#if any conlang I can make can be “like French but worse” this would be it

[strixcattus]

I want to make a list of everything that needs to agree with something in the time travel conlang, just to get my thoughts organized.

The guiding principle here is: Everything that might have cause to agree with something, does so. A Watsonian explanation for this would probably be something like, "there are a lot of ways time distortion could drop information or cause someone to miss it, and they would really like to know whether they're talking about their friend or an evil future version of their friend." The Doylist explanation is absolutely that I think it would be funny and fun and also I've never done any sort of agreement in a conlang before and have a lot to make up for.

The numbers this conlang inflects for are: —Singular (needs no explanation) —Monogender plural (a given group of one gender) —Multigender plural (a given group of multiple genders) —General plural (used for blanket statements that may or may not have exceptions, such as "stars give off heat" or "cats have fur")

The grammatical genders of this conlang are: —Null (always and exclusively used for 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th person) —Former (past variant of myself, you, or a familiar 3rd person entity) —Future (future variant as above) —Alternate (alternate-timeline variant with a branch point in the past) —Split (alternate-timeline version of a future variant, with a branch point in the future) —Dopple (they're not a past or future version, our lives are identical, but somehow we exist separately at the same time and I need to gender them somehow)

(The distinction between 3rd and 3.5th person can get complicated. If I'm friends with someone named, say, Alice, and her future self travels back in time to now, then regardless of whom I'm speaking to, Alice is referred to in 3rd person and future-alice as Future 3.5th. If, however... let's say Nikola Tesla. If Tesla were to time-travel to 2023, and I met him, I would refer to him in 3rd person, because he would be the only Tesla I am familiar with and the only Tesla in this time frame.

On the other hand, if my grandfather were to travel through time as a young adult, and we met in the present, I would refer to him in 3.5th person, because I already know my grandfather as someone else. However, if I did the time-travelling, and met my grandfather in the past, I'd refer to him in 3rd person, and the version of him who is my grandfather in 3.5th... unless I happened to bring my present grandfather with me, in which case my present grandfather would be referred to in 3rd person and the past version in 3.5th.

Get it? By default, the native version of a person in the current time frame is referred to in 3rd person and all interlopers in 3.5th... unless they do not exist in that time frame, in which case the one with the greatest familiarity to the speaker is referred to in 3rd and all others in 3.5th, or if the speaker is travelling with the native version of that person to their time frame (or another person native to the same time frame who also knows the person), in which their native version is referred to in 3rd and all others in 3.5th.

As a sidenote: If my young grandfather (3.5th) time-travelled to a point after his death, but within my life, I would be well within my rights to refer to him in 3.5th person, even if he is the only version of himself in the current time. Those who did not know my grandfather at his current age, but met my time-travelling grandfather, would be well within their rights to refer to him in 3rd person and my present-day grandfather in 3.5th (future gender—or alternate, if my present-day grandfather didn't do any time travel in his own life).

(I don't know what you would do if Nikola Tesla showed up in 2023 in his time machine, then took you back in time to meet his self from a few years later in that self's native time. Leave it as exercise for the reader, I guess.)

—Adjectives agree with gender of the nouns they modify, by way of suffixes. If they need to agree with multiple genders, the suffixes are stacked in a set order. They're also inflected for number and for person, because you can expect to have an adjective attached to a 1.5th, 2.5th, 3rd, 3.5th, or 4th person noun/pronoun (e.g. in 1.5th person, "the evil me").

—Adverbs agree with the verbs they modify in terms of objective tense, again by way of a suffix.

—All persons of noun and pronoun that have multiple genders inflect for gender and number.

—Verbs are conjugated first for tense in objective time, then affixes are attached (these can be prefixes or suffixes) which encode person, gender (if applicable), and subjective tense for the subject and object. The positioning of these affixes is fluid, but they each point towards the nouns they're agreeing with.

