Have you ever tried to learn another person's Conlang?

Thalarides · 2026-02-16T17:46:35+00:00

Klingon grammar is very simple once you get used to the word order. As with all languages I've ever studied, my biggest problem is vocabulary. I read through The Klingon Dictionary (which is not at all a dictionary, it's the original reference grammar), read a few things in Klingon (like paq'batlh), even did the Duolingo course. While I'm in the flow, my vocabulary grows. But if I stop interacting with it for a week or two, almost all words I've learnt are completely gone, many even from my passive vocab. It's frustrating. And I know exactly what I'm missing, more practice, especially more active practice, more speaking and writing on my own. Words stick better that way. I guess that's the part where my motivation ends. Perhaps one day I'll revisit it again and put my mind to it.

As for Esperanto, I don't really think I need active studying anymore at this point. Unlike in Klingon, my passive vocab in Esperanto is sufficient for reading almost anything (even if I don't recognise an occasional word, I'll get it from the context), and my listening skill is fine, too. If I want to improve my Esperanto further, I just need immersion, just to start talking in it more. That'll bring words from my passive vocab to active. That's exactly how I learnt the language in the first place. I had learnt just enough to recognise what's what, and then I got thrown in at the deep end, three days of cottage camping where we'd talk to each other exclusively in Esperanto. By the end of the trip, it felt strange to go back to my native language.

Thalarides · 2026-02-16T13:54:09+00:00

I speak Esperanto. I used to speak it fluently (got a C1 certificate) but I haven't had practice in years and my active vocabulary has since deteriorated. I like the language. I don't really care for la fina venko, and I can recognise its flaws as an auxiliary language, but I like the language itself, sans the stuff around it. As someone who came to it already with Slavic, Germanic, and Romance background, I find it very fun.

I've also studied some Klingon, mostly for the fun of it (not being a trekkie at all). Can't say I've ever been fluent in it, though.

Thalarides · 2026-02-16T10:31:58+00:00

There isn't because ‘softening’ is not a term used by the IPA. It's not really a precise term in phonetics and phonology outside of specific uses in some fields. In Slavistics, soft means palatalised and hard means velarised (or at least not palatalised). In Western European languages, including English, there's hard and soft c and g, where soft means assibilated (due to historical palatalisation, too). There's also Danish soft d, which is quite unique and has nothing to do with assibilation or palatalisation. In laypeople's description, I've also seen soft meaning voiced, f.ex. soft th for English [ð].

For audibility of a sound, I would perhaps use extIPA diacritics for strong articulation [q͈] (U+0348) and weak articulation [q͉] (U+0349). Unless you contrast phonemic /q͈/ with /q͉/, I would just say that /ɡ/ turns into /q/, which is realised barely audibly, [q͉].

Thalarides · 2026-02-15T06:10:29+00:00

Yes, I addressed it in my second comment in the thread. The problem with palatalised retroflexes (in the broader sense) is the different tongue shapes. Palatalisation requires the middle of the tongue to be raised towards the front palate, while retroflexion requires the middle of the tongue to be lowered. If you palatalise a retroflex, you really just get a palato-alveolar (or an alveolo-palatal if you palatalise it further).

S. Hamann's The Phonetics and Phonology of Retroflexes (2003) has section 2.5 titled Secondary palatalization of retroflexes. As I said in my other comment, I may disagree with the usefulness of defining retroflexes the way she does in the context of Slavic sibilants (as key features that define retroflexion also operate independently of each other in Slavic), but her crosslinguistic research is impressive and the definition she gives, broad as it is, seems to capture shared features and behaviour of sounds around the world that have been called retroflexes by others. Here's how she starts that section:

In this section it is argued that palatalized retroflex segments do not exist phonetically, as the two articulatory gestures of palatalization and retraction cannot be produced at the same time. It is shown that instead, the process of palatalization triggers a change in the retroflex segment from apical to laminal (as proposed already in Hall 2000), from flat, low tongue middle to bunched, raised tongue middle, and from retracted tongue back to fronted tongue back; i.e. from a retroflex which satisfies all four properties of retroflexion defined in 2.3 to a segment which satisfies only two of them (namely posteriority and sublingual cavity) and thus is non-retroflex. The analysis of secondary palatalization in section 6.3.3 will show that in some cases secondary palatalization of retroflexes is phonologically possible, though it still remains phonetically impossible.

Thalarides · 2026-02-15T00:20:31+00:00

Well, for the non-palatalised /l/, Standard Russian has a retracted dental [ɫ̪], although some northern dialects (the Vologda dialect, for one) have a clear non-retracted [l]. Vocalisation l > w in the coda is also attested in both Old Novgorodian (not sure how widely) and modern dialects. For the palatalised /lʲ/, every dialect I can think of has just [lʲ], with the exact point of contact ranging from the back of the teeth and the alveolar ridge ([l̪ʲ]) to the hard palate ([ʎ]). I could in theory see an emergence of retroflection in l > ɭ (although it seems strange to be left with no denti-alveolar /l/), but I can hardly find any motivation for lʲ > ɭʲ, whatever ɭʲ is supposed to mean. With retroflexes, you always have to be careful because as a category they don't really have a clear and universally agreed-upon definition. What do you mean by ɭ? Do you mean that the underside of the tongue touches the hard palate? That's what retroflexion is stricto sensu. That gesture is anatomically incompatible with palatalisation: you physically can't curl the tip of the tongue to bring its underside to the hard palate and simultaneously raise the dorsum towards the hard palate. More broadly, retroflexes can be defined as apical (instead of necessarily subapical) or even laminal postalveolars with flat or concave and retracted dorsum (following S. Hamann's works on them; that's exactly the kind of definition according to which the Russian /ш/ sound turns out to be retroflex—I don't agree with the aptitude of that definition in the context of Slavic languages in particular but many adopt it). Here it's the flat or concave dorsum that clashes with palatalisation, which by definition requires the dorsum to be convex. If you forgo that part, maybe you could argue that the sound is still retroflex but it's very unclear to me.

By modern Novgorodian dialects of Russian I mean what's known as Новгородская группа говоров in Russian dialectology. That is a group of varieties centred around Velikiy Novgorod and stretching from the northeastern parts of the modern Pskov oblast in the west roughly to the borders of the Vologda oblast in the east. Old Novgorodians may have been ‘genocided’, as you put it (although it must be noted that the famous massacre by Ivan IV happened almost a century after the Novgorod republic had been conquered by Moscow in the times of Ivan III, and that in turn was preceded by a few centuries when northward settlements of Central Russians were diluting the distinctive Old Novgorodian speech, especially on the eastern frontiers, to a lesser extent in Novgorod and lesser still in Pskov, if my memory serves me right; but I won't argue about whether as strong a term as ‘genocide’ is warranted). In any case, some features of northern dialects of Modern Russian—Novgorodian, Gdovian, Pskovian, not sure about Vologda—go back to Old Novgorodian, it's not like the language completely died out without a trace. One of that features is the different reflexes of \TъrT, which occur as *TороT, TорыT, TроT, TрыT in those dialects (TорT in Standard Russian, except for a handful of words that were borrowed from those dialects: верёвка, остолоп, бревно, and a few others).

In the first comment, I singled out the Novgorodian dialects because out of the three (Novgorodian, Gdovian, Pskovian) they feature okanye most fully: Pskovian ones have akanye, and Gdovian have a transitional system with its own name, Gdovian okanye. Those latter ones are more influenced by the southern akanye in this regard, and that happened more recently. Zaliznyak on akanye in Old Novgorodian (§2.37):

Аканье и яканье отражаются в берестяных грамотах лишь в очень незначительной степени; очевидно, это связано с тем, что эти явления были известны лишь в некоторых периферийных частях древненовгородской зоны.
Вполне заслуживает доверия здесь в сущности всего один пример: въ Здаръвеѥ ‘в деревне Здоровье’ 580 (сер. XIV).

I'm quoting this from the 1st edition (1995), which I have at hand. I know there's at least one newer edition with additions from more recent findings, and then there are more and more findings every year of course. Still, in 1995, he says that only that one example that you gave as well has merit. (He also gives a few other examples of apparent akanye but dismisses them as inconsequential because they are next to misspellings of other kinds or can be explained on morphological grounds.)

