Page 1 of 5

My conlang so far: Halvian

Posted: 2014-09-24, 5:12
by Mentilliath
Keep in mind this is a work-in-progress. It is not finished by any means, but I will give some of what I have completed here. Just wanting to know what people think of it.

First off: It is an a posteriori language whose grammar and phonology is based on Proto Indo-European, but it is not meant to be an exact analogue. The vocabulary is, for the most part, 100% original.

It is a general SOV language, pro-drop, highly inflexive.

Here is the phonological inventory:

Vowels have short and long counterparts:

Short: /a/, /ɛ/ (e), /i/, /o/, /u/
Long: /aː/, /eː/, /iː/, /oː/, /uː/

Irregular: /ə/ (ë)

Consonants:

/p/, /b/, /v/, /w/, /j/, /t/, /θ/ (th), /s/, /n/, /d/, /l/, /r/, /z/, /k/, /g/, /kʷ/ (qu), /gʷ/ (gu), /h/

Geminates are distinctive. Accent marks here represent stress. Stress cannot be placed further back than the antepenultimate syllable. Accents shift to accomodate this.

Nouns are organized into declensions by stem: a, e, i, o, u, and consonant. Three genders.

Some example random vocabulary:

nouns (nominative, genitve)
gálla, gállas - field
duéno, duénos - boy
ramgála, ramgálas - truth
nenía, nenías - garden
tilléniath, tilleníathis - [man-made] harbor

Cases: Nominative, Genitive, Dative, Accusative, Ablative, Locative, Instrumental, Allative, Vocative, Essive
Numbers: Singular, Dual, Plural

verbs (First singular present, infinitive, first singular aorist, first singular perfect, perfect passive participle)
melámi, meláse, ámlai, mémlatha, meláto - love
sámi, sáse, ásai, sésatha, sáto - I swim
gábrimi, gabríse, agébrisai*, gegábritha, gabríto - I speak, talk
glémimi, glemíse, aglémisai*, giglémitha, glemíto - I change
ketémi, ketése, áktei, kíktetha, ketéto - I ride

*both of these belong to the "sigmatic aorist" class. The rest are "regular".

Moods: indicative, imperative, subjunctive, optative, jussive, necessitative
Tenses (Tense-Aspect): Present, Imperfect, Future, Aorist, Perfect, Pluperfect, Future-Perfect

Simple example sentences:

"I speak Halvian"

Hime gábrimi Hálvarën (emphatic)
Hálvarën gábrimi (unemphatic)

"I live in the field"

Gálli predámi.

"I left the store and went home."

Ínsod átelmei sot véquana ówei.

ínso, ínsos = store (ínsod = ablative)
telmémi = leave (átelmei = aorist)
sot = and
ówei = irregular verb, aorist of "go"
véquas = house (véquana = allative)

Yes, this is not much to go on. But I'd just like to know what you think so far. :)

Re: My conlang so far: Halvian

Posted: 2014-09-24, 5:25
by Koko
Looks really good :) Sounds nice, too.

I gather that the verb to love is irregular (ámlai being the aorist), so does the verb sáse demonstrate regular -a stem verbs?

Re: My conlang so far: Halvian

Posted: 2014-09-24, 5:29
by Mentilliath
Thanks!

And sorry I wasn't clear on that. Verbs that have m_l, m_n, k_t, s_m and various other consonant combinations with vowels in-between at the beginning of their stem delete the vowel (zero-grade ablaut) in the aorist and perfect. So instead of "amelai", it's just "amlai", and instead of "aketei", it's just "aktei".

I need to make a list of which consonant combinations use the zero-grade ablaut.

sáse does demonstrate a non-ablauting verb, yes.

Re: My conlang so far: Halvian

Posted: 2014-11-13, 3:39
by Koko
I would just like to point out:

Mentilliath wrote:The vocabulary is, for the most part, 100% original.

Sorry, I love seeing contradictions that happen to work. Because these phrases I love are contradicting each other, it's weird to think that the better alternative is less fun ('cause above all else, fun is better than sense).

Anyway, I was originally going to ask you something, then I saw the above and couldn't resist ^^. Question my be to see more of language your? Like more of the morphology, maybe allophones, a little more syntax; are there any irregularities, exceptions? What rules cannot be broken? The us'.

Re: My conlang so far: Halvian

Posted: 2014-11-13, 3:45
by linguoboy
If vowel length is phonemic, why isn't it distinguished in the orthography?

