Linguistics

[Laufey]

In Finnish textbooks when mentioned, cats are often called Mirri. Is it common name for them in Finland?
In Russian there are similar looking Мурка (Murka, for female cats) and Мурзик (Murzik, for males) which are even used as synonym to word "cat".

Mirri used to be a really typical name for a cat but nowadays it has an even worse meaning than Misu... actually it's now entirely synonymous to a certain forum-censored English word that also used to mean a cat but has turned into meaning something else entirely.

[Bobriha]

Mirri used to be a really typical name for a cat but nowadays it has an even worse meaning than Misu... actually it's now entirely synonymous to a certain forum-censored English word that also used to mean a cat but has turned into meaning something else entirely.

Oh, my... Btw, I even met aforementioned English word in some English children book from the begining of 20th century. When did things go wrong?

[Hrollo]

I've studied linguistic quite a lot, both on my free time and in university, I have a pretty good intuition of the underworkings of language in general (I have also occasionally tried my hand at conlanging, inventing languages from scratch); so based on this, I had said I would eventually do, on this forum, a series of tutorials explaining the logic of various linguistic or grammatical concepts, in order to make language learning an easier task for those of us who have trouble with foreign grammatical concepts.

However, since this was an enormous task and I am appalingly lazy, I never got around to actually do it.

So I was thinking, the only way this is going to happen is if I actually let people ask specific questions and/or ask me to talk on a specific subject. Whence this thread.

In this thread I will thus takes your questions about cases, gender, syntax, language evolution or any other linguistic/grammatical subject you want to know about and I'll do my best to answer them. Obvious caveat: I am not a professional linguist; while I studied the subject extensively, while I was considered good at it in university, I dropped out after getting (the French equivalent of) a bachelor's degree (I dropped out for personal reasons, my grades were fine). And if others who know about linguistics want to participate to the thread as well, they are welcome to.

So come with your questions and queries.

If this works out, I'll try to index the different answer posts I'll make in this one.

[Adriano]

Heyo !

I am currently creating a language of my own for my sci-fi setting for big space-opera stories. I've called it, for now, the Ikaean.

I actually have vocabulary, alphabet, writing, but simple verbs and no grammar/declinations.

So, how it works :

Let's take a look to a single word : Rin. It has a capital letter to indicate it's a noun. Each letter has its own proper meaning, that influences its actual meaning. But let's stay simple and only speak about overall sense. This word means "knight". The suffixe -in is indication of neutral gender (more like unspecified gender in this case). The suffixe -in is added to nouns either for unspecified gender, either for plural nouns mixing male and female, such as Rin meaning "knights". Are they only male knights ? No, or we don't know about it.
Ri means "male knight", because suffixe -i indicates male gender. Ro means "female knight", because suffixe -o indicates female gender.

An example of other unspecified gender : Klan'k Ikrin, which means "Clan [of the] Firsts", and because a whole clan generally contains both males and females, the genre of the whole clan is unspecified. Speaking of Klan'k Ikri would mean speaking only about males of the clan.

1) Until now, there is no suffixes for plurality. Should I make one, should I use pronouns, or should I leave it to context ? (as I first thought)

2) And is that suffixe system for genders making sense ?

[Ana Nymus]

Heyo !

Why hello, fellow conlangers! I'm no expert on these things, but I'll put in my two cents for what you've written here!

1) Ultimately it's up to you whether or not to include some marker of plurality in your nouns. I personally like the idea of having the articles mark plurality (though I'm not sure if your language has them). But if you do decide to leave it to context, I'd just be careful about how you word your sentences, or you could get a lot of ambiguity. Words denoting number, specifically or generally, will be your friend. (Think of it this way: there's a big difference between "a sheep running down the street" and "a hundred sheep running down the street".)

2). To me, yes, the gender suffixes make perfect sense. Though I'm curious now: are all inanimate objects/things that are not people neutral gender? Or do they have genders assigned to them like in Spanish or Latin?

[Adriano]

Ho, hello conlanger !

1) Ahaha, I see xD I will try to come with either a whole numerotation (one, two, three,...) or words like "a bunch", "some", "a few", "a sole", "unique", etc.
Thank you for your input ! o/

2) Yay ! Hm, good questions. I don't have decided for animals, but robots and AI (they're sentient in my setting) are always neutral !

[ryagami]

Hi Hrollo

Thank you so much for this thread!

Hi Adri!

I think much of what the language should look like depends on what kind of influences it has and what concepts were needed to be represented, i.e., what kinds of things you would need to distinguish. Like, you could probably get away with as few concepts of number as "non-zero" (i.e., existence of something, the quantity being unimportant or unknown), "one", "a few/some" and "a lot", and I can see that being a specific enough system (e.g., "I saw three people" could be "I saw a few but not one human", "There are mice in our house" could be "In our house is non-zero mouse"). With that, you would not need either plural markers or any other numerals if you do not find them necessary.

