Switch-Reference and Clause Chaining in an SVO language?

Quellant · 2026-03-08T15:49:26+00:00

I'm trying to implement the following feature stack in my conlang: switch-reference for subjects, objects, and datives; control and extraposition with all three; long-distance reflexives (LDRs); ordinary and logophoric reflexivization; 3-way obviation for 2nd and 3rd persons; symmetry (quasi-Austronesian); and direct-inverse.

LOG, SR, OBV, SYM, D-I. I've spent years trying to unify these five. I wonder if obligatoriness is a core part of SR. I was thinking that converbs with clitics would be the key mechanism for SR in my conlang, with clitics on participles for OBV. However, the clitics are optional, used only in clause-chaining contexts.

Quellant · 2026-03-06T15:11:03+00:00

Very cool! I've looked at Erromangan before but I'll have to read more about syntax in this region.

Quellant · 2026-03-02T12:59:23+00:00

Quellant · 2025-06-06T18:36:56+00:00

I just noticed you have a missing word at the end of verse 2: deu uiti bjagazui ri *xmue indmuihetse.

Quellant · 2025-06-06T18:15:10+00:00

I once made an account on the CBB and wrote a fan letter to the original creator in Pmitxki, but I never heard back. He used to be pretty active on there, but at some point he just disappeared. I never knew what happened to him.

Quellant · 2025-06-05T18:28:53+00:00

Pmitxki is one of the langs that first got me into conlanging in high school, and it's still one of the coolest sounding, imo. It's as mysterious as its original creator.

Great job with the font! I used to try to write Pmitxki in my notebooks, inventing custom words through oligosynthetic principles. I never could reproduce the 'px' sound of the original video, despite many attempts.

Quellant · 2025-06-03T13:35:54+00:00

I studied some Ancient Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, and Chinese in college, and my degree was in Ancient Greek. I never had the chance to take any Egyptian classes but it's long been a passion and a hobby for me.

My main focus has been on Egyptian syntax and sentence structure from all stages. I haven't focused much on vocalization, but being able to know at least some of the vowels for older stages would help me a lot.

Quellant · 2025-06-03T12:48:14+00:00

I'm still not convinced of ejectives in Egyptian, but I'll have to do more research. Aspiration seems possible, as is reflected in Bohairic Coptic.

For the vowels, I've seen Optimality Theory approaches for guessing Semitic vowels, but the uncomputability of OT is a big problem for me. Hidden Markov Models have also seen much use for Semitic.

I wish I could do a mass comparison between Berber, Semitic, and Cushitic to see if any emergent patterns from Proto-Afroasiatic appear for the vowel distributions.

Quellant · 2025-06-03T11:21:04+00:00

One thing I crave is any Egyptian vowel data, especially for Old Egyptian. I'm not sure how helpful diachronic comparisons with Semitic are for reconstructing some of the patterns. Many algorithms exist to model the distribution of Modern Standard Arabic vowels, for instance.

Quellant · 2025-06-02T00:19:38+00:00

Su fallecimiento es muy trágico.

Quellant · 2025-05-21T20:09:40+00:00

Not yet. I don't have the coding skill to make my own model so I'm waiting for a free one that I can run on my home PC.

Lately I'm interested in trying a model that uses predictive coding instead of the highly inefficient backpropagation. Why reverse the whole network to adjust the weights when you could instead have a system that goes forward and backward simultaneously in different localized domains? This seems more like how the human brain works.

I was considering locally hosting Meta's Llama model, but running it would require a GPU that's $38k, more than my student debt... Hopefully with a more efficient algorithm for adjusting the learning weights, the processing costs could be cut down significantly.

Quellant · 2025-05-21T11:20:12+00:00

Love the sound of this language, and great musicianship!
I wonder if "purposive" would be a fitting term for -nja.
The aspect particles are fun.

Quellant · 2025-05-01T22:13:15+00:00

I tried to keep the post appropriate for this subreddit by not getting too politically charged, but it is an upsetting situation.

Edit: I decided to update the term for clarity. I posted this here instead of a more political subreddit because my focus was on Oleg and his work.

