#proto language

[somethingusefulfromflorida]

If there are any linguistics professionals reading this, I could use some help.

I'm doing research into Proto-Indo-European, the mother tongue of much of Europe and South Asia, and I recently discovered Schleicher's Fable, a short story about sheep and horses which has been translated into a dozen proto-languages to show how different branches envolved over the millennia.

My problem is that I don't know the word order or declensions (suffixes for different conjugations) of any of these languages, so I have no idea which words mean what throughout the text.

I know owis/hovis/avis means sheep (same etymology as modern English "ewe")

Ekwos means horse (equus, equestrian, etc.)

Wlna/wlana/vilno means wool

Oinom/aikam/enem means one

Krd/kart/sird means heart (cardio)

Widntei/widntbhos means see/seeing/sight (video/visual)

I think agnutai/egnutoi means hurt or pain (agony) but I don't know for sure

Same with megehm/megam for big (presumably like mega/magnum)

I can recognize a handful of other words from context, but some sentences completely confuse me. The phrase "heavy wagon" appears to be "woghom wegontm," both words of which look like they possibly share the same root, but I don't know which means heavy and which means wagon. All the variations of "dgmonm oku bherontm" mean "carry a man quickly," but I don't know which words corresponds to carry, man, or quickly. I think bherontm means carry because it has the -ontm suffix which I think marks a verb, but again, I just don't know.

I don't know the words for "the master makes the wool of the sheep into a warm garment for himself" or "the sheep fled into the plain." It's helpful that the story is broken down into lines, but it doesn't explain what each individual word means in order, so I don't know the proper translation.

Does anyone know where I can find an in depth breakdown of Schleicher's Fable with every word and declension annotated? I've tried looking up Proto-Indo-European glossaries/dictionaries online, but every corpus spells the words differently (lots of subscript letters and numbers and asterisks), some words have multiple PIE translations and no two sites agree on which to use when. It's not helpful at all.

I need a word-by-word translation, something like:

PIE: owis kwesjo wlna na est ekwoms speket

Literal: sheep which wool no have horses saw

English: a sheep which had no wool saw horses

Does anyone know where I can find the proper resources for this project?

[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.

[nubsneos]

Big collection of all my recent requests.

Wolf:

ku/kwo/wail/wailos/kwoself

way/waylo/waylos/waylos or wayloso/wayself

cane/cani/canis/canes/canem or caniself

Nature:

mon/moone/moyn/monæ/moonself or manan - derived from moon

groia/groie/growan/growen/groself - derived from grow

thri/thrif/thrifa/thrivas/thriself or thribana - derived from thrive

þri/þrif/þrifa/þrivas/þriself or þribana - from thrive

flos/flore/flori/florio/flores/florself or flosculus - from flower

nat/natur/natour/naturs/natours/naturself - from nature

wel/welde/wilde/wildis/wildnes/wildself or wyldernis - from wilderness

mon/mona/mano/meno/mehnis - from moon

Fire:

fyr/feure/fiur/fewr/fiurself or a fewe - from fire

heng/hengw/hengwni/hengwnis/hengself - from really old word for fire (living, active)

ha/heh/hehter/hehtr/hehself - from fire, unknown gender

bhel/bhelg/bhelo/bhelgos/bhelself or bheloteh - from flame, shiny, glitter

lieg/liege/lieges/liegas/liegself or liegum - from flame

leyg/leygr/leygrinn/leygjar/leygself or leygjrinas - from flame

lig/lewk/loug/laugi/lauself or laugiz - from flame, blaze

blas/blase/blese/blaese/blaself or blason - from blaze

Light:

lieh/lieht/liehtan/liutan/liehself or liuhtijan - from lighten

shine/shinen/schon/schonin/shinself or schinen - from shine

ski/skimo/schine/skinan/skiself or skinijan - from shine

glo/gloa/gloie/gloien/gloself or glodiz - from glow

byr/byrt/beraht/biraht/byrself or birhtj - from bright

kŕ/kŕmi/kŕmis/kŕmays/kŕself - from crimson, worm

qir/qirm/qirmiz/quirmizy/qirself or qirmisines - from crimson, Aribic form

IPE tonic/stressed Sets

1st:

eǵoH/m-mé/mé-me/mébhi/mm-ét

h₁eģ/h₁mé/h₁méne/h₁méǵʰio/h₁moí/h₁med/h₁moi

2nd:

tī̆/te/tos/tébhi/tw-ét

tuH/tué/teue/tébʰio/toí/tued/toí

[artmctalon]

Did a bunch of orthographic doodles during my breaks at work, as I was working through ideas concerning language construction.

