<Slereah__> Let's make the #isharia conlang
<Slereah__> We will call it... isharian
quoting con quesa, Layperson, California:Here's a potential phoneme inventory just to get that over with (all values IPA):
consonants:
pʼ pʰ b tʼ tʰ d tʃʼ tʃʰ dʒ kʼ kʰ ɡ
f s ʃ x h
w j
m n ŋ
ɾ
-voiced stops and fricatives merge intervocalically as voiced fricatives
- /w/ can sometimes be [ʋ] why not?
-ŋ can occur word-initially
vowels:
ɪ iː ʊ uː
ɛ eː ɔ oː
æː ɑ ɑː
-ɛ comes from a merger of older short /ɛ/ and /æ/, maybe this has morphological consequences
Some random words:
yostí [jɔstiː]
mæneŋí [mæːnɛŋiː]
sobosru [sɔvɔsɾʊ]
áfak' [ɑːvɑkʼ]
wek'né [wɛkʼneː]
quoting con quesa, Layperson, California:For negation, why not copy English on this? A negative auxiliary verb analogous to "don't" transparently formed from an older negative particle, used in some TAM classes, with that same negative particle (let's say its ga to be concrete) used for negation in other TAM contexts?
Soŝna ɡás wek'né
Soŝna-NOM NEG.DO catch.fish
"Soshna doesn't catch fish"
Soŝna ga móch'í wek'né
Soŝna-NOM NEG want.to catch.fish
"Soshna doesn't want to catch fish"
quoting Serafín, 農, Canada:
Suggested romanization:
/pʼ pʰ b tʼ tʰ d tʃʼ tʃʰ dʒ kʼ kʰ ɡ qʼ qʰ/ <p' p b t' t d c' c j k' k g q' q>
/f θ ð s ʃ x ħ ʕ h/ <f þ ð s S x H 3 h>
/w j/ <w y>
/m n ŋ/ <m n N>
/r/ <r>
The use of <H> is from Klingon and Arabic, <3> /ʕ/ is from Kabyle ɛ and Arabic, <N> is sometimes used for /ŋ/ when romanizing languages from India. Regarding /ʃ/ <S>... do we allow /sh/ to happen at all? If we don't we could simply use <sh>. I can type ŝ or ś or š easily, but I think of our mates on Windows 10...
quoting Serafín, 農, Canada:Suggested stress pattern: Word-initial, or near the beginning of the word (maybe there's derivational prefixes that never take stress?).quoting con quesa, Layperson, California:For negation, why not copy English on this? A negative auxiliary verb analogous to "don't" transparently formed from an older negative particle, used in some TAM classes, with that same negative particle (let's say its ga to be concrete) used for negation in other TAM contexts?
Soŝna ɡás wek'né
Soŝna-NOM NEG.DO catch.fish
"Soshna doesn't catch fish"
Soŝna ga móch'í wek'né
Soŝna-NOM NEG want.to catch.fish
"Soshna doesn't want to catch fish"
Hmm... what is -s? Some sort of habitual-aspect marker for only auxiliary verbs?
Some suggested morphological distinctions:
- determiners: number (singular, plural), case
- - probably with some syncretism
- nouns:
- - number: singular, plural (with an affix), supraplural (meaning "many many Xs", and let's make it easy using full reduplication of the plural: "x.PL x.PL", or maybe "x.PL from x.PL")
- - - - something similar to the supraplural is attested for some collective nouns in Arabic, where collectives can take plural morphology
- - cases: NOM, GEN, INST (instrumental)
- - - - this is inspired from Georgian, which doesn't have an accusative
- - - - for direct objects we could use NOM in positive verbs or sentences, and GEN in negative ones, cf. de in French j'ai un problème 'I have problems' vs. j'ai pas de problème 'I don't a(ny) problem'.
- - - - a paradigm of 2 numbers x 3 cases seems good and fairly easy to learn to me, even with morphophonological complications
- verbs: no idea yet, but maybe distinguish habitual, present, past, irrealis at least?
quoting Rhetorica, Kelatetía: Dis, Major Belt 1:Woah, hold up. Kabyle has two approximants and two trills, not just a weeby tap. It's very out-of-place to have such an undiverse PoA given how many series of plosives and fricatives there are.
And now a rant about transliteration schemes.
As far as I can tell from their Wikipedia recordings, [ʕ] is barely audible, and contrast between [ħ] and [h] is ridiculously hard to hear. If you want those sounds, make them allophones, not distinct phonemes. Even if they get distinct graphemes, there should be some contextual rule about which is used, e.g. [ħ] in word-initial positions but [h] elsewhere. [ʕ] probably doesn't even deserve a grapheme, but could maybe work as the sound of lenition-in-progress as applied to a [ʁ] or [ɣ] consonant (as a counterpart to [x], since otherwise it seems there's plenty of voiced/unvoiced/aspirated-unvoiced contrast in the inventory.)
I think if this collablang is going to be safe from the level of autistic xenophilia that presumably brought about the aforementioned ten-tone lang, then attention really does need to be spent on naturalism. The original writing system of the Berber family, Tifinagh, is quite inexact about phonology—it was originally an Abjad with numerous variants and redundancies. Even today all three common orthographies (Latin, Neo-Tifinagh, and Arabic) have some amount of ambiguity in what a given letter represents. I can understand that, while constructing the language, it might be desirable to have an exact system of phonics1 but no everyday orthography has a perfect 1:1 correlation for more than a few minutes after its creation.
quoting con quesa, Layperson, California:Also I reject your claim that a language having /ɾ/ as it's only liquid is "weeby". Lots of languages lack /l/.
I also think that talking about how the writing system (if one exists) ought to work is a bit premature,
quoting Rhetorica:As far as I can tell from their Wikipedia recordings, [ʕ] is barely audible, and contrast between [ħ] and [h] is ridiculously hard to hear.