—"No tense" is a valid objective tense for a verb whose objective tense is unknown, but whose subjective tense is known. For instance, if I know I'm going to mail you a letter, but I'm not sure when in time I'll be when I do so, I can refuse to inflect the verb for tense.

—A particle (which may act as an adjective or an adverb) can be constructed to indicate objective and/or subjective time for something not normally indicated. For instance, it might be attached to the noun "his texts" to indicate that the texts have not been written yet, or that whoever "he" is hasn't written them yet, but the texts themselves exist already, or to a verb to indicate that some third party (with which it agrees in number, gender, and person) has already experienced an event which is in the future for all other players in the sentence.

Verb objective tense conjugations tend to indicate the subject's person in some way. Some objective tenses lump 1st person with 1.5th person and so on, and others distinguish between them. I haven't decided yet, but this may be dependent on the base form of the verb. Like French! But worse.

[thedwarrowscholar]

my question concerns the phrase "Forgive me", which I tentatively translated as "iltin e"(I would have preferred the form "grant forgiveness to me", which I've later determined is biraikhjim altâb dê), but I was at a bit of a loss at the time. I assume it'd be a noun type 10(abstraction), but how to choose the appropriate vowel combo? AA or AI, there doesn't seem to be a distinctive difference. The LTN radicals were in the index, but not the dictionary.

BEFORE YOU START TO READ: For those not actively learning the language, not regularly translating phrases into Neo-Khuzdul, or just starting out with the language, this reply is rather long and technical, which you may want to skip. I don’t want to give you eager beginners “information overload”, or worse, scare you away. 

However, for those more advanced students and those actively learning the language, it may be worth your while to read through this one. 

Hello there,

Thank you for that question. Now, before we dive into to this translation, we need to be careful when we try to translate literally from English, even with such short phrases. The combination of “to grant” with the noun “forgiveness” to express “extending pardon to someone” is expressed differently in many languages, often the verb “to grant” doesn’t fit this noun like it does in English, so many languages have other combinations to express this. For instance (when translated literally to English): “to give forgiveness” (which is quite common), “to grant amnesty”, “to give pardon”, “to beg to forgive”, or simply “to forgive” or even “to excuse”.

So what I’m trying to say here is, that even if in English “forgive me” and “grant forgiveness to me” have somewhat of a different flavour that may not be the case in Neo-Khuzdul.

Which is the case in fact, as the verb used to express this in Neo-Khuzdul could mean either “to pardon”, “to forgive” or “to absolve”. There in fact is no need to use the verb “to grant” to express this, the basic verb here will convey what you had in mind. That is a good rule in fact to use when translating to Neo-Khuzdul in general, if you have a typical English phrasal verb-noun combinations, such as “to grant forgiveness”, “to show approval”, “to give warning”, etc… you are quite safe to translate these with the standard verbs (”to forgive”, “to approve”, “to warn”) without losing any of its meaning. There are obviously exceptions to this, but in most cases this holds true.

Ok, so now that we know we can just use “to forgive” for this, instead of literally translating “to grant forgiveness”, let’s have a look at what else we know.

Forgiveness (absolution) is “altân” - using the radicals LTN - as you said correctly, a “type 10″ noun (commonly used for abstract concepts, like this is)

This verb is indeed not mentioned in the “Verb forms” document, but it is in the overall dictionary. The verb form document (which clearly shows the seven verb types) was never intended to cover all verbs really (although it lists many) , but more to give a general idea of the split between the verbs and how the conjugations happen.

Now as you mentioned, when a verb is related to a type 10 noun this can either be an “AA”- or “AI”-verb. For those unaware of what we are talking about here, the first letter of the verb type classification refers to the vowels used when constructing the Perfect Form (stating dependable facts), while the second vowel is the one used when constructing the Imperfect Form (stating actions that are vividly happening).

Compared to other languages, many things in Neo-Khuzdul are incredibly predictable (noun types, conjugations, auxiliary verbs, word-structure, etc…) to the point that there are very few exceptions. 

