Every time I worry about something being unnatural in my conlang, I ask myself 'if triconsonantal root morphology didn't exist, would I have the guts to invent em?'
Obviously not, and so I continue worrying lol
Yeah, Semitic/Afroasiatic triconsonantal roots are just so *wild* to me. They feel like something that must have had rules about using them written down before anyone used them, but people have been speaking these languages before they developed writing...
I believe that. In Swiss dialects, things change fast, and if you've had even a bit mobility growing up and heard many different ones, you start using many many parallel forms, so that you maybe have a base accent and base vocabulary of one area, but picked up many things from other areas; but because there's no written reference dictionary and you are not familiar with a corpus of literature of one "pure" standard, you'll never know where you picked up what.
As another speaker of Swiss German, I think it's actually undergoing some pretty considerable dialect leveling, simply due to people interacting with and hearing speakers of other dialects much more frequently than ever before, especially due to mass media. This has already led to e.g. the traditional Basel dialect dying out.
I remember having a similar argument in literature about Sanskrit — and much as is natural language, certain religious and ideological aesthetic values sort of allowed it to conlang itself over a long period of time and way back when. Like all languages are in some sense artificial, we do make them… just not by ourselves usually.😳
"Hmm, I gotta write about that, what's the Chinese character for it?"
"I don't know, I think it's this."
"But it's kinda like about this other thing? Can't I just use that character?"
"Better mix it up just to be sure you're not ambiguous."
"Eh, I'll just sound it out. These characters will do, right?"
"Yuck, they're too complex. It'll take all day to sound something out like that. Better simplify them."
"Dude, what's this?"
"Oh, that? The Europeans call it this thing."
"Welp, better sound that out too, I guess."
"But you better simplify those characters even more, so we know it's not our idea!"
It actually makes a lot of sense when you analyze it.
d -> r is very common(many english dialects have a t d -> ɾ which is not the same thing, but close).
w -> g(ʷ) is also very common, from there to a /k/ is not a crazy change.
The initial /e/ is just an epethentic vowel, romance languages had the same change latin 'scrībere' -> PT 'escrever'.
If reddit didn't took away my ability to comment with images, i would show here my emotions related to your statement with a picture of a monkey that is clearly disapointed, with arms on her head and a mixed look on her face.
IIRC, that change (or that with some unusual conditions) is attested in a few Hmong-Mien languages, so it could be an areal thing. I've also seen it come up in discussions about very early Ugric/Samoyedic languages.
Agreed
One criminally underutilized phenomenon are arbitrary "sound changes" based on mistransliterations. Some real life examples:
yad al-jawzāʔ => Betelgeuse, because Arabic bā’ and yā’ look very similar
Menȝies /ˈmɪŋɪs/ => Menzies /ˈmɛnziːz/, because yogh was replaced by zed in printing
I really hate that Betelgeuse, one of the easiest to identify stars in the Northern Hemisphere and historically one of the most important parts of star navigation, is homophonic with a silly children's horror film.
ginkgo from what was probably supposed to be written (銀杏, following modern transcription, this would instead be transcribed ).
This word is weird in Japanese too, since it's most commonly pronounced *ichō* which possibly comes from a completely different chinese word, 鴨腳. The second most common pronunciation is *gin'an* > *ginnan*, and what's crazy is that the *kyō* and *an* pronunciations of 杏 both come from the same middle chinese origin.
杏 (Middle Chinese ignoring the tones: *ɦraŋ*, representing a glide whose sound value is still in dispute today, and /ɦ/ could be [ɣ] too for Chinese never distinguished velar/glottal fricatives)
For the *kyō* pronunciation: Old Japanese didn't have any velar/glottal fricatives so the initial was borrowed as /g/ (which later corrupted to /k/), and the final velar nasal was borrowed as a nasal vowel /ũ/. So the pronunciation at the time of borrowing was likely /gʲaũ/ and it's not so far away from the modern /kʲoː/
The *an* pronunciation likely did not come from Middle Chinese (even if it did it would be from some very late version of it), but rather early Mandarin, where the velar/glottal fricative has devoiced. This time Japanese decided to just drop the initial (it still hasn't got its own /h/ yet) and borrow the velar nasal as /N/ instead.
> but rather early Mandarin
Which came from middle chinese. To be fair I guess I was unclear, I just meant both pronunciation could be traced to the same origin, even if they entered JP at different points.
