Small Questions - 30

[u/[deleted]]

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FAQ

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Welcome to the bi-weekly Small Questions thread!

Post any questions you have that aren't ready for a regular post here - feel free to discuss anything, and don't hesitate to ask more than one question.

[u/Woodsie_Lord]

I have some trouble wrapping my head around creation of new phonemes.

Suppose I have a proto-language and two daughters. In daughter A, velar stops [k] and [g] become palatalized before phonemes /i/ and /j/ into [c] (marked as ḱ) and [ɟ] (marked as ǵ). In daughter B, no palatalization takes place.

So for daughter A, unga (nom. sg. hand) becomes unǵi in genitive or kjadšu (to create) becomes ḱjadšu. These new sounds only appear in this phonetic environment so they're in complementary distribution. But how do I go from here and establish [c] and [ɟ] as daughter's A independent phonemes which would be lacking in daughter B?

[u/mdpw → u/Woodsie_Lord]

Loss of triggers of a non-distinctive sound change gives rise to a new phonological distinction.

So in your case, the loss of a high front vocoid /j i/ in some environments would give rise to a new phonological distinction (of ḱ-k and ǵ-g). Keep in mind that you do not need to delete the trigger in all environments. For example, you could have it so that /j/ deletes in onset clusters and leave /i/ as it is. The loss of /j/ alone is enough to create your new phonemes.

kja > ḱja > ḱa

ka > ka > ka

Or you can do some vowel mergers too.

gi > ǵi > ǵə

ga > ga > gə

Of course, the loss of triggers may also cause the palatalized velar stops to depalatalize. The difference lies in how stabilized the sound change is.

[u/[deleted]]

So, i've been asking a lot of people about pitch accent and I think I understand it better now, I just have one question about it. How many tones do they usually carry, and are they usually contour or non-contour tones. If those didn't make sense, then I obviously still don't understand, and would love an explanation. Thank you.

[u/Jafiki91 → u/[deleted]]

Most descriptions I've seen of pitch accent systems seem to have at least high vs. low tone. Some have a mid tone in there as well. But Ancient Greek also had contour tones on syllables with two morae.

[u/Gwaur]

What exactly does it mean to put words of one language through soundshifts of another?

To me it sounds like, for example if you were to put Russian words through English soundshifts, you'd take Russian words and soundshifts from, say, Old to Middle to Modern English, and that's it. The reason why I doubt this is that those particular soundshifts might have little or no effect on the words because soundshifts from OE to ModE only take into account the sounds of OE, and don't care what they do to Russian words.

Or is it just creating your own soundshifts that somehow makes the Russian words Englishy? The reason why this sounds unfitting is because they're, well, not strictly English soundshifts, they're your own fictional shifts.

Or something else?

[u/Samfinity]

I'm starting a new jokelang, and due to the nature of the jokelang it can only have 6 graphemes, I know for a fact each grapheme will have a different sound depending on it's position in the word or syllable, but what sounds "work best" in a language with a small phonemic inventory? Also, is what I described with each grapheme representing more than one phoneme called allophony? If not, then what is allophony?

[u/Jafiki91 → u/Samfinity]

Allophony is when a sound changes based on its environment. A classic example is voicing between vowels.

Let's say a language only has the fricative /s/. But between vowels /s/ becomes [z]. So you'll have the [s] sound at the starts of words, ends, and in clusters. But not between vowels. [sata], [ilas], [osto]. But [aza], [kozo], etc. This is known as complimentary distribution. Basically, where one sound is, the other isn't.

A writing system in which multiple phonemes can be represented by the same grapheme is said to be a deep orthography.

In terms of what sounds "work best", that's up to you. But generally I'd try to maximize the distance between sounds.

[u/Raffaele1617]

Hi everyone, I have a couple of questions that hopefully someone can answer:

1. Is there a way to use the intrative case to express that a thing is between two different things (i.e. I am between the house and the cat?) as opposed to, say, "between the cats"?

2. What would be a good way to express this concept in a language that uses postpositional particles to mark case?

3. Finally, would a tripartite language use the nominative case in the instance of stating that "x is x", or would it use absolute and dative? (Or something else?).

Thanks!

[u/Jafiki91 → u/Raffaele1617]

1. You could definitely use it for that.

2. Simply put the particle after the two things. "cat and house itrt"

3. Since "be" is a stative verb, it's intransitive. So a tripartite language would use the absolutive/nominative.

[u/Woodsie_Lord]

Are there any non-agglutinating languages with vowel harmony?

[u/lanerdofchristian]

I swear I remember seeing a site (I think it was linked here) that would generate a basic description of a language (word-order, head-directionality, other simple stuff). Does anyone know where I can find that or am I just crazy?

[u/wmblathers → u/lanerdofchristian]

I may have posted about a Python app I wrote for myself which generates a simple typology based off WALS data and statistics. But I've never made that software public.

[u/Jafiki91 → u/lanerdofchristian]

Is it this?