After all, we must not forget that Mahal (Aulë) “made” this language for the dwarves, so even within the realm and canon of Middle-Earth the language itself is a conlang (constructed language) and did not “evolve” from one language to another. 

Plus, add to the equation that Dwarvish is subject to very little change over a very long period of time, that generally means that if you know the rules for these structures you can easily “find” the word or conjugation you need, without worrying about too many exceptions. 

The imperfect form however is one of the “rule breakers” here. As you literally need to remember when a verb will use either “a” or “i” in as the stem (CCvC). As you mentioned, “there doesn’t seem to be a distinctive difference“, sadly you are spot on there. That is because there isn’t any distinctive difference at all. To quote David Salo on the topic, from midgardsmal.com

“This is a purely lexical distinction, is unpredictable and does not correspond to any kind of semantic class”. 

“Unpredictable”. So as one would have to remember if a verb ended in “-ir”, “-er”, or “-re” when learning French, here you would need to remember if it used an “a” or “i” in the imperfect from. Sadly there is no trick to this apart from memorizing it (once you’ve looked it up), as it is simply unpredictable.

So, after this very long intro and explanation (apologies for that), let us get to your translation again. Your phrase is “forgive me”. 

So, we need to ask ourselves first, in order to determine what verb conjugation we’ll use, what to we wish to convey here and to whom are we speaking. “We are not stating “you forgive/forgave me”, so we can rule out both perfect and imperfect forms. This leaves us with the question, is this an order or a request?

Clearly, this is a request, as we are asking kindly for someone to be forgiven (us in this case), we are not ordering them to forgive us after all. Hence, instead of the Imperative Form (generally used for commands or orders in Neo-Khuzdul) the Jussive form (which is used to offer suggestions, recommendations, desires or pleads) would be ideal for this.  Which would translate into something like “I suggest (ask kindly/recommend) that you forgive me”. 

The structure of the Jussive form is details in document 38 (Imperative and Jussive) but in brief this would be either:

ai-CaCuCsu = I suggest you -verb- (to a male)

ai-CaCuCsi = I suggest you -verb- (to a female)

Let us, for the sake of example, say this is said to a male, that would then become: 

ai-latunsu = I suggest* you forgive (using LTN - as the consonants, as we had established at the start)

*I’m using the translation “suggest” for simplicity’s sake here to indicate a kind request or suggestion - so feel free to change the translation here to “ask”, “recommend”, etc… .

Now, we aren’t there yet, as we still need to add the translation for “me”. As in “I ask you to forgive me”

In many of the documents I have made available you will see this accusative pronoun (in this case “me”) written out separately, not attached to the verb. This is common in basic Khuzdul lessons to clearly define verb and accusative pronouns as separate elements. Yet in more advanced lessons we’ll see an interfix pop up, which is either “w” or “y”. This interfix (or linking element) merges both the verb form with the accusative pronoun. More on the workings of the interfix in document 50 on the dwarrowscholar.com/library.

Simply put, when the pronoun starts with a vowel (any vowel) and the last letter of the verb form is a “u” or “o” the interfix will be a “w”, while when the last letter of the verb form is “a, “e”, or “i”, the interfix will be a “y”.

Which gives us this:

ai-latunsuwê = I suggest you forgive me (when addressing a male) - instead of the more classroom version “ai-latunsu e”

or

ai-latunsiyê = I suggest you forgive me (when addressing a female) - instead of the more classroom version “ai-latunsi e”

Sharp eyes will have noticed that we’re actually use the Genitive Determiner “-ê” (meaning “my”) when using the interfix to link the verb to the accusative pronoun, instead of the actual accusative “e” (meaning “me”). This is important to remember, that when you use the interfix you always use the Genitive Determiner instead of the proper Accusative form.

ADDED BENEFIT: Using the interfix with the Genetive Determiner definitely makes you “a pro translator” in my eyes, and totally gives you bragging rights within our little community here.

