#protolang

[miochimochi]

First part of translating for me goes like this:

Subject Object Verb Link

The Creator stood upon the mountain and overlooked a frozen land. This is how it was in the beginning.

English is an SVO language which means that, typically, the subject comes before the verb which comes before the object. I don't know how to explain what each of these is as it's not as simple as agent-patient (the one doing the verb and the one being acted upon). We understand subject, object, and verb even if we can't entirely formulate the words to entirely explain them. "The dog bit me" and "I was bit by the dog" mean the same thing, the agent and patient are the same in both, but the subject and object switch.

SVO isn't the only word order either. We'll use the words "She hit me" in all word orders:

SOV: she me hit (Japanese)

SVO: she hit me (English)

VSO: hit she me (Irish)

VOS: hit me she (Fijian)

OVS: me hit she (Urarina)

OSV: me she hit (Warao)

I ordered these from most common to least common word order as well - and before going to Wikipedia for example languages! (Had SOV and SVO switched on the list initially though)

SOV accounts for almost half of the world's languages. But there's actually one other word order: free word order. This was the word order of Latin that would eventual be replaced in the Romance languages with groups preferring to use words in certain orders, most of them being SVO. The way that Latin did this is by markings that indicate what is what through a nominative-accusative system, one of the morphosyntactic alignment systems.

These systems are dependent on the syntactic relationship between various components of a sentence rather than placement of words within the sentence. The simplest system is the Dixon argument system:

(S)ole - the subject of a transitive verb

(A)gent - the subject of an intransitive verb

(P)atient - most times called the Object, but I like giving it more separation from word order, the object of a transitive verb

And the various alignments:

Nominative-Accusative - S=A ; P

Ergative-Absolutive - S=P ; A

Active-Stative - S¹=A ; S²=P

Austronesian Alignment - both S=A ; P and S=P ; A are true, people can choose to use either, although there are common triggers for each, working similar to voice in English

Direct Alignment - there is no distinction between S, A, or P, it's based on context clues

Tripartite Alignment - S, A, and P have their own separate cases

Transitive Alignment - A=P ; S

The most basic breakdown of the section chosen without any alteration to words to mark for anything is this:

Creator stand mountain overlook land-(frozen). This be beginning.

Marking them again for word position:

Creator stand mountain and overlook land-(frozen). This be beginning.

And now marking for argument:

Creator-A stand mountain-P and [Creator-S] overlook land-(frozen)-P. This-A be beginning-P.

Creator here is both the Sole and Agent in the same sentence since there's 2 verbs linked by an "and" which, in English, implies the subject being used again if no new subject is presented. Stand and Be are intransitive verbs where Overlook is transitive. Transitive verbs require an object for the subject to act upon where an intransitive verb can be acted upon by a subject without an object. You can say "I'm standing" and that's a complete sentence but you can't say "I'm overlooking" and have it be a compete sentence. "I'm standing" can take on an object with a preposition such as "on", but "I'm overlooking" always requires an object that is being overlooked and takes the object without the need for a preposition.

There's a few ways we can deal with the double argument:

Implied argument change - the subject is implied in the second part and so is the argument

Prepositional argument change - the preposition takes on the argument for the subject, so "and-S" would be its own separate thing from "and-A"

Repetition argument change - having to use the subject both times, changing only the argument

There's also other noun classes that can be used. For the nouns we have, we can go for a number of different possible cases (and this isn't an extensive list, just what would work here):

Creator : direct, ergative, nominative (not the intransitive case even though there's an intransitive verb because the preposition makes it grammatically act like a transitive verb and we could even make stand-on its own verb)

Mountain : absolutive, accusative, direct, locative, prepositional, superessive

Land : accusative

This : ergative, identical, nominative

Beginning : ablative, accusative

Could've missed some, but here we are. Thinking of cases, there's a hierarchy that languages typically follow, although breaking from these typicalities is typical of language as well. It's a general rule rather than a hard-set law.

nominative > accusative or ergative > genitive > dative > locative or prepositional > ablative and/or instrumental > others

Generally, if they're missing one of these, they are missing all after it. Such as, if there's no dative case, there likely isn't a locative, prepositional, ablative, instrumental, or others.

Verbs also have their own "classes" leading to what's called conjugation. Anything that changes a noun can even affect the verb form, such as having verb-a for a nominative and then verb-b for an accusative. The main ones to focus on first are gender, person, tense, and aspect.

