<twabs> numerals in maotic: âst, dék, caont, int, ue, khá, lek, teth, kel, hel
<twabs> numerals in dálx: êth, tês, hénth, inth, ús, ghés, lês, thed, hell, sél

I found an old paper of conlang notes. Most of them are bad but there's a list of inflections that we could potentially do something with. They were originally a list of way too many cases, but they're going to be verbal inflections now.

okaja
o
otges
otʝīt
otɕâ
otʝīph
opədêr
opədīt
opəpâ
opənpēh

The stem, let's say, is *okʷ < *nokʷ. So otges, otʝīt, otɕâ, otʝiph are from okdes, okdīt, oktʲâ, okdipah by metathesis. I'll probably put this in * somewhere but I don't have the rest of my notes right now.

But what do they mean.

okaja is infinitive. o is probably imperative.
otges is imperfective present. In the past otʝīt is used.
otʝīt is habitual present. opədīt is habitual past.
otɕa is perfective present. opəpâ is perfective past.
otʝīph is hortatitve present.
opənpēh is whatever the 'should have' mood is called; usually past but sometimes present.
opədêr is optative.

The language is either Low Tavarian or High Tavarian. I'm not sure which. My intuition says Low, but I want to place these closer to the (southern) Taol languages so they can have some similarity in verbal morphology.

Meanwhile:

Caighir is a distant descendant of the Maotic language. It is the standard dialect; another dialect is called Thâgwhanaigh. In Caighir these are pronounced [ˈkʲæɣɨʁ] and [ˌθag.wəˈnəɪ]. In Thagwhanaigh they are pronounced /tʃeɪɹ/ and /tʃɜ̀ːwaːniː/. The etymology of the latter is (point of divergence) *tʰaːgwanakʲe < (Maotic) *Thao-kuelin-óké. The -óké suffix is the same one as in Soróké, a dialect of Maotic.

Orthography tastefulness check: ʝ, ɕ, and ī could be rendered less impractically. Maybe retain the spellings used by a related language?

absolutely not; my aesthetic sense is impeccable

(maybe c ć... hmm, I'll need to think about this. having both vowel and consonant diacritics tends to be a bad combination)

<j c>. That'll be twenty dollars.

quoting twabs, Conversational Speaker:

absolutely not; my aesthetic sense is impeccable

(maybe c ć... hmm, I'll need to think about this.

j is /j/

honestly in general using <j> as a fricative is against my aesthetic.

okaja, o, otges, otcīt, otćâ, otcīph, opedêr, opedīt, opepâ, openpēh

macron and circumflex are original and secondary length; the latter is from contraction and the former is from some sort of stress-based lengthening (considering *okʷdipah and *okʷədipah or something, say stress is on the second syllable?)

So what are you using <y> for, huh? Huh?!

Motion to add <dzh> as [dʒʰ] to the language's official phonology, but not appearing in any words.

the answer to both questions is "I'm not an elf"

<zh> for [ʒ] is awesome; so, why not?

Láadan is actually a pretty language (fight me), so I am going to make a derivative out of it.

It does have some nooblang problems which will need to be retconned, however. I feel like the phonology honestly doesn't have to be one of these—it's weird, but I feel like it's kind of plausibly weird.

A thing which does to be retconned is the noobish phenomenon (which really needs a name) of forming a group of related words with by changing only one phoneme—e.g. the evidentials wa, wi, we, wáa, waá, wo, wóo (and there are other examples). Accordingly I will change these. (I will also remove the last one, which is supposed to simply be a null marking anyway.)

I am also getting rid of the "speech act" markers (the things that go at the beginning of the sentence), except for báa which will remain as an interrogative marker.

Hence, here is a brief grammar of Improved Láadan:

Verbs

TENSE - PERSON/HON - NUMBER - ATTRIB - ASPECT - root - GENDER - COMP - NEG - HABIT - EVID

Tense: aril- future1, é- past, rilrili- subjunctive, wi- optative.

Person: le- first, ne- second, behid- third masculine, behizh- third feminine.

Honorifics: -i deferential, -a intimate, lhe- formal. The first two combine with a final bowel (li-, la-); the last precedes the person marking (lheli-).

Number: zhe- paucal, me- plural. Before a sonorant these become zh-, n-.

Attributive marker: wo-

Aspect: du- conative, ná- continuative, raa- iterative, elith- cessative.

Gender: -id marks masculinity. How could we forget our favourite feature of Láadan? Note that when the subject is incorporated into the verb, gender will actually be marked twice.

Complementizer: -hé2

Negative suffix: -ra

Habitual suffix: -badan3

Degree: -hal4 comparative, -háalik superlative; -ulh anticomparative, -úulhik antisuperlative.

Evidentiality: -álh perceived, -wi self-evident, -yen dreamt, -atháá trusted, -waálh untrusted.

I am slightly concerned there are too many things here... hmm.

Okay so let's finally talk about Proto-Taol.