Note though, on the topic of the Jussive Form, that by the third age the usage of the prefix “ai-” in this form is considered largely archaic and rarely used, with the exception of official or (overly polite) speech.

Meaning that it would likely be:

“latunsuwê” or “latunsiyê”, unless you wish to express a more courteous plea, in which case leave the “ai-” attached.

Apologies for the length of this reply again, yet I wished to be rather thorough with the reply, considering your somewhat technical questions. I hope that clarifies it somewhat.

Ever at your service,

The Dwarrow Scholar

[cinneira-blog]

I rate how languages sound.

Okay, so I was asked to do this rate X thing. I’m gonna rate how I personally perceive how different languages sound.

ACHTUNG! IT’S DAMN BIASED AND RUDE!

Languages that I’ve never heard are not mentioned. Standard varieties are implied unless stated otherwise.

IE.

Germanic.

English. Is everywhere, so whining won’t help much, I guess. Certain British accents are cool (e.g. RP and London). SAE is a potato. Scottish English sounds affected. Irish English I dunno, is it even English? Quantum computers might be able to decipher it.

Dutch. Throat disease.

Icelandic. Shit tier.

Faroese. 10/10, it has “ch” sounds, “ll” —> “tl” and other nerdgasm-inducing things.

Danish. Acquired taste.

Swedish. 9.5/10. Very cute.

Norwegian. 8/10, sounds manlier and a bit rougher than Swedish.

German. Sounds gay when spoken, decent when sung.

Celtic.

Welsh. Mongolian of Europe.

Irish. Russian backwards, seems to have been robbed of sibilants. Poor souls.

Breton. Sounds 100% like French, but actually is not. Weird.

Romance.

Spanish. LA is shit, EU is better, but not really. Although the variety where they pronounce “ll” as a “j”-sound is cool.

French. Throat disease.

Italian. Overrated, but still very cool. They speak too fast tho.

Catalan. Better than both Spanish and French.

Occitan. Second only to Italian.

Portuguese. BR is shit, EU is a bit better. Madredeus are 10/10.

Romanian. Blanda-upped something, 4/10, I guess. Hard to tell.

Slavic.

Russian. Very cool when sung. Spoken, it’s hard to tell since I’m a native, but let’s say shit. Girls nowadays sound too capricious and guys whiny and gay.

Ukrainian. Jokes aside, quite cute. 6.5/10.

Belarusian. Jokes aside… Wait, it’s not even cute.

Polish. Gone overboard with sibilants. Like, seriously. Also flat.

BCS. Tones, really? (Can’t remember if it was actual tones or pitch accent, doesn’t matter tho). Doesn’t suit a Slavic language at all, makes it a bit too sing-song-ish.

Bulgarian. Surprisingly decent, although would be better if they had more palatalised consonants (it would be Russian at that point tho).

Czech. Too soft, can’t compute.

Baltic.

Weird Slavic.

Hellenic.

Greek. Utter shit when spoken, a tongue of gods when sung. Seriously, what the heck? Go listen to Eleftheria Arvanitaki/Natassa Boufiliou or even Disney’s “Colors of the wind” in Greek first, and then to a random Greek League of Legends streamer.

Armenian.

Worse Greek with uvulars and a lot of affricates. When a Slavic speaker complains about unpronounceable consonant clusters, you know something’s gone very wrong.

Indo-Iranian.

A no for me. If you think that was too wide of a brush, wait until I get to American or Australian languages.

URALIC.

Hungarian. Cute, cute, cute. 9.6/10. My mother is fluent in it, and I still can’t forgive her for not teaching it to me when I was a larva.

Finnish. A cheap imitation of Quenya. I’m [not] sorry.

Erzya, Moksha, Komi, and other Uralic tongues of Russia. Sound like Hungarian (or Finnish) spoken with a thick Russian accent. Not fun.

SEMITIC.

