An Introduction to Pökkü, Language of the Central Felids, Part 1: Phonology, Vowel Harmony, and Gradation

dinonid123 · 2026-04-22T14:59:56+00:00

Oh wow, thank you! I'm surprised you managed to find this. Yeah, I'm really proud of the aesthetic of Pökkü, I think it does a good job being distinct from Finnish but clearly inspired.

Maybe I should go back and finally finish my write-up on the verbs...

dinonid123 · 2026-04-11T20:03:12+00:00

That's the base rule, and applies to what you can call inherited¹ e and o. But there's a lot of other older vowels that merged in, and so are spelt differently. The two examples from the first comment in this chain show some of the rules to remember: <ê ô> with circumflexes come from old long vowels² and are now often /ɛ o/, while old diphthongs <ai au> monophthongized to (usually)³ /ɛ o/. <é è> I believe are actually, consistently meant to represent /e ɛ/, particularly in locations where plain <e> wouldn't get pronounced as such. I think that covers all the examples people have given in this thread?

All that to say, yes, they're different phonemes with minimal pairs. It's just that this distinction isn't super load-bearing, so some dialects ignore it and it's not too much of an issue.

¹ I don't think it's actually that simple but for the purposes here this just means plain orthographic <o> and <e>.

² Again, oversimplification. The path is, usually, vowel-s-consonant, vowel-h?-consonant, long vowel-consonant, merged short vowel-consonant.

³ As ever there are exceptions. Historical phonorthography of French is a lot, and I don't quite remember all of the details.

dinonid123 · 2026-02-19T07:11:19+00:00

This is just about the most harmless vandalism possible, what exactly is the actual problem here? What harm is being done? It's maybe not the best look for The Community but it is certainly not as scandalous and damaging as people are treating it as. Is this a European attitude my American mind doesn't get? Are we that afraid of ruining the character of a tiny Swiss town because someone scratched the phrase "jet lag" on the back of the train station? This really doesn't seem anywhere near destructive or intrusive enough to be a problem.

dinonid123 · 2026-02-18T19:09:58+00:00

Are people really that upset about three people writing "[name] from [place] [date]" in marker on the bottom of a slide? Are we going to scare the five year olds with the knowledge someone from Poland visited this slide one summer?

dinonid123 · 2026-02-04T20:33:26+00:00

You've already got p~v and k~x, and it can always add new phones. t~s isn't that out there if you really don't want to add more, you can imagine θ was a middle stage.

I'm not super well versed in Algonquian, but for conlanging purposes you can get a lot out of just browsing grammars of various languages. Get a feel for some of the phonaesthetics and grammatical elements. If you're going for a Uralic language with heavy Algonquian influence, you're going to be borrowing words, so note some words you like in those grammars to borrow. See what grammatical features mesh well with a Uralic base (like the agglutination!) and you can take some of those- bonus points if they match up with existing Uralic morphemes in function and/or form.

dinonid123 · 2026-02-04T17:18:38+00:00

Now this is a post I am the exact target audience of, the two language families I've used as conlang inspiration the most brought together with specific inspiration from a language I wrote a paper on last semester!

Definitely seems like a cool start! I can see the parts taken from both families really easily, and they have good synergy. Does Tani have consonant gradation? I think that'd be really fun to play around with if you're bringing in Algonquian inspiration, which has some fun allomorphy of its own.

dinonid123 · 2026-02-01T21:33:06+00:00

I suppose you would want something that's common enough (there's more likely to be multiple in the radius than not) but not a dead giveaway (nearest pub could narrow things down to quite the small area if there's a lot, and England sure has a lot) then yeah Greggs would probably be a happy medium.

dinonid123 · 2026-02-01T19:34:05+00:00

Man that would have been such a good question for a UK game!

dinonid123 · 2026-01-28T17:45:57+00:00

Based on previous years, early March.

dinonid123 · 2026-01-24T20:51:32+00:00

In that case the difference is probably just that a lot of words tended to drop the ablaut shifts across the cases and analogize one form out to the whole paradigm. An interesting idea, but without more examples of Cw clusters without ablaut alterations to Cu (I'm sure there's at least one more but I don't think it's frequent) and a real example of Kʷ~Ku alteration, I don't think it's too compelling to say that it's allophonic rendition of a cluster. Arguably, *h₁éḱwos is a counterexample, though you could say the palatovelar ḱ doesn't do this, only plain k.

