Language [Xiluh]

[SDragon]

I'm thinking of working on Xiluh linguistics, but creating an entire language from scratch is... well, a daunting task. I already have some ideas brewing in my head, but I'm not sure how to fully implement them.

First, since it was good enough for the Mayans, I'd like to have a syllabary. Right now, this means accounting every syllable of every Xiluh-specific word, and figuring out some system for them. I suspect I might have too many for a single viable system, so maybe some should get delegated to race-specific words? How many syllables can a believable syllabary have?

after that, I have a wild idea of removing adjectives. Well, not exactly. Instead, this approach really treats them as verbs: "this house reds. It is redding." Hopefully this will help add to a non-European tone.

I'm also thinking of giving gender to words. I'm not sure if I want all words to have gender, or if it will only be some types of words. The more I think about this, the more convenient it seems; It can help allow more words per root word. I'm thinking I might want to apply more than just the masculine/feminine genders, and maybe add some more. What other genders might be applicable in Xiluh? Can I designate certain syllables to genders, like how the letter A is feminine in Spanish, while O is masculine? What if some syllables were dedicated specifically to genders?

I'm sure I need to consider quite a bit more, but this seems like a good workload for now. I'm probably going to have to change some of the words I already have, but I can handle that. I'm also planning on copying my current linguistic notes over to here, to make this thread a bit more comprehensive. Does anyone have any suggestions for this?

[limetom]

(If I have said something in linguisticese that y'all don't understand, ask so I can explain.  If you want more examples, I can do that too.)

logograms[/url] (a grapheme which represents a whole word or morpheme, rather than an individual sound or syllable) and a syllabary.  There are a variety of other languages, like Japanese for instance, that do the same.

When you're designing a syllabary, the real thing you need to know is: "What makes a syllable in this language?".  Most languages that use syllabaries often have somewhat limited syllables.  But this requires knowing how a syllable is constructed.

Syllables have three parts: an onset, a nucleus, and a coda.  The onset is the initial consonant of a syllable.  This can range from nothing (for vowel-initial syllables, like English at), to large clusters of consonants (English strength, for instance).  Nuclei are the only non-optional part of a syllable.  Generally, nuclei are vowels, but some languages allow certain consonants as nuclei (such as Nuxálk, a language spoken in British Columbia, which has words like sps, 'northeast wind').  Finally, the coda is the end of a syllable.  These are comprised of consonants, but like

Languages which can have a few consonants in the nuclei aren't too hard to deal with.  Ones like Nuxálk where basically any consonant can be a nucleus could be problematic.  Codas, however, are the real problem for syllabaries.  They can quickly increase the number of graphs needed to make a syllabary from a few to an unwieldy number.

There are workarounds to these problems, however.  Japanese only has one possible coda consonant, -n, so it has it's own glyph.  Mayan languages have lots of coda consonants, but the Classical script is subtractive.  You delete the last vowel if it is a repetition of a previous vowel.  This means that if you want a word to be read bag, you would write ba-ga.  If you wanted a word to be read ba-ga, you would write ba-ga-a.  Inuktitut also has lots of coda consonants, but uses a modified syllabary which allows for final consonants to be added as their own glyph.  

To compare these by numbers, the Japanese syllabary has 47 syllable glyphs, 3 digraph glyphs (to make ka kya, for instance), 1 final glyph (-n), a glyph to indicate geminate consonants (to make poi ppoi, for instance), and 2 diacritics, one to mark voicing (to make ka ga), and one to make p, which has no set of glyphs to itself.  This gives us a total of 54 glyphs.  The Mayan syllabary has (at least) 82 glyphs, though there may be more to be discovered/deciphered. The Inuktitut syllabary has 48 syllable glyphs, 1 long vowel diacritic, and 16 final consonant glyphs, for a total of 65 glyphs.

In my experience, a range of about 50-100 is average and workable.  With some real study, a system that size could be memorized in two or three weeks (I know from experience :3).

I'm also thinking of giving gender to words. I'm not sure if I want all words to have gender, or if it will only be some types of words. The more I think about this, the more convenient it seems; It can help allow more words per root word. I'm thinking I might want to apply more than just the masculine/feminine genders, and maybe add some more. What other genders might be applicable in Xiluh? Can I designate certain syllables to genders, like how the letter A is feminine in Spanish, while O is masculine? What if some syllables were dedicated specifically to genders?

fraoch[/i], the Scottish Gaelic word for 'heather'.  It just got assigned a noun class.