The linguists at Chásur reconstruct Proto-Taol something like this:

 p   t   kʲ   k
ˀp  ˀt  ˀkʲ  ˀk
 pʰ  tʰ  kʲʰ  kʰ
 f?  s   ʃ    h

n l r ʁ

i  e  a  ɑ  o  u
ī  ē  ā  ɑ̄  ō  ū
î? ê  â  ɑ̂? ô  û?

The existence of *f is uncertain; it is largely reconstructed to explain Maotic words which have /h/ (instead of Ø), however, it has been noted that most such instances precede /a/, e.g. *fālu > hálu "female human".

kʲ ʃ will be spelled *c *š.

The second vowel series is the long counterpart of the first. The third vowel series, marked with a circumflex, is infrequent; its properties are uncertain, but it was preserved into the earliest stages of all Taol languages (including Eastern Taol, which lost length) long enough to be invariably marked in the standard orthographies. In Maotic both the second and third series collapsed into the first; in Dálx the second and third series are both pronounced as long; additionally, the circumflex marks vowels compensatorily lengthened by the loss of a consonant (e.g. *lek-ši > lês. In Eastern Taol the third series is pronounced long (usually analyzed as doubling of the vowel, e.g. âcasi /a.a.tʃa.si/, etc.) The origin of the third series in Proto-* shows several apparent contractions in *VyV, among scattered other sources.

Maotic

The Taol empire that held Maotel as its seat led Maotic to become the literary language of much of Talócár at an early date, and as a result of the language's standardization, it showed relatively little change for a long period.

Maotic is spoken throughout the majority of Talócár, and is to some degree a lingua franca for Elmincár in general.

A rough sketch of changes from Proto-Taol to the earliest literary period looks like so:

Later final /e/, /a/ were lost (compare literary fíre with modern fír "tree"), and more importantly the entire length contrast.

There may be some more rules later.

Dálx

to be done later, probably in this post (watch this space)

Eastern Taol

same

The linguists at Chásur reconstruct Proto-Taol something like this:

 p   t   kʲ   k
ˀp  ˀt  ˀkʲ  ˀk
 pʰ  tʰ  kʲʰ  kʰ
 f?  s   ʃ    h

n l r ʁ

i  e  a  ɑ  o  u
ī  ē  ā  ɑ̄  ō  ū
î? ê  â  ɑ̂? ô  û?

looks neat!

The existence of *f is uncertain; it is largely reconstructed to explain Maotic words which have /h/ (instead of Ø), however, it has been noted that most such instances precede /a/, e.g. *fālu > hálu "female human".

kʲ ʃ will be spelled *c *š.

The second vowel series is the long counterpart of the first. The third vowel series, marked with a circumflex, is infrequent; its properties are uncertain, but it was preserved into the earliest stages of all Taol languages (including Eastern Taol, which lost length) long enough to be invariably marked in the standard orthographies. In Maotic both the second and third series collapsed into the first; in Dálx the second and third series are both pronounced as long; additionally, the circumflex marks vowels compensatorily lengthened by the loss of a consonant (e.g. *lek-ši > lês. In Eastern Taol the third series is pronounced long (usually analyzed as doubling of the vowel, e.g. âcasi /a.a.tʃa.si/, etc.) The origin of the third series in Proto-* shows several apparent contractions in *VyV, among scattered other sources.

do you think irl (the constructed rl), the difference is tonal? or with voicing modality?

...
A rough sketch of changes from Proto-Taol to the earliest literary period looks like so:

short *ɑ merges with /o/, long *ɑ̄ breaks to /ao/

long *ū breaks to /ue/

preglottalized consonants become voiced and lose preglottalization

interesting. i'd expect them to lose preglottalization and become voiceless plain, while the old voiceless plain become voiced (chain shift, i guess). but this way works, too.

* loss of final *i

loss of *š universally

that's weird! you'd expect some reflex of it, not a complete disappearance (since it's a noisy sound). maybe you get š -> h -> 0?

* loss of *h universally? debuccalization of *f > h

shift of /n/ to /m/ when initial or preceding nearby /n/+a very strange change to be sure, but the distribution bears it out

that makes sense, at least the "preceding /n/" part, that's just dissimilation. the initial part is weirder, but i suppose it could be bullied into happening by the dissimilation change.

loss of gemination

*kʲ > [ts] allophonically before front vowels /e i/; gʲ > /dz/ universally

Later final /e/, /a/ were lost (compare literary fíre with modern fír "tree"), and more importantly the entire length contrast.

looking forward to more!

το̨ πα̨ς το κκονφον υπερͱενον

quoting twabs, Conversational Speaker:

ͱ in the middle of Greek

ಠ_ಠ

quoting Rhetorica, Kelatetía: Dis, Major Belt 1:

quoting twabs, Conversational Speaker:

ͱ in the middle of Greek

ಠ_ಠ

pls κονσιdερονι the αλφαbετι γρεκ ι γjουχeς σ̈κϳιπε

it's /j/, it's a real letter that existed, see Buck § 5

Pfft. You jⱵst don't want tⱵ credⱵt ClaudiⱵn.