counting the stars

☕help me be alive and stuff☕ 🔞FA (nsfw)🔞 furry art | conlanging & linguistics | a million autistic special interests b. 1992 | transfem (she/her) | strictly monogamous the deadliest sin is sloth say a prayer for the wind, and the water, and the wood and those who live there, too

[ahleidreams]

creationism is the belief that humans are morally superior to other animals; everything else is the pretext.

[ahleidreams]

help my perfect pitch is broken

so i sorta have perfect pitch (in that i can usually identify a pitch or triad or key just by hearing it) and i'm also mildly synesthetic (in that certain pitches/triads/keys have certain color associations for me) but lately my perfect pitch has been drifting up a half-step and my synesthesia is going with it and i have no idea why.

for example, i was listening to the album American Idiot and the song "Letterbomb" (which is in E) legitimately sounds to me like it's in F major. E major for me is purpley nighttime colors while F major is greeny springtime afternoon colors, but when listening to this song that used to give me nighttime colors, i now get the springtime colors--and in this case, it actively takes away from my experience of the song.

on the other hand, "Whatsername" (which is in D) legitimately sounds like it's in Eb to me now but i don't mind it as much. D major for me is white sunny noontime while Eb major (my favorite key) is a glowing golden sunset, and hearing one instead of the other in this case doesn't really take away from the song for me.

the only reason i can think of that this might be happening is that i listen to alot (ALOT) of Beethoven on period instruments (which are tuned slightly lower than A440 tuning but not quite a half-step) and maybe that's been messing with me? but i've been listening to that tuning for over 15 years and this change is like within the past year or so.

i had a similar experience after some intensive jaw surgery i had 10 years ago but it went back to normal pretty quickly.

so, uh, yeah. curious if anyone has had a similar experience.

[ahleidreams]

hot take

if "murder of crows" only occurs in the sentence "did you know a group of crows is called a 'murder of crows?'" then it's not really called a "murder of crows."

(fellow descriptivists pls tell me if i'm off-base but i hate these made-up animal group names so much for so many reasons i can't be the only one)

[ahleidreams]

pride slogams

i did a big (nsfw) pride illustration that doubles as a debut for my conlang in my art cause i wrote some slogans in Agmuliqʼ for it. i only used two of 'em but i thought i could talk about them all here.

tixu qʼammis qəvəqtəpʼilqət - "my body is a revolution"

i liek this one.

in my font it currently looks like this:

(again, i really hate the qʼ glyph and just how that word qʼammis looks in general) but yeah for my drawing i actually innovated some ligatures to save space. these aren't reflected in the font yet but it'd look something like:

syntactically, this one isn't too mind blowing; it just breaks down like:

tix-u qʼammi-s qəvəqtəpʼilqət 1P- GEN body- TOP revolution

the etymology is where i had more fun.

even the first-person pronoun tix is interesting; it comes from *ti (1P pