'd probably have to advance Feråjin a couple thousand years.

I'd suggest doing the main Fáralo descendent-- the language of Ussor. After all, someone has to. I'm not going to; I'm working on a Naidda descendant...

[Zhen Lin]

The language of Athalē proper has not been done either. It probably dies out fairly soon though, seeing as it leaves no influence on the other branches...

[Radius Solis]

I've been chugging away on Naidda and Kasca, slow but steady. See this thread for a discussion of afterlife-type beliefs; I've begun working on the grammar page again too. And I've got additions for the dictionary, too, which may number 200 or more by the time I'm done with them.

Edit: in order to have certain words I wanted for cultural reasons, and after exhausting other options, I was left needing to coin two new NT roots: kwagan, "bean(s)", and tiska, "flax".


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Meanwhile, slow as things have been in here the last week, here's some entertainment: let's identify all the English-Edastean false friends we can find Here's a few to start us off. All of these were unintentional accidents, I promise! They resulted from a word generator.

NT lewai "word", Faralo lega ~~~ Latin legere "to read", English law and legal and legible

NT baus "ox", Faralo and Naidda bo ~~~ Latin bos "cow, ox, bull", English bovine and beef

Another is NT pumâ "smoke, steam" which in the first generation reflexes all still start with p or in Faralo kp, but I believe one or two of Adata's daughters have something like fum.

What else can you find?

[Zhen Lin]

Meanwhile, slow as things have been in here the last week, here's some entertainment: let's identify all the English-Edastean false friends we can find

Yes, that sounds like fun!

Another is NT pumâ "smoke, steam" which in the first generation reflexes all still start with p or in Faralo kp, but I believe one or two of Adata's daughters have something like fum.

Ayāsthi has pòṁaṅ /"pO~A~/ but the plural is āfòṁaṅ /A:"p\O~A~/.

Here's a few more from Ayāsthi:

àfa /"Ap\A/ (a)far
átsı /"A:ts/ ash(es)
əṅ /@~/ and
làch /"lAkx/ bone, c.f. lich
lèġə /"lEh\@/ law; decree, c.f. legal (via Fáralo lega)
màw /"mAu/ mouth, c.f. maw
mìh /"mih/ modern, new; late, c.f. Sino-Japanese 未- mi- not yet
ōjó /o:"jo:/ eye, c.f. Spanish ojo
pì /"pi/ nose, c.f. Mandarin 鼻 bí (It should have been pỳ, but what's done is done.)
vòch /"wokx/ back - but the Adāta form is even closer, bókha.

[Cedh]

Meanwhile, slow as things have been in here the last week, here's some entertainment: let's identify all the English-Edastean false friends we can find

Buruya xɛvra "sheep" (Delta Naidda zivra) ~~~ French chèvre "goat"

[dunomapuka]

One that's been bugging me a while:
Fáralo sernat "minister" > Nam. senat, c.f. "senate"

[Corumayas]

The Naidda article l- kinda jumps out at me (cf. French etc. l').


Trying to get myself back into working on Akana stuff, I've updated the wiki pages with our latest ideas about PEI diachronics (as I understand them). A couple things I think are worth pointing out:

-I've noticed that Far ghantač "dragon" can't come from *gwent-a-ts; it has to come from PI *s-gonta-ʈ, *s-gonta-tj[a,e,o,u], or *s-gonta-tuj. So we are certainly dealing with a different suffix than the one seen in FMiw kwintas "bird" here.

-The Faraghin nominalizing suffix -s, whose PI form is given as *-TS, must in fact come from *-ts, unless it came into use only after the Western Isthmus fricativization of stops adjacent to *s; otherwise the fricativization would affect various stops that occur adjacent to it. This is definitely true of another, possibly related, suffix *-t (at least in the word mašt "house, palace", which would be **mas otherwise); this suffix may also be seen in nagat "lord, baron", kert "anger", and possibly other words. There's also a suffix *-k, maybe of similar date, seen in, e.g., ghisk "knife" and českan "to hide".

I've tried to clarify the word-forms in the PI lexicon better, but it still needs work. I'll get back to it within a few days, but feel free to edit it if you feel so moved. Along with resolving more of the variables, adding some realistic semantic drift might be nice; most of the glosses apply to the Faraghin words of ca. 1600 years later...