Japanese has no grammatical gender, but some words and phrases are preferred over one gender or another.  English has only the leftovers of a now-gone gender system, found in words like blond (masculine) and blonde (feminine), but even these distinctions are fading (most people nowadays, I'd wager, don't even know the word blond or how to use it).  Then there are the Romance gender systems, which evolved from Latin's three way distinction of masculine, feminine, and neuter.  Finally, some languages decided to have way more than just zero, two or three genders.  Indeed, even in European languages, noun class is the better term because most gendered words don't really have anything to do with the gender they're given.  Lenape, or Delaware, for instance, has a animate-inanimate distinction (but even this is arbitrary, as the word for "raspberry" is animate and the word for "strawberry" is inanimate )  Finally, you get systems that went a little crazy, like Swahili, which has 18 noun classes, distinguishing people, plants, animals, plurality, location, and various other things.

[SDragon]

(If I have said something in linguisticese that y'all don't understand, ask so I can explain.  If you want more examples, I can do that too.)

logograms[/url] (a grapheme which represents a whole word or morpheme, rather than an individual sound or syllable) and a syllabary.  There are a variety of other languages, like Japanese for instance, that do the same.

If both languages do the same-- a logogram/syllabary combo-- then presumably I could use Japanese as some inspiration.

Would you mind giving some examples of syllables and morpheme (graphemes?) from Japanese?

after that, I have a wild idea of removing adjectives. Well, not exactly. Instead, this approach really treats them as verbs: "this house reds. It is redding." Hopefully this will help add to a non-European tone.

So a simple approach like this is workable? Sounds good to me!

I'm also thinking of giving gender to words. I'm not sure if I want all words to have gender, or if it will only be some types of words. The more I think about this, the more convenient it seems; It can help allow more words per root word. I'm thinking I might want to apply more than just the masculine/feminine genders, and maybe add some more. What other genders might be applicable in Xiluh? Can I designate certain syllables to genders, like how the letter A is feminine in Spanish, while O is masculine? What if some syllables were dedicated specifically to genders?

fraoch[/i], the Scottish Gaelic word for 'heather'.  It just got assigned a noun class.

Japanese has no grammatical gender, but some words and phrases are preferred over one gender or another.  English has only the leftovers of a now-gone gender system, found in words like blond (masculine) and blonde (feminine), but even these distinctions are fading (most people nowadays, I'd wager, don't even know the word blond or how to use it).  Then there are the Romance gender systems, which evolved from Latin's three way distinction of masculine, feminine, and neuter.  Finally, some languages decided to have way more than just zero, two or three genders.  Indeed, even in European languages, noun class is the better term because most gendered words don't really have anything to do with the gender they're given.  Lenape, or Delaware, for instance, has a animate-inanimate distinction (but even this is arbitrary, as the word for "raspberry" is animate and the word for "strawberry" is inanimate )  Finally, you get systems that went a little crazy, like Swahili, which has 18 noun classes, distinguishing people, plants, animals, plurality, location, and various other things.

eighteen[/i] of these classes, but it certainly helps one think outside of masculine/feminine. I'm already trying to decide what extra classes I could go with.

Thanks for the help!

[SDragon]

Copied over from the main thread:

Xiluh- ZEE-loo
Kunah- koo-NAH
valley of Thenta- VAL-lee of THEN-ta
Tixivan- TIX-ee-'vahn
yuma- YOO-ma
Kunahite- KOO-nuh-'height
[/spoiler]

[limetom]

æˆ ã,,, ã,ã,‰ã¬ はã,‹ ã,,, ã,'かしの はã,‹ なã,‰ã¬ ã,ãŒ 身 ひとつ は ã,,との 身に して
Tuki ya ar-an-u faru ya mukasi-no faru nar-an-u waga mi fido-tu fa moto-no mi-ni s-ite
moon QPT be-NEG-ATTR spring QPT old-GEN spring become-NEG-ATTR my body one-CL TOP base-GEN body-DAT do-SUB
'Is there not a moon?  Is this spring not like that spring from before? [Only] I myself am [still] my former self.'[/font]

The linguistic abbreviations in the third line aren't important.  What is important is that Japanese writing does not line up well with its grammar.  You can't put a hypben between the a and the r of ã,ã,‰ã¬ aranu ('not be'), because ã,/a is one glyph, and ã,‰/ra is another.