Linguistically, gender has nothing to do with biology or psychology, although it's often tied to human biological genders (male and female). Could even look to a "spiritual gender" such as the concept of two-spirit in Amerindian cultures where one person has both a male and female soul and are, as a result, closer to the spiritual. That's why the culture building is an important part of language building. I imagine Mochian culture as having a belief in 3 souls: the genderless immortal soul that reincarnates, the soul that is inseparable from the body (and thus is what the body is) that rests when they die, and the soul that is created by memories that dies once they are forgotten. The memory-soul's "gender" is what they are remembered as and has nothing to do with one's biology.

Person depends on perspective. We all know first, second, and third person. First person is from the perspective of the subject "I ran home". Second person is from the perspective of the other "you ran home". Third person is from the perspective of an outside observer "they ran home". But there are other persons to go with. Could simply split the third person to have one case for denoting the topical person and the other case for the obviate person. Could even have a 4th person or a 0 person for an indefinite general referrence.

Tense is another commonly understood one. English has three - past, present, and future - right? Actually, no. That may be true in an abstract temporal sense but not in a linguistic sense. English only has two tenses: past and non-past. "I wanted", "I want", and "I will want" are all talking about want at various temporal moments, the past being "I wanted". But "I want" and "I will want" are using the same grammatical tense, the non-past tense. The word "will" is adding context about the non-past verb "want" to denote this as a future thing that is to come. But there are languages that do have a dedicated future tense so "I will want" would have "will want" as a singular verb with a future tense, so it's more like "I want-F". There are a lot more tense systems - and even tenseless systems which rely on context clues and "helper" words. Past-Nonpast is as described, Present-Nonpresent and Future-Nonfuture work similarly. Tenses work in two ways: relative or absolute. An absolute tense is relative to the "now", a relative tense is relative to another point in time. A relative tense can also be divided between a strict relative and an absolute-relative tense. Strict relative is relative to just some point in time, absolute-relative is relative to a point in time that is relative to the "now". "I ran", "I sweat when I run", "I will be running tomorrow" are examples of absolute, strict relative, and absolute-relative, in that order.

Aspect is another side to temporal marking. Rather than telling the point in time, aspect tells the finality, or lack thereof, of the verb. These do more than just say whether or not the verb is ongoing (continuous "I'm running") or complete (perfect "I ran"), it can also tell that it happened in a single moment (momentane "I sighed"), that it's done regularly (habitual "I run everyday"), that it almost happened (defective "I almost fell"), and that it is beginning (inceptive "I'm about to run").

So breaking down the verbs:

Stood : Past tense, perfect aspect of Stand

Overlooked : Past tense, perfect aspect of Overlook

Is how it was : Past tense, perfect progressive aspect of Be

All of these verbs had an ending, all of them happened before the present, one of them is the end of some that was continuous. Last thing I want to get to is adpositions and modifiers, which are divided between prepositions (preceding their complement) and postpositions (following their complement). The main thing about adpositions to look at is Hawkins' Universals:

Preposition ⊃ ( (N-Demonstrative v N-Numeral v N-Possessive ⊃ N-Adjective) & (N-Adjective ⊃ N-Genitive) & (N-Genitive ⊃ N-Relative) )

Postpositions ⊃ ( (Adjective-N v Relative-N ⊃ Demonstrative-N & Numeral-N & Possessive-N) & (Demonstrative-N v Numeral-N v Possessive-N ⊃ Genitive-N) )

Lemme explain what you're looking at...

If the language is Prepositional, then is the Demonstrative, Numeral, or Possessive comes after the Noun then the Adjective will come after the noun, if not then it can go either way. If the Adjective is after the Noun, then the Genitive will come after the Noun, if not then it can go either way. If the Genitive comes after the Noun, then the Relative will come after the Noun, if not it can go either way.

If the language is Postpositional, then if the Adjective or Relative come before the Noun, then the Demonstrative, Numeral, and Possessive will come before the Noun, if not then they can go either way. If the Demonstrative, Numeral, and Possessive come before the Noun, then the Genitive will come before the Noun, if not then it can go either way.

I just threw a lot of words at you so I should define things that you probably don't know (we all know what an Adjective and Noun are, right? I don't need to define those, right?).

