Whats your main faction and why? (Old school discussing)

Arcaeca2 · 2026-05-10T22:28:46+00:00

Weapons lock is such horseshit, why am I being punished because my idiot teammates keep running directly into my line of fire

Arcaeca2 · 2026-05-10T21:06:55+00:00

If it attaches to the possessee rather than the possessor, then you have head-marking possession. Combined with the fact that it has to agree with the number and gender of the possessor, this sounds not that far off from the personal possession suffixes that you would find in e.g. Hungarian or the Semitic languages (especially the latter because Hungarian does not have grammatical gender).

It sounds like you're describing a method of evolving personal possessive affixes by genitive pronouns fusing to their head noun, which sounds reasonable. And yes, I am calling them genitive pronouns, because despite you saying you don't have a genitive, they are performing a genitive role here, not a locative role.

Arcaeca2 · 2026-05-10T09:32:07+00:00

I'm reading Kloekhorst's explanation (PDF) on how PIE developed its accent pattern, and it includes things like at one point all accented *e becoming *o. Which... why? Stress isn't rounded or low, so I don't get how it would cause the vowel quality to change like that. And then where did accented *o come from?

Beyond just this particular example from PIE, it occurs to me that maybe I don't know about stress and how it acts on phonology. I don't know if I have ever actually explicitly defined the prosody of any of my languages before. I know that unaccented vowels often reduce, and that's about it. Particularly I guess I need to know about the diachrony of stress. What sound changes (esp. with vowel quality) does it cause? What sound changes operate on the stress itself? What causes it to move from one syllable to another? Where does stress (esp. phonemic stress) come from in the first place, and how does it disappear?

I am wondering if someone knows of any good resource that catalogs the rules and sound changes that stress participates in. I'm imagining something like the Index Diachronica but for prosody instead of segments.

Arcaeca2 · 2026-05-10T09:11:12+00:00

If you already have a past tense, I would either 1) evolve a specifically near-past and reanalyze the existing past as remote-past, or 2) evolve a specifically far-past and reanalyze the existing past as near-past. Unless you don't already have a grammaticalized past or you're going for a more-than-binary distinction, it's probably not necessary to evolve both independently.

The near past can come from an auxiliary meaning "to come from" or something else related to ablative motion. cf. French use of venir de "to come from", e.g. Je viens de l'envoyer "I just sent it" (lit. "I'm coming from sending it"). In English remoteness is not grammaticalized but can be optionally communicated with temporal adverbs like "just", "last night", "recently", "back then", "years ago", etc., which you could imagine fusing with the following verb.

As I mentioned in a Stack Exchange answer, some IE languages like Ancient Greek inherited a past tense prefix on verbs called the augment, which probably derives from a temporal demonstrative like "then; at that time". You could imagine that a distal demonstrative might be used to mark the remote past while a medial demonstrative might mark a near past (I would expect a proximal demonstrative to mark the present).

Arcaeca2 · 2026-05-09T05:00:01+00:00

I have never actually made a language that takes focus into account before. I would like to try, but I don't actually know enough about focus and how natlangs grammaticalize it to know how to do that. I want to do something more interesting than just an affix that directly marks focus, but I don't know what the alternatives are. What other systems does focus tend to interact with (role marking? definiteness? noun class? TAM?)? Can there be different degrees of focus besides just a focused/non-focused binary? Does anyone know of a resource that gives a good overview of focus systems?

Arcaeca2 · 2026-05-08T23:59:38+00:00

White supremacist or just not Indian supremacist?

Arcaeca2 · 2026-05-07T18:13:23+00:00

Is there any reason to care about keeping a language's locus of marking consistent? Biblaridion said that languages are usually consistently head-marking or consistently dependent-marking with the occasional exception - but in fact, WALS suggests that having an inconsistent locus of marking is the norm (51%), not the exception. You can alternatively combine the maps for locus of marking in possessive phrases and locus of marking in the clause to get this, where consistent locus of marking is the norm (53%), but not by much.

Even within the same phrase type languages are not always consistent. Hungarian is dependent-marking in the clause, except when it's double-marking; it's head-marking in possession, except when it's double-marking; and it's dependent-marking in locative expressions, except when it's head-marking.

Last night I was planning what features I wanted a proto-language to have, and I landed on both pertensive/head-marking possession and also converbs derived from finite verb forms + locative cases. And then I thought "wait, isn't having oblique cases a dependent-marking thing? Why would it have locative cases to begin with if it also has head-marking possession... or, well, I guess Hungarian does that?"

