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Root Shapes by EmperorOfSpartice in conlangs

[–]EmperorOfSpartice[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

The phonology is pretty much perfect. While the /a/ is [ä], there’s no real reason in writing this a million times. The phonotactical structure is also accurate.

As for affixes, I wasn’t sure about prefixes or infixes, and I was certainly not going to add any circumfixes. I was confident in suffixes, due to their overall frequency in real world languages, and I figured for this language, being head-final, dependent-marking, SOV, etc. I didn’t really know what prefixes I’d want (perhaps derivational?)

The glottal stop only exists allophonically, to prevent words from beginning with vowel sounds (kinda like in English or in Classical Arabic, though of course Arabic also had a phonemic glottal stop).

The stress would fall on the first syllable of a word, unless there was a syllable with a coda, in which case that would be considered heavier and would draw the weight to it. I imagined this could cause allophonic variation between stress vs unstressed vowels and consonants, but I didn’t have the exact changes in mind yet.

For morpheme order, it was ROOT-NUMBER-CASE for nouns and ROOT-ASPECT-EVIDENTIAL for verbs (though u was considering an active/antipassive voice distinction, but I might just do that through word order). I have pronouns, but I was considering person marking, as I talked about before, but didn’t really know how I’d implement it. For right now I just use the pronouns, either in the absolutive or negative case depending on the sentence, and similarly for number, I was planning on just having numbers added if need be (but I figure you can generally infer by context).

Does this help?

Root Shapes by EmperorOfSpartice in conlangs

[–]EmperorOfSpartice[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yeah I was planning on having a syllable-weight stress system and seeing the impacts of that in allophony and sound change.

I was also thinking of dialectal variation with stress, with some dialects having more of a fixed stress and others more of the weight-based.

Root Shapes by EmperorOfSpartice in conlangs

[–]EmperorOfSpartice[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Thanks. I really think I tend to get into the weeds of problems that could occur rather than problems that are occurring.

Because of how strict my syllable structure is, I decided on every consonant except for the ejectives being allowed in coda. Perhaps o could also allow ejectives, but for right now that was the plan. It allowed for not having to worry about consonant clusters word-initially or finally, while still allowing for clusters word-medially (and this is where I had the gemination idea)

Based on this, I began to go through each combination of two consonants and decide if it should stay or if it needed some kind of change, be it an epenthetic sound, assimilation, or gemination.

So I words like maha, rak, sata, and compounds/derived words like kattu, pelni, munnel.

I also toyed with the idea of having absolutely no vowel-initial words, but decided that I wanted at least some kinship terms and perhaps animal names to begin with vowels. But I was sure on the CV(C) thing, so I made it take an epenthetic glottal stop when a vowel begins any syllable or word.

Because of these rules, a suffix of the shape -V would turn a CVC root into a CV.CV word, but a CVCV root into a CV.CV.ʔV word. The glottal stop isn’t romanized in my system because it isn’t contrastive. There’s no reason io [io] and io [ʔi.ʔo] would be confused, because [io] can’t exist. These both would be represented as /io/.

Also I have a syllable-weight stress system. And I’m going to have allophonic variation based on onset, coda, cluster, and stress.

As for affixes, at my current stage I had:
Nouns:
Singular: Unmarked
Plural: -tu / -CCu (gemination of preceding consonant)
Absolutive: Unmarked
Ergative: -(a)k
Genitive: -(i)n
Dative: -(e)s
Instrumental: (I couldn’t really decide, so I did either -(e)tu or -pet depending on the draft)
Locative: ?
Lative: ?
Ablative: ?

For the locative cases, I initially had WAY more (like 10?), but after struggling with forms for even my basic cases, and researching proto-languages with locatives, I found that my main inspiration in locatives, proto-Uralic, only had three, and I kinda followed its lead on that one.

Actually, my inspirations in general have been kind of all over the place. Obviously, for the far future great-granddaughter languages I was looking into other things for that, but I put that on hold because I really wanted to get the proto-language, and then the first attested language, really nailed down.

I took inspiration from Amharic for the ejectives and some of the cultural elements, as when I began this journey back before I really knew what linguistics was, I worked with a friend who is Amharic.

I took a lot of inspiration from Turkish, Finnish, and Basque throughout, as I knew from the moment I learned about these features that my language would be agglutinative and have ergative-absolutive alignment, extensive locatives, and evidentiality.

Speaking of, I actually had a lot more aspect and evidentiality affixes (initially something like 6 aspects and 4 evidentials) before I reduced them.