Demonstrative : "this" and "that" words, indicating what's being referred to

Numeral : "one" and "once" words, indicating the quantity of what's being talked about

Possessive : 's, indicating the owner of a thing

Genitive : an expression of the relationship between two nouns

Relative : a clause that modifies a noun

And finally, languages have hierarchies in the order of a modifier. The modifier hierarchy for English so as so:

Quantity > Opinion > Size > Age > Shape > Color > Origin > Material > Purpose > Noun

You don't say "the grey round old stone", you say "the old round grey stone". In an agglutinative language, you could pile all of these into one word, mashing word pieces together to build a bigger word. "The old grey stone" could be theoldgreystone if English were agglutinative.

Now it's time to finally build this language... in the next post! I did a lot for this one, I'll get back to it later.

[spookygibberish]

Asking as a conlanger, have you or any of your friends created original language or languages for the Jar of Mice setting?

Also, really good artwork in that project. It scratches all my itches in terms of design, lore, and visuals inspired by other artists.

I have something right now that is essentially just a naming language, although there are things about the phonotactics that I want to go back and revise, mostly rules regarding sonority. I've been wanting to get back into conlanging for a while now, but haven't had all that much creative energy this year.

[sadpurpleblood]

i dont think syllable structures are supposed to take this much space of your conlang document but what can i do.

dont make languages without phonemic vowels, kids. or else youll have to do this.

i hope how i phrased this text is sorta understandable.

[sol-and-the-aviary]

I just applied the sound changes for my northern protolang to the language of Kynisian. Look what word has surfaced: “s’sssfzfffyeyw”

It has one vowel. One lonely vowel. And a whole lot of s, a ton of s.

Ssssssssssssssss

[crynwr-drwg]

?

Going to do phonemic inv for nordic rn. Dont really know how much that shit should doffer from atmoran. Probably an alright amount

[kolic]

Word of the Week - Wednesday 23.4.2025

Aaaaa! I completely forgot to actually write today's Word of the Week, and I've been planning it all day! I've actually got a good one for y'all today:

Kjá

number

Etymology: I don't have a protolang to show the actual etymology (hopefully I will one day!) but it's cognate with the word kjagg, meaning "pile."

Dozen

I don't know how much I talked about Kolic numbers in the past, but up until today I only had number up to five. ynna, tälla, kaegða, júrða, ikka.

On my commute home today though, I reworked the system a little bit, actually settled on some things that I've been thinking about for a long time, and added some new stuff.

Kolic uses dozenal most the time (though in some situations decimal can be used and the two can even be combined, we might get into that sometime later). So, here are the number from one to a dozen in Kolic:

ynna

tälla

kaegða

júrða

júnna

júlla

jújða

täärða

täärðynna

täärðälla

täärðaegða

kjá

For numbers up to dozen eleven (23), you say [remainder] on dozen. Remember that Kolic doesn't really use adpositions and uses a lot of cases instead, and superessive (meaning "on") is one of them, marked "-na/-nä" (at least until I decide to rework the case markings again).

So a number like fifteen, or in dozenal, dozen three, is kaegða kjána.

As you might have guessed, above that you just say "two dozen," "three dozen" and so on. So for a number like 64 (decimal), which is 54 (dozenal), you'd say júrða júnnana kjään — literally "four on five of dozen."

But let's go back to the list of numbers from one to a dozen. You might have noticed a pattern that repeats after four numbers. It might be kinda subtle in the first repetition (except all of the number beginning the same way), but it gets way more transparent from eight to eleven.

That's right, there's a sub-base of four underneath the base twelve counting system. The words one, two, three, and four are unique, but then five, six, and seven are just blends of four and the remainder. Eight is a blend of two and four, because it is two fours, and nine through eleven are again blends of eight plus the remainder.

I thought of this on the train, when I was struggling to come up with numbers for six and up, and noticed that twelve goes really nicely into three groups of four, and decided to make a sub-base. I really like the way it came out, it gives me this vaguely Finnish-y vibe.

Finally, if I have any time left at all, let's talk VERY briefly about combining bases.