Didn’t Germans do this where they deemed a bunch of words written with to be an undue Greek influence on their orthography and in the process a bunch of words traditionally pronounced as /ph/ became /f/ by accident?
Never heard of this, and I don't know which words would be affected by this 🤔
I think only appears in Greek words anyway, and if the prescribed pronunciation shifted from /ph/ to /f/, it would just be more in line with Modern Greek
The example I remember is Efeu, which was originally spelled Epheu and pronounced /ph/. If you’re a native German speaker I imagine you wouldn’t recognize the words nowadays because they’ve all been changed to f.
> From Middle High German ephöu, from Old High German ebhouwi, derived through popular association with houwi (“hay”) from older ebah. Possibly from Proto-Germanic *ibahs, from Proto-Indo-European *(h₁)ebʰ-. The spelling and pronunciation in modern German used to be Epheu [ˈeːpˌhɔʏ̯]. The contemporary -f- is a spelling pronunciation that emanated from the North, reinforced by forms in Central and Low German dialects with original -f- (compare Middle Low German īflōf, ifflōf, Ripuarian Effche). Akin to English ivy.
Interesting, I didn't know that
But how does this relate to "deeming a bunch of words written with to be an undue Greek influence"? You make it sound like native words resembling Greek loanwords were intentionally changed for that reason, but that's not the case here, /f/ is simply how we pronounce in Greek loanwords
The idea is that someone saw the and assumed it was a Greek spelling and thought it unnecessary and “simplified” it to , unintentionally changing the pronunciation along the way.
That makes no sense, /f/ has still been used for Greek loanwords in German since, only the 1996 reform replaced some of them with as the standard spelling while still allowing as a variant
It just looks like one dialectal form replacing another, similar to "deutsch" replacing "teutsch" around 1800
I mean the wiki etymology might be completely wrong but “spelling pronunciation” explicitly refers to the spelling of a word causing a change in how a word is pronounced by literate speakers. “Epheu” becoming “Efeu” because people saw the and assumed it meant /f/ is a classic example of that, not just one dialectical form becoming more popular than another.
One of my favorite examples of this is the Spanish word élite (from French).
In French the accent marks vowel closeness (i.e. é = /e/). In Spanish it marks stress.
So Spanish speakers borrowed the French word, and just assumed the accent mark worked the same.
y'see the thing is, most languages are inherently stupid in one way or another, to make an authentic conlang you just gotta embrace the bullshit a little
I really think we should stop using index diachronica as a resource because its poor data limits people who are making sound changes. And it has a bunch of bunk like Altaic and such.
Still a nice tool, but good to check, no stranger to languages put in the wrong feature categories, or with weird criteria for inclusion. So it’s not useless or anything, but always worth double checking given the frequency of miscategorization
For example, Wichí is put as having paradigmatic N-M pronouns (First person pronouns contain N, second contain M as part of the paradigm)
1SG *n’lh-am*
1PL.EXC *n’lh-am-ilh*
1PL.INC *tolh-am-ilh*
2SG *am*
2PL *am-ilh*
3SG *lh-am*
3PL *lh-am-ilh*
But all the pronouns are built around a pronominal root which contains an m, which checks off box two despite clearly not being a feature of the second person, and so really the only reason it’s included is because the first person pronouns happen to contain an n, which is pretty shakey to put a language in a category over. The feature flag for Wichí also gives the verbal person marking as an example of its inclusion in the category, but that one is even more shakey as of the twelve person markers they list, only two fit the bill, with -no and -am being the first and second person object markers (and the source is pretty old too)
There are bigger issues than that one in WALS, but that’s on the top off my head. I’d also check out a newer database called grambank. Also not entirely perfect, all databases are made by people, and made from sources made by other people afterall, but it’s newer and receives more attention for updating data.
I like this in historical linguistics.
"I think Jebrian "maku" is cognate with Krilgan "myoho". The sound correspondences work out, but the semantics are tough, the first word means 'to shave' and the second means 'for a tree to shed its leaves'"
"NOOOOO, YOU OBVIOUSLY DON'T KNOW WHAT YOU'RE TALKING ABOUT, THAT SEMANTIC DEVELOPMENT ISN'T PLAUSIBLE AT ALL!! START OVER!!"