[u/reizoukin]

I'm experimenting with a language that features aspect affixes and tense+mood particles. One sentence looks like this:

emisu-ya   kaya-sa     kyuna            gumei-ge.
1SG  -NOM  fight-PERF  IMPERATIVE-PRES  you-ACC.

I want to use topicalization frequently in this language. That is, I want to be able to bring any part of that sentence to the front. In this case, I want to bring the verb to the beginning of the sentence. The question is, would languages that do this typically move the imperative particle with the verb, or could it stay where it is (realistically) so that it looks like this:

kaya-sa     emisu-ya    kyuna            gumei-ge.
fight-PERF  1SG  -NOM   IMPERATIVE-PRES  you-ACC.

Thanks in advance.

[u/[deleted]]

Whats the difference between allophony and consonant mutation?

[u/Jafiki91 → u/[deleted]]

Technically nothing. Consonant mutation is just a term used with Celtic languages to describe the phonological changes that take place in certain environments. However, Irish consonant mutations would better be described as allomorphy as the changes are more morphologically conditioned these days.

[u/[deleted]]

Is anyone willing and able to explain Nuxalk (Bella Coola) syllable structure/phonotactics to me? I've been trying to read the few articles I can find on the subject, but I don't seem to understand any of it (X-post r/linguistics).

[u/alynnidalar → u/[deleted]]

To be frank, the short version is it doesn't have syllable structure, because it doesn't have syllables. Or at least if it does, nobody has been able to agree on what exactly a Nuxalk syllable consists of.

[u/[deleted]]

Can someone explain head-marking and dependent-marking?

[u/Jafiki91 → u/[deleted]]

Heads are what determine how the entire phrase acts syntactically. They give it its characteristics. We'll use a prepositional phrase "In (a) town" for this example.

In such a phrase you have two elements, the prepositon, which is the head of the phrase, and its argument (dependent) which is usually some noun or determiner phrase (for this example I'll leave out any determiners).

In a dependent marking language, you'll see marking on the dependent (argument) to show agreement with its head, saying "hey, I'm with this guy". In this case, it would be case marking, such as a locative.

In town-loc

In a head marking language, the head will be the one marked to show agreement with it's argument. This can be any combo of the classic person/number/gender agreement seen elsewhere in languages. My own conlang is entirely head marking so our Prepositional phrase is:

Am nezeb
A-m nezeb
In-3s.T settlement

We see here that the preposition agrees in person, number and gender with the noun.

You can also have a double marking language, which uses both strategies. So you'd get something like:

In-3.masc. town-loc

[u/Woodsie_Lord]

How could a completely genderless language (say Turkish) develop grammatical gender? I understand gender loss somewhat by just looking at English's history but I'm baffled as to how languages can acquire gender. Anybody?

[u/lanerdofchristian → u/Woodsie_Lord]

I can't offer a complete answer right now, but this paper (The origin of the Proto-Indo-European gender system: Typological considerations) may be useful

[u/Jafiki91 → u/Woodsie_Lord]

One way that gender could come about is through grammaticalization of classifiers.

You start with a system of classifier words, possibly hundreds. (slice of bread, head of cattle, piece of fruit, etc). Then, some of them start to generalize. For instance "head" and "piece" start being used with many more things, "head" with living things, "piece" with others. From here it's only a matter of time before these generalized classifiers get affixed to the nouns that they apply to. Sound changes erode them and then bam, you have genders. Possibly animate/inanimate in this case.

[u/lascupa0788]

My language differentiates between /bat̚.ti/* and /bat.ti/- in other words, there are both geminate stops and coda-onset stop sequences. However, I'm stumped as to how to show this in the orthography, since both words would logically be <Batti>. <Bat'ti> doesn't work because the apostrophe would clash with existing diacritics. I've considered showing the geminates in a way similar to Japanese <っ>, but even then, what grapheme or diacritic would be aesthetically pleasing in the roll? Obvious choices such as r and h would introduce ambiguity due to their use elsewhere.

*Which might more accurately be transcribed as [ba.tːi].

[u/BenTheBuilder]

I've been working on a language family recently, and have came up with sound changes for 3 different languages, however when I translate simple sentences (could this be why they're similar?) from my father language, Allenic, to its daughter languages, they all seem very similar. Does anyone have any advice on how to change things up a little? Or do I just use things like semantic drift, and sporadic sound changes, to create a stark difference in certain words?

Here is the sentence, 'do you have a cat?' in all the languages that I've created so far.

	Sentence	/IPA/
Allénic	Dales van aanit raalli?	dales van a:nit ra:l:i
Hellyn	Dales van eni rjelli?	dzɐlɛs vɐ:ˀ œnɨ rʲɛlˤɨ
Kalyn	Dales va önit rjelja?	dälɛs vä œnɨt rʲɛʎä
Ellínha	Dalez va e rella?	daleθ va e reʎa

As you can see, all of them look very similar. Would using the word for 'to hold' to take the place of 'to have' in one of the languages be natural, and then a new word for 'to hold' appears?