To be perfectly honest, I am kind of slowly losing my justifications for base 10 to coexist with base 12 in the Kolic culture. I mean, it would be a fun way to bring some more chaos and flavour into the language, but I am having trouble coming up with things they'd actually use it for. So this system I am going to describe may actually very well be out of date VERY soon. I'm not even going to use the Kolic words for the numbers, since 10 turned out to be a trisyllabic "täärðälla." But here is the idea behind it:

Basically, due to the way they conceptualise numbers as stacking remainders on larger numbers, they can use any larger number as a base. You might, for example, want two hundred eggs, and then a dozen six on top of that, which makes for six on dozen on two hundred eggs, as opposed to three on six dozen on one gross eggs. Yea no that system doesn't really make much sense, there is no reason anyone would count like this I think, but I still wanted to showcase it to show some of the dead ends I come across.

Oh! And although I already said finally once, here is, finally, for real this time, an example sentence:

Aeru néjin kjái irin kyfðva núnva. /ɑɪ̯.rə nɛɪ̯.jɪn kjɑu̯.ɪ ɪː.rɪn kɪːð.vɑ nʏn.vɑ/ [ɑɪ̯ɾə nɛɪ̯jɪn kjɑu̯wɪ ɪːɾɪn kɪːðʋɑ nʏnʋɑ]

English: There are dozens of flowers in front of our house.

lit. Is of-flowers dozens with-itself house-in_front_of our-in_front_of

gloss: be.N.ATEM flower-PL.GEN dozen-PL 3EXPL/REFL.COM house-ANT 1PL-POSS-ANT

Note: This is something I probably should've mentioned in the main body, but. Things that are being counted are always in the genitive-partitive case (in this case functioning as a partitive). The number behaves as an adverb, and if the verb doesn't agree with the counted noun, but instead always with the neuter gender. That's because the subject isn't the counted object (in this instance the flowers) but an expletive "it" that is "hidden," i don't know if that's the correct terminology but it's just. not there. It's omitted.

[paizau]

I started watching the @letshaveabouba livestream on youtube, I'm 2 streams in and its really nice! the only bad thing is that because its a recording of a livestream I can't really add my input or share my ideas so I'm gonna blurt it all here.

The proto inventory they came up with is this:

In their documentation they put /a/ as a low central vowel, so its a classic 5 without /e/, but I decided for me I'll make it a square system, it'll make vowel stuff easier for me - so /i/ /u/ high, /æ/ (a for ease) /ɔ/ (/o/ for ease). I also interpreted the back consonants as +pharyngeal, and split the back non stops as one being a fricative and thr other an approximant, instead of having both be both.

regarding syllable structure, they came up with CCVT. I elaborated on it and made it #CC-VCCV-T#, which stands for:

initial cluster of any 2 different consonants allowed. yes, every cluster, even /jqa/ is allowed, but /tta/ is not.

intervocallic clusters of any 2 different consonants allowed, no 3 or more consonants in a row. so /aqba/ but not /ut.ska/

word finally only single consonants allowed, and specifically only alveolars. /klat/ not /pgum/

regarding sound changes, they talked about tone, and having epinthetic vowels breaking up initial clusters and vowel lowering. These are the sound change I came up with to achieve these goals, and some other stuff that seemed cool to me:

Tonogenesis: high tone after voiceless consonants, low tone after voiced. A voiceless consonant preceded by a voiced one gives low tone, and voiced preceded by voiceless gives high tone: /tá/, /dà/, /ntà/, /kná/. Im pretty sure something similar happens in tibetan, but it has aspiration involved, and im not going to have that, so this is only inspired by it.

voicing assimilation: stops and fricatives assimilate to the voicing of a following consonant of the same cluster. now tone is phonemic :) yay: /kná/ > /gná/, /ztì/ > /stì/, but /ntì/, /lsì/ stay as is.

pharyngeal spreading: a consonant in a cluster with a pharyngealized or back consonant become pharyngeal aswell: /psˁì/ > /pˁsˁì/, /ħɡʷà/ > /ħɡʷˁà/.

epinthetic vowel insertion: a vowel is inserted between all initial clusters. its quality depends on the surounding consonants. if one of them is palatal its /i/, if one of them is labialized velar, its /u/. if its both, it depends on the initial cons. else its /a/: /ctú/ > /citú/, /skʷò/ > /sukʷà/, /wɲù/ > /wuɲù/, /tkú/ > /takú/. idk what tone the new syllable gets I haven't thought about that.

pharyngeal lowering: vowels are lowered as follows after pharyngealized and back consonants: /i/ > /e/, /u/ > /o/, /æ, ɔ/ > /ɑ/. now we have 7 phonetic vowels - /i, u, e, o, ɛ, ɔ, ɑ/ yayyy yippee I love big vowel systemsss!! /tˁicˁá/ > /tˁecˁɑ́/ etc.