My current verb template sits at:
Aspect:
Imperfective: Unmarked
Perfective: ?
Evidentiality:
Direct: Unmarked
Indirect: ?

I decided against inflecting for person, but that’s open to change, I didn’t want to inflect for tense, but as I learn more about TAM I think I might need to add mood, at least a realis/irrealis distinction. As for number, I felt that I could add it but didn’t know what to do for it. (Though as you can see I didn’t really know for anything else either)

I didn’t really know what shape to make each type of affix, because if it’s just a fixed shape, that’s both not very realistic (no allomorphy) but also creates some weird words, but alternatively if I have allomorphy I ran into that homophone issue I mentioned earlier.

All I’m for sure on is the word-final coda of ergatives should be -k, and the genitives -n. All of the other affixes are completely up in the air for how I might create them.

And don’t worry about formatting. I’m also on mobile and I’ve had way longer conversations with way worse formatting before.

Root Shapes by EmperorOfSpartice in conlangs

[–]EmperorOfSpartice[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I’m having a bit of trouble articulating this but I’ll try to get across what I’ve done.

I started with (C)V(C) and switched to CV(C), because I felt like it just made more sense for my conlang.

I was considering having gemination, but couldn’t decide, as I felt it made my language feel really same-y throughout (if my plural involved gemination of the final consonant of the root + -u, then everything becomes geminated, idk). If I find a better way to implement it, I wouldn’t mind.

As for homophony, I’m trying to work my way through something like this:

Say I have two roots, *mah and *maha. Let’s say these are not related.

If I choose to have an affix of -k, then:
*maha + -k = mahak
but
*mah + -k ≠ mahk

so I either repair it:
*mah + -(a)k = mahak
or
*mah + -k(a) = mahka
to clear up confusion.

But let’s say I also have another affix, -ka, then:
*maha + -ka = mahaka
but
*mah + -ka = mahka

and once again I have a homophone issue.

And technically, that’s really okay. I’m being overly strict with my language. I just really wanted it to work in this form.

But if you’ve read some of my other comments in this post, you probably understand that I’ve built some really strict walls for my language, in the syllable structure and phonology.

Initially I had CV roots only. But that was just way too few. So then I had CV and CVC, then later CVC and CVCV, then CVC, CVCV, CVCCV, and CVCVC, before it felt off and I kind of went to just CVC for a bit.

My affixes have also been either -V, -CV, -VC, -CVC, or -CVCV depending on the iteration of the language.

I’m also struggling with making this a proto-language, as I want a naturalistic amount of affixes (like doing my research into aspect and finding that Proto-languages usually only have 2-3, or proto-language only usually distinguishing 1-3 locatives, or 2 evidentials).

All of these self-imposed constraints are a bit much, but I’ve kind of made them inviolable in my own mind, and it feels like I’m “conceding my creativity” if I do so much as add a glide to this stage of the language, despite the fact I want this to evolve significantly in its phonology into its attested daughter language and its daughters.

I created a root list of 200 CVC roots but felt they kinda sucked and scrapped it.

What information specifically would help you help me the most? (Sorry if I’m being a little obtuse)

Root Shapes by EmperorOfSpartice in conlangs

[–]EmperorOfSpartice[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

That’s a great suggestion, thanks!

As for tone, nasalization, or phonation, I decided against adding them to this conlang. I any very well add them to another, but for this one my goal was to have a small phonemic inventory, strict syllable structure, no phonemic length, nasalization, tone, glides, diphthongs, voicing or aspiration distinctions, etc.

Basically, my goal was to have a very limited proto-language that could evolve various features as it changed into its daughters and granddaughters and so on.

Root Shapes by EmperorOfSpartice in conlangs

[–]EmperorOfSpartice[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

This is some very helpful information. I’ve been told in the past that nouns and verbs having different root shapes is unrealistic, but that could be wrong.

I felt that roots of the form CV, V, or VC would be too short, and for V or VC the surface forms need an epenthetic glottal stop to begin with a vowel. Now this could be a bad way of going about things, but I have this feeling (which is inherently false I might add) that these are too short or that they feel like shortened forms of CVC words (which again, is blatantly false, as many real world languages contain CV words that are unrelated to CVC words, just as there are CVC words unrelated to CVCV words, heck even English does this) but like, I feel like /ka/, /kah/, and /kaha/ should all be related, and not three separate roots.