Re: My conlang so far: Halvian

Posted: 2014-11-13, 3:58
by Koko
My take on his long vowels was that they followed similar rules to German (or Italian) in that they can't be long before two consonants; hence no orthographic distinction like double-vowels or diacritics.

Re: My conlang so far: Halvian

Posted: 2014-11-13, 4:05
by linguoboy
Koko wrote:My take on his long vowels was that they followed similar rules to German (or Italian) in that they can't be long before two consonants.

In that case, their occurrence is entirely predictable and, therefore, the contrast is not phonemic. (In Standard German, double consonants are entirely orthographic, but he specifically says "Geminates are distinctive".)

Re: My conlang so far: Halvian

Posted: 2014-11-13, 4:06
by Koko
Because geminates are distinctive is why I said "(or Italian)," which can never follow a long vowel. Plus, he says the vowels have short and long counterparts, not necessarily stating a phonemicity.

Re: My conlang so far: Halvian

Posted: 2014-11-13, 13:48
by linguoboy
Koko wrote:Because geminates are distinctive is why I said "(or Italian)," which can never follow a long vowel. Plus, he says the vowels have short and long counterparts, not necessarily stating a phonemicity.

But he puts them between forward slashes in his inventory. That indicates phonemicity. If they're only allophones of the short vowels, that should be stated plainly.

Re: My conlang so far: Halvian

Posted: 2014-11-13, 15:17
by Koko
I don't know!(exclamatory: like "heck!") it's not even my own conlang so I don't know why I'm arguing about its phoneme : orthography ratio.

Re: My conlang so far: Halvian

Posted: 2014-11-17, 1:46
by Mentilliath
Sorry for not being clear about that; that was a mistake. Long vowels are phonemic, as are long consonants. When I write using the Georgian alphabet, I have specific characters for long vowels--in transliterating them into the Latin alphabet, I left them as regular vowels, without macrons. Additionally, long vowels are often stressed, and typing accented vowels with macrons proved difficult on my computer.

For example, before ablative -d, vowels are always long, so it should be "ínsōd" rather than just "ínsod". There are other examples; I will have to re-write some of those sentences with macrons in the correct places.

Geminates are also phonemic, so they can be used to distinguish to completely different lexemes:

géta = young woman, maiden
gétta = source (of a river)

And Koko, I will provide some more morphological examples; I was having trouble figuring out how to post a table. If someone can explain to me how to do that, I can post more.

Re: My conlang so far: Halvian

Posted: 2014-11-17, 3:25
by linguoboy
Why use macrons then? Why not use some other convention, like following colons or doubled vowel symbols? After all, you're already using doubled consonants symbols for phonemically long consonants.

Re: My conlang so far: Halvian

Posted: 2014-11-17, 3:32
by Mentilliath
True. I guess since I'm a student of Latin, macrons are my go-to. For my next examples, I will be sure to show the long vowels explicitly.

Re: My conlang so far: Halvian

Posted: 2014-11-17, 3:52
by Koko
If there's rules as to when a vowel should be long or not, then for those cases I wouldn't bother marking length unless it then causes a minimal pair. Say there's an "ínsod" that contrasts with "ínsōd," I would write the macron on the latter because it is different from the former. If there's already a minimal pair, I would mark them.

However, there's phonemic pitch accent in some Japanese accents, but isn't marked by anything in any script (except for very unofficial transliterations). Swedish doesn't contrast between its two tones in orthography either. Perhaps you could do the same but by not marking length, which is basically what you've done.

Re: My conlang so far: Halvian

Posted: 2014-11-17, 4:19
by Koko
Mentilliath wrote:And Koko, I will provide some more morphological examples; I was having trouble figuring out how to post a table. If someone can explain to me how to do that, I can post more.

There's a page somewhere in the Questions and Information forums on table making. Everytime I want to take a look at it, it seems to be moved from where I thought it was — though that's unlikely and I'm just blind. You could take a look there.

Re: My conlang so far: Halvian

Posted: 2014-12-10, 1:20
by Koko
I've got an idea! It'll solve my jealousy issue of Halvian!

Do you have a conculture? Either way, would you let a small diglossic community exist on Isya where the speakers primarily speak Isyan and Halvian and often change to the other mid-sentence? The same thing could exist with your conlang-speakers' native country/continent/whatever.

Re: My conlang so far: Halvian

Posted: 2014-12-10, 1:31
by Mentilliath
Yeah, I have a conculture although it's not as fully developed as I'd like. More or less a world that is a combination of the European Middle Ages and Ancient Rome--somewhat inspired by the world of George R. R. Martin.