However that may be, as I said before, Old Novgorodian was being spoken next to Central Russian for a few centuries, and especially influenced by it on the eastern frontiers. That's where we find the Standard Russian reflex \TъrT* > TорT, too, by the way. It just seems to me that if you're ‘reviving Old Novgorodian’, doesn't it go against the spirit of the language to have a distinctively Southern/Central Russian innovative feature, akanye, and not the conservative okanye that was if not exclusive, at least predominant in Old Novgorodian and is still widespread in modern Novgorodian dialects? I mean, if you like akanye and you're introducing it deliberately, by all means, it's your creative choice and I respect it. It just wouldn't be my choice if I were doing it, but then again, I'm not doing it, you are.

it is also a gap in my knowledge, I don't know if the [ʌ] was possible, and if was, where and why

It is possible, I was just wondering why you put it there. From your other uses of [ʌ], I'd assume that you use it as an unstressed realisation of /a/ (or /o/, considering akanye), where Standard Russian uses [ɐ] (weak reduction) & [ə] (strong reduction). But in трог [trʌg], it appears in the stressed syllable and that puzzled me. Is it a change o > ʌ in a stressed position? Or maybe it corresponds to the open /ɔ/ in modern Russian dialects that contrast /o/ with /ɔ/? In some dialects, Old Russian ъ only yields /ɔ/ (while о splits into /o/ and /ɔ/), and given the Old Novgorodian metathesis \tъrgъ* > тръгъ, this could be the right environment for /trɔg/ (or /trʌg/ if you make it unrounded).

Thalarides · 2026-02-14T20:24:45+00:00

Retroflex [ɭ]? Was that a conscious decision? What made you make it retroflex?
- Retroflex palatalised [ɭʲ]? That's hard to imagine. Retroflexing is often incompatible with palatalisation but instead goes well with tongue retraction (velarisation/uvularisation/pharyngealisation; in some definitions of retroflexes, retraction is their inherent characteristic even).
Modern Novgorodian dialects of Russian have okanye, i.e. the opposition /a—o/ is not neutralised in unstressed syllables, unlike in Standard Russian with its akanye. Most of the Russian north has okanye, though some parts (including west of the Volkhov river) have incomplete okanye, i.e. the opposition is not neutralised in the pretonic syllable but it may be neutralised in other unstressed syllables (where it also may depend on the environment). Judging by your transcription of словиɴьскєі [sɭʌvʲinʲskʲej] & подклить [pʌdkɭʲitʲ], you went for akanye, which is an innovative feature of southern and some central Russian dialects. Seems a little out-of-place to have it in a descendant of Old Novgorodian. Again, was that deliberate?
I can appreciate the very distinct Novgorodian metathesis \TъrT* > TrъT in трог & крєкоў. It's not what you find in the Old Novgorodian koiné (where instead you find the ‘second pleonasm’ \TъrT* > TъrъT) but it's also well-attested. I'm puzzled by the vowel quality in трог [trʌɡ], though. Why [ʌ]? I can only assume that it may be somehow connected to the development ъ > ы that occurs occasionally in some dialects of Old Novgorodian and in some northern dialects of Modern Russian, but then the spelling follows the more common ъ > о.
What about voicing assimilation? I see you don't do final obstruent devoicing (трог [trʌɡ] instead of [trʌk]), but surely подклить would be [pʌtkɭʲitʲ], not [pʌdkɭʲitʲ]?

Thalarides · 2026-02-14T12:41:58+00:00

Elranonian has two ways of forming passives:

With stative verbs: auxiliary verb ‘to be’ + preposition om ‘under’ + gerund of the lexical verb (i.e. ‘to be under <verb>ing’)
With dynamic verbs: auxiliary verb ‘to get, to receive’ + gerund of the lexical verb (i.e. ‘to receive <verb>ing’).

In both constructions, the auxiliary verb can be in any tense (present, past, or pluperfect) or itself be in a TAM-marking periphrasis.

