Conlangers

A few weeks ago I was chatting with some conlangers, and we were talking a bit about some deeper issues in conlanging, especially around personal conlangs. I was extolling the virtues—not entirely coherently— of keeping a diary in your conlang. I said that you don't always know what resources you already have available when you want to create something new, but that inhabiting the language even a little, such as in a diary, will open up possibilities that might not otherwise occur to you.

One of Kílta's riches that occurred to me very recently, based on only a few uses of the diminutive, was that I could use to mark what is effectively first person possession when referring to direct line family relationships (grandparent, parent, sibling, child, grandchild):

Ommira në erniënto.
omm-ira në er-niënt-o
mother-DIM TOP TRANS-leave-PFV
My/our mother left.

With a little more thought I decided this could extend out to non-direct relations (cousins, nieces, etc.), if you grew up seeing them nearly every day.

Finally, I decided that with possession, you could use the diminutive to refer to family members very close friends you spent a lot of time with, especially while growing up.:

Ton vë ommira në erniënto.
2SG ATTR omm-ira në er-niënt-o
mother-DIM TOP TRANS-leave-PFV
Your mother left.

Since Kílta is a personal language, there aren't many opportunities for me to make use of the construction in this second example, because none of my childhood friends are ever going to learn the language. Nonetheless, I sometimes create things for Kílta to establish a general ambience, to suggest the full meaning of a construction, even if marginal functions of a construction aren't going to get much use.

When a conlang needs something new, it's easy to just create something entirely new, and often enough that's necessary. But I always enjoy finding preexisting material ready to be used to create some new construction or nuance.

In the Bryatesle-Dairwueh religious landscape, there is a variety of mystical practices in the religious communities. Some schools of mysticism overlap many of the faiths, some schools of mysticism are closely aligned with some particular faith, and some schools of mysticism are more or less synonymous with a faith.

Within the stedbaprian faith, a widely held idea is that humans live their lives in a state comparable to inebriation. We do not realize the true state of affairs, because this pseudo-inebriety prevents us from seeing clearly it.

There are several ways of dealing with this. Note, however, that the state is not the same as inebriation, but merely in several ways similar to it. From this emerges a notion: if a person can, during inebriation, practice his ability to think clearly, this will help him see clearly when sober - much like a swordsman will first practice with wood swords or some other less sharp implement.

Thus, the stedbaprian mystics will consume alcohol and various psychoactive herbs at certain times, and then practice a variety of cognitively demanding tasks. This tends to be done in groups of at least three.

A person who is very proficient at these tests when intoxicated will be considered more likely to be able to see the world as it is, and hence will be more trustworthy and proficient in thought, perception, behavior and skills.

Through the years, I have suggested some typologically unlikely, and maybe even some typologically impossible ideas in this blog. I find typologically unlikely - and even antiuniversal - systems somewhat interesting. However, I do believe there are some types of systems that we even find in some conlangs, which violate a type of constraint that I believe is a solid wall of impossibility.

In my own thoughts on this topic, I basically think of them just by the term "genuinely impossible systems". However, an issue with them is that their surface realization is possible - and there's probably multiple genuinely impossible systems corresponding to every possible surface realization.

Here's a phonological example. In antirealistic, there are two phonemes /b/ and /p/. These have the following realizations. NB: the phones themselves aren't really the interesting thing here, their relative realizations are:

initial: /b/ : [b], /p/ : [p]
medial: /b/ : [p], /p/: [b]

Why do I hold this to be unrealistic? Unless there's super-strong morphophonemic reasons to identify the [b] inside a word with /p/, and the [b] in the onset with /b/, I am very certain that any child or foreigner learning this language will identify the [b]-sounds as /b/, and the [p]-sounds as /p/. In lieu of a very strong morphophonemic relation here, there's no way a learner would identify them like that - even if the writing system maintained the identity.

A morphological example, then - and I don't think we find much of these in conlangs (unlike the phonological example seen above). In unrealistic, there are special verb forms corresponding to English -ing, and in unrealistic it's -int. However, for intransitive verbs, this consists of -i- (intransitive) and -nt (intransitive active participle), whereas for transitive verbs it consits of -in- (transitive) and -t (transitive active participle). Unless -in-, -i-, -n-, -t and -nt exist as independent morphemes but only ever occur in this context, there's no reason a learner would identify this as a complex suffix.

Syntax, then. Can anyone come up with a good syntactical example of a similar infeasible structure?

Passives and reflexives sometimes are fairly similar (and in some languages even indistinguishable). One of the Russian passive constructions is the reflexive construction, and the Swedish synthetic passive originates in a perfectly analogous construction - a reduced reflexive pronoun becoming a verb morpheme.

In some languages, the "passive" does not promote the object to subject position. This, for instance, is the case in modern Finnish (but earlier, it does seem it might have been the case). However, since the passive fulfills many of the roles the passive fulfills in other languages - emphasizing the object as the "central" participant, omitting the subject, etc - it gets to be called a passive.

This leaves open a simple way of keeping the reflexive and passive distinct, yet reuse the morphology:

noun.nom verb.refl = reflexive
noun.obj verb.refl = passive

However, there are of course reflexive constructions (and passive ones!) that do not directly pertain to the direct object - "I gave myself a surprise", "I looked at my toe", "I did it for myself". In such circumstances, I like the idea of letting a language conflate the two, or possible allow for disambiguating the reflexive by inserting a pronoun.

Further, third person pronouns could possibly have an anti-reflexive morpheme available for such constructions:

he saw.refl him.nonrefl in front of him

he₁ saw him₂ in front of himself₁

I am pretty sure the idea of a nonreflexive pronoun has occurred previously in this blog, but I am pretty sure the general idea here is new. I am considering including it in Bryatesle, since its reflexive and passive system is still underdeveloped. However, it feels like integrating this with the Bryatesle case system would be a nightmare.

Alas, Ćwarmin, Sargaĺk and Bryatesle all have sufficient passive/reflexive systems fleshed out, Ŋžädär isn't really suitable for this, and Tatediem is off the table, for now at least. Maybe I should revive it.

Of course, group #4 and #3 will be aware that some writers do not distinguish they/them, and if the context has several they/them-errors, they will join #2 temporarily.