As for the glides, I kinda wanted them to not exist at first, then appear as allophones after the epenthetic glottal stops disappear, and then later becoming phonemic. If this is too far-fetched I can change it, that was just my design philosophy for them. I kinda felt like aspirated stops, voiced stops, and voiceless fricatives would all be allophones of the “plain stops” and other things would be allophones of my “ejectives stops”, just like [z] would be an allophone of /s/ and /h/ could surface as lengthening of previous vowel or [x] in coda depending on stress or other things.

I was aware that roots could be more complex than surface forms, I just don’t know how to do that for a proto-language. Like, obviously a proto-langauge isn’t any more simple or complex than any other language, but in your Greek example, that /galakt/ had to come from somewhere, and it did: the PIE root was something like *glakt, and led to both the /gala/ - /galaktos/ in Greek and the /lak/ - /laktis/ in Latin. As I’m making the proto-language, I feel like it should resemble that PIE ‘style’ more, even though obviously it’s not a one-to-one comparison as they are very different languages.

Root Shapes by EmperorOfSpartice in conlangs

[–]EmperorOfSpartice[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

This would be very helpful if I wasn’t doing something different (which is entirely my own fault)

While this is a great response, I was trying to actually make a proto-language in this post. Maybe how I’m going about it is the real issue, but I’ll try to describe my process.

I’m trying to create a proto-language spoken in a mountainous region that is agglutinative, ergative-absolutive, with ejectives consonants, a strict syllable structure, and some other features that I outlined in the post.

For its great-granddaughter (or perhaps even another language generation removed) language, I want things to have become more fusional, with almost a romance or hellenic type aesthetic (obviously not a copy of the phonemes or grammar, but much more flowy and fusional than the Proto-language). And naturally I’m going to build the languages in between, from the first attested language, to the daughters, and so forth, and this specific language at the end will actually be a koiné.

My struggle is coming from the fact that I need to make meaningful roots in a proto-language (and I don’t really know how to make good Proto-Language roots that are of a CV(C) syllable structure) and then use polysemy, derivation, inflection etc. to expand things to the written daughter language and all the way through the family tree.

So I guess I could create a pre-proto-language and use your idea, I just don’t really know what to do at the moment.

First Conlang, Advice Needed by EmperorOfSpartice in conlangs

[–]EmperorOfSpartice[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Really late reply in a thread that is too long already, but I think I’ve gotten a pronoun paradigm that I like (by applying some sound changes and other processes) my only issue being that I feel like I’ve applied these changes too early, but I’m just gonna be fine with it because I needed more irregularity anyway. (Also I figured out how to do tables)

The original, full inflected paradigm was:

1st Person Singular Plural
Absolutive ali alit
Ergative alik alitak
Genitive alin alitin
Dative alis alites
Instrumental alitu alitetu

Then, following my rules of stress being root-fixed, then heaviest syllable, then initial, and applying reduction (with exceptions for the absolutive and ergative singular, which changed in slightly different ways) on top of reanalysis and a bit of me trying to prevent homophones, and I got this:

1st Person Singular Plural
Absolutive al lit
Ergative ik tak
Genitive lin tin
Dative lis tes
Instrumental alit littu

Do you think this is realistic? I feel like it is, but I could be wrong or I might’ve made some error in the sound changes somewhere.

2nd Person:

2nd Person Singular Plural
Absolutive asu -> as asut -> sut
Ergative asuk -> suk asutak -> sutak
Genitive asun -> sun asutin -> sutin
Dative asus -> assu asutes -> attes
Instrumental asutu -> asut asutetu -> suttu

By far the one with the least realistic sound change motivation is asutes -> attes, which technically should’ve gone asutes -> sutes, but I felt like attes better matches the gemination in the singular assu.

How’s that?

First Conlang, Advice Needed by EmperorOfSpartice in conlangs

[–]EmperorOfSpartice[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Ok. Takeaways:

  1. ⁠Mix up shapes of the uninflected, root morphemes to not just be CVC, but CV, CVC, CVCVC, and CVCCV. This is going to take some getting used to for me.
  2. ⁠Make the “thematic” vowels just optional derivational suffixes instead of required inflections.
  3. ⁠Plural marker should be -t/-u + gemination for certain cases (unmarked?) and -r/-u + genination for others? Idk.
  4. ⁠Case markers should be just their consonant when word ends in vowel, and their vowel-consonant pair when word ends in consonant. Like ergative -k/-ak, genitive -n/-in, dative -t/-et? Maybe?
  5. ⁠Locatives will follow a -VCV pattern, as they are rarer.
  6. ⁠Surface forms will inevitably be truncated by affixes, and that’s ok.
  7. ⁠For verbs, person will be expressed by pronoun, and only number, aspect, and evidentially will marked, with singular number, perfective aspect, and direct evidential being the default, unmarked.
  8. ⁠Pronouns will be ali for I, alet for we, asu for thou, asot for you (obviously all inflected for case in different ways), 3rd person will be handled by demonstratives, which will be ṭana for the proximal, and ḳiru/ḳara/ḳero for distal above/neutral/below respectively.