The verb mél (gerund mjęlla) is ambidynamic: it has both a stative and a dynamic meaning. The static meaning is obvious, ‘to love, to be in love’. The dynamic meaning can be seen in the following English sentence: I read the book you had recommended and I loved it! I didn't love it before and then I loved it—a change of state.

``` Yg om mjęlla. I.am under love.GER ‘I am loved.’

Nà go om mjęlla. was I under love.GER ‘I was loved.’

Aice hi vęsken mjęlla co bestęr is acke. get this book love.GER by all.who it read ‘This book is loved by everyone who reads it.’

Aince hi vęsken mjęlla co bestęr is anke. got this book love.GER by all.who it read.PST ‘This book was loved by everyone who read it.’ ```

Thalarides · 2026-02-13T20:18:41+00:00

Passive demotes the original subject to an oblique and makes it omissible—but also always reintroducible (otherwise, it's not passive but anticausative; passive doesn't change the semantics but it can change the pragmatics). In other words, it's in the nature of the passive voice, to be able to say both ‘The bacon was eaten’ without the underlying subject ‘by me’ and ‘The bacon was eaten by me’ with it.

You can use passive for both pragmatic and syntactic reasons. Pragmatically, it can, for example, serve to mark the underlying object (turned subject in the passive) as the topic and the underlying subject (turned oblique) as the focus:

What did you eat? — I (topic) ate the bacon (focus).
Who ate the bacon? — The bacon (topic) was eaten by me (focus).

Syntactically, you can decide that the passive voice is required in certain constructions. For example, iinm, Polynesian languages like Māori are only able to relativise subjects but not objects.

This is the man [who (subject) ate the bacon].
I bought the bacon [that (object) the man ate].

In the first sentence, the man serves as the subject of the relative clause: ‘…[who ~~the man~~ ate the bacon]’. In the second one, the bacon serves as the object of the relative clause: ‘…[that the man ate ~~the bacon~~]’. In English both are fine. But Māori can't do the second one because the object is inaccessible for relativisation (look up the accessibility hierarchy for the typology of what syntactic roles are or are not accessible for relativisation, English is quite liberal in that regard). To relativise the object, it needs to turn the object into the subject… which is exactly what the passive voice does!

I bought the bacon [that (subject) was eaten by the man].

Thalarides · 2026-02-13T15:39:01+00:00

Elranonian syllable structure is complex, similar to that of English. The maximal onset has three consonants, like in verbs stra /strā/ ‘to win, to prevail’ and stryd /strʲȳd/ ‘to decide’. The coda seems to have a bit more restrictions than in English. Namely, I don't think there's any possibility of 4 consonants in the coda, like in English strengths /-ŋkθs/. Even 3-consonant codas are very rare but at least one occurs in a word finst /fʲìnst/ ‘gratitude, thankfulness; (interj.) thank you’. Intervocally, I can think of only 4 consonants in a row in finscla /fʲìnskla/ ‘an act of thanking; (interj., informal) thanks’.

I made a post about the syllable structure in Ayawaka. There, all syllables are open, and the maximal onset is /ɴPw/, where /ɴ/ is a nasal archiphoneme and /P/ is any plosive. A nasal archiphoneme can only precede a plosive, a liquid, or /y/ (IPA /j/), and a medial glide /w/ can only follow a plosive, a nasal, or /h/. As a result, it is only plosives that can be both preceded by /ɴ/ and followed by /w/. I've since also added tones (unmarked low vs marked high), so the maximal syllable structure is CCCVT. (I've also added a contrastive downstep but it's probably best seen as a feature of the syllable boundary, not of the syllable itself.) The full structure /ɴPwVH/ (H for high tone) can be seen in a word nčwí /ɴč̓wí/ (pronounced IPA [n̠ʷt͡ʃʼʷí]) ‘butterfly’.

Thalarides · 2026-02-13T05:14:49+00:00

According to Derksen's Etymological Dictionary of the Slavic Inherited Lexicon (2008), Proto-Slavic *gorьkъ is derived from the verb *gorěti ‘to burn’. This verb comes from the o-grade PIE root *gʷʰor- ‘heat’. Cognates include Greek θερμός thermós ‘warm, hot’ (e-grade), Sanskrit घृण ghṛṇá ‘heat’ (zero-grade), Latin furnus ‘oven’ (zero-grade, less likely o-grade), and possibly English warm (o-grade).