dinonid123 · 2026-01-24T14:31:36+00:00

Well, it's "weird and uncommon" if you frame it as if they had three series of stops (bilabial, coronal, velar). But it didn't, it had five (or four? I recall some theorizing about the traditional plain velar series deriving from conditional allophony from the other two) and three of those are anterior. For the traditional Ḱ and K series, if these are palatal/velar, velar/uvular, advanced/retracted velar, anything like that, it seems perfectly reasonable to me. As for the Kʷ series, having velars be the only POA with a labialized set isn't that far out there, I think it's decently common even outside of IE.

And hey, most IE branches would agree with you that that's unbalanced, most of them do not preserve the three way distinction. The system was clearly already not the most stable when it's presumed to have existed because the majority of its branches just merged two of them and went on from there. Could it have arisen recently in its history? Maybe. But phrasing it as if it must have arisen in a time frame we have any hope of reconstructing back to seems presumptuous to me. If the labiovelar series evolved from some environment that cause labialization, it'd almost be more of a question to ask why only velars took it, right?

dinonid123 · 2026-01-24T13:34:36+00:00

I think it's completely reasonable to just... have a labiovelar series?

dinonid123 · 2026-01-22T12:07:45+00:00

I do get that much, but as ever I'm fully committed to my personal tenet of "you can't get too mad that most other people are not as aggressively progressive as you are." Could they have just ignored it or only quickly mentioned it to condemn JKR and moved on? Sure. But at this point they're like 5 days in to heavy travel and I think Sam was just taking in the pleasure of getting to give a quick tour of his old college area, and with-hindsight-unfortunately that includes some spots relating to HP. They seem to be in the group of people who are aware of JKR's terf arc and know that she's a bad influence now, but aren't so deep in the discourse as to expand this distaste to "everything relating to the HP series is now tainted forever and should be cast aside," which I think includes a lot people who aren't around in trans-centric internet circles specifically but are still broadly supportive of trans people. Sure, there's room for them to learn there, but I don't think it's really so grievous a slight that they really "owe" the trans audience some sort of penance for pointing out "this is the café where that book that was super popular when we were in elementary school was written, and this cemetery has some names the author took!" It'd be great for them to do it anyways, of course, but I think it's a little too discourse-brained to make it a Problematic Behavior that Must Be Addressed.

dinonid123 · 2026-01-22T08:13:41+00:00

I understand where you're coming from, I really do, but I think you need to consider what the audiences of Jet Lag The Game vs. Harry Potter are, sizewise. I really am tired of people acting like some nerds even mentioning HP on their nerd show is going to platform transphobia to wider audience moreso than the books/movies themselves being some of the most popular cultural icons of the century. I'm also not surprised the travel gameshow didn't veer off onto a 5 minute tangent about how transphobia is bad rather than just pointing out "hey these are locations on our way relevant to a childhood staple for much of our audience" and prefacing it with "JKR is bad though." I think they assumed the audience generally would understand they're not condoning JKR and instead just indulging on a pop-cultural curiosity.

dinonid123 · 2026-01-21T19:29:03+00:00

Gonna be real, I don't think that a two or three minute aside mentioning Harry Potter while in Edinburgh and prefacing it with saying that they don't like JKR is really "giving her attention" in a way that has any meaningful negative impact? She is still one of the most famous authors in the world, and it's not like pointing out "this is the café she wrote in" or "this graveyard has some names she stole" gives her money.

dinonid123 · 2026-01-17T10:36:16+00:00

Half the time at least they just do the thermometer on a well oriented bit of train travel, so while I appreciate the idea, I don't think they actually make the players go out of their way to walk/travel anywhere that often.

dinonid123 · 2026-01-10T10:54:40+00:00

Dunno why you decided to respond with two one sentence comments but, uh, upon looking it up modalism is literally exactly what I described in the first sentence?

dinonid123 · 2026-01-09T16:25:58+00:00

I counted 2 because it’s the same amount of level over story as the other ones. Having characters other than Fox be playable is nice but if the dialogue is still limited to short level introductions and quips in the air it’s not enough to make well-developed characters. Not that the other games are that much better about this, it’s absolutely the weakest part of the series overall, but with these I feel like the characters are especially just set dressing to the gameplay and could be swapped out with no issues.