I think a diglossic community between the two languages would be an awesome idea hehe

Re: My conlang so far: Halvian

Posted: 2014-12-10, 1:44
by Koko
Great!! Now I shall rule the world and take charge of all conlangs! Muwahahaha!

It shall be called Halvisya and the Isyan name for Halvian is… well, (Mebeya) Halvio/Halvia(na). It is been ijesev to Isyan :) . Something like that rarely happens: ijesejo only happens to gods, priests, Viyanyav, and in some few other occasions.

Re: My conlang so far: Halvian

Posted: 2015-03-10, 4:46
by Mentilliath
Finally decided to post more here. The reason I hadn't posted anything yet is that Halvian's paradigms are exceedingly complicated (it's fun for me to make them complicated, without making them illogical, but it is hard, I will admit that) and I did not have them complete at the time. They're still not fully complete. But I've completed enough now that I can start to share some more about how this language works.

I can start by sharing some information about noun formation. The nominal paradigms are based on PIE, Ancient Greek, Old Latin, and my own creation. My main goal was to use archaic features of PIE and Old Latin that had been dropped.

The First Declension

Declensions are organized by their stems, not by whether or not they are a certain gender. Most 1st declension nouns are feminine, but not all. The main thing to know about the 1st declension is that it is the a-stem declension. This applies for nouns of ALL genders.

Halvian nouns have singular, dual, and plural number. Forms are distinct in almost all paradigms, though there is overlap with the vocative mainly. Length of vowels matters as do accents. Accents move around, much like they do in Ancient Greek.

The example noun I'm going to use is gálla, meaning "field", esp. one for farming. It's a very basic word. :)

Singular

Here's gálla declined in the 10 cases in the singular. To avoid long vowels with accent marks (which don't show up on some people's computers): Assume a long vowel is accented if an accent appears nowhere else (as in the dative and instrumental). All Halvian words with more than one syllable have an obligatory accent mark!

CaseForm of gállaEnding
Nominativegálla-a
Genitivegállas-as
Dativegallāi-āi
Allativegállana-ana
Accusativegállan-an
Ablativegállād-ād
Vocativegálla-a
Locativegállai-ai
Instrumentalgallē
Essivegallássa-assa


Notice the different accent and long markings in the dative and locative, even if they appear to be syncretic, they are not exactly the same.

Plural

Now, on to the plural. This may be subject to change unfortunately. I've changed it so many times it gives me a headache to even think about it. This is the way it is as of 3/9/15. The singular was fun compared to this crap :x :

CaseForm of gállaEnding
Nominativegállās-ās
Genitivegállasom-asom
Dativegallābos-ābos
Allativegállanes-anes
Accusativegállans-ans
Ablativegállāis-āis
Vocativegállas-as
Locativegallāsu-āsu
Instrumentalgallābis-ābis
Essivegallássinen-assinen


The vocative plural is the same as the genitive singular. This is because long vowels never appear in vocatives, no matter what. It's unlikely that these would be confused however. Originally I had the nominative plural in -ai, and while I still like that ending, it's far too similar to Ancient Greek and Latin and I decided to take the Sanskrit root and go back to the reconstructed PIE plural ending.

Dual

The dual, unlike in Ancient Greek and most other IE languages, is fully productive and functional in Halvian and has its own set of distinct endings. They are as follows:

CaseForm of gállaEnding
Nominativegállā
Genitivegallāia-āia
Dativegallāien-āien
Allativegállade-ade
Accusativegállain-ain
Ablativegállāins-āins
Vocativegálle-e
Locativegallāisu-āisu
Instrumentalgallābi-ābi
Essivegallássain-assain


An -i- infix and an -n suffix are common markers of dual, but they can't predict all the case forms. The unusual vocative form is to the fact that unless there was a distinct vocative form, the nominative singular and vocative dual would be the same, which makes no sense. Additional, long vowels cannot appear in vocatives.

Masculine First Declension Nouns

The only difference between the masculine and feminine first declension nouns is in the nominative and genitive singulars. The nominative singular is -as instead of -a, and the genitive singular is -ásio instead of -as (to avoid syncretism with the nominative). Otherwise, everything else is exactly the same. And that includes the vocative. So for a masculine 1st-declension noun like the name Príntas, the genitive would be Printásio and the vocative would be Prínta.

Whew. Okay, that's enough for now. I'll update this more from now on. I don't really care if people read it or not. I just need to get this out lol.

Re: My conlang so far: Halvian

Posted: 2015-03-10, 23:28
by Koko
Yes!! I've been waiting for so long to see Halvian's nominal morphonology! Yay! You have the dual too! It shall dominate.