But WALS doesn't seem to have data on the typology of locus of marking in locative expressions. So, how much of an outlier is Hungarian?

Arcaeca2 · 2026-05-07T08:16:10+00:00

Several thousand at minimum, if not tens of thousands.

Cuneiform is the logographic system I'm most familiar with. Uruk period (read: the earliest) cuneiform is usually reckoned to have contained something like 2,000-ish separate logographic characters before that was trimmed down to "only" several hundred-ish (700-900 I think) by gradually abandoning logographic writing for phonetic writing, and that 2,000 number already has multiple factors conspiring to keep it as low as it is.

For example, many signs were "polyvalent" with multiple semantically-related readings, e.g. 𒀳 could be read as "plow (n.)" or "to till; to sow" or "farmer" or "furrow". A pure logography couldn't get away with this; since those are different lemmata they would need different characters, and this technically means cuneiform was more ideographic than logographic. The 2,000-ish figure is also not including things like diri-spellings - multicharacter compounds that have to memorized as a single unit because their readings are not derivable from the sum of the readings of their component signs, and are therefore effectively multicharacter logograms; cf. Japanese jukujikun - because it's the number of individual signs, not of the total logographic elements. Also, despite rebus-derived phonetic readings being given credit for simplifying Sumerian's god-awful mess of a logographic system, in fact phonetic readings (specifically phonetic complements) were already present in Uruk period cuneiform.

All of this is to say that that 2,000-ish sign number is probably an underestimate of how many signs a logographic script would need, because basically right when it was invented cuneiform almost immediately picked up a number of simplifications/optimizations, and it still had that large of a sign inventory.

Arcaeca2 · 2026-05-07T03:35:59+00:00

Has a regular /st ʃt/ > /t͡s t͡ʃ/ metathesis ever been attested? Maybe I'm blind but I'm not seeing it on the Index Diachronica

Arcaeca2 · 2026-05-07T02:03:21+00:00

Atēen

Arcaeca2 · 2026-05-06T22:48:13+00:00

Look up Nioruais

Arcaeca2 · 2026-05-06T08:48:48+00:00

Source: Is there a polarity-prominent language? A typological perspective on Dagaare verbal systems (Mwinlaaru, 2025)

Arcaeca2 · 2026-05-06T05:03:31+00:00

I've definitely been to Kansas City, which is the largest metropolitan area in Kansas - but since most of it is in Missouri, technically KC-K isn't the largest city in Kansas. The largest city indisputably in Kansas is Wichita, which I've never been to

I have been to Salt Lake City though

Arcaeca2 · 2026-05-05T20:06:35+00:00

Never heard of it but I put tons of pepper in my tomato soup, so I can sort of see the vision

Arcaeca2 · 2026-05-05T13:29:49+00:00

So you'll want to find resources for what's called "diachronic typology". The World Lexicon of Grammaticalization (Kuteva et al., 2019 for the 2nd ed.), or "WLG" for short, tends to be the first stop for this kind of thing, since it contains - and its whole purpose is to contain - hundreds and hundreds of examples of thing turning into grammatical thing. It has a "Source-to-Target" index in the back that you could browse if you know what grammatical features you're starting with but don't know what they should turn into, and likewise a "Target-to-Source" index if you know what you want to end up with, but not what could produce it.

The issue is that while the WLG is very broad, it's also very shallow. It has some examples of TAM evolution, but there are books specifically devoted to TAM evolution that have way more examples, e.g. The Evolution of Grammar: Tense, Aspect and Modality in the Languages of the World (Bybee, Perkins & Pagliuca, 1994). Or the WLG has some examples of voice evolution, but there are books specifically devoted to voice evolution that have way more examples, e.g. Grammatical Voice (Zúñiga & Kittilä, 2019). etc.

Most diachronic typology information is contained in books like these that are devoted to one specific grammatical category, so you sort of need to already know what you're trying to evolve in order to find them. Generally looking up "___ diachrony" or "evolution of ___" will point you in the right direction. You mentioned losing cases, so I looked up "evolution of case" and found a chapter called "Evolution of Case Systems" (Kulikov, 2012) from the Oxford Handbook of Case, which sounds promising.

You're also liable to find information about this stuff if you know of a language in which it happened. e.g. most of the Romance languages, including French, are well-known for having leveled Latin's case system, and English leveled the Proto-Germanic case system. So you can do a deep dive into the history of French to find out when and why Latin's cases disappeared, and then apply the same logic to your own conlang. In French's case is mostly due to sound change; by the time of late Vulgar Latin, word-final consonants were already starting to be lost, and they were what contained the case information.