[TzirTzi]

Would it be possible for me to join the project? I did a couple of langs for it a while back but was never involved in the conworlding side...

I've now read this thread (not a small task) but have to admit that I couldn't keep track of a lot of the discussion - so if tis ok for me to join, then I'll probably stick mostly to conlanging for a while until I familiarise myself with the history a bit more. On which topic, I'd like to derive a daughter from proto-Isles. Is there any need for such a conlang? Where could it fit in the general scheme of the world (as there is no proto-Isles page on the wiki)?

Is the plan to stay on Frathwiki or, as was suggested when KQ went down, to move to a site specifically dedicated to this project? If the second, then I might be able to help - I have a domain that I'm not using at the moment, and could provide hosting for it.

EDIT: looking at the timeline, I am right in thinking that Proto-Isles is contemporary to some later form of Ndak Ta and the language spoken by the Andagg people?

[Cedh]

Welcome back!

I'd like to derive a daughter from proto-Isles. Is there any need for such a conlang? Where could it fit in the general scheme of the world (as there is no proto-Isles page on the wiki)?
...
EDIT: looking at the timeline, I am right in thinking that Proto-Isles is contemporary to some later form of Ndak Ta and the language spoken by the Andagg

If you want to derive directly from Proto-Isles, your best bet is to select a yet unclaimed island, although there might be some space on mainland Peilaš as well. We haven't dealt much with anything east of Huyfárah yet. Of course you could also make a language that remains on the eastern continent, but that would place it outside of the Edastean sphere for long, as PIs. is indeed contemporary to NT, and regular intercontinental contact does not occur before +1000 YP (that is, three millennia afterwards).

What I would see as more relevant to the conworlding side of things though would be creating a descendant of Mûtsipsa', which could then interact with the daughterlangs of Fáralo as the economic focus of the continent shifts towards the eastern seaboard in the late 1st millennium. Such a language would have to be influenced by Takuña, about which we know next to nothing currently, so if you have a conlang to use as Takuña you could start there. I mentioned having a few ideas about this earlier, but I wouldn't be oppesed to someone else taking over as there's other stuff to work on.

What's the current state of Yēt, by the way? I don't remember you finishing it; the last version of the grammar that I saw was a .doc file had impressive morphology tables but no syntax section or sample text.

Is the plan to stay on Frathwiki or, as was suggested when KQ went down, to move to a site specifically dedicated to this project? If the second, then I might be able to help - I have a domain that I'm not using at the moment, and could provide hosting for it.

We didn't really discuss this yet. I'd be very much in favour of starting a wiki of our own, because it'd be much easier to keep track of all the Akana stuff if it was all in one place without loads of other conlang projects diverting attention away from it. I'm hoping for something like the Almeopedia, actually. If you could provide hosting, as well as installing and configuring MediaWiki there, that would be a great start.

How much bandwidth do you have? Because the KQ timed out temporarily twice due to bandwidth issues, and at least in one of these months about 90% of the activity there was the Akana project, so we should make sure a wiki of our own doesn't suffer the same too easily.

[TzirTzi]

Welcome back!

Thanks!

If you want to derive directly from Proto-Isles, your best bet is to select a yet unclaimed island, although there might be some space on mainland Peilaš as well. We haven't dealt much with anything east of Huyfárah yet. Of course you could also make a language that remains on the eastern continent, but that would place it outside of the Edastean sphere for long, as PIs. is indeed contemporary to NT, and regular intercontinental contact does not occur before +1000 YP (that is, three millennia afterwards).

So when it says:

c. -1600: Proto-Isles speakers begin migrating from mainland to islands. Andagg state has disintegrated.

are they migrating from mainland Peilaš out to islands or from the eastern continent out to islands and then eventually to Peilaš?

What I would see as more relevant to the conworlding side of things though would be creating a descendant of Mûtsipsa', which could then interact with the daughterlangs of Fáralo as the economic focus of the continent shifts towards the eastern seaboard in the late 1st millennium. Such a language would have to be influenced by Takuña, about which we know next to nothing currently, so if you have a conlang to use as Takuña you could start there. I mentioned having a few ideas about this earlier, but I wouldn't be oppesed to someone else taking over as there's other stuff to work on.