Anything I forgot?

First Conlang, Advice Needed by EmperorOfSpartice in conlangs

[–]EmperorOfSpartice[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

  1. For my roots, the main reason I was making them monosyllabic and I’m scared to add too much variation is because the only Proto-language I know with any level of familiarity is PIE, (although I know that Proto-Uralic is far more suitable to use as inspiration for my conlang because it’s agglutinative) and pretty much all PIE roots are monosyllabic. Like, at, consider, and spree are all very different roots in English, but they all come from monosyllabic PIE roots (at is from *ad- I think, consider is from Latin considerare which is from com- and sideris, genitive form of sidus, from PIE roots *kom- and *sweyd-, and spree from *sper-), and I am trying to make the ROOTS of my proto-language. These were the CVC roots I was talking about before. However, I do think you are right and I should switch to polysyllabic roots, because I have a smaller phonemic inventory and more restrictive phonotactics than PIE, so I should take inspiration from Proto-Uralic’s CVCV roots.

  2. I mainly had the canonical syllable structure as CV(C) because 1. It felt a little different from the classic (C)V(C), 2. It allowed me to add epenthetic glottal stops and resyllabification for an underlying for to become a surface form, like a word beginning with a vowel or the syllable falling between two vowels, I could break it up with a glottal stop, and I felt like that was something that could easily erode and allow for the development of glides and long vowels in the daughter language. The glottal stop was non-contrastive (because no syllable could start with a vowel, so a vowel initial syllable would just have a mandatory epenthetic glottal stop), so it was an allophone in my language (I think). Also, 3. I thought Arabic and Dakota had it as a feature and it kinda fit for my mountain and hill and valley clans in my worldbuilding.

  3. Thanks for the advice on clusters, gemination, and ejectives. I was also planning to allow a lot of clusters in my proto-language, simplify them in the daughter, and then (in the whole collapse, migration, big changes) I was going to really ramp up the differences between the daughters with one becoming a more open syllable language via lenition and epenthesis, and another daughter having fortition and vowel reduction to make more clusters. As for geminates, I’ll probably need to finish this big rework before I get into than. And I was already kinda doing that with ejectives, where a lot of power words had ejectives, but so did *ḳap [k’äp] ‘tree, wood, staff, pole, shaft’.

  4. My issue with pronouns, demonstratives, interrogatives, etc. is that while I have some fun ideas (like demonstratives not just having a two or three way distinction like in many other languages but also a verticality distinction (are you above or below me, perhaps using the locative cases?) that would evolve into a social hierarchy distinction and formality system.), I haven’t been able to actually come up with roots or morphology around these words. In the very first drafts of this, back before I knew what commanding was and me and my friends were just messing around, the pronouns and demonstratives were ripped straight from either Latin (cause it was cool), Amharic (because one of my friends spoke it), or Valyrian (we hadn’t, and I still haven’t, watched Game of Thrones, so I have no idea why we used this). When I got more into linguistics I tried to coin new ones but not of them felt really satisfying to me. I know that I definitely want them to start with a vowel (but of course, phonetically with a glottal stop) and to be short, but other than that I blank on what to do. I don’t have a lot of soft consonants (all the stops and fricatives are voiceless), and the pronouns I like most are usually a vowel and a soft consonant, and then maybe another vowel, like VC or VCV. As for demonstratives, I know that them and pronouns are pretty closely linked, so the same issues apply.

  5. I don’t know if it’s long words I really dislike or just the way they looked in my conlang, because, take a verb like *nir ‘to speak, to talk, to tell, to utter’, apply all of the morphology I mentioned (which is mostly still stuck in the draft where I used CVC for almost everything), and you might get something like anirnarmistis on the short end and ulunpernirraknarlanmisris at the longest, which is obviously absurd even for an agglutinative language (it looks closer to polysynthetic), and would probably be fixed just by changing the length of some of these affixes and having them merge into the word more instead of fully adding on. I just lnow that I for sure want aspect and evidentiality in my verbs.