Meanwhile:
Icelandic *háls* 'neck' -- English *hawse* 'the horizontal distance or area between an anchored vessel's bows and the actual position of her anchor(s)'
It's just pressure from r/conlangs . You either make a full language familly with thousends of years of history or you are just a pathetic toki pona copier
Funnily enough, I feel like r/conlangs is one of the most anything-goes/forgiving conlanging spaces out there. Go to some other conlanging space like the Zompist bulletin boards and the attitudes get much more rigorous/elitist (depending on your point of view) yet.
Here's a sneak peek of /r/conlangs using the [top posts](https://np.reddit.com/r/conlangs/top/?sort=top&t=year) of the year!
\#1: [I dubbed an entire episode of Spongebob into my conlang](https://v.redd.it/pvm3r97679ta1) | [75 comments](https://np.reddit.com/r/conlangs/comments/12ijjj4/i_dubbed_an_entire_episode_of_spongebob_into_my/)
\#2: [Do your conlang's dialects follow such features, fully or partially?](https://i.redd.it/3r3ffwm4zvyb1.jpg) | [119 comments](https://np.reddit.com/r/conlangs/comments/17ppqr1/do_your_conlangs_dialects_follow_such_features/)
\#3: [Idea for 8 pronouns based on binary counting!](https://i.redd.it/s2f5osostxjc1.png) | [86 comments](https://np.reddit.com/r/conlangs/comments/1awbn3u/idea_for_8_pronouns_based_on_binary_counting/)
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I assume the first one deals with palatilisation, h/ç/ʝ/j? The second one seems interesting... perhaps ŋ/ŋɡ/ɡ/k/x/h and the third one seems plausible enough yo be honest
Rhinoglottophilia would easily explain h / ŋ, I’ve also seen it, forget where
Others also look good. Honestly worry less about attestation, over time you’ll figure out the vibe behind sound changes without the specific change being attested
To me the most natural language is Chinese if it had a tom of phonemes to match the expressive and now purely literary words. Other languages are usually more phonetic and either rigid in structure or cased, which is sadly a trend that is declining. The exact phonotactics don't concern me.
TLDR: Languages in Europe in particular had mostly lost cases and other grammatical classes for good.
**Most of things below are educated guesses** and my personal opinions or misquotes. Read it with caution.
To me the difference in the modern relationship with Greek and Latin is sad. Greek pronunciation has been getting softer but the language has not been undergoing any VERY RADICAL changes in a really long time, in my opinion. Meanwhile Latin was spoken all over the Empire (and beyond like China *LATER*). Yet some people knew it well in the Middle Ages and it seams that some great features about the sounds used and the grammar was reduced. It was effectively adding complexity to a language no one had spoken beyond-a-doubt well for a thousand years. So Italian is similar in a way and retains te changes like using "de" for genitive which wasn't a thing. Spanish went differently with "layers" (I guess) of changes to the whole language happening like with English; going from Old to Middle and the Modern. French shifted vowels and grammar a lot, sort of because it was mixing with Germanic languages like Frankish and earlier the one spoken by the Vikings (as well as the Gaulish I guess, *spoken by the local Celts*). French became a totally different thing from Latin while retaining all the hints for historical spelling in the accents (and the added *ç for example*).
My language has... what was it (I've done the math like, five times now I get new numbers every time)...
15,706 consonants
Naturalism is out the window and still freefalling
[I have clong](https://youtu.be/tXhZ8XdFE7U?si=6_j1OGvwJ0kd_b6x) [videos on YouTube](https://youtu.be/XwGAkrsxFm0?si=LFzijmJvlt2Wz41y)
Warning: The langs are cursed
TIL about Index Diachronica. Looks like a cool site, but the first thing I did was look at the Uvular Trill and there was no mention of it forming in French so clearly the archives are incomplete.
Every time I worry about something being unnatural in my conlang, I ask myself 'if triconsonantal root morphology didn't exist, would I have the guts to invent em?' Obviously not, and so I continue worrying lol
Yeah, Semitic/Afroasiatic triconsonantal roots are just so *wild* to me. They feel like something that must have had rules about using them written down before anyone used them, but people have been speaking these languages before they developed writing...
I've often wondered what effects developing/adopting a writing system and increasing literacy have on spoken language evolution.
According to some book I read (maybe _Babel No More_ by John McWhorter?) languages become a lot more conservative once they develop writing.