Well, if that's cool then that sounds like a good place for me to do some work I'll probably play with a proto-Isles descended lang as well, but I've got lots of free time at the moment so I'm sure that I'll manage both at once . Looking at Mûtsipsa', it looks like it will be a quite a lot of work to derive from... Tone sandhi But I'm sure I'll manage. And there's no background as to what kind of language Takuña should be/what it's descended from at all?

What's the current state of Yēt, by the way? I don't remember you finishing it; the last version of the grammar that I saw was a .doc file had impressive morphology tables but no syntax section or sample text.

I'm ashamed to say that, looking at my files, it seems I left it with a two page syntax section following a 13 page morphology section. I'll pdf-ise and upload what I've got (because I expect it's a later version than is online) and then see about expanding the syntax. pdfising might take a little while though, because I wrote this in word but am now using openoffice so the formatting is fucked in places.

We didn't really discuss this yet. I'd be very much in favour of starting a wiki of our own, because it'd be much easier to keep track of all the Akana stuff if it was all in one place without loads of other conlang projects diverting attention away from it. I'm hoping for something like the Almeopedia, actually. If you could provide hosting, as well as installing and configuring MediaWiki there, that would be a great start.

How much bandwidth do you have? Because the KQ timed out temporarily twice due to bandwidth issues, and at least in one of these months about 90% of the activity there was the Akana project, so we should make sure a wiki of our own doesn't suffer the same too easily.

Ok, my hosting situation is a bit complicated - I used to run a little hosting company with a friend, but that's kind of drifted apart - so I still have access to the hosting, and he's happy for me to use it, but no longer much knowledge of what's going on. So I'll contact him to find out what the bandwidth limit is and whether this might be a problem.

[Zhen Lin]

I can help with administration and setup of MediaWiki to some degree. (I'm used to having shell access for maintenance purposes.)

Hmm, Peilaš. An Adāta calque would be pēlas, but I can't help but think that it should be the other way around: lasapē or lāpē. Alternatively we could borrow it directly from Fáralo: peilas...

[TzirTzi]

Open Office is lose. Much, much, much lose.

But here is the Yēt grammar as it is, anyway.

[Cedh]

So when it says:

c. -1600: Proto-Isles speakers begin migrating from mainland to islands. Andagg state has disintegrated.

are they migrating from mainland Peilaš out to islands or from the eastern continent out to islands and then eventually to Peilaš?

The second of these.

Looking at Mûtsipsa', it looks like it will be a quite a lot of work to derive from... Tone sandhi But I'm sure I'll manage. And there's no background as to what kind of language Takuña should be/what it's descended from at all?

All we know about Takuña is from the Mûtsipsa' grammar, plus the minor fact that we've since decided it is related to the equally obscure Núalís language mentioned in the Máotatšàlì grammar. (BTW I've always imagined this name to be pronounced [nwɑˈliːʃ])

The only Takuña words we know are these four (from this post):

Takuña - autonym of the Takuña (loaned into Mûtsipsa' as the second component of Siix-taguna, the first part is a native morpheme meaning "north")
Awsákuti - the small island Nin Dûke'i
Sútupaj - the founder of Etúgə (in the Fáralo lexicon he is mentioned as Sútapaj BTW)
Rutawká - another philosopher

There may be other loan words, but I'm not sure of that. I've already done comparative work on about a third of the Mûtsipsa' lexicon, and I haven't yet found any terms where I could not identify the Proto-Isles etymology if no other was given. Anyway, the above Takuña samples seem to indicate CV(j,w) syllable structure, a fairly basic consonant inventory with no voicing distinction, a three-vowel-system, and either variable stress or tonal distinctions. Of course, a mere four names is very little to go by...

Hmm, Peilaš. An Adāta calque would be pēlas, but I can't help but think that it should be the other way around: lasapē or lāpē. Alternatively we could borrow it directly from Fáralo: peilas...