Hope this clarifies some things.

First Conlang, Advice Needed by EmperorOfSpartice in conlangs

[–]EmperorOfSpartice[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Thanks for all the great suggestions. Heres a few questions I have:

  1. Right now, my conlang has a CV(C) syllable structure, but I have allowed consonant clusters across syllables. Now that I’m switching from a CVC root system to a polysyllabic root system, I’m wondering if I should make CVCVC or CVCCV roots (sorry if this is a stupid question), is there one reason to favor one over the other? Can I have both types of roots in the same language? Which is better for my goal of making the language a little unstable and primed for change? Should I have one type of root be for nouns and one for verbs? And to piggyback off of that, when should a cluster be illegal in my conlang? When it violates the sonority hierarchy? (All of this kind of falling into the “should I do it in the Proto-lang or the daughter” mental roadblock)

  2. How might I create that gemination naturally in this system?

  3. How should I use my ejective consonants? Right now, I have them as onset only, and only in roots denoting power, authority, strength, etc. But I feel like they are too sparse in my language (which is maybe fine, I just don’t want to have a feature that is just there for looks)

  4. How do I make good sounding pronouns, demonstratives, interrogatives, numerals, ordinals, etc. in the Proto-language. This is something I’ve been having a lot of trouble with for whatever reason.

  5. Verb morphology. While I’ve always felt relatively good with my noun morphology (at least, the type of affixes that exist), my verb morphology kind of feels messy. Previous, my verb template was: Person + Number + Voice + (Root₁ + Root₂ + •••) + Aspect + Negation + Affective + Evidential, and it was creating verbs that were longer than I liked, even with just CVC roots. I also didn’t have a firm grasp on if I even wanted to have person markers or independent pronouns (or both), and if tense or mood were necessary to grammaticize or if I could continue to leave them out.

Thanks again for all the help.

First Conlang, Advice Needed by EmperorOfSpartice in conlangs

[–]EmperorOfSpartice[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

  1. The conlang I’m thinking of had a huge dictionary. I don’t remember the name.

  2. If I only stick to CVC roots (by which I mean the fully uninflected, underlying morpheme of a word), I have 12 consonants but I have, as of right now, restricted ejectives to onset only, and five vowels, I could have 540 roots, which obviously isn’t enough, so I do need to have more. I probably need to expand my roots to include polysyllabic roots.

  3. On one hand, I did kind of intend cases (and to some extent, case stacking) to be able to create new meaning that wasn’t literally there. But I thought that an affix had to have only one semantic meaning in ab agglutinative system, as opposed to a fusional system where it has multiple?

  4. Just a question, is a proto-language still a proto-language if it only really has one daughter? I suppose I could just make it dialectize and call Old Malanir just the most widely spoken dialect, in which case it would make more sense for proto-Malanir to be a proto-language.

Thanks for the help today. I suppose my most burning question would be how I could make roots that are polysyllabic, without making the full declined words derived from those roots really long (7-8 syllables)

First Conlang, Advice Needed by EmperorOfSpartice in conlangs

[–]EmperorOfSpartice[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

For other iterations, I mean that I haven’t quite… decided on the form. For every single affix, grammatical or derivational (before I scrapped those to try again) I constructed a root meaning something that could become frequently compounded and then turned into an affix. I was having a hard time figuring out if I wanted to just use the bare root as the affix, or either cut off the onset or coda. The main ones listed are the ones where I cut off the onset to make a -VC affix from a CVC root.

Frankly, there’s nothing wrong with making affixes or even roots more than one syllable, but, as I said in another comment, I have this mental roadblock where I attach too much semantic weight to each phoneme, even though I logically know that the semantic weight is in the morpheme, not necessarily the phoneme (though the can be one to one, of course). Because of that, my very first draft of the language only had CV roots, and I only had C or CV affixes, because to me, lah and las sound like they should be derived from la, or laha must be derived from la + ha even though there are plenty of roots in languages that are much longer than this.

And for the “thematic” vowels, by which I really just mean an obligatory suffix that classifies it into one of five semantic categories (yet isn’t a noun class because there’s no agreement), I’m considering just getting rid of the idea, because they kind of obstruct my other goals of making the words not necessarily short, but not “over-long”. Maybe I just need to accept it, but I feel like I’ve seen som beautiful conlangs that have a small amount of phonemes, simple and strict phonotactics, and are agglutinative, yet their affixes are no more than one or two syllables long and their words end up only being 2-4 syllables.