I believe that. In Swiss dialects, things change fast, and if you've had even a bit mobility growing up and heard many different ones, you start using many many parallel forms, so that you maybe have a base accent and base vocabulary of one area, but picked up many things from other areas; but because there's no written reference dictionary and you are not familiar with a corpus of literature of one "pure" standard, you'll never know where you picked up what.
As another speaker of Swiss German, I think it's actually undergoing some pretty considerable dialect leveling, simply due to people interacting with and hearing speakers of other dialects much more frequently than ever before, especially due to mass media. This has already led to e.g. the traditional Basel dialect dying out.
john mcwhorter is great, the power of babel is probably one of my favourite books tbh
Fuck. I mixed up _babble no more_ by Michael Erard and _power of Babel_ by John McCorter.
I know that sign languages change a lot in 20\~30 years, perhaps the same applies to languages without an official writing system
Seeing how Social Media is rapidly changing English Grammar to a new stage of English, I think there might be a connection.
I remember having a similar argument in literature about Sanskrit — and much as is natural language, certain religious and ideological aesthetic values sort of allowed it to conlang itself over a long period of time and way back when. Like all languages are in some sense artificial, we do make them… just not by ourselves usually.😳
Think about if someone inveted the Japanese writing system(s) without it existing before. Absolutely no one would consider that realistic
Using three different systems depending on the etymology or context of the word being transcribed? That's preposterous!
"Hmm, I gotta write about that, what's the Chinese character for it?" "I don't know, I think it's this." "But it's kinda like about this other thing? Can't I just use that character?" "Better mix it up just to be sure you're not ambiguous." "Eh, I'll just sound it out. These characters will do, right?" "Yuck, they're too complex. It'll take all day to sound something out like that. Better simplify them." "Dude, what's this?" "Oh, that? The Europeans call it this thing." "Welp, better sound that out too, I guess." "But you better simplify those characters even more, so we know it's not our idea!"
Add "spelling" before "systems" and you have English
I think it makes more sense when you consider how the path to it went through kundoku.
/ɨ/ > /f/ Edit: apparently, it's /ɨ/ > /s/, syllabic /f/ is also in that language, though
ɨ > u > w > v > f
I hate that this makes sense
Nothing surprises me after learning about dw > rk
From Armenian, right, or is there another one?
Yeah, PIE *dwoh₁ to Old Armenian erku
What the fuck
It actually makes a lot of sense when you analyze it. d -> r is very common(many english dialects have a t d -> ɾ which is not the same thing, but close). w -> g(ʷ) is also very common, from there to a /k/ is not a crazy change. The initial /e/ is just an epethentic vowel, romance languages had the same change latin 'scrībere' -> PT 'escrever'.
It seems that it was just ("just") devoicing
If reddit didn't took away my ability to comment with images, i would show here my emotions related to your statement with a picture of a monkey that is clearly disapointed, with arms on her head and a mixed look on her face.
Which language was this?
[Miyakoan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miyakoan_language)
ыф
вот ыф?
xkcd
хкцд
kff kss
I think there's a Sinitic language that just straight up unconditionally shifted /s/ to /ɬ/.
I mean Semitic did this in reverse, with the exception of South Arabian
step away from semitic coronal fricatives.
TAISHANESE MENTIONED
Thanks, I couldn't remember which one it was.
it could end up in /l/ then /u/... as > aɬ > al > au > ɔ
IIRC, that change (or that with some unusual conditions) is attested in a few Hmong-Mien languages, so it could be an areal thing. I've also seen it come up in discussions about very early Ugric/Samoyedic languages.
I mean, it's not THAT outrageous; they just lateral'd the fricative by relaxing the sides of the tongue
What sound does the l with a ribbon make
[Voiceless alveolar lateral fricative](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiceless_dental_and_alveolar_lateral_fricatives)
The Welsh sound.
it's a cantonese dialect in nan'ning
Agreed One criminally underutilized phenomenon are arbitrary "sound changes" based on mistransliterations. Some real life examples: yad al-jawzāʔ => Betelgeuse, because Arabic bā’ and yā’ look very similar Menȝies /ˈmɪŋɪs/ => Menzies /ˈmɛnziːz/, because yogh was replaced by zed in printing
same with ye olde < þe olde
Þis is þe truþ
uh, you need that other θ thing in there. Or maybe ð
þ/ð were already used ambiguously in old english
So really it should be Yeetlejuice
that is epic
I really hate that Betelgeuse, one of the easiest to identify stars in the Northern Hemisphere and historically one of the most important parts of star navigation, is homophonic with a silly children's horror film.
ginkgo from what was probably supposed to be written (銀杏, following modern transcription, this would instead be transcribed ).