I have been fiddling with a couple conlangs for a while now, mostly for this worldbuilding project I've also been fiddling with on and off again, involving the Vita-Ra.

Right now I have a proto-language of roots that I want to develop into a language family, and this was me ideating on what sort of writing system the early language speakers might have invented. I figured that like the Oracle bone script, early forms of writing would be recognizable pictographic representations of existing things, which would over time evolve into a writing system with more abstract, simplified characters (like how the Phoenician abjad was influenced by more representational hieroglyphs in its evolution).

Still trying to figure out the visual aesthetic. Some of the designs, I find too off balance or messy. Also, I think a couple characters just look like I straight-up copied a Hanzi logogram (hell, the character for "Ko" might as well be the same thing as the Chinese character for "river").

Still, it's a work in progress. And there's still plenty of potential I can work with.

Probably gonna binge some Artifexian vids this week.

[grymm-gardens]

the language nerd in me is fucking screaming and crying about the fact that Cassandra Pentaghast has what i believe may be the most accurate impression of the extinct gothic germanic accent we have, and the fact that they didn't even try to give anyone else from Nevarra the same accent is fucking criminal

yes i know it is an entirely made up accent that miranda developed herself, she unintentionally hit the nail on the fucking head with the accent of a dead language that would even be lore accurate with the placement of Nevarra relative to orlais and the other neighboring countries

also im sorry using Gothic as the language inspiration for nevarran??? is that not like too fucking perfect??

like yeh i get it accent training people for a fake accent is ridiculously hard

i do not care

give me gothic nevarrans in the truest sense of the word

i might post the notes find the notes here i have on the actual linguistic comparisons if anyone cares because i studied her pronunciation to compare to historical texts when i made the connection

[yvanspijk]

Wool & lana

The word lana (wool) in languages such as Spanish is etymologically related to English wool. For words to be related, they don't have to look like each other. Instead, you have to be able to trace them back to the same ancestor through regular sound changes - and that's what linguists managed to do with wool and lana. The infographic shows the Germanic and Romance family trees of these words.

[lonesomedreamer]

WILLIAM SHATNER in Insight: “Locusts Have No King” (1965; aired 1967)

I think of myself as a principled man. What good are principles if you don’t act on them? How solid is a belief if it isn’t worth fighting for?

[voidmetal-alloy]

Some little body swap shenanigans to get me back into drawing after my little break

Bonus ‘where did Proto Man go?’:

[chiropteracupola]

A very fine captain, and a finer friend.

[somethingusefulfromflorida]

I'm all for the use of non-gendered language and options for non-binary people, I just want them to make linguistic sense. "Nibling" sounds dumb. If you want a gender-neutral word for niece/nephew, it should share etymology with them. They both descend from the Proto-Indo-European root *nepot-, so there are a ton of plausible sounding options for derivations that don't call attention to themselves as neologisms.

Nepot is too visually similar to nephew, and sounds too much like the derivative nepotism, so maybe drop the p like Spanish did and go with something like nete or niete. Niete is too close to niece; nite, maybe? Or neti? Neit, neiti, neite, nit. These all look like real words, not clumsy 21st century portmanteaus like "nibling." If p and t are no good, we can go with another unvoiced stop like k. Nik, neik, nike (probably not that one), niki, neki, neke, nekie, so many possibilities, anything but "nibling."

Same thing with aunt/uncle. I've never heard a non-gendered term that sounds like something a layperson would use.

Hewhos became ewos, became avus, became avunculus, became uncle. Aunt is derived from words that mean mother; amma, amita, ante, aunt. I thought the word parent derived from the same root as paternal meaning father, but no, it's from the PIE root *pere-, mening to bring forth or produce. Sibling ultimately derives from the PIE root for self/oneself (*swe-), literally meaning same blood, related to myself, kin. "Parent's sibling" could be derived from swepere, swepar, suepar, supar, maybe something like sempar, "same parent/same source," simpar (maybe avoid anything with simp in it). Or "one source," onpar, honpar, paron, paroin, peron, peroine (from PIE *hoinom for one). I'm not thinking of germanic soundshifts, how these roots would evolve directly into English, I'm thinking broader, like how they would evolve in Latin or French to be loaned into English. If you want a neutral word that looks like it belongs with aunt and uncle, maybe something like umpar, umper, ompar, onpar, onper, onter, anything like that.