/ji/ /wu/ > /i/ /u/: because I don't like those sequances. I also think /wra/ >> /urà/, /jki/ >> /igì/ is pretty cool.

Here the current inventory after these changes:

and a few notes:

phonemic destinction between H and L tones

kept the lowered vowels allophones. You could just make pharyngealization go away and phonemicize the vowels but I like this gigantic inventory better lol

Potential /q ħ ʕ/ > /ʔ ∅ ∅/, to make the vowels phonemic. maybe /q/ > /k/. or even /q/ > ∕∅/ aswell?? it'll be a bold decision to make

syllable structure - #CVCCVT#. Initial clusters are now forbidden, but everything else is the same. I think V{j, w, ɰ, ħ, ʔ}C can lead to vowel length or more qualities or something, the sequance has potential.

So yeah this is all the ideas I have in my head rn, I hope it was an interesting read lol. I also recommend you go and watch the streams yourself, the vibe is very nice and help the creative juices flow, like I'm really happy with what I came up with here based on their protolang. it was like a fun colab challenge thing :) here's a link to the channel:

[thylocalbard]

'Supdate Sunday #12

Hello! It has been a rather busy few weeks, but my exams are blessedly over. I now have far too much writing to share with you.

NOTE: The next 'Supdate Sunday will be slightly delayed as I will likely not have reception until the Monday afternoon. Sorry about that lol.

Updates are on:

Tyrant's Reign

Morgwen fic

hammycrack

A new fandom (yes, again)

Taglist (reply to be added/taken off): @resmyx @moonelight @creature-of-delerium @tributes-vamps-and-ginnyweasley @mr-orion @theloudestwriter

Tyrant's Reign

Alrighty, I have officially moved to LibreOffice for personal use and who was going to tell me that it's so amazing??? I can now tell you that my wordcount is 23k (woohoo!) AND that I learnt how to make a custom font!! Pic attached below (id in alt text). So far it's just one rune (the one meaning tyranny lmao) but I do hope to flesh out the system soon. Then of course come my conlangs...which I am now intending to make protolangs for. Because we can't have nice things, apparently.

Anyways, I'm really motivated to work on TR so hopefully that continues into next week!

Morgwen

It's finally here! I'm so excited because I'm super proud of this fic, even if it took me ages to write. coming up roses is now one of my favourite pieces, based off the concept that if Arthur's emotionally constipated, you'd better bet that Morgana is, too!

Hammycrack

Two new chapters. That's right, two (2). Spiders Wishywashy is just as unhinged as it sounds, and chapter 15 has an unhinged title that i cant be bothered to type out. jefferson and madison were meant to be added in this latter chapter...but alas, peggy the pyromaniac had other plans. theo and mary emmons will also be added soon! (soon meaning at some point). also sorry to any charles lee enjoyers.

A New Fandom Calls

I have uploaded one of my Inspector Calls fics. More may be coming, but not tonight because it's too much effort. Anyway, Eva takes the form of a letter from Sheila Birling to the fic's namesake after the events of the play. I ship them your honour.

Errr thank you for listening to my rambling and I'll be back at some point. Lmao

[umbralstars]

Considering taking a step back with my conlang and making more of a protolang -> modern-lang cause currently it's a bit of a mess and I can still scale back instead of scrapping at this stage.

Benefits of this is that I can make Faerghalig, Srenghal, and Leicestereg from one proto-lang and since I'm using it for FF7 I can also develop Nibelig into its own thing and explore the sprachbund this language has with Wutanian

[miochimochi]

Alright, time to build the language.

Let's play around with word order after figuring some other stuff out first, although I'm leaning towards OSV right now. Let's just remind ourselves the system we're working with

Subject Object Verb Link

The Creator stood upon the mountain and overlooked a frozen land. This is how it was in the beginning.