Here, for comparison, is what modern Japanese looks like.  (I'm not going to bother with transcribing or translating it.  It's from the Wikipedia page for the University of the Ryukyus, the school I'm studying abroad at.

ã'Œç‰çƒå¤§å­¦ã¯ã'æ²–ç¸,,çŒä¸­é ­éƒ¡è¥¿åŽŸç"ºå­—千原1番å°ã«æ¬éƒ¨ã,'置く日æ¬ã®å›½ç«‹å¤§å­¦ã§ã,ã,‹ã',ã'

The important thing here is the mix of logograms and syllabic characters.  Modern Japanese mainly uses syllabic characters for grammatincal stuff (those bound morphemes I talked about before), rather than things with meaning, using kanji (literally, 'Chinese characters'), for things such as verb roots (those free morphemes I mentioned earlier) and nouns and such.

(It's late, I'll probably add some more to this tomorrow sometime.)

[SDragon]

tl;dr: logographs are kanji and similar writing systems; don't do that. Syllabaries are kana and similar writing systems; go for it.

Right?

I can see Japanese fonts, by the way, but I appreciate the transcribing and translations nonetheless.

Edit-- with a little work, I can get to roughly 70-80 syllables and codas. That seems decent.

[SDragon]

This is my first time ever using the table code, so forgive me if this goes wrong, but this is the syllabary thus far:

[table=Syllables][tr][th][/th][td]A[/td][td]E[/td][td]I[/td][td]U[/td][/tr]
[tr][th]B[/th][td]ba[/td][td]be[/td][td]bi[/td][td]bu[/td][/tr]
[tr][th]CH[/th][td]cha[/td][td]che[/td][td]chi[/td][td]chu[/td][/tr]
[tr][th]DR[/th][td]dra[/td][td]dre[/td][td]dri[/td][td]dru[/td][/tr]
[tr][th]H[/th][td]ha[/td][td]he[/td][td]hi[/td][td]hu[/td][/tr]
[tr][th]K[/th][td]ka[/td][td]ke[/td][td]ki[/td][td]ku[/td][/tr]
[tr][th]L[/th][td]la[/td][td]le[/td][td]li[/td][td]lu[/td][/tr]
[tr][th]M[/th][td]ma[/td][td]me[/td][td]mi[/td][td]mu[/td][/tr]
[tr][th]N[/th][td]na[/td][td]ne[/td][td]ni[/td][td]nu[/td][/tr]
[tr][th]P[/th][td]pa[/td][td]pe[/td][td]pi[/td][td]pu[/td][/tr]
[tr][th]XHU[/th][td]xhua[/td][td]xhue[/td][td]xhui[/td][td]~[/td][/tr]
[tr][th]R[/th][td]ra[/td][td]re[/td][td]ri[/td][td]ru[/td][/tr]
[tr][th]S[/th][td]sa[/td][td]se[/td][td]si[/td][td]su[/td][/tr]
[tr][th]T[/th][td]ta[/td][td]te[/td][td]ti[/td][td]tu[/td][/tr]
[tr][th]TH[/th][td]tha[/td][td]the[/td][td]thi[/td][td]thu[/td][/tr]
[tr][th]TL[/th][td]tla[/td][td]tle[/td][td]tli[/td][td]tlu[/td][/tr]
[tr][th]V[/th][td]va[/td][td]ve[/td][td]vi[/td][td]vu[/td][/tr]
[tr][th]Y[/th][td]ya[/td][td]ye[/td][td]yi[/td][td]yu[/td][/tr]
[tr][th]X[/th][td]xa[/td][td]xe[/td][td]xi[/td][td]xu[/td][/tr][/table]
[table=Codas]
[tr][td]n[/td][td]rk[/td][td]rg[/td][td]sk[/td][td]k[/td][td]l[/td][td]ph[/td][/tr][/table]

This totals to 82 glyphs total right now. The coda -rk is probably going to be assimilated into -rg, bringing it down by one. Also, I'm not sure if I like the dr- group, and it only exists in an example, so I might take that out as well, bringing it down to 77.

Xhu- is pronounced as a "shw" sound, so xhuin would sound like a famous bicycle brand. Actually, I may or may not use that word... Anyway. The syllable xhuu would roughly be an awkward "shwoo" sound, which I'm avoiding. I'm contemplating changing this group to q- or qu-, hence it's current position in the table. X- is pronounced as a "z" sound, hence it's position, there.

