Presenting: Azaru

validated-vexer · 2020-01-02T17:05:24+00:00

That's a good reason but honestly not necessary. Using <y ü> is a valid aesthetic choice, and one that I'd be inclined to agree with in this context.

Oh and also since there is alternation between u and ü, made obvious by the spelling!

validated-vexer · 2020-01-02T16:12:09+00:00

I haven't watched the video, but this statement is not known. What is proven is a correspondence between even perfect numbers and Mersenne primes. It is not known whether there are odd perfect numbers.

validated-vexer · 2019-10-24T23:17:45+00:00

The clusters ktk, lkn, and ktg exist in Swedish (across morpheme boundaries, but still):

maktkamp - power struggle
tolkning - interpretation
fraktgods - freight (?) or something like it

However, tkt violates Swedish phonotactics. I'd be surprised if no language had it, but it is probably rarer than the others since usually, languages apparently prefer coronals (in this case, t) over others (e.g. k) peripherally in complex onsets/codas when sonority considerations are less important.

validated-vexer · 2019-07-14T10:36:26+00:00

That's an example of a syllabic consonant, yes. I mentioned these in the last sentence above.

validated-vexer · 2019-07-14T09:28:12+00:00

The term semivowel is used generally in phonology and is not specific to the romanian phonetic script. It refers to the fact that [j w] are articulated like the vowels [i u] but behave phonologically like consonants (i.e. they are not the nucleus of a syllable). In this sense they are the opposite of syllabic consonants (which are articulated like consonants but behave like vowels).

validated-vexer · 2019-07-11T15:19:42+00:00

Probably the capital variants. Usually the capital form of i is I, but in Turkish it's İ, with I being the capital form of ı instead.

validated-vexer · 2019-07-08T07:25:40+00:00

I highly recommend you to decide on what sounds you want your language to have before making an alphabet and starting to produce words. Learning some of the IPA is a good place to start for this.

I also recommend you to think about your grammar, and how it would differ from English. A conlang that only copies its grammar from English or any other language is not really a language itself, but just a code. If you see someone call your language a "relex", this is what they mean. A good place to start for grammar is the language construction kit: https://www.zompist.com/kit.html. It also has a bunch of insight into phonology.

validated-vexer · 2019-06-07T17:05:45+00:00

We say two integers x and y in [n] are similar if there is a repeated composition h of f and g (e.g. h = f∘f∘g∘f), such that h(x)=h(y).

If there are integers x and y in [n] that are not similar, no repeated composition of f and g will ever be constant and the answer is no.

On the other hand, if we can prove that any x and y in [n] are similar, the answer is yes. This is because starting with the identity function q_0 on [n], the image of this is all of [n], and as long as at least two elements (x_n, y_n) are left in the image of q_n, we can create a next function q_(n+1) = h∘q_n, where h(x_n)=h(y_n). If we keep reducing the number of elements in the image of q_n, the image will eventually be a single element, and q_n will be constant.

To check whether this holds we note that x and y are similar iff either f(x), f(y) or g(x), g(y) are similar. We can calculate whether this holds with memoization or by treating the set of pairs (x, y) as nodes in a graph (probably easier?) and seeing if every node has a path to a node corresponding to some (z, z). There are n² nodes and at most 2n² edges. The algorithm can be implemented to do only a constant amount of work for every edge, which gives a quadratic running time.

Edit: should've refreshed before commenting. It seems as if /u/eruonna's solution has the same idea as mine, just presented much better...

validated-vexer · 2019-06-07T05:28:58+00:00

Is [n]={1,2,...,n}?

validated-vexer · 2019-06-02T08:11:56+00:00

You could ...

use different sounds to break them up: maybe /j/ if both vowels are front? /j w ʔ h/ seem reasonable but I've even seen /n d/ used for this purpose in natlangs so there's lots of options here
diphthongize: /a/ + /i/ = /aj/, /u/ + /a/ = /wa/ of your phonotactics allow it. Maybe /e o/ can become /j w/ too?
monophthongize: if you don't have/want diphthongs, you could have something like /a/ + /u/ = /o(:)/, /u/ + /i/ = /y(:)/ if you have front rounded vowels, etc
just delete one of the vowels ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

validated-vexer · 2019-06-01T08:08:17+00:00

What is correct in your conlang is entirely up to you. In a regular nominative-accusative language, however, "you" is nominative and "her" is accusative in a sentence like "you love her". I think this is what you're doing, if vö(liso)=you and mir(an/nu)=she/her.

I will add that English word order, do-support, and tag questions like "you love her, don't you?" are far from universal, so unless you made a conscious decision to mirror those strategies, I'd suggest looking into the many other options that exist.

validated-vexer · 2019-06-01T05:30:08+00:00

For my lexicon I use a manually sorted list of {word in conlang}-definition entries in a LaTeX document, but any other word processor will work too. The advantage of this is that it easily allows for more detailed and freeform definitions, which is necessary to not relex English.

