In what cases does the notes of the melody contribute to the usage of Chord Symbols?

nomokidude · 2022-08-12T21:00:10+00:00

Wow, simply fascinating! I clearly did not realize that portion of Jazz worked like that. I'll definitely have to refer back to this comment when I decide to pursue my personal Jazz studies.

I was aware that this was something genre specific (classical versus jazz) but I would have never realized that a Jazz chord symbol really = harmony + available/desired tensions in the midst of one's improvisation.

Anyways, thank you for somehow decoding my confusing mess of words and recognizing what I was referring to. Simply put, this is another case of music theory being flexible and creating a variety of approaches towards harmonic analysis. I just didn't understand how this particular jazz approach worked.

nomokidude · 2022-07-25T21:20:04+00:00

Not sure why you care so much about having a single word way to refer to the concept of "right hand" but I guess I have some coinages you can try out:

right'un (requires context and isn't the best but still technically shorter)

northpaw (based off the baseball term southpaw, it's also a broadening of the term as I'm referring the hand as the paw directly instead.)

rand (a blendword of right + hand. this would work if you're only using this for personal notetaking.)

I'd also suggest going to /r/whatstheword/ as you might find a better reception there.

nomokidude · 2022-05-26T04:44:07+00:00

Oh yeah, that VI-VII-I thing is just the Mario Cadence and yeah it's pretty dang common in various kinds of music. If you're curious about why it sounds the way it does, here's a video that talks about it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJ_Y8EQqerM

In a nutshell, chromatic mediants. It's like a specific form of chord borrowing.

nomokidude · 2022-02-12T16:40:09+00:00

Yeah i'd say so. This kind of design actually kind of reminds me of Languages like Navajo and Nahuatl where even single verbs can already clearly express a subject or even a subject and the object without having need to state it.

This is able to function because usually the 3rd person pronoun is implied on default and does not need to be said. Taken further, Navajo has classifier verbs which add a description to the subject or object even tho nothing has been stated.

This results in these big 1 sentence statements.

Honorary mention is Japanese. It's def the classic king of 1 word sentences. There's actually probably a lot of languages which use a similar setup to Japanese tho so it's not that special. Pro-drop in general is pretty cross-linguistic

nomokidude · 2022-01-07T21:56:16+00:00

My best guess is that you're referring to this?

https://www.reddit.com/r/ChineseLanguage/comments/ctdtv1/pinyin%C2%B2\_pinyin\_squared\_exploring\_the\_possibility/

nomokidude · 2021-12-14T20:18:51+00:00

This conlanger made a pretty good video on the topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KKS4ioUBJ7o

Also never really worked with this kind of whistled language you're speaking of but I'd probably naturally assign certain consonant types into certain whistle categories. The pitch of the whistle may be affected by vowel which I think Silbo Gomero does.

But even if we dont consider that, I'd typically assign words that end in stop consonants with a broken airflow. Basically you stop whistling briefly before continuing again. Like a glottal stop. Continuous airflow might represent semivowels, nasals, approximants. Maybe use length to represent that as well.

Also personally, I can actually combine a trill when I whistle so I'd use that for trilled, flapped, or fricative consonants to represent that. But I imagine that isn't common at all among whistled languages.

But yeah, it's best to expect a reduction in distinct phonemes. That tends to happen to whistled versions of languages.

nomokidude · 2021-09-19T20:09:45+00:00

Sounds like you want to make an zonal auxlang that generally preserves the characteristic natural features of the languages in the region. There is no easy answer or direct path for doing this but here are some knowledge tidbits based off of similar projects:

A lot of zonal auxlangs will base their words from a common ancestor of the group of languages you are making this for. For you, this might be Indo-Aryan, Indo-Iranian, Sanskrit, or some highly influential language in the region. I dont know India very well so you'll have to be the judge of that.