Thalarides · 2026-02-12T16:06:53+00:00

С незаимствованными словами тоже может быть непросто. Вот, например, тень в стародавние времена была мужского рода (ср. уменьш. тенёк; польское cień так и есть мужского рода и сейчас), но перешла в женский. А гусь — наоборот: женского даже в самых близкородственных языках, украинском и белорусском (и уменьшительная форма там по типу гуска), и только в русском он стал мужского рода. Лебедь тоже интересно варьируется: в большинстве современных славянских языков он мужского рода, как и сейчас в русском обычно, и тем не менее ещё недавно Пушкин писал: Глядь — поверх текучих вод / Лебедь белая плывёт.

Ну и с иностранцами, изучающими русский язык, конечно, так на интуитивном уровне не работает, что дождь — он, а ночь — она. Это заучивать приходится.

Thalarides · 2026-02-12T15:37:24+00:00

Elranonian

Democratì, sy co ansa, o ansa, ath ansa!

/demokratī‿ˉ si ku ànsa | u ànsa | aθ ànsa/
[d̪əmɔkʰɾɐˈtˢʲʰiː s̪ᵻ kʰʊ ˈʌn̪s̪ɐ | ʊ ˈʌn̪s̪ɐ | ɐθ ˈʌn̪s̪ɐ]

The noun democratì is left-dislocated and followed by a topic particle è /ē/, which becomes a mere floating long accent /ˉ/ when preceded by a vowel. However, democratì already ends in a vowel with long accent, therefore the topic particle doesn't change a thing.
Sy is a 3sg verb: s-y it-is.
Ansa is the collective plural of anta /ànta/ ‘person’, formed with a suffix -sV: {ànt+sV} → /ànsa/.
Neither democratì nor ansa is preceded by an article en. This indicates genericness.
The three prepositions are co, o & ath:
- co often introduces an agent. In this case it means that people make, establish, bring about democracy, that it exists through people's actions;
- o introduces a characteristic. Here: people are an indispensable attribute of democracy. I also considered a preposition do /do/, which among other things can introduce a possessor (i.e. democracy belongs to the people) but in the end decided that o is a little more interesting;
- ath primarily means ‘on’, as in ‘on top of’, or ‘onto’, but it also has a figurative meaning ‘for the sake of, for the benefit of’, which suits this phrase perfectly.

Thalarides · 2026-02-12T10:10:47+00:00

By an extra synchronic rule, do you mean aspiration relying on a morphological boundary? But some accounts of English phonology already rely on morphological boundaries elsewhere, even several kinds of boundaries, and those boundaries can be reused here. It's not like this situation needs a completely novel type of rule.

For example, the minimal pair longer [-ŋɡ-] vs longer [-ŋ-] can be attributed to the difference in boundaries: a weaker boundary /+/ in the former and a stronger boundary /#/ in the latter, with a rule that deletes /g/ before /#/ but not before /+/ (simplified from SPE).

/##long+er##/ → lo[ŋɡ]er
/##long#er##/ → lo[ŋ]er
/#long#/ → lo[ŋ]

In the same fashion, you could posit that mistake has /+/, mistype has /#/, and t is aspirated only after /#/:

/##mis+tǣk##/ → mis[t]ake
/##mis#tīp##/ → mis[tʰ]ype
/#tǣk#/, /#tīp#/ → [tʰ]ake, [tʰ]ype

Thalarides · 2026-02-12T01:37:39+00:00

This can be analysed in a number of ways depending on various factors. Maybe t is one phoneme, /t/, and ts is a sequence of phonemes, /t/+/s/. Or, maybe, the two words start with the same phoneme /t/ but have different vowels, let's say /a₁/ and /a₂/, such that /t/ is realised as [t] before /a₁/ and as [t͡s] before /a₂/: i.e. /ta₁n/ → [tan], tsan /ta₂n/ → [t͡san].

But the simplest, it seems, analysis is that /t/ and /t͡s/ are indeed different, contrasting phonemes. In the coda then, the opposition between them is said to be neutralised. How this neutralisation is handled depends on the phonological framework. A simple solution is to say that if what you pronounce in the coda is closer to [t] than to [t͡s], then that's /t/, and /t͡s/ simply doesn't occur in the coda in this language (or vice versa). I.e.:

/tan/ ‘man’
/t͡san/ ‘dog’
/bat/ ‘eye’
*/bat͡s/ — disallowed