As for the gender question, feel free to choose whichever variant you wish, they can almost all make equal sense, but by some logic, if you do not express gender when it is unimportant and/or unknown, it makes some sense not to enforce it for concepts that does not have any intrinsic gender. Maybe you would say the an animal is of this or that gender in contexts where it s important, like for breeding/mating.

[Hrollo]

Adriano >

1) Adding to what Ana Nymus said, number marking in language can be entirely optional, or even completely absent (that is, the nouns never change for number, but of course you can give quantity indication with separate words like "some", "many", "two", etc). Some languages also only mark plural on some sub-category of nouns, but not on all nouns. This map gives a good overview:

http://wals.info/feature/34A#2/25.5/145.7 (you can also click on the "Occurence of Nominal Plurality" grey button to get a detailed description of each possibility).

There are also a lot more ways to mark plural than the use of suffixes:

http://wals.info/feature/33A#3/-1.44/71.67


2) For gender, I think one thing you need to clarify is whether you want lexical gender or grammatical gender (or both!)

Lexical gender is gender that is specifically that of the referent, of the actual thing being refered too by a word; English has lexical gender: we talk about actors, stewards or policemen if we are refering to men, but about actresses, stewardess or policewomen if we are refering to women — this depends of the real thing we are talking about, not directly of the words we use (that is, if the words can indicate gender at all — most English words can't, this is mostly limited to job nouns, and to singular third person personal pronouns: he vs she vs it).

Grammatical gender is a property of words that is completely independent of what is being refered to: in French "victime" is feminine even if the victim is male, and "serpent" (snake) is masculine even if it's a female snake; gender is a fact about the words themself, not a fact about the things the words refer to. Grammatical gender generally implies gender agreement: adjectives, articles, pronouns and/or verbs will have to "match" the gender of the noun they are refering to. Here's an example from italian:

Un lento treno è passato = A slow train has passed.
Una lenta machina è passata = A slow car has passed.

"treno", train, is masculine, "machina", car, is feminine, and you can see that the indefinite article, the adjective, and even the past participle change form to match the gender of the noun.


Most languages that have grammatical gender also have some degree of lexical gender, making things more complex, but there's nonetheless an important difference between the two.

[Guardian G.I.]

I'm studying linguistics at university (apparently) - posting to watch.

[Adriano]

Thanks for your answers !

I think I'll go with no plural marking but indicative words like "non-zero", "a few/some", "one", etc.
I use lexical gender in this language. So, word gender related to the stuff. I will surely put no gender marking for concepts with no such use.

More input about the Ikaean :
Verbs know (for now) only three tenses : simple past, simple present and simple future.
They know no declinations due to subject (like english, but unlike it, not even at third person), and are only marked by suffixes.
Simple past is marked by the suffixe -i
Simple present is marked by the suffixe -e
Simple future is marked by the suffixe -o

Example : knedi = drank; knede = drink; knedo : will drink
Infinitive is kned = to drink

Nouns have capital at their beginning, and capital also after a ' if it's a title form. Example : Tan'Ikrin = Great First One. Counterexample : ge'ren = to run toward smthing

Now, I can also speak about this little trivial fact : we know that -i both marks maleness and past. It is because men are linked to the past and they're the past of human race. On the contrary, -o marks the femaleness and the future. It is because women are linked to the future and that they're the future of human race, in this language philosphy.


Question : What do you think of this verb forms ? Do you have any idea for expanding the tenses ? And what do you think of the link between past/male and future/female ?

[Cliodna]

Adriano, your conlang sounds very interesting if I may say so.

I don't really have any linguistical questions as of this moment (I do have some trouble making my plurals work with conjugation and compound words, but that's a matter of having chosen letters that don't sound good together rather than anything else), just wanted to say that this thread has already given me ideas on my own language attempt. And that it only now sort of hit me that nominal plurality is a thing that actually exists - I was kinda proud to have "come up with it on my own" when expanding my language attempt, which probably speaks volumes of my actual experience relating to this hobby. And lots of thanks to this thread for making me realize that I probably needs a plural for "none". If it makes a difference, then I currently has plurals for "one/a", "two/a pair", "a group", "a lot of" and "all". When I add one for "none" then it should cover all the bases.

In any case I'll be keeping my eye on this thread.

[Hrollo]

Adriano > the only things that bugs me is that the least marked verb form (here kned) is usually the present, the past or the imperative, and if there's an infinitive distinct from those, it's that infinitive that takes a suffix — although I'm sure exceptions exist, and this is more a general tendency than an hardcoded universal.

[ryagami]

By analogy with masculine~past and feminine~future, maybe the infinitive could have the -in suffix?

[Adriano]

Rollo : Well, I think I see what you mean, but I really doesn't want to change the ending of the verbs. But I get your point.

ryagami : No, I want a different ending ^^ For now, the endings of infinitive are -en and -ed
But your idea is interesting, thanks

Cliodna : You may, you may

[Hrollo]

Meanwhile, I did a thing: http://thelegion.free.fr/arabic.htm