So, is this good enough to use? Should I make any further changes to make it more usable?

[limetom]

The coda -rk is probably going to be assimilated into -rg, bringing it down by one.

Just a little nitpicking from my specialty, -rk would be more common, as sounds tend to devoice at the ends of words (i.e. d becomes t, b becomes p, g becomes k, etc.).

Have class, will comment more later.

[limetom]

Oh, as an additional note: to go over it again, syllables are composed of onsets, nuclei, and codas.  Codas aren't something different.  Also a point of interest, nuclei and codas can be grouped as a bigger part of a syllable, the rime.  It is, as the name might imply, the part of a syllable that makes rhymes (and has some other effects attached to it, like when you stretch out a word really loooong, you're stretching out the rime).

Your vowel system is interesting, if I'm understanding it right.  There are only four vowels, which is somewhat uncommon.  Actually, Okinawan, the indigenous language of the island I'm on now has the same vowel system.  It merged what used to be an o into u.  For example, the name of the island in standard Japanese (and Proto-Japonic, which both of them came from) is おきなã,/Okinawa, but in Okinawan, it's うちなã,/Uchinaa.  There you can see several sound changes; the o became a u, the ki became a chi, and wa reduced to just a.  You also have vowel length, which is really common.  There are many ways to represent that.

Japanese has two syllabaries.  One for native words, called hiragana, and one for foreign words, called katakana.  In hiragana, you indicate long vowels simply by doubling the vowel.  Let's say you want to make か/ka long.  You write かã,/kaa.  In katakana, however, a simple dash is used.  To use the same example, ã,«/ka becomes ã,«ãƒ¼/kaa, not ã,«ã,¢/kaa.

[SDragon]

On the -rk/-rg thing, my reason for getting rid of -rk is simple: each of these codas are used once so far, and each for the name of a First-One emperor. The first emperor was Thark, which is fine. The second, however, was Marg. I can accept a Tharg, but using Mark as a proper noun... not sure I want to do that. Of course, with what I have now, I could just construct a new name entirely...

Oh, as an additional note: to go over it again, syllables are composed of onsets, nuclei, and codas.  Codas aren't something different.  Also a point of interest, nuclei and codas can be grouped as a bigger part of a syllable, the rime.  It is, as the name might imply, the part of a syllable that makes rhymes (and has some other effects attached to it, like when you stretch out a word really loooong, you're stretching out the rime).

Yeah, I know the coda isn't a separate thing, I just wasn't sure what to call the onset/nucleus combo. I probably should have made that note.

hiragana[/url], and one for foreign words, called katakana.  In hiragana, you indicate long vowels simply by doubling the vowel.  Let's say you want to make か/ka long.  You write かã,/kaa.  In katakana, however, a simple dash is used.  To use the same example, ã,«/ka becomes ã,«ãƒ¼/kaa, not ã,«ã,¢/kaa.

I'm actually (very) slowly working on learning my kana. I can recognize a good deal of hirigana, and I'll start on katakana as soon as I'm comfortable with the rest of hirigana. Flash cards, ahoy!

[SDragon]

Thought: Can I make a set of noun class syllables, and leave them generally implied, possibly used primarily for educational purposes? It's a bit of a handwave, really; I get to claim noun classes, but I don't have any major need to actually create anything for them yet.

[limetom]

Thought: Can I make a set of noun class syllables, and leave them generally implied, possibly used primarily for educational purposes? It's a bit of a handwave, really; I get to claim noun classes, but I don't have any major need to actually create anything for them yet.

all[/i] nouns in a language must fall into one.

[th]Literal[/th][th][/th][th]Purposeful[/th][th][/th][th]Arbitrary[/th][th][/th]

buachaill m	'boy'	búistéir m	'butcher'	cárta creidmheasa m	'credit card'
cailín f	'girl'	báicéir m	'baker'	ráta seachbhuaice m	'off-peak rate'
fear m	'man'	Béarla m	'English'	foirgneamh m	'building'
bean f	'woman'	Gaeilge f	'Irish'	fógra m	'announcement'
caora f	'ewe'	Spáinnis f	'Spanish'	réalta f	'star'

The 'Literal' column is straightforward.  In Irish, most professions are masculine nouns, as shown in the 'Purposeful' column.  Also, all languages except English are feminine.  There's no structural reason why it can't be feminine, so the only good conclusion is that this was done for some conscious reason by speakers of Irish.  Finally, the 'Arbitrary' column shows arbitrary distinctions.