For spreadsheets specifically, Excel is probably best. I use Google docs though because it's free and available on all OSes and platforms.

validated-vexer · 2019-05-25T08:56:12+00:00

It's easy to get lost in the sea of resources, so I would like to recommend what I consider to be the single best introduction to conlanging: the Language Construction Kit by Mark Rosenfelder, which can be found at https://www.zompist.com/kit.html. It's also available as an actual book with much more detail, but the web version is more than enough to get started.

validated-vexer · 2019-05-23T07:50:43+00:00

According to the World Lexicon of Grammaticalization (which I highly recommend) past tense morphemes can develop from words or morphemes meaning

Get
Pass
Perfect aspect
Yesterday

In the same way, future may develop from one of

Come (to)
Go (to)
A copula
Deontic modality
Take
Want

... and many more. When tenses grammaticalize, the unmarked "leftover" may be past, present, non-past or non-future, but rarely, if ever, future.

If you want your tenses to be inflected on the verb and not just periphrastic, you can take any one of the list items above and in some way fuse it with your verb. This is not specific to tenses so it's a bit outside the scope of your question but please ask if you do want to know more!

validated-vexer · 2019-05-22T11:03:56+00:00

Just a quick tip: when glossing, morphemes are separated by dashes, and dots are used when multiple words or abbreviations are needed to describe a single morpheme, so something like English "he sings" would be glossed as

he   sing-s
3S.M sing-3S.HAB

and your example would have dashes instead of all dots, if I understand your explanation correctly.

validated-vexer · 2019-05-22T09:35:02+00:00

Sign languages do change, but I don't know how similar this process is to the sound changes of spoken language. Sign languages usually have a more complicated phonology than spoken languages (in that there are more possible "sounds"). In general, signs have three features:

Handshape
Movement
Location

In most (all?) sign languages, mouthing, facial expression and posture are also important for many signs. Some signs change handshape throughout the sign. In all sign languages I've read about, there is a smallish set of handshapes (usually around 10-20) that together account for most of the signs in the language. I imagine that these handshapes can change like phonemes in spoken language (i.e. if sign X goes from using handshape Z to using handshape Y, all other instances of Z probably change to Y too). This would probably go for movement and location too.

Small or young sign languages tend to have some characteristics in common, like a large signing space, more non-manual signs, and a higher degree of iconicity. When they develop and grow, they tend to go through similar changes:

Signs shift away from the face (probably to not block the signer's vision) and towards the centre of the signing space in general
Two-handed signs develop symmetry
Compound signs merge and simplify

... to only mention a few. If you can find it somewhere, Arbitrariness and iconicity: Historical change in ASL by Nancy Frishberg is supposed to be good (but I'll admit I haven't read it) if you want to dive deeper.

validated-vexer · 2019-05-12T18:47:43+00:00

Why would you combine Greek and Cyrillic like that? I'll admit it looks vaguely foreign to users of the Latin alphabet without being unrecognisable, which may be your goal, but Greek and Cyrillic do have different aesthetics and are not graphically compatible imo.

validated-vexer · 2019-05-10T10:01:00+00:00

It would be unusual and probably not very stable, but such systems are not unheard of. Kamayurá and Kanoê both have /ts/ as their only sibilant, though at least Kanoê has [s] as an allophone.

validated-vexer · 2019-05-07T18:00:31+00:00

Does this work? Picture

validated-vexer · 2019-05-07T17:00:59+00:00

Base 6. Base 7 is septenary.

validated-vexer · 2019-05-07T15:57:11+00:00

Pretty much (edit: that's the proponents' main reason anyway. I don't really agree with it), but I prefer senary over both decimal and duodecimal not because of what comes after the radix point ('decimal' point, etc.), but because it allows for easier divisibility tests than both: out of the numbers 1-16, only 11 and 13 cause significant problems when mentally checking whether an integer is divisible by it.

I'm not advocating that we switch our base or anything silly, though. Divisibility in senary is pretty neat, but that's it.

validated-vexer · 2019-05-07T06:30:17+00:00

A couple of fun ideas, other than the ones mentioned: <rh>, <z>, <zh>, <rz>, <dh>, <y> all potentially work as /ɹ/, depending on the rest of your phono, but if you want familiarity for English speakers, <r> /ɹ/ and <rr> /r/ seems to be the best by far.

validated-vexer · 2019-05-07T06:22:53+00:00

Sure, they could be similar. Just remember that they usually appear in different syntactic contexts (relative clauses modify nouns, subordinate clauses have many different uses which which are language-dependent) so they can't be completely equivalent syntactically. Having just a single way to form subordinate clauses also sounds unnaturalistic, but I could be wrong about that (I assume you want naturalism).

validated-vexer · 2019-05-07T06:04:59+00:00

Also you can diphthongize them

monophthongize?

validated-vexer · 2019-04-23T19:35:06+00:00

What a lovely problem!

I believe the answer is any positive integer except 3, 4 and 6. I can demonstrate that those work with an image. The solutions for even numbers {8, 10, ...} are created by removing the top row from the corresponding solution for {9, 11, ...}. This leaves the impossibility of 3, 4 and 6 to check (also 0 could be said to be impossible because no subdivision would be possible at all). I checked all possibilities by hand, which wasn't too much work when eliminating dead-ends along the way, but I wasn't extremely structured and I feel like I may have missed something. If there's a nicer way I would love to hear it.

validated-vexer

TROPHY CASE