[miochimochi]

I started working with the protolang I had made for a bit, but I wasn't liking it. Things just didn't really fall together like I'd hoped. This is part of the process, though, and you wanna figure this stuff out during the proto phase. For me, the protolang phase is my planning and testing. Sometimes I like where it's going already, other times I don't and need to scrap it. But we'll get through this quicker since a bunch of the explanations were already given in the last post.

First thing I'm revamping is the phonemes...

I also brought /e/ over because I kept wanting to use the phoneme when thinking of roots.

Red letters are the written forms

I'm still using the Animate-Inanimate gender with a Masculine-Feminine Animate distinctions as well as the Singular-Plural-Superplural plurality.

Pronouns

Keeping the Agentive-Default Fluid S S¹=A;S²=P and changing something about the cases. (Made a mistake here, the Agentive is used when the subject is the actor, the Patientive is when the subject is acted upon)

And how they relate to the Agentive and Patientive.

Articles will still only mark the definite, the indefinite is unmarked.

And I got a list of derivational morphology, which basically is just a way you go from a root word to a new word.

Verb tense and aspect are fine as is.

And syllables will be (C)(y, w)V(V)(m, n, š, č, l, c)

[victusinveritas]

Starkey comics: I've made a giant tree of Indo-European languages! 🌳🌸

Actually this was just intended a template with which I plan to make a bunch of images about related words in these languages, so stay tuned for that. And I'll probably put a HD version of this image on my site soon too.

This image shows 64 living Indo-European languages (around the outside), as well as many dead and extinct languages.

Moving into the image from the outside we travel back in time, until we reach the core of the image, wherein lies Proto-Indo-European. PIE was spoken somewhere around the border of Europe and Asia, and diverged into the 10 inner Proto languages shown here 4500+ years ago.

There are about 380 Indo-European languages missing from this image, although I've tried to pick representatives from as many branches as possible. The Indo-Iranian branch is the largest, actually accounting for around 2 thirds of Indo-European languages.

-⭐🗝️

[kkulbeolyeonghwa]

Colors in Ainu! - Ainu itak; iro

retar - white retara - white (Kaminokuni) kunne - black ekurok - true black hure - red kunnehure - brown toine - brown (Kaminokuni) ruhure - pink hukinane - green hukinatomne - green (Saru) kinane - green (Kaminokuni) (kon)kan(e/i) - gold sirokan(e/i )- silver nis iro - light blue siwnin - yellow (historically also blue&green) nikapiro - yellow (Bihoro) sikerpepeus - yellow (Horobetsu) sikerepepeun - yellow (Kaminokuni) katuwa - grey rayoci - rainbow-colored

The traditional Ainu color scheme has four colors; yellow, white, red and black.

The word for "color", iro, is from the same root as the Japanese word for it, 色; Proto-Japonic *erə is the root for both words. Did you know that this word is also the root for the Palauan word chiro meaning the same thing?

[yvanspijk]

Girles were children

The ancestor of the word girl meant 'child of any gender'. Its meaning narrowed to 'young female human' during the Middle English period. The meanings of words change over time. This is called semantic drift. Click my new graphic below to have a closer look at five examples of narrowing. Tomorrow we'll dive into the opposite semantic change: widening.

[blackcrowing]

Review of The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World by David W. Anthony

I will be upfront, it is a very technical book. If you are not well versed in the anthropological categorizing of cultures and time periods of the areas being discussed it can be very difficult to keep up with the more finite points the author is making. That being said, I had never heard of any of the specific cultures being discussed in the Danube Valley and was still able to enjoy this book and its well put together analysis of various aspects of language, culture, technological developments and shifts in behaviors and place.

If you are especially interested in any of the major themes this book discusses (which is in all honesty is an extensive list including but not limited to; the development of Indo-European language, the time periods and locations as well as likely motivation for domestication of various livestock types, the cultural effects of technological developments on the peoples of the Eurasian Steppes and their migration/trading patterns) I do highly recommend. It is heavy reading but extremely illuminating.

[calvogostoso]

Silly old men BCE.

Language notes:

Mr. Germania speaks Proto-Germanic, here written in the Elder Futhark runic alphabet:

ᚱᚢᛗᛟᚾᛁᛉᚺᚢᚱᚾᚢᚾᚷᚨᛉ = *rūmōniz *hurnungaz = "roman bastard"

(I translated it myself and can't really verify how accurate it is so keep this in mind)

The classical Latin alphabet didn't have the letters J, U and W so I often represent Grandpa Rome's speech bubbles without them.

I'll let the scene which inspired this piece explain the Latin bit lmao