I agree that it should indeed be the other way round, precisely because both components would be transparent to Adāta speakers, pē "big, large" and las "land". When I added the Peilaš article on the KQ in mid-April, I tried out several reflexes in daughter languages of Adāta and decided it would be best if it was calqued into Imperial Adāta (late enough that a medial cluster would be allowed) as Laspē. This comes out as Aθáta Laspé [lasˈpe] → E'át Lasplá [ləsˈpla] and as Æðadĕ Læspe [ˈlæspe] → Yād Lespē [ˈlɛspeː] → Zhaj Rısype [ˈɾɪsʉpe], Yēt Lĭspī [ˈlispʰiːw].
(For comparison, the reflexes of Adāta *pēlas would be Aθáta *pēls and Æðadĕ *bēlz)

[Zhen Lin]

That gives Ayāsthi làhpē /"lAhpE:/, possibly làhfē /"lAhp\E:/ (manner of articulation assimilation) - I never gave much thought to consonant changes in the second elements of clusters. Mavakhalan laspê /laspe/.

FrathWiki seems to be down at the moment. Hrm.

[Dewrad]

I can help with administration and setup of MediaWiki to some degree. (I'm used to having shell access for maintenance purposes.)

Hmm, Peilaš. An Adāta calque would be pēlas, but I can't help but think that it should be the other way around: lasapē or lāpē. Alternatively we could borrow it directly from Fáralo: peilas...

As for compounding, you might really just do as you please. Older compounds are likely to be head-initial, while more recent ones will be head-final. Compounds with verbs will have the verb as the final element.

So it depends on when the word was calqued or borrowed.

[Cedh]

-pē might also be reinterpreted as an augmentative suffix when the normal compound order switches. We already have thāraspē for "Greater Thāras", for example. This would be even more plausible if the morpheme becomes uncommon on its own at some point (Aθáta and Æðadĕ, the two dialects most likely to have direct contact to Fáralo-speaking lands, do not have a reflex currently, though this is simply due to the word not occuring in the Tsinakan text).

FrathWiki seems to be down at the moment. Hrm.

It's up again.

let's identify all the English-Edastean false friends we can find

NT lewai "word", Faralo lega ~~~ Latin legere "to read", English law and legal and legible

I haven't published it yet, but due to lack of non-prenasalized voiced plosives this one becomes Necine lenga "language" (borrowed from Puoni lega).

[Zhen Lin]

I think, when all my exams are done, I'll resume work on Proto-Peninsular and create a vowel-harmony daughter. Maybe.

First, some differentiation: /i a u/ → /i 3 a u/ → /i y e a o u M/ → /i y e 6 A o u 1/

For a fairly standard front-back vowel harmony system:
Front: /i y e 6/
Back: /1 u o A/

And then some chain-shifts: /i y e 6 A o u 1/ → /i u e @\ A 3 o 1/ → /i u e 1 a @ o i/

Giving a rather opaque, if not outright bizarre, vowel harmony system:
"Front": /i u e 1/ <i u e â> (<â> for /1/ is, of course, attested in Romanian)
"Back": /i o @ a/ <i o ë a>

Example:
*thu~thúri-sk-axk-u → tothóriskakho (Grassmann's law!)
*kára-sk-axk-u → kárëskakho
*kára-mri-sk-axk-u → kárëmriskâkhu (mixed harmony)
*míçr-nt-isk-axk-u → mírhentiskâkhu

And if we throw diphthongs into the mix it could get even stranger...
*thúri-nh-la-i → thórinëlai /"t_horin@læ/
*kāra-mri-nh-la-u → kárëmrineleu /"kar@mrinelø/

[TzirTzi]

That sounds like a very interesting system - I like the way your final two sets of vowels would have no systematic relation to one another if you hadn't seen the sound changes... Is it attested in any natlangs? (not that that would matter, as it's perfectly believable anyway).

Working on Takuña, the direction that I'm going in is that Takuña and Núalís are the same language - the mutually comprehensible different ends of a dialect continuum. Does that sound feasible in the setting? If they were quite slow changing languages and if there was some movement or communication between various islands then it could work, I thought...

[Zhen Lin]

That sounds like a very interesting system - I like the way your final two sets of vowels would have no systematic relation to one another if you hadn't seen the sound changes... Is it attested in any natlangs? (not that that would matter, as it's perfectly believable anyway).

I took inspiration from Korean, actually. Modern Korean has an opaque vowel harmony system:
Yang: /a aj o oj/ [a E o we]
Yin: /@ @j u uj/ [V e u wi]
Neutral: /i M/

Middle Korean had a slightly richer system (omitting diphthongs):
Yang: /a V o/
Yin: /@ M u/
Neutral: /i/

Which, according to one hypothesis, is a result of a chain shift from:
Back: /a V u/
Front: /E @ y/
Neutral: /i/

[TzirTzi]

Cool stuff about Korean - I must go and read about that

About hosting - I sent my friend a long message about it, and he replied without answering any of my questions saying we should discuss hosting when we meet up (in a week and a few days, hopefully) - so probably yes, but that offer will have to go on hold until then I'm afraid.