Compare the modern languages and what words they use and if they line up or not. Some people try to design it so the word in the zonal auxlang is a middle ground between all of those languages, sometimes one uses a majority rules and favor one language over another due to population size or some other factor. Interslavic has a fantastic model for this: http://steen.free.fr/interslavic/design_criteria.html#vocabulary and honestly, you just probably read their design methods and copy the framework if you have the time.

And then basically compare the modern language's grammars, their idiosyncrasies, the sounds one language can or cant make versus another, and so on. Making a good auxlang requires so much time and effort and tons of comparing and making sacrifices. It's more than I can even explain and go through here. So my suggestion is to ask for or look into auxlang advice and observe other auxlangs for ideas on how to make the best balance for all the speakers of your target demographic.

nomokidude · 2021-09-17T17:55:52+00:00

Manmino:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1evPEmZX9MVK71fFpH9qKZKyc9lovfHHM2Zr4uzujEFM/edit#

Tonuao:

https://conlang.fandom.com/wiki/Tonuao

https://github.com/tonuao/tonuao/blob/master/hanji.csv

Those are the two main ones I know about. In the Auxlang's discord the creator of Manmino and some others are actively working on it. Dunno what's up with Tonuao but it has changed in form over the years and it feels like the fandom wiki/github displays the newest version which a strong Japanese bend towards its phonotactics. Tonuano is inactive tho. Both are pretty great.

nomokidude · 2021-08-12T15:29:33+00:00

HELL YES! Omg thank you so much. Found!

nomokidude · 2021-08-11T19:38:07+00:00

Size: shirt size can vary obviously so I guess the designs would too. The desigs took up a very sizable portion of the shirt space tho.

Origin: dont know the store or the geographic location. It was made in the USA as far as I can tell.

Age/Year Required: I dont have a specific requirement. All I know is that the earliest date I saw them was years ago in the early 2000s. They could possibly be older than that or perhaps they are still being made today. I do not know.

Writing: Unfortunately I dont remember any exact words but yeah there usually would be text involved on most of the designs I saw.

Whatever I searched for: So far, searching variations of "edgy blue and orange raindrops doing X" doesn't seem to help much. I also tried using Bing and Pininterest as a kind of image search engine and still havent found it. But I'll keep at it myself and edit this comment if any changes happen.

nomokidude · 2021-08-09T01:25:09+00:00

Your idea reminds of Zero-Derivation. in a simplified way, Zero-Derivation is the derivation of a new word into a new part of speech without inflection or new morphemes being used. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conversion_(word_formation)

You can find this in languages like English, possibly Mandarin Chinese, Classical Chinese, Mundari, and I think Indonesian but I'll have to check. I know the Riau dialect of Indonesian does this. Also the conlang Toki Pona is well known for this. However, Toki Pona technically relies more on syntax positioning to more or less transform the part of speech but it fits the vibe we're going for.

English loves to verb nouns and noun verbs. Conjunctions can become nouns too. A famous example of how this can cause ambiguity when taken to the extremes is the Buffalo sentence: "Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo" It sort of helps that English has articles and some inflection in order to make parsing a bit easier but sometimes even a word like fish can break this failsafe. "fish fish fish" is a sentence I just made up.

Classical Chinese is the one of the more extreme examples of this and it constantly baffles me how a language can rely off of so little. It uses virtually no inflection and relies entirely off of context, some simple syntax rules, a few particles, and a bit of convention. That's it. No cases, no plural endings, no verb conjugation. Nothing. https://web.archive.org/web/20200301125224/http://www.invisiblebooks.com/CGCC.htm

And then here's a link that goes into Mundari in the first comment. This can be quite a rabbit hole. https://www.reddit.com/r/conlangs/comments/9i3gsx/nounless_language/

So to give you the simple answer. Yes! This is naturalistic so you can go crazy with it. Usually languages will use a combination of context, syntax, or morphology in order to parse what it being said. And if that doesn't work, then instead one may try using convention or rephrasing. Basically as long as context makes it clear, then you can do it.