Arabic. I’m not really versed in dialects of Arabic, so I can’t say which ones it were, the ones I heard. Most likely, Levantine or Egyptian. Sounds like choking. Worse when sung.

Hebrew. Better than Arabic when sung, indistinctly shitty when spoken.

Berber (Tamasheq). Pretty cool, go listen to Tinariwen.

DRAVIDIAN.

A no. Can’t stand retroflexes (yes, they regularly give me existential pain when I speak Russian or hear Swedish, I know, but still).

CAUCASIAN (NW, NE, S).

These are actual alien tongues. Almost everything about them save nominal morphology (even with that said, they are mostly ERG-ABS) is butt-clenchingly hard (I mean, the real, mean, savage kind of hard. All the usual language learner boogeymen like Chinese or Arabic are jokes compared to THIS. Almost perfect analysability, go figure). Alan Bomhard thinks NWC had intercourse with IE when IE was young. Supposedly, one of the reasons why IE is so troubled with irregularity.

Kabardian. Can vary between completely alien-sounding to absolutely, stunningly beautiful. Go lurk on youtube for some videos.

Chechen. Danish of Caucasus, but devoid of potatoes. Incredibly soft-sounding and melodic.

Georgian. Surprisingly, shitty-sounding.

TURKIC.

Turkish. Shit tier.

Uzbek. Even worse.

Kazakh. Very decent. I hear a Russian accent every time though.

MONGOLIC.

Khalkha Mongolian. Welsh of Asia.

Other Mongolian varieties. Sounds just as funny as Ukrainian to a Russian speaker. Jokes aside, far softer than Khalkha. Not like it’s a good thing tho.

TUNGUSIC.

Manchu. I don’t think it’s possible to find a recording of it spoken, but from what I’ve read about its phonology it seems VERY DAMN INTERESTING. Why would you die out tho.

SINO-TIBETAN.

Mandarin. Absolute shit tier.

Cantonese. Cantopop one love. (Hong Kong makes much better mainstream pop-music than both Japan and Korea). Even though supposedly all the lyrics are written in Standard Mandarin and then sung with Cantonese readings. Spoken, sounds a bit angry.

Tibetan. Weird, soft, palatal. The cadence is nothing like any variety of Sinitic. Old Tibetan must have been hilarious, just as Old Chinese (btw, google “fengshengbang Old Chinese reconstruction” or smth like that, you will be very amused).

KOREANIC.

Korean. Uhm. In K-pop sounds like shit regardless. Alternative stuff, though, is pretty cool. When spoken, makes think of relationships gone wrong, arguments in drama and stuff. 6/10. Nell’s lead singer is 11/10 tho.

JAPONIC.

Japanese. 9/10 when sung (they tend to fuck the prosody to accommodate for Western rhythms), 10/10 when spoken by females, 2/10 when spoken by males. The worst thing you can hear in your life is Japanese spoken with English accent. The second worst is Japanese spoken with Russian accent.

TAI-KADAI.

Shit.

AUSTRO-ASIATIC.

Shit.

AUSTRONESIAN.

Shit, with the exception of…

Tahitian and Maori. These are very well designed conlangs. I would like to shake hands with the creator, he seems to have great understanding of phonetic aesthetics. Easy to pronounce for a change.

AMERICAN LANGUAGES.

I mean, I’ve heard some recordings and stuff, but can’t remember the names of the languages. These are something I know very little about, maybe some day I’ll dig into that potpourri.

NIGER-CONGO

Too much prenasalisation from what I’ve heard. Like, really.

KHOISAN

Clicks lol. On a serious note, some of them are very cool, it’s just the clicks, they sound like impure audio or smth, I can’t help.

So, basically my top 5 would be (in alphabetic order):

Faroese

Greek

Hungarian

Japanese

Kabardian

Not even that much of IE-bias, wow. Next time I’m gonna do the same thing but with writing systems/alphabets/orthographies.