Another kind of system is that of classifiers, as found in many languages.  Classifiers are words all by themselves, which must be used in combination with a noun in certain instances, depending on the language.  Here I'll use Japanese.

[th]Classifier[/th][th]Meaning[/th][th]Example[/th][th][/th]

sai	Years of age	ni-juu-ni-sai	'22 years old'
hon	Long, thin objects	ro-ppon pen	'6 pens'
kai	Numbers of floors	yon-kai	'the fourth floor; four floors'
nin	Number of people	Shichi-nin no Samurai	'The Seven Samurai (movie title)'
mai	Thin, flat objects	san-mai shashin	'three photos'

Note that these are only five out of dozens of classifiers in Japanese.  Japanese inherited a large portion of this system from Chinese, which has a more complex system.  Sign languages also tend to have very complex classifier systems.  Some languages have very simple classifier systems, with only five or six classifiers.  Noun classifiers have been known to evolve into noun classes when they start getting simpler and simpler, and the reverse is possible as well.

Also note that noun classifiers are generally words, while noun classes are usually (bound) morphemes (or sometimes entirely independent of sound).

These are the two most common kinds of classifier schemes in languages.  There are others, but they are not as common.

[SDragon]

Is it plausible to have both?

[limetom]

Not really.  I don't know of any language that has both.  Generally, you have one or the other.

In isolating languages, that is, languages where the ideal is one morpheme-per-word, you don't have a case system, so you generally don't have a noun class system.  Isolating languages are generally the ones that have classifiers.

In synthetic languages, where the ideal is typically more than one morpheme-per-word, you often have a case system, so you often have a noun class system as well.

These two, however, are not set in stone.  Chinese is regarded as a very isolating language, yet has a ton of compounds, which are two words put together to make a new word (e.g. ç"Ÿæ—¥ / shÄ"ngri 'birthday' < ç"Ÿ+æ—¥ / shÄ"ng 'birth; life' + ri 'day').  Middle Japanese is much more synthetic than modern Japanese, but still has monomorphemic words (e.g. æˆ / tuki 'moon'; cf. うã'たまはã,‰ãšã,‰ã,' / uketamafar-az-ar-am-u 'wouldn't one listen [to something someone of higher status says]').


Definitions for Stuff I Mentioned:
Morphemes, remember, are the smallest unit of meaning in language.  Words are composed of one or more morphemes.  So by some of the words I've used in this sentence and the last, we can see that English isn't an isolating language (i.e. morpheme-s, small-est, compose-d, etc.).

A case system adds a morpheme to words to indicate some grammatical relation.  Old English had cases, but for the most part, modern English doesn't.  This can still in English pronouns (like how you can't switch 'he' and 'him').  In a very simple sentence, you have a subject, verb, and object (abbreviated S, V, and O, respectively).  The order of these three varies from language to language.  For example:
[note]For full completeness sake, the meaning of the above sentences is not exactly the same.  The English verb kick and the Japanese verb ke-ru, both mean, simply, 'to hit with the foot'.  The Irish verb, ciceáil, means specifically 'to kick a ball (as in soccer)'.  The Latin verb, calcitrare means specifically 'to kick with the heel'.  Remember that the Romans wore open-toed sandals, so kicking with any other part of the foot was dangerous.[/note]
[th]English[/th][th]Japanese[/th][th]Irish[/th][th]Latin[/th]

Jean (S) kicked (V) the ball (O).

Jiin-ga (S) booru-wo (O) ke-tta. (V)

Chiceáil (V) Síne (S) an peil (O).

Ioann-a (S) calcitr-at (V) pil-am (O).

These three variations in word order, SOV (Japanese), SVO (English and Latin), and VSO (Irish) - in that order - are the most common in languages.  

Here, both English as well as (to a lesser extent) Irish have lost case marking.  Japanese and Latin still have it.  Subjects in Japanese are marked with -ga, and objects with -wo.  Latin has multiple noun classes (masculine, feminine, and neuter), as well as several structural varieties (declensions).  Here, we see subject marking in the first declension is -a, and object marking in the first declension is -am.  Case marking is obligatory in Classical Latin, while you can, in spoken Japanese, leave out case marking a lot of the time.

[SDragon]

I'm not so sure I want to deal with such a case system yet; I might eventually, but not yet.