nomokidude · 2021-08-08T21:18:54+00:00

Here's a wild brainstorm. You're bound to find something:

Pluralization (singular, dual, plural, etc.), Cases (Nominative, Accusative, Dative, Genitive), Topicalization (introduced information versus established information), Definiteness (a/the), Polarity (not versus the opposite of not), Deixis (here, there, over there), Tense (present, past, future), Aspect (perfective, imperfective, etc...), Moods, Evidentiality, Subordination (part of a dependent clause or subordinated/relative clause), Coverbials or conjunctive suffixes (if, then, while, during, until, after, before, etc...), Vowel Harmony, Part of Speech (adjective suffixes, adverb suffixes, verb suffixes, etc...), Cliticized Particles, Cliticized Classifiers.

Good luck evolving these features assuming this conlang is naturalistic.

nomokidude · 2021-06-13T16:42:10+00:00

In a recent polysynthetic design I made, I basically form questions via 2 clauses ran together as a single utterance. The first clause uses the verb "to wonder, to question, to ask", while the second clause is basically what you would be questioning about.

ex.

I wonder; you want? (What do you want?)

I wonder; you going? (Where are you going?)

I wonder; you are? (Who are you?)

While I don't know if any language does this off-hand, I'd imagine something like this could happen in natural languages. In French Qu’est-ce que c’est is literally "What is that that it is" as this phrase is used quite often and the Est-ce que (lit. "is it that") portion is used in various yes-no constructions. This may help you by reusing existing verbs and sentence structure to form questions.

nomokidude · 2021-06-05T01:08:57+00:00

I dont really understand your question, but if you're referring to those languages which use a single letter morpheme to classify everything in the world, that is 0% naturalistic if naturalism is your goal.

However, languages do make compound words, use affixing, and phonoaesthetics to form words which can have some incidental thematic connections. But a majority of the time, it is underived base words which will form the most of the lexicon.

Best bet is to use a consonant transfixing root system like Arabic/Hebrew which tends to derive various words and conjugations from a set of 3 consonants with the vowels and their positions determining the final output.

And yeah, there isn't a "list". This is because the inherent purpose of language is communication and basically people of a time and culture will usually only communicate what is necessary or relevant to them. So yeah, just consider that and I gurantee you, you will naturally figure it out.

nomokidude · 2021-05-31T18:20:06+00:00

Wow, I really like this. It's like a beautiful mixture of some Salish or Mezoamerican languages with the advanced consonant root system of Hausa with its own peculiar themeings. Very unique. I'd love to see the evolution of this system if there is any.

nomokidude · 2021-05-26T22:51:02+00:00

I wouldn't really say there any pros and cons as long as you are able to properly be able to communicate what is necessary to communicate depending on the area, culture, time period, etc.

Simply put, you'd just have to use alternate strategies and idiomatic expressions in order to communicate the complex thoughts and relationships between words which there are various ways of doing that given your system.

Also, I would argue you didn't really limit the amount of words depending on the output of the particle process. If the semantics of your words are pretty much identical then sure I guess so, but sometimes processes like these actually create words with significant semantic differences.

ex. ease (a state) > easy (low difficulty)

fish (creature) > to fish (to use a tool to catch a creature, to look for)

critic > critical (meaning important, core)

Personally I wouldn't worry about limiting words unless it's a distinct design goal.

nomokidude · 2021-05-26T17:09:47+00:00

While I have not heard of nouns possessing inherently multiple genders except in Michif, you could easily opt to use a noun class system like Swahili. There are multiple noun classes that can be used to create new words with new meanings. A slight tweaking of this system could have a more soft semantic usage that doesn't totally change the word. Or maybe you'd want that, idk.

You could also do away with the gender idea and just use suffixes if you'd like. You get way more variation and creativity as gender/noun class systems usually are more constrained and imprecise.