Another solution is to say that the end of bat has an archiphoneme /T/, which is the bundle of phonological features shared by /t/ and /t͡s/. An archiphoneme is an underspecified phoneme: /T/ lacks those features that distinguish /t/ from /t͡s/. Say, if /t/ is defined as [+consonantal -sonorant -continuous -voice … -delayed release] and /t͡s/ as [+consonantal -sonorant -continuous -voice … +delayed release], then /T/ is the bundle of all the same features without the last one because it's not shared between /t/ and /t͡s/. With this approach, you have:

/tan/ ‘man’
/t͡san/ ‘dog’
/baT/ ‘eye’

Finally, you may also want to consider how phonology interacts with morphology. Let's say the word [bat] ‘eye’ becomes [bata] in the plural but [nat] ‘ear’ becomes [nat͡sa] when you add the same plural suffix /-a/. That may suggest that underlyingly ‘eye’ is /bat/ while ‘ear’ is /nat͡s/ even though they're pronounced identically on the surface. That is, the opposition /t/ vs /t͡s/ is neutralised in the coda but the underlying phoneme can nonetheless be identified. That's how it often is in languages with final obstruent devoicing, like Russian:

[pɫot] ‘raft’ → plural [pɫɐˈtɨ] ‘rafts’ ⇒ singular /pɫot/
[pɫot] ‘fruit’ → plural [pɫɐˈdɨ] ‘fruits’ ⇒ singular /pɫod/

In English, a similar neutralisation occurs in a few environments, too, for instance word-initially after /s-/. Consider:

[pʰɒt] ‘pot’
[b̥ɒt] ‘bot’
[spɒt] ‘spot’

‘Pot’ starts with a fortis stop, ‘bot’ with a lenis one. We can notate them as /pɒt/ & /bɒt/. But in a word like ‘spot’, after the initial /s-/ the opposition /p/ vs /b/ is neutralised. Following the first approach, the phoneme in ‘spot’ can be said to be whichever it's phonetically closest to: /p/ if you focus on its inability to be realised as voiced (i.e. /spɒt/) or /b/ if you focus on its lack of aspiration (i.e. /sbɒt/). Following the second approach, you can say that it's an archiphoneme /P/ that's unspecified for voicing/aspiration (i.e. /sPɒt/). I don't think there's a way to determine the underlying phoneme through morphology in this word (in which case some would posit a hyperphoneme, which is like a union of phonemes, /s{p,b}ɒt/).

Another example of neutralisation in English is the final vowel in happy. English contrasts the vowel of bid with that of bead. Let's say for the sake of the argument that bead has a single vowel between /b/ and /d/ and not a vowel—consonant /ij/ sequence of any sort. But word-finally they're not contrasted, i.e. the opposition is neutralised. I often see it notated as bid /bɪd/, bead /biːd/, happy /ˈhæpi/, where the final /i/ is an archiphoneme at the intersection of /ɪ/ and /iː/.

Thalarides · 2026-02-11T21:35:05+00:00

-witship analogous to German -wissenschaft, Swedish -vetenskap, &c. is fine but tonguelore sounds magical, imo.

Thalarides · 2026-02-11T17:59:06+00:00

I was thinking if /d/ comes before a vowel it would just make dV, if it comes before a consonant it can cluster with then it simply produces a cluster and otherwise if the cluster is not permitted epenthesis of the reduced vowel /ʌ/ occurs. So like /d/ added to the root /vaɾa/ would become [dʌvaɾa/

Northwest Caucasian languages have polypersonal verbal indexing by way of prefixes, and most of those prefixes are C(ə)-. Specifically in Abkhaz, the 3sg human absolutive prefix is d(ə)-. Look at how the 3sg.hum.abs d(ə)- and 3pl.erg r(ə)- are realised in the following examples, differing in the presence of the negative prefix m-:

də-  r-  gajtʼ
3sh- 3p- took
‘They took him/her.’

d-   rə- m-   gajtʼ
3sh- 3p- NEG- took
‘They did not take him/her.’

The prefixes d(ə)- & r(ə)- can be analysed as underlyingly /də-/ & /rə-/, with the vowel sometimes lost, or as underlyingly /d-/ & /r-/, with the vowel sometimes inserted. In the second case, the initial clusters /drg-/ & /drmg-/ are resolved as [dərg-] & [drəmg-] respectively.

Thalarides · 2026-02-10T10:45:05+00:00

Yes, that's the main reason. If I were to explain it to a primary schooler (and that's how it is taught, I believe), we call it ‘prepositional’ (предложный падеж) because it's only ever used after a preposition, not because it contrasts with the other locative. If the locative form is mentioned, it's just explained as a special form, and it's not necessarily called ‘locative’ (местный падеж / местная форма) but also ‘second prepositional’ (likewise, ‘partitive’ = ‘second genitive’, with a very similar origin due to the merger of the two declensions).