For those interested in Takuña, here's some samples of what I know so far -

The acute accents on some of the already known words (eg. Awsákuti) mark contrastive stress in the Maki dialect (the dialect currently known as Takuña), or vowel length in the Núalís dialect - vowel length in Núalís Takuña tends to correspond to stress in Maki Takuña. The <ñ> in Takuña is an /N/ (although Núalís actually doesnt have /N/ and its equivalent word is /tAkunkA/ <takunka>). It has some interesting allophonic spreading of nasalisation from stressed syllables - so for example, Maki Takuña <kuamí> /ku@."mi/ (meaning "water") is realised [Nku@~."mi].

Morphologically, I have only looked at nouns so far. Three different classes of nouns are distinguished based on number marking - unitary count, collective count, and mass. The third is obvious and doesn't have any number marking. The first two are a little like default/marked types of number marking, in that unitary nouns are default singular and take marking for plural while collective nouns are default collective and take marking (similar to the unitary count noun plural markings) for singulative. Distributive number may also be marked on either class. Nouns also mark inalienble/alienable possession.

Somepoint soon I'll actually finish the proper document and will post it though this week will be a bit busy for me, so I'm not promising anything fast...

[Corumayas]

I'm not sure about having Takuña and Núalís as dialects of the same language, unless you're talking about a very early stage of their history. It seems to me they should be at least as distant as Mûtsipsa' and Máotatšàlì are from each other, since the Takuña and Núalís speakers were both already in their homelands before the Isles people showed up.


For the Eige-Isthmus family, I've been fiddling with sound changes, trying to lay some groundwork for tonogenesis in the Eige Valley langs. The current sound changes are here.

If we can fill out the rest of the changes to Proto-Isthmus, we can project that lexicon back to Proto-Eige-Isthmus... there should be at least a few more, since I think PI is supposed to be a thousand or more years later than Proto-Eige Valley, and probably at least a couple thousand after PEI. Any suggestions for more changes?

[TzirTzi]

Hokay, in which case I will just work on Takuna for now and worry about Nualis later, if that's cool

[TzirTzi]

So, there is an account set up with 100mb space and 1000mb bandwidth, currently accessible (although empty) at http://65.111.181.58/~akana. I don't seem to be able to download mediawiki right now (just getting a timeout error when I click download, so presumably that will come back up soon..), and the subdomain isn't set up yet (hence the current address for the space), but things are getting there. If we seem to be going to use more bandwidth or space than that then I can edit it (within reasonable limits).

[Zhen Lin]

There are some useful extensions which you should look into - for instance, CharInsert.

[Corumayas]

TzirTzi, that's awesome, thanks!

Here are the basic pronouns in the known Isthmus languages plus PI, with their possible roots in PEI and cognates in PMiw using the current soundchange lists. (I'm leaving Ngauro out of the equation for now; I'll start work on it once the diachronics for the rest of the family are solid.)

Code: Select all

              Far  Fer  Dor   PI    PEI                   PMiw
1SG           da   dæ   da    da    da                    ta̤
1PL           goč  goš  goʔ    guʈ   g(w)ur{p,t,k}         k(w)ṳr{p,t,k}
2SG           čin  tin  tɔñ   tujn  t{(w)uj,wi,woj}{n,ŋ}  d{wi,we}{n,ŋ}
2PL           fa   fe   we    fe    fe                    fi
3SG.AN        ni   ni   ñø    njo   {n,ŋ}jo               {n,ŋ}ju
3SG.INAN      meš  miš  meh   mis   mis                   mis
3PL           lor  lo:  lots  ludz  l(w)udz               l(w)uz
INT/REL.AN    koi  ke:  ke    kej   k(w)ej, keŋ           g(w)i, giŋ
INT/REL.INAN  boi  be:  be    bej   b(w)ej, beŋ           p(w)i̤, pi̤ŋ

Given that PI and PMiw are meant to be roughly contemporary and separated by at least 2000 years of change, do they seem different enough?