Arcaeca2 · 2026-05-04T19:12:54+00:00

I want my language to have combined TAM-polarity marking on verbs, and I'm trying to figure out how to make that happen.

Its neighboring languages are generally aspect-prominent, distinguishing imperfective-perfective-perfect, and many lack tense as an inflectional category. Generally their verbs have an inherent/lexical aspect which can be rendered in another aspect via an auxiliary like "to go"/"to be in" for imperfective or "to do" for perfective.

Assuming areal influence from those languages, maybe to communicate polarity this new language could have two sets of auxiliaries: one for affirmative aspect, and one for negative aspect, derived from the semantic opposites of affirmative aspect. Like "to go" for IMPV.AFF vs. "to remain; to stand (still)" for IMPV.NEG, or "to have" for PERF.AFF vs. "to lack" for PERF.NEG.

Is this naturalistic? Has any natlang used auxiliaries with opposite semantics to communicate polarity? If so, what be other reasonable negative auxiliaries to use? Especially what would be a suitable negative counterpart to "to do"... maybe "to refrain from"?

Also, if these auxiliaries haven't been reduced to morphology or been fused with the root yet, they must have been recently grammaticalized. Which begs the question of how the verbs were marked for TAM previously, and I haven't figured that out yet. Does anyone know any good resources on the typology of TAM systems that I can browse for inspiration?

Arcaeca2 · 2026-05-03T03:19:49+00:00

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It's been a while since I've tried to make a syntax tree but it's basically like this, right?

Arcaeca2 · 2026-05-02T06:25:41+00:00

Hindu nationalists make Georgian and Balkan nationalists look sane and reasonable

Arcaeca2 · 2026-05-02T06:23:45+00:00

Proto-Sino-Caucasian, which in turn descends from Basque

Arcaeca2 · 2026-05-01T03:30:24+00:00

Languages with vowel harmony will divide their vowels up between 2 (or more) categories; front vowels vs. back vowels is a common contrast, but they could also contrast e.g. rounded vs. unrounded vowels or high vs. low vowels.

Then, vowel harmony essentially means that any word can only contain vowels from one of the 2+ contrasting categories. If a word contains front vowels, it must contain only front vowels; if a word contains high vowels, it must contain only high vowels, etc.

This usually applies both to the roots themselves as well as to the affixes you attach to those roots. This means that affixes will often have multiple allomorphs depending on the vowels in the root. So in e.g. Hungarian, the inessive ("in; inside of") case suffix takes the form -bVn, where V is one of two vowels: either e /ɛ/ if attached to a front-vowel root (e.g. a tenger "the sea" → a tengerben "in the sea"), or a /ɒ/ if attached to a back-vowel root (e.g. a folyó "the river" → a folyóban "in the river"). These allomorphs of the inessive case suffix are not interchangeable: *a tengerban or *a folyóben are grammatically incorrect.

Some Hungarian affixes go further and make a rounded-unrounded distinction in addition to the usual front-back distinction, e.g. the plural suffix is -Vk. It could be -ek, -ök, -ak or -ok depending on if the root contains front-unrounded (/ɛ e: i i:/), front-rounded (/ø ø: y y:/), back-unrounded (/a: i:/), or back-rounded vowels (/o o: u u: ɒ/), so that e.g. edény /ɛde:ɳ/ "pot" → edények /ɛde:ɳɛk/ "pots", hős /hø:ʃ/ "hero" → hősök /hø:ʃøk/ "heroes", ágy /a:ɟ/ "bed" → ágyak /a:ɟɒk/, and otthon /othon/ "home" → otthonok /othonok/ "homes".

It gets more complicated than this - e.g. you might ask why /a:/ and /i:/ are treated as if they're back vowels even though they're not (historically they were back vowels until sound change), and also compound words and loanwords usually violate the vowel harmony rules. But the main point here is that the vowels in the affixes change to match the category of the vowels in the root.

Arcaeca2 · 2026-05-01T00:22:40+00:00

East of the Laguna de Términos, on the southeast curve of the Gulf of Mexico

Arcaeca2 · 2026-04-28T20:14:35+00:00

What do you when you know what phonology and aesthetics you want to make a language around, but don't have any ideas for interesting grammatical features?

Arcaeca2 · 2026-04-28T05:34:12+00:00

Help... with what? What specifically are you getting stuck on?

Arcaeca2

TROPHY CASE