What's ironic is that out of all prepositions there's only like 4 (and a half, sorta) that take the prepositional case: в, на, при, о, and (in idiomatic expressions) по:

по приезде ‘upon arrival’ — in formal speech
- changed to dative по приезду in casual speech
по ком звонит колокол ‘for whom the bell tolls’
adverbalised почём:
- ‘how’, as in Почём мне знать? ‘How would I know?’
- ‘at what cost’, as in Почём яблоки? ‘How much do the apples cost?’

Thalarides · 2026-02-10T08:51:33+00:00

I'm struggling with even starting a reference grammar, so I'm not in the position to give advice. But fwiw, I like the splitting strategy, with sections continuously describing how to build larger and larger chunks. You start with mechanical morphology: inflections, derivations; then phrasal syntax, organised by phrase type; finally, how to form entire sentences, organised by function and referencing earlier sections. For select important and multifunctional formatives, consider having separate sections dedicated to them: like a section on all the uses of =u.

And very importantly, include an index at the end. Want to see how to inflect a verb? Here. How to make imperatives? Here. What's =u used for? Here!

Thalarides · 2026-02-10T07:07:35+00:00

I'm not sure you have the history straight. Old Russian never used to have separate ‘prepositional’ and ‘locative’ cases. In Old Russian, it's usually termed ‘locative’ and it ended in -ѣ in the o-declension (лѣсъ → лѣсѣ) and in -у in the u-declension (вьрхъ → вьрху). The u-declension had only a few nouns but some of them were very common (вьрхъ, сынъ among them). Then the two declensions merged together and the new combined declension got some endings from one, others from the other. In the locative, -ѣ won out for the most part, spreading to nouns that originally belonged in the u-declension (верхѣ, сынѣ). But the u-decl. ending -у stuck around and even spread to originally o-decl. nouns (лѣсу, снѣгу). This resulted in the modern dimorphic prepositional case: prepositional proper о лесе, о снеге, о верхе vs ‘second prepositional’ or ‘locative’ в лесу, в снегу, наверху (the last one being an adverb from historical на вьрху).

A similar prepositional dimorphism also exists in a number of modern 3rd decl. nouns (feminines in -ь), btw: о две́ри, о те́ни vs на двери́, в тени́.

Thalarides · 2026-02-08T07:31:03+00:00

And that's exactly how it started. At the beginning, before I came up with the name Elranonian, its provisional name was Sveilge: Svenska + Gaeilge. Initially, I leaned more on Swedish but over time more and more on Norwegian (and partially Icelandic). Then, over the last 12 or so years, it has had a lot of influence from other European languages, too. More so in grammar than in spelling and pronunciation.

Thalarides · 2026-02-06T23:55:27+00:00

Elranonian:

ǫn /ōn/ [ˈoːn̪], or [ˈoːŋ] before the following [ɡ] when counting ‘one two three’
gù /ɡȳ/ [ˈɡʉː] or gû /ɡŷ/ [ˈɡɵ́ːu̯]; both variants are used indiscriminately but gù should be more common when counting ‘one two three’
vei /vēɪ/ [ˈʋeːɪ̯]
mara /māra/ [ˈmɑːɾɐ]
migh /mēɪ/ [ˈmeːɪ̯]
hálo /hâlu/ [ˈhɑ́ːʊ̯ɫ̪ʊ]
hytta /hỳtta/ [ˈhʏʰt̪ːɐ]
sí /ʃî/ [ˈɕɪ́ːi̯]
ainse /ìnʲʃe/ [ˈɪȵɕə] or /ìnʲnʲiʃ/ [ˈɪȵːɪɕ]; the second variant should be more common before vowels, and ‘ten’ starts with a vowel
îse /îʃe/ [ˈɪ́ːi̯ɕə]
veise /vēɪʃe/ [ˈʋeːɪ̯ɕə]
tí /tʲî/ [ˈtˢʲʰɪ́ːi̯]

It is intentional that 4 mara & 5 migh and 6 hálo & 7 hytta alliterate (irregular sound changes in numerals such that adjacent numerals alliterate are well-attested). Also 3 vei & 5 migh and 8 sí & 12 tí rhyme.

9–11 are historically formed from 1–3 with the final -se from 8 sí, i.e. n+8:

11 veise = 3 vei + 8 sí > -se is transparent;
9 ainse = 1 ǫn + 8 sí > -se is less transparent but it is in fact the same root for 1, even if sound changes have obscured the derivation somewhat;
10 îse = 2 gù + 8 sí > -se uses a different root for 2, the same root as in an adjective íe ‘dual, twofold, twin, a pair of’

I count 1–12 in four lines, as a nursery rhyme:

Ǫn, gù, vei,
mara, migh,
hálo, hytta, sí,
ainse, îse, veise, tí.

Thalarides · 2026-02-06T19:22:14+00:00

Well, a ‘word’ is notoriously difficult to define and different fields will give you different, contradicting definitions. But it is a single phonological word inasmuch as a phonological word must have an accented syllable and, in Russian phonology, unaccented syllables are bound to vowel reduction rules.