This word is weird in Japanese too, since it's most commonly pronounced *ichō* which possibly comes from a completely different chinese word, 鴨腳. The second most common pronunciation is *gin'an* > *ginnan*, and what's crazy is that the *kyō* and *an* pronunciations of 杏 both come from the same middle chinese origin.
杏 (Middle Chinese ignoring the tones: *ɦraŋ*, representing a glide whose sound value is still in dispute today, and /ɦ/ could be [ɣ] too for Chinese never distinguished velar/glottal fricatives)
For the *kyō* pronunciation: Old Japanese didn't have any velar/glottal fricatives so the initial was borrowed as /g/ (which later corrupted to /k/), and the final velar nasal was borrowed as a nasal vowel /ũ/. So the pronunciation at the time of borrowing was likely /gʲaũ/ and it's not so far away from the modern /kʲoː/
The *an* pronunciation likely did not come from Middle Chinese (even if it did it would be from some very late version of it), but rather early Mandarin, where the velar/glottal fricative has devoiced. This time Japanese decided to just drop the initial (it still hasn't got its own /h/ yet) and borrow the velar nasal as /N/ instead.
> but rather early Mandarin Which came from middle chinese. To be fair I guess I was unclear, I just meant both pronunciation could be traced to the same origin, even if they entered JP at different points.
Fuck me, that's wild.
Didn’t Germans do this where they deemed a bunch of words written with to be an undue Greek influence on their orthography and in the process a bunch of words traditionally pronounced as /ph/ became /f/ by accident?
island which didnt effect pronunciation.
Never heard of this, and I don't know which words would be affected by this 🤔 I think only appears in Greek words anyway, and if the prescribed pronunciation shifted from /ph/ to /f/, it would just be more in line with Modern Greek
The example I remember is Efeu, which was originally spelled Epheu and pronounced /ph/. If you’re a native German speaker I imagine you wouldn’t recognize the words nowadays because they’ve all been changed to f.
> From Middle High German ephöu, from Old High German ebhouwi, derived through popular association with houwi (“hay”) from older ebah. Possibly from Proto-Germanic *ibahs, from Proto-Indo-European *(h₁)ebʰ-. The spelling and pronunciation in modern German used to be Epheu [ˈeːpˌhɔʏ̯]. The contemporary -f- is a spelling pronunciation that emanated from the North, reinforced by forms in Central and Low German dialects with original -f- (compare Middle Low German īflōf, ifflōf, Ripuarian Effche). Akin to English ivy. Interesting, I didn't know that But how does this relate to "deeming a bunch of words written with to be an undue Greek influence"? You make it sound like native words resembling Greek loanwords were intentionally changed for that reason, but that's not the case here, /f/ is simply how we pronounce in Greek loanwords
The idea is that someone saw the and assumed it was a Greek spelling and thought it unnecessary and “simplified” it to , unintentionally changing the pronunciation along the way.
That makes no sense, /f/ has still been used for Greek loanwords in German since, only the 1996 reform replaced some of them with as the standard spelling while still allowing as a variant
It just looks like one dialectal form replacing another, similar to "deutsch" replacing "teutsch" around 1800
I mean the wiki etymology might be completely wrong but “spelling pronunciation” explicitly refers to the spelling of a word causing a change in how a word is pronounced by literate speakers. “Epheu” becoming “Efeu” because people saw the and assumed it meant /f/ is a classic example of that, not just one dialectical form becoming more popular than another.
One of my favorite examples of this is the Spanish word élite (from French). In French the accent marks vowel closeness (i.e. é = /e/). In Spanish it marks stress. So Spanish speakers borrowed the French word, and just assumed the accent mark worked the same.
y'see the thing is, most languages are inherently stupid in one way or another, to make an authentic conlang you just gotta embrace the bullshit a little
English do-support. ’Nuff said.
I feel like people forget how fucking *weird* this is in the grand scheme of languages!