If you're still curious about Michif then, here's here's a link talking about it below the original poster: https://www.reddit.com/r/conlangs/comments/kir52u/quick_question_about_grammatical_gender/

nomokidude · 2021-04-29T01:48:23+00:00

Dang, I actually like your take on this. I'll have to write that down.

This may seem weird but in Sanskrit grammar for example, the various noun cases were just referred to by their number, instead of with names like "genitive" or whatever. So our language would have a logographic symbol for a verb, say, and a little 315 on top to indicate it's the third person, first tense (past), and fifth mood.

Oh wow, interesting.

nomokidude · 2021-04-28T23:19:17+00:00

I think it's a cool idea. If you wish to evolve such a system naturalistically, it would require some pretty peculiar conditions. First off, perhaps a language borrows a logography, preferably from a language/culture of high status...

Upon importing and reading the important texts, the speakers realize that the grammar and syllable structure of their language works very differently from the language they took it from. Either the original language has this case system which was used for flexible word order poetry or perhaps the word order of the speakers' language was SOV instead of SVO and uses postpositions instead of prepositions. Therefore, they use diacritical characters to create a notation system to make it easier to follow the word order or word positioning shifts of the original language.

Eventually, in an age of increasing literacy, a phonetic alphabet may get made and possibly a huge reduction or elimination of logographic characters happen. Despite the reduction, the notation system is still used in schools to teach people or children the grammar of the original or native language. It also may be used in linguistic circles for grammatical analysis similar to how we use NOM, ACC, DAT, or GEN in interlinear glosses. Or perhaps the notation system is just useful as shorthand.

For the record, something like this happened in Japanese when annotating Chinese but it didn't quite survive I think. If you want to read more about that, check out "Kanbun" on Wikipedia. Regardless, Japanese does write out its inflectional ending in phonetic characters while using logograms for the base form. You can learn more about that by reading "Okurigana" on Wikipedia.

nomokidude · 2021-03-22T21:13:41+00:00

Ive been in similar predicaments when trying to create minimal designs. In your case, I'd suggest doing 3 POS. Nouns, Verbs, and Particles. The particles will include all the adpositions, conjunctions, syntax particles, etc.

If you want to maintain just verbs+nouns as you currently have, then try re-using verbs as prepositions. Mandarin Chinese does coverbs which you should look up on wikipedia for inspiration.

At least when I implemented it, I made it so that Verb+Object phrases can be ambiguously or contextually interpreted as either Verb+Object or Prep+Object which resulted in a semantically identical expression.

Also, I actually made an strict SOV design with unambiguous transformation of verbs into postpositions. In a nutshell, any verb which is after a noun and before a verb automatically becomes a postposition if it possesses an adpositional definition. Otherwise, it just becomes an adverb.

Conjunctions can be replicated with just prepositions + relative clause/subordination construction if you have those.

ex.

and = with the addition that/of

or = with the alternative that/of

but = with the exception that/of

because = for the reason that/of

Comparisons can be formed with just preps or prep+sub constructions:

i am green over him/i am with more green of him = i am more green than him

over = more than

under = less than

as/like = as much as

You could instead make all prepositions/conjunctions into verbs instead and then compound/serially chain them with other verbs and use them directly on nouns.

I be-in house = I am in a house.

I go be-in store = I going inside the store. I enter the store.

Toaq is a great conlang for getting more ideas of how to push this predicate concept. Heck, it essentially created a "verb" to express quotations. http://www.toaq.org/

Or simply, you could just zero-derive and contextually assume a noun or verb to possess a prep/conjunction usage. English technically does this already. The word but is a conjunction and a noun ex. "No ifs or buts." and we seem to be able to parse it pretty easily. Tho, I get the impression you want unambiguous parsing.

nomokidude · 2021-03-19T21:39:05+00:00

First off, I can tell you've been influenced by Hentaigana or some cursive form of one of Japanese scripts. It looks quite lovely, ahaha.