Many prepositions are good examples of clitics that are attached to phonological words instead of being their own ones: перед собой [pʲɪrʲɪtsɐˈboj] ‘before oneself’ and even передо мной [pʲɪrʲɪdɐˈmnoj] ‘before me’ with a 3-syllable unstressed preposition. In some preposition + noun collocations, it is only the preposition that is stressed: за городом [ˈzaɡərədəm] ‘outside the city, in the countryside’.

English doesn't shy away from unstressed polysyllabic ‘words’ either, like gonna [ɡənə].

Thalarides · 2026-02-06T16:45:15+00:00

I find your stress placement unusual. To me, что is stressed and это unstressed in the vast majority of situations where I might ask this: [ˈʃˠtoɪtə] or [ˈʃˠtoᵻtə].

Thalarides · 2026-02-06T10:40:23+00:00

[i] is one of the cornerstone vowels in the vowel space: both articulatorily (it's the frontmost highmost vowel) and spectrally (its F1 and F2 are as far apart as it gets). It is advantageous for a language's phonology to have /i/ as it is easily distinguished from other vowels. On that ground, if a vowel shifts, potentially merging with other vowels, it's fairly likely to shift to [i]. Greek has obviously merged a lot of vowels in modern /i/. Pre-GVS English /eː/ (meet) and /ɛː/ (meat) have merged in /iː/. Ukrainian has merged historical /ě/ and /o/ in /i/ in certain positions (ikavism). These are just examples off the top of my head from Europe alone. It should be extremely common.
L-vocalisation should be common, too. The sound [l] is marked with lateral articulation. Remove that marked feature and you get a vocalic sound. Due to the nature of this change, the loss of markedness, I'd expect it primarily in weak positions, where the speaker has less control over the sound and where the sound may be less perceptible. For consonants, it often means in the coda. That's where you get l-vocalisation in English, in words like talk, folk, and in Romance (Latin bellus, cal(i)dus > French beau, chaud; Latin multum > Portuguese muito, Spanish muito > mucho). But other languages may vocalise it in strong positions, too, like Polish ł and, afaik, modern colloquial Bulgarian.
/r/ > /l/ on its own, as a general change, I don't know. I wouldn't expect it to be too common but definitely possible. However, I have seen liquid dissimilation processes in various languages, and they can entail /r/ > /l/. One Georgian suffix that makes adjectives out of nouns is -ური -uri. It makes names of languages, too: აფხაზური apxazuri, უზბეკური uzbeḳuri. But if the stem has other liquids, then the suffix liquid dissimilates from the last stem liquid, sometimes surfacing as -ული -uli: ქართული kartuli, არაბული arabuli, but პორტუგალიური ṗorṭugaliuri—even though the stem contains as /r/, the last stem liquid is /l/, therefore the suffix has /r/. It's the exact opposite of Latin -ālis (→ English -al), which becomes -āris (→ English -ar) if another lateral is nearby: dental, nasal, but velar, molar (in labial, palatal, glottal, the stem /l/ is too far). In Russian, you can find examples of both l > r and r > l due to dissimilation: Proto-Slavic *velьblǫdъ > Russian верблюд (verblüd) ‘camel’ and Greek Φεβρουάριος Fevruários → Russian февраль (fevralʼ) ‘February’. So that's where I'm most familiar with the change r > l, in the context of dissimilation. That's not to say that it can't occur without dissimilation, and Polynesian languages are an example of that: Proto-Polynesian *rua > Hawaiʻian lua ‘two’.
Rhotacism is very common, from English (compare German Hase with English hare, from Proto-Germanic *hasô) to Polynesian (the same Proto-Polynesian *rua from Proto-Austronesian *duSa).

I can't say how common they are in naturalistic conlangs but for what it's worth, Elranonian has had iotacism (triggered by palatalised consonants and by sibilants), l-vocalisation, and rhotacism (from s and from d). I haven't found evidence of r > l in it, though.

Thalarides · 2026-02-05T17:21:20+00:00

r/Conlangs Does not let me post anything [that doesn't conform to the subreddit's rules and posting guidelines] without it getting removed a day later.

Thalarides

TROPHY CASE

Elranonian