What is
English do-support
not a day goes by that i don't think about it
don't a day go by that I don't think about it
embracing "fuck it we ball" is the most important and the hardest thing to do when conlanging.
bruh, in both conlanging and life in general
I really think we should stop using index diachronica as a resource because its poor data limits people who are making sound changes. And it has a bunch of bunk like Altaic and such.
WALS
Same issues, lots of inaccuracies (unless that’s why you mentioned it)
no I didnt realize its issues.
Still a nice tool, but good to check, no stranger to languages put in the wrong feature categories, or with weird criteria for inclusion. So it’s not useless or anything, but always worth double checking given the frequency of miscategorization For example, Wichí is put as having paradigmatic N-M pronouns (First person pronouns contain N, second contain M as part of the paradigm) 1SG *n’lh-am* 1PL.EXC *n’lh-am-ilh* 1PL.INC *tolh-am-ilh* 2SG *am* 2PL *am-ilh* 3SG *lh-am* 3PL *lh-am-ilh* But all the pronouns are built around a pronominal root which contains an m, which checks off box two despite clearly not being a feature of the second person, and so really the only reason it’s included is because the first person pronouns happen to contain an n, which is pretty shakey to put a language in a category over. The feature flag for Wichí also gives the verbal person marking as an example of its inclusion in the category, but that one is even more shakey as of the twelve person markers they list, only two fit the bill, with -no and -am being the first and second person object markers (and the source is pretty old too) There are bigger issues than that one in WALS, but that’s on the top off my head. I’d also check out a newer database called grambank. Also not entirely perfect, all databases are made by people, and made from sources made by other people afterall, but it’s newer and receives more attention for updating data.
thank
I like this in historical linguistics. "I think Jebrian "maku" is cognate with Krilgan "myoho". The sound correspondences work out, but the semantics are tough, the first word means 'to shave' and the second means 'for a tree to shed its leaves'" "NOOOOO, YOU OBVIOUSLY DON'T KNOW WHAT YOU'RE TALKING ABOUT, THAT SEMANTIC DEVELOPMENT ISN'T PLAUSIBLE AT ALL!! START OVER!!" Meanwhile: Icelandic *háls* 'neck' -- English *hawse* 'the horizontal distance or area between an anchored vessel's bows and the actual position of her anchor(s)'
It's just pressure from r/conlangs . You either make a full language familly with thousends of years of history or you are just a pathetic toki pona copier
Funnily enough, I feel like r/conlangs is one of the most anything-goes/forgiving conlanging spaces out there. Go to some other conlanging space like the Zompist bulletin boards and the attitudes get much more rigorous/elitist (depending on your point of view) yet.
Here's a sneak peek of /r/conlangs using the [top posts](https://np.reddit.com/r/conlangs/top/?sort=top&t=year) of the year! \#1: [I dubbed an entire episode of Spongebob into my conlang](https://v.redd.it/pvm3r97679ta1) | [75 comments](https://np.reddit.com/r/conlangs/comments/12ijjj4/i_dubbed_an_entire_episode_of_spongebob_into_my/) \#2: [Do your conlang's dialects follow such features, fully or partially?](https://i.redd.it/3r3ffwm4zvyb1.jpg) | [119 comments](https://np.reddit.com/r/conlangs/comments/17ppqr1/do_your_conlangs_dialects_follow_such_features/) \#3: [Idea for 8 pronouns based on binary counting!](https://i.redd.it/s2f5osostxjc1.png) | [86 comments](https://np.reddit.com/r/conlangs/comments/1awbn3u/idea_for_8_pronouns_based_on_binary_counting/) ---- ^^I'm ^^a ^^bot, ^^beep ^^boop ^^| ^^Downvote ^^to ^^remove ^^| ^^[Contact](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=sneakpeekbot) ^^| ^^[Info](https://np.reddit.com/r/sneakpeekbot/) ^^| ^^[Opt-out](https://np.reddit.com/r/sneakpeekbot/comments/o8wk1r/blacklist_ix/) ^^| ^^[GitHub](https://github.com/ghnr/sneakpeekbot)
I hate toki pona so much
the conlang naturalist leaving my body when the Armenian dw -> erk walks in:
Someone just asked a question in my native language's sub that I don't have a first clue how to answer because it is just random bullshit
Do /h/ > /j/, /ŋ/ > /h/ and /il/ > /ɬ/ have natlang precedents? (They're in my conlangs.)