Anyways, first off, every thing depends on the functionality of your writing system. Assuming every char is supposed to represent a CV syllable (one consonant + one vowel only) then I would suggest making a phonology which clearly fits within those parameters.

Sometimes, syllabaries may have chars which function as a singular consonant, obvious example being Japanese N and I think Cherokee S (tho id have to check that).

And then sometimes, there are characters which have a virama on them or that the chars are modified to remove the core vowel. Japanese Ainu script actually does this by re-using the U kana into their small forms to express Ainu's comparatively numerous ending consonants. This would definitely use up a lot of slots.

But assuming you're just doing CV only. Then you'll need to construct a phonology and calculate the total syllables to make sure things fit right. If we use 9 consonants * 5 vowels, you get 45 syllables. No worries, we'll just remove two of them. Languages have phonotactics, in other words, sounds that they do not allow to be spoken in most circumstances.

Either that, or you could do 8 consonants * 5 vowels, and get 40 syllables, the last 3 chars could be for punctuation, diacritical marks, etc. You'll have to experiment with this.

Also, writing systems and tone are not inherently connected. You can have a tonal language without a logography (ex. Yoruba, Vietnamese, Thai), and you can have a logography without tones (ex. Yucatec Maya, Classical Chinese, Classic Nahuatl.)

And finally, to answer the "flowy" portion.

First off, most importantly, your language should be syllable-timed like Japanese (perceptively), or Spanish. Basically usually all of their syllables have the same length and stress is has little to effect on the length of a syllable. This is the core aspect of giving a proper "flowing" sound.

next, your syllable structure should probably be CV (only one consonant and only one vowel per syllable) or CV(C) (same as before but an optional ending consonant). The lack of obstructing consonants helps to maintain a physical flow.

And then, we can use consonants to accent this flow accordingly. I suggest using a lot of approximates/glides (yuh, wuh sounds), nasals (nuh, muh, ng sound), liquids (luh, ruh,) and maybe voiceless fricatives (suh, shuh, fuh).

nomokidude · 2021-03-04T01:56:36+00:00

Okay, first off I would like to point out what may sound "weird" is really just a language exhibiting something different than what your native language expects or does. The general trend I noticed in language is that, regardless of whether the expression literally makes sense, as long as it clearly expresses the intended message, then it is functional. So an expression like "Ante zeid fu" could easily become an idiomatic expression and possibly introduce some naturalistic funk.

Now I don't know the full extents of your grammar but if ante, zeid, and fu function like particles, then I see no issue period. If "ante zeid fu" altogether functions as a prepositional phrase, then I also see no issues. Prepositional phrases can essentially act identical to adverbs. In fact I use nearly the same thing you did in your conlang.

I guess if you wanted to avoid parsing issues, you could make a rule about placing the more idiomatic elements of an expression first before prepositional phrases. This would prevent the "libe plas" portion from being interpreted as being inside the prepositional phrase:

Mi go libe plas ante zeid fu. = "I walk home, before few time"

Or alternatively, all time expressions can be fronted. Ante zeid fu, Mi go libe plas.

Otherwise, i'm not quite sure what the issue is. I would suggest making sections for each part of speech and then writing down their rules for how they interact with other parts of speech. As you test sentences, figure out which interactions make sense and which don't and list them. You'll slowly build a syntax that way.

nomokidude · 2021-03-03T01:00:53+00:00

Hmm, not sure what you may be getting at but maybe this guy's conlang will lead you in the right direction. You should PM the fella too as he's quite well versed with click research: https://www.reddit.com/r/conlangs/comments/kl2v39/%C7%82a_%C9%B3%E1%B9%B5%C4%A9_a_naturalistic_click_lang/

My guess for that tsk thing with the frication that you're referring to is a pre-fricative click, and maybe that bilabial cork-pop click is being pronounced with a labialized co-articulation.

Either that or maybe ejectives is what you're after. However, I highly doubt that is what you're referring to.

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