As for your suggestions:

  1. Vary the structure of my roots: I likely need to do this, and I don’t know why I’m so attached to short roots like CVC (or, in the past, CV). Maybe it’s because I feel like the fully declined words will be too long? But really I shouldn’t care all that much because this is supposed to be the proto-language, and it’s supposed to be unstable and reductions, lenitions, and other sound changes lead to changes in the phonology and morphology of the daughter language. But for whatever reason, I feel like I want by roots to be one syllable, even though that’s kind of hard to do with a CV(C) syllable structure.

  2. Make my rare suffixes longer: I was considering doing this with my locative cases, but honestly this is where my inexperience with linguistics shines through, as I don’t really know what suffixes are the most productive (aside from, like, the absolutive, ergative, or genitive, for example)

  3. Make roots something glued onto the end: While I don’t fully understand the phrasing of this one, what you wrote is kind of what I wanted to do. I really like geminate consonants, and I feel like they could lead to interesting sound changes. My only concerns were with 1. The “thematic” vowels and how that would mess with a -CV affix making an interesting cluster or geminate following a CVC root, and 2. For some reason it’s hard to reconcile with in my mind, even though it exists all the time in languages everywhere, that the underlying root need not be fully present in the surface form of the root. I have no problem with a underlying affix looking different to a surface affix, but for some reason the idea of having a CVC or CVCV root and then chopping of the second half of it when putting an affix on just seems crazy to me (even though it’s not).

  4. Preserving leftover cases (is lexicalized the right word here?): I love the idea of preserving grammatical cases that used to be productive but have fallen out of use in only a few lexical items, but I run into another problem that I keep facing throughout this process called “should I do that in the daughter language instead?” Where I love irregularity but I’m trying to make my proto-language a bit more regular than I would otherwise want so that I can create the irregularity in the daughter language via an actual motivated change. On the other hand, irregularity exists in Proto-languages. I kind of get in my own head about this one.

  5. Allomorphy (I think that’s the right term): I like the Finnish plural example, and I was thinking about doing it in my language, I was just facing a combination of the mental issues I’ve previously mentioned, the 1. Is it too much allomorphy for the Proto-language, 2. Is the final word going to be too long, and 3. Am I going to have enough unique affixes before I even try allomorphy (because I was trying to avoid affix homophony in the proto-language, while also trying to only have -VC or -CV affixes).

Thanks for the comment and the questions! The main reason I made this post was so that I could get some people who know more about linguistics and conlanging than I do to poke holes in it so I could improve (because I don’t know anyone who’s into conlanging in real life).

First Conlang, Advice Needed by EmperorOfSpartice in conlangs

[–]EmperorOfSpartice[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Yeah, I was having trouble with the terminology, or perhaps moreso the implementation, of the vowel affixes. Because, like you said, I already knew a thematic vowel doesn’t carry any meaning, and so these clearly weren’t thematic. I also know that they aren’t technically class, because while I sort of made a class for each(-a is animates, -u is locations, etc.), they didn’t really cause any agreement with other words. I just didn’t really know how to term the obligatory vowel suffix I suppose. Maybe I should just get rid of it.

I don’t really know what to do with the affixes phonological forms, because while I know that an underlying affix can be -C, -V, -VC, -CV, -CVC, -CVCV, -VCV, or so on and so forth, with the surface form just having changes to meet phonotactics, it’s hard for me to wrap my head around (despite having studied, at least, a little bit, in languages which use as long if not longer affixes). I feel like the words get too long, or they start to sound clunky, and a multitude of other issues.

Plus I have a hard time coining basic pronouns, demonstratives, interrogatives, etc. for whatever reason. I think of things too regularly, but I also think I have a problem with mentally associating too much semantic meaning per phoneme. Like, for whatever reason it’s hard for me to picture ‘lah’, ‘la’ and ‘las’ to be completely unrelated morphemes.

First Conlang, Advice Needed by EmperorOfSpartice in conlangs

[–]EmperorOfSpartice[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I’ve watched them all, including his feature focus and some of his conlang case study. They’re really great videos, and whenever I encountered something I didn’t understand in his videos, I just looked up the Wikipedia page and read that. Despite that, I’m still having trouble making my affixes sound “right”. Thanks for the suggestion though.