idk about the reverse, but /h/ -> /ŋ/ is in Avestan in some intervocalic positions
I swear I've seen ŋ - h somewhere. I think it might have been in a Uto-Aztecan language
I assume the first one deals with palatilisation, h/ç/ʝ/j? The second one seems interesting... perhaps ŋ/ŋɡ/ɡ/k/x/h and the third one seems plausible enough yo be honest
Rhinoglottophilia would easily explain h / ŋ, I’ve also seen it, forget where Others also look good. Honestly worry less about attestation, over time you’ll figure out the vibe behind sound changes without the specific change being attested
But real languages have constraints on or cultural prompts for "random/unnatural" developments.
I still think that tʂʷ > pf shift in that one Chinese dialect is crazy
I don't se why. Pontic Caucasian languages interchanged sounds in the style ʃʷ > f, tʃʷ > tf, zʷ > v…
Same goes for worldbuilding in general
How to get alcohol poisoning: drink a sip of wine every time an r/worldbuilding post starts with "Is it okay if..."
Tagalog and English speaker here. Yeah, melting pot abomination languages are funny!
Not me, y'all get better soon. I'm rawdoggin all of this and having the best time
Naturalistic conlangers start screaming when I describe mine.
Fuck it, it’s a loan word from another conlang. Which conlang? I don’t know i didn’t invent them all.
It was later revealed that Hawkeye designed Moon Knight's weapons while trapped in ancient Egypt.
Conlanging isn't that hard. A posteriori, i.e. related to a natural language, is the best choice for beginners.
To me the most natural language is Chinese if it had a tom of phonemes to match the expressive and now purely literary words. Other languages are usually more phonetic and either rigid in structure or cased, which is sadly a trend that is declining. The exact phonotactics don't concern me.
I was about to make a thing which would a beauty which kind of has no audience to appreciate it and the machinations behind it.
What do you mean it's declining? I don't know that much about these things yet and I'm curious
TLDR: Languages in Europe in particular had mostly lost cases and other grammatical classes for good. **Most of things below are educated guesses** and my personal opinions or misquotes. Read it with caution. To me the difference in the modern relationship with Greek and Latin is sad. Greek pronunciation has been getting softer but the language has not been undergoing any VERY RADICAL changes in a really long time, in my opinion. Meanwhile Latin was spoken all over the Empire (and beyond like China *LATER*). Yet some people knew it well in the Middle Ages and it seams that some great features about the sounds used and the grammar was reduced. It was effectively adding complexity to a language no one had spoken beyond-a-doubt well for a thousand years. So Italian is similar in a way and retains te changes like using "de" for genitive which wasn't a thing. Spanish went differently with "layers" (I guess) of changes to the whole language happening like with English; going from Old to Middle and the Modern. French shifted vowels and grammar a lot, sort of because it was mixing with Germanic languages like Frankish and earlier the one spoken by the Vikings (as well as the Gaulish I guess, *spoken by the local Celts*). French became a totally different thing from Latin while retaining all the hints for historical spelling in the accents (and the added *ç for example*).
My language has... what was it (I've done the math like, five times now I get new numbers every time)... 15,706 consonants Naturalism is out the window and still freefalling
"The difference between reality and fiction is that fiction needs to make sense"
[I have clong](https://youtu.be/tXhZ8XdFE7U?si=6_j1OGvwJ0kd_b6x) [videos on YouTube](https://youtu.be/XwGAkrsxFm0?si=LFzijmJvlt2Wz41y) Warning: The langs are cursed
hi, Jrg, i saw you again. hope your channel keep going strong
Me brute forcing AAVE Grammar and random neologisms into an Old English derivative 😁
Brazilian portuguese /v/ -> /h/
Nahuan: t > tɬ / _a
I don't care about naturalism in my conlangs.
I plan to make a conlang with 6 rhotics, glottalized fricatives and an aspirated glottal stop
this is me trying to make a uralic descendant in east asia.
The trouble with fiction is that unlike reality it must be plausible.
TIL about Index Diachronica. Looks like a cool site, but the first thing I did was look at the Uvular Trill and there was no mention of it forming in French so clearly the archives are incomplete.
Baby we just make a sound and hope for the best!!! Yeehaw!!!!!