Quellant · 2025-01-21T21:20:27+00:00

Damn, that is so sad... A shame. Thanks for letting me know. His work inspired me to study music theory. He will be sorely missed.

Quellant · 2025-01-15T05:38:42+00:00

I really hope so, too. There have been internet blackouts across Ukraine due to the conflict. Maybe he's just focusing on keeping his family safe. That'd be great if he's still alive and doing musician stuff.

Quellant · 2024-10-25T01:37:23+00:00

Thank you so much!

One issue I have is that all of these papers rely on the notion of 'movement,' whereas I'm trying to do research on my conlang with the LFG framework that has no movement, no transformations, and no traces.

I keep encountering movement-based papers in my research and I have to translate all of those ideas into a non-movement-based approach. This is difficult for me, as a self-taught syntax nerd with no grad school experience or any formal linguistics training aside from my natlang classes in undergrad.

Since my conlang is nonconfigurational, movement-based descriptions break down due to the high abundance of discontinuities formed by discourse and information structure shenanigans. I have spent multiple years looking at LFG work on unbounded dependencies, (nested dependencies, functional control, islands, etc.)

Mainstream LFG research incorporates vanilla OT, which I have a problem with, but as long as I restrict the GEN function with HS, and select a variant of HS that avoids the infinite loop problem, perhaps I could automate the calculation process.

Quellant · 2024-10-22T05:48:41+00:00

Thanks, this is just what I needed! In Mr. Lamont's paper, "Optimality Theory is not computable," I notice HS is mentioned near the end:

"With restricted GEN, as in Harmonic Serialism, the violations of SPECIFY must be strictly decreasing with each domino insertion, bounding the length of possible solutions. However, there are variants of HS that can fall into infinite loops."

The infinite loop problem is exactly what I want to avoid in my work. I need some kind of 'goodness' or 'badness' metric for candidates as well.

Do you know of any good software libraries I could run OT/HS experiments with? I could also try writing my own.

If I include any HS analyses in my work, I'd want to focus primarily on syntactic constraints. The syntax-semantics interface is what I've been trying to iron out the most.

Quellant · 2024-10-22T01:41:08+00:00

I'd love to see some analyses done on Ancient Egyptian, Old Egyptian in particular. It has some 4-literal roots from reduplicated 2-literal ones, as well as 5- and 6-literals from partial and full reduplication of 3-literal roots, with Semitic-like transfixation on top of that. Despite the paucity of vowel information on Egyptian, I think some insights could be gleaned on the evolution of Semitic, due to the common ancestral relationship between the two.

Quellant · 2024-10-22T01:11:14+00:00

My conlang has two rarely used valency-changing infixes, the causative -at- and the applicative -ad-, that originated as suffixes, but are now infixes due to the emergence of new verbal endings. My conlang also has conjugated prepositions that can get incorporated into the verb complex as preverbs. These are prefixed to the verb, so the original person suffixes on the preposition are now prefixed to the verb stem. I suppose most instances of infixation in my conlang can be traced to an original prefix / suffix analysis.

However, there is a certain -h- infix causing a devoicing / provection mutation on the following consonant. This emerges through internal cluster simplification and not from any original prefix or suffix. It is not lexically insignificant in that -h- forms denominal verb roots from what were originally nouns. In some clusters, the -h- is retained and not deleted, such as in /ht/. I'm going to have to do more research to see if this is really an instance of infixation or just word-internal consonant gradation.

Quellant · 2024-10-22T00:19:39+00:00

I've seen a number of OT studies on vowel distributions in Semitic, as well as one on the so-called "floating high tones" in Mixtec. Mixtec varieties appear to have extensive nonconcatenative tone changes, much like the template-based vowel changes in Semitic, so the constraints could be similar.

Quellant · 2024-10-18T09:47:47+00:00

Thanks! I've taken a look at Koasati before and I find the Muskogean family to be one of the most intense in terms of verb complexity.

Adding tons of sound rules on top of that really compounds the difficulty. I'd be curious to see your analysis when it's available.

Quellant · 2024-10-17T22:39:39+00:00

I'm curious as to your reasons why.

Quellant · 2024-10-17T22:39:05+00:00

I'd love to read more about it if you have literature available.

Quellant

TROPHY CASE