I'll be going with Active-Stative alignment, so S¹=A and S²=P, perhaps going with agentive-default fluid-S, so this would mean that S¹=A will be unmarked, as it is assumed the default position, where S²=P will be marked, as it is a change to the default. Nouns will have a Agentive and Patientive form as a result, with the Patientive Sole being marked like the Patient. But languages aren't strict rule followers, they have exceptions. I could imagine there being exceptions to the rule, such as a Locative being marked in both Agentive and Patientive cases, depending on which one is being x'd on. Speaking of cases, I think I'll go with Genitive (GEN - attributive relationship between two nouns), Dative (DAT - marks the recipient of an action), Locative (LOC - indicates location in relation to another noun), and Instrumental (INS - something being used by another noun) cases. For the locative case, the specifics of in, on, under, &c. is inferred but helper words could be used.

And here's the rule for adpositions:

Prepositional - Demonstrative, numeral, adjectives, comes after the noun, possessive, genitive, and relative come before the noun

Quantity > Opinion > Size > Age > Shape > Color > Origin > Material > Purpose > Noun seems perfectly fine to me, I guess I could change some just to change some. Could order them by objectivity I suppose. I could go objective to subjective

Quantity > Material > Size > Shape > Origin > Age > Color > Purpose > Opinion > Noun

Or the reverse

Opinion > Purpose > Color > Age > Origin > Shape > Size > Material > Quantity > Noun

The noun should come at the end due to the language being prepositional. So I'll go with subjective to objective for this, keeping the objective closer to the noun just makes sense to me.

Number is something I didn't really go over, that's my bad. English only has 2 numbers: singular and plural. But I'll do more than just the two. Singular (SNG) "one dog", definite plural (DPL) "multiple dogs", indefinite plural (IPL) "many dogs". The definite plural is for a defined or implied set amount, such as "dogs in the city" or "two dogs". The indefinite plural is for an undefined amount, there's just "dogs" out there and we're not talking about some specific amount.

I will also go with a tri-gender system of Masculine, Feminine, and Inanimate. There is a neuter as well, but it would be based on syntax. So this means I would need to determine what triggers gender agreement. The most common is vowel-based triggers. I think I'll go with /i/ and /ɪ/ for the feminine neuter and /a/ and /o/ for the masculine neuter. The masculine and feminine are together the "animate" gender for this language, but this doesn't mean only animals will get it, as animacy has been applied to what is inanimate, such as rivers, mountains, the sun and moon, &c. Pronouns would come from this, so He/It (it¹), She/It (it²), and It⁰ are the pronouns that come directly from this gender system but some others will be used as well. There will be both an inclusiveᶦ and exclusiveᵉ to various pronouns. Clusivity is simply marking whether includes or excludes something. English doesn't have this, if you say "we" one would have to infer by context clues if you're including them or if it's you vs them. So, we have I/me, youᶦ referring to a group, youᵉ referring to an individual, weᶦ including you, weᵉ excluding you, and they. It⁰ would be divided between 3 definites: d¹, d², and d³. These are the this, that, those, and these of the language. There's also the relative and indefinite pronouns which I would say distinguishes directness rⁿ for the relative which refers back to something "to whom it may concern, that which we knew what was to come" and r⁰ for the indefinite which is more general "to each his own"

Another thing I forgot to mention in my last post: articles. Articles are the "the"s and "a(n)"s. English has 3 articles, 2 marked. Definite, indefinite, and zero. Definite is like "the book", whereas indefinite is "a book", and zero is simply "books" as it's only used for plurals and mass nouns. I'll go with animate definite "the¹ man", inanimate definite "the² book", and zero which will be for anything not definite "the² book" vs "⁰ book".

Now for verbs... imma be pretty basic with tense: past (PST), an unmarked present (PRS), and future (FUT). Then I have to think of the aspects that I want to convey. I think unmarked would be perfect (PER - it has happened and still has relevance to the now). There will also be a perfective (PFV - it has happened at some point in relation to the now), continuous (CON - it is ongoing in the now), discontinuous (DIS - it happened but might not be now), prospective (PRO - it is beginning to happen), and I couldn't find one for this so I'm creating the name suspensive (SUS - it is about to stop happening). The discontinuous could only be applied to the past. At least, I can't conceptualize it being used in a present or future tense.