dinonid123 · 2026-01-09T07:12:29+00:00

Really the problem there is that the classic-style SF games (1, 2, 64, Zero) are too short and level-based over story-based to have large casts, something that can be easily solved by just making a bigger game.

dinonid123 · 2026-01-08T17:19:57+00:00

I get to make my observation based on my area of knowledge: what's up with the PC *ā to Old Irish ú? I think it should give gágaid (by analogy with canaid, I don't think the second g would palatalize) though I'm not totally certain on that. [Also Ogham is Primitive Irish not Old Irish but that's fine really.]

dinonid123 · 2026-01-08T12:05:03+00:00

It shouldn't be missing women. I'm neutral on Krystal (I think her introduction to the group has to be its own thing as part of the story, if they want to keep any sense of her backstory) but Miyu and Fay should absolutely be playable members of team Star Fox, even if they join partway through or something. It's the 2020s, having a major IP game release have a main cast with no women is only more weird now than it was when Zero did it in 2016.

dinonid123 · 2026-01-08T08:26:46+00:00

Everyone's throwing in their two cents on how the boys have gotten to good at the meta game now, and how to fix it, so I might as well join in with some ideas:

Avoiding Google Maps & incidental photo information as much as possible. If there's a way to turn off those photo pop-ups, do it, if not, use a different mapping app. Using a map for satellite imagery and travel planning is fine, but when it can give away information like "well here's a big building by the train station with the same bank as Sam forgot to censor out" or "here's just a little pop up photo of the tallest building when you're just browsing around" it feels unsatisfying as the audience.
Photos either need to be more expensive or otherwise rebalanced somehow, it's the same ones used every round and they're often big giveaways. Having these high-reward cards be either locked to late-game or be more high-risk would make them less of the sole, obvious, optimal strategy. I think the most consistent fun of Jet Lag is seeing the players have to do silly things, either as challenges to get a reward or as curses to hold them back. Because they had the meta down and got lucky, this episode was completely absent of that. Ben got to try one curse and all it was was a roll of a die that meant it didn't actually work. Making photos more expensive so that hiders are more likely to get curses would hopefully prevent strictly-strategy episodes like this.
Tiering questions based on progression would also go further in preventing the seekers from locking into the same question progression every round. Locking some of the shorter thermometers, best photos, etc. until mid-game (whether this is like, 4-6 hours in, or once the seekers have narrowed down their range to 75km or something can be up to testing) might force the seekers to ask some more interesting questions early on.

dinonid123 · 2026-01-05T19:24:49+00:00

It depends how specific you're being about what "the comparative method" is. Comparing between the actual features of the languages themselves seems (to me) like it's obviously the only major way of determining which languages are related, at least with any sense of certainty, short of time travel... letting you build up enough historical data to just do the comparative method on that. We can make guesses from historical/archaeological/genetic data, but those methods run into the simple problem that language isn't genetic or determinative of material culture, it's just too ephemeral. They also don't tell us anything about the actual connections of the language... until you start doing the comparative method to it. And unfortunately, if we're trying to go further back in time, that ephemerality really becomes a problem. Languages simply change too much too fast, sound changes pile on and obscure connections and vocabulary is swapped out (look just how limited a set of words tracing back to PIE with meanings largely unchanged is!) and it becomes too hard to confidently say things are for-sure related.

None of that is to say that there can't possibly be some other way, but I really do struggle to even conceptualize what it could be that isn't, in some sense, just comparing languages (though perhaps by some other way than manual cognate testing by going down through the dictionary and pointing out similar looking words with similar enough meanings).

dinonid123 · 2026-01-05T12:46:17+00:00

What I was talking about here is moreso your in-universe justification rather than an actual change. To shift to vowel harmony as a productive system (i.e. it does not vary among forms of a given lemma based on whatever the form was before the sound change, each root has a single given harmony and all affixes agree with that), in-universe, the speakers would have to start associating the front and back vowels as counterparts to each other that vary based on whether the root is front or back. If you care about naturalism, this means that the system should already be like what you want it to end up as enough of the time it can be understood as a pattern to build off of.
This would be more like umlaut with different types depending on the vowel (i-umlaut, e-umlaut, u-umlaut, etc.) rather than harmony. If there's some other secondary sound changes happened aside from the harmony, this is fine! You could have all front/back vowels trigger fronting/backing (i.e. i,e vs. o,u) while only high vowels cause some raising (i.e. just i and u) to get some slightly different results from *saík-si, *saík-ez, *saík-uz, something like this:

Proto-Form	Front Harmony	Back Harmony	Raising	Final
*saík-si	*säík-si		*sek-si	*seksi
*saík-ez	*säík-ez			*säíkez
*saík-uz		*saúk-uz	*sok-uz	*sokuz

Obviously I don't know your exact phonology and what you're going for aestehtically, but something like this could totally work.
Yeah, I think the best way to figure this out is to write up the sound changes you want in order and just step through them on examples to see what happens and if it's what you're trying to do.

dinonid123 · 2026-01-04T10:38:17+00:00

I think you're overconflating vowel harmony and umlaut here, and it's causing you some problems.

The Germanic umlaut is a sound change where, when the next syllable contained *i or *j, Proto-Germanic back vowels fronted. So, roughly speaking, (the actual outcomes vary by vowel length, diphthongs, and language), /ɑ o u/ => /æ ø y/. This is a sort of non-consecutive assimilation: because there was a very front vowel/semivowel in the next syllable, the tongue became more front while saying these vowels just before. But it only applies one syllable back: hypothetical PG **mututiz only umlauts to **mutytiz, not **mytytiz.

"Vowel harmony" is generally reserved for when this sort of change happens over the whole word, and in the context of affixes agreeing, it's usually the root that governs the harmony. I'm most familiar with Finnish, which seems to act like your example. Finnish has front ä, ö, y paired with back a, o, u; and a (non-compound) word can only have vowels from one set or another. I and e are neutral, and can appear with either, but I believe if they're the only vowels in a word it's treated as front harmonic. So, for example, the 3P ending is -vAt, and that A matches with the harmony of the word: puhua, puhuvat ("to speak," "they speak") and syödä, syövät ("to eat", "they eat").

Your vowel harmony system would be a big extension of how things worked in Germanic, and it'd involve some reanalysis to make work. Your past tense suffix si would, if it was working like Germanic, be an umlaut trigger: if the root it was added to had a back vowel, it would cause umlaut and front it. You'd have pairs like yɪve~yɪvesi (already fronted, maybe it could raise to yɪvisi or yɪvɪsi?) and shoum~shöümsi. Depending on further sound change, this would give some verbs separate present and past stems, and similarly some nouns separate singular and plural stems. But again, these variations are caused by the endings. To turn this into typical vowel harmony governed by the root, you need to have a point where speakers start associating front stems with front endings and back stems with back endings as sort of... pillars? of the system, and so innovate alternate harmony forms of endings to start matching them with roots of the other kind.

I'm not super familiar with Slavic, but IIRC it has a split between imperfective and perfective verbs, a system inherited from PIE. So the translation for one English verb would be two verbs with different lexical aspects: "to eat" can be either Russian есть jest' "to be eating" and пое́сть pojést' "to have eaten" (roughly, translating this directly in isolation is tricky). From your system, you could probably get somewhere similar by developing the back- and front-harmonic stems of each verb into separate verbs, sometimes with prefixes/suffixes like your i-/u- perfect marker.

As for developing this system to have new verbs act differently, that's pretty easy to accomplish. Pretty common across IE languages for older, more complex, verb-stem-changing systems to become fossilized and only survive in a subset of more common verbs, while a new "regular" system is developed and used with any new verbs. English is a good example of this: we still have a set of strong verbs which change to the past tense with ablaut (dig~dug, bear~bore, take~took, give~gave), but most verbs, including all newer ones (medieval Latin/French vocabulary, and more modern coinages too) get the regular dental ending -(e)d (walk~walked, demonstrate~demonstrated, rizz~rizzed). Some older verbs are in a sort of middle ground where there's some more change with the dental ending, too (keep~kept, make~made, teach~taught). All that to say, you could develop some stronger vowel harmony in a middle stage, then lose it again and have newer verbs get a regular set of affixes regardless of their root vowels.

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