Postby Kshaard » 2018-12-03, 0:25
So I decided to revisit/completely overhaul this language a few months ago, combining it with some of the features of my very first conlang, and it is now occupying a decent chunk of my attention.
Also, this forum still exists apparently! Reddit and discord haven't quite eaten it up yet, I see.
Phonology is basically as it was in 2013; a couple of minor changes were made in the consonants - /t d/ are now dental rather than alveolar, /j/ is now /ʝ/, /x ɣ/ tend to be realised /h ʁ/ in quick speech, the /ŋk ŋg/ allophony is not really a thing any more. There now exists another long vowel /y:/ and a slew of new diphthongs - three beginning with /ø/ and four ending with /y/. The "vowel mutation" system has been totally revamped to actually make sense now, and the rules governing phonotactics have been changed up a bit.
Ergative-absolutive is still a thing, but the word order somehow got flipped around to something more like SOV. No doubt because I wasn't checking my notes carefully enough. Still got a whole pile of cases with varying usefulness, but I decided to make them a little bit less latinate: we now have absolutive, ergative, comitative, instrumental, locative, possessive, possessed, and comparative (coincidentally still eight of them. Maybe I just like that number?) Also there are now prepositions (because I'm lazy apparently) which tend to take either the locative or the comitative respectively, depending on whether the relationship they represent is spacio-temporal or not.
Rules governing grammatical number have shifted around quite a bit. The unmarked noun is by default paucal, and this can either be changed morphologically to singular and/or plural, or those senses can be inferred from the determiner which is used.
Pronouns are now regular because I'm lazy or something.
Every single word class aside from the conjunction particles (ötę, siz and co) can be made negative by undergoing a regular suffixation, and these negative senses "stack" instead of cancelling each other, e.g.,
Panna zjoir qy c uettö.
he-ABS-SG loudly less - sing-PST
Panna zjoiros qy c uettö.
he-ABS-SG loudly-NEG less - sing-PST
Both of these sentences mean effectively "He sang less loudly than before", even though the second one contains a negative in the form of zjoiros "quietly". One would use this construction if he were now singing what would be considered "quietly" rather than simply "less loudly than before".
Verbs now have extra tenses (distant past, distant future and indefinite), no infinitive form, and a two-level aspect system borrowed from my first conlang (inchoative vs. perfect vs. neither, then long vs. short). Also their morphology looks totally different now.
Determiners work quite differently now. The two most common types are, as before, indefinite (ra/rat/-/r) and definite (ęra/ęrat/ęr/ęr), but rather than an using an English-style system to work out which to use, this is based on whether or not the item has been brought up in conversation yet. Indefinite is used whenever a new item is introduced, and definite is used to reintroduce an old item. Neither is used if the item is currently being discussed. These two can also stack up with other determiners before the noun, e.g.,
Qüs e gjoti r obpec . . .
1SG-PSV this all INDEF cart
"All these carts of mine which we haven't mentioned yet . . ."
Plus there are now one or two homophones to spice things up a bit. Not quite sure why I was so afraid of them back when I was first into conlanging. Ah well. se vs. -se "four" vs. "exactly". it vs. it "through" vs. "as much as possible". ü vs. ü "on" vs. "that".
Plus there's that thing with word classes in Jengief being rigidly tied to semantics and the interesting cultural outcomes of that rigidity. But it's twenty past midnight and I've no idea why I just typed all this stuff.
Enjoy, ask questions if you like, and so on.
Project Zelia is not dead - it is only sleeping. Long live project permanently unnamed!
Xupaca - Gakxiirou - Tawʒessò - Ōrgadūvk - Maxyrteser