Word order is still there to figure out, though... so the general rule across the majority of languages is Object-Verb bonding. That means that the Object and Verb are most likely to be next to each other. So SOV, SVO, VOS, and OVS. So would Proto-Mochians hold to this? Most likely. But part of what should be figured out is where exactly their Euro-Asiatic ancestors came from and then we can look at how their languages developed. One idea for the first peoples of the Americas would be through ancient Siberian populations. So what are the Siberian languages like? Itelmen is SOV, Chukchi is free but SOV is standard, Alyutor is also free with SVO and VSO being common, Nivkhe languages are SOV, Ket is SOV. It seems that among Siberian languages, there's a tendency towards SOV, but this also may be a result of contact with other languages, such as the Turkic, Slavic, and Mongol languages. What of languages in the region in our timeline? The Salish languages are by and large verb-initial with the most common word order being VSO. Alyutor has VSO also being common, so perhaps the Alyutors (sadly going extinct with less than 500 people and less than 10% of that actually speaking the language) and the Salish might have a common linguistic ancestor? Highly unlikely, bordering on the absurd, though interesting to think about such a possibility. So we could take the other approach to the Salish for that dichotomy of the two worlds, but I think a fusion of them might be better. So what do we get with SOV+VSO? We could use both, and indeed this proto-language will be free word order, but for the purposes of where we'll end up, let's go with VOS as the commonly used word order and give that a shot. Can always change it later as a part of the language's evolution.

Next step after putting all of this together is to take the phonemes and these rules and put them together to finally (for real this time) translate.

[kelasian]

is it time to start a new lang yet....... (i plan to repurpose one of my old conlangs from like 2021 into a protolang for the langfam it originally belonged into)

[vitor034]

my solution to the protolang blues: only make a rough sketch, and only refer to that sketch when you feel it necessary.

real life linguists haven't worked out the entirety of most protolanguages, and even the ones that are pretty well worked out (basically just PIE) aren't as well understood as any extant language.

if you want some historical context for a word, or some grammar, tinker with the protolang and then work through your changes. it's only necessary to make a whole protolanguage when you plan on deriving a huge family, and if you are that's awesome but i have not and will never take on such a challenge.

i think i'll mess around a bit with the protolang and try to get somewhere. my initial idea was creating a small family, but i've decided i'm gonna focus just in one language for now.

anyways, thanks a lot for the comment/help!

[sadpurpleblood]

What’s your favourite thing or feature from your conlang so far?

thats a hard question, because as of now, it really is just the most barebones things. but i can say that so far its the conlang ive been most pleased with so far. ive tried conlanging before but would always scrap things when they didnt work. i basically cherrypicked all the things i remembered out of these past sketches and tried to mold em into one thing. and so far it worked! it still feels a little too agglutinative and regular as of now, but thatll change once i get to evolving the daughter languages out of it (i hope) but if i HAD to choose one thing, then probably its phonoaesthetic. its very continuant and nasal heavy. it flows nice and its not too complicated. at least in my opinion.

[conlangcrab]

Conlanging Shenanigans

now series on the blog lets go

EPISODE 1: POST-PARADIGM DEPRESSION

I'm making a conlang for a project. In this setting my job is taking a protolang ive been assigned and evolve it. My assigned protolang was a beutyful clusterfuck with beutyful allophony, reduplication and palatalization rules along with a fatastic stron-weak nouns system.

(btw the project is open if ur interested in simulating the evolution of a language family ann/or to worldbuild a whole culture u can join)

Anyway i immediately ditched all of that and now i have verb paradigms and i wanna show the most amusing forms of the same verb i have :)))

ˈjon - to make noise (for animate subjects) ˈjan - ˈjaɲːøt��ʂ'av - rɛˈʐampɔ - rɛˈpjompɔ ˈynɔn

ˈbapɔ - to see ˈvapo - ˈvaltav - rɛˈbolptu - ˈbimto - ˈpwalpoptu - ˈpto

[conlangery]

Last week, we started on our protolang phonology. Today, we're going to finish up the consonants with glides and laryngeal settings and potentially start on our first stage of sound changes. Step into Faerie with me at 3:30pm Central Time (in about an hour) for more work on Sylvan for Tongues and Runes.

[paizau]

okay so I think the Ngįout document is like 80% done - all I have left is to finish the example sentences, and to rework the section about the orthography.

I'm also toying with a new conlang I'm currently calling Kshâtá /kʂɑ́.tʌ́/, which is based on the alt-evolution post I made a few months ago about the LHAB protolang. Not much has stayed the same, but hey credit where credit's due. Currently it's just a phonology but I have a bit of potential grammar vibes floating around in my head. I also at one point want to addapt Akka-tą́ (Ngįout's script) to it, because it sounds like a cool challange and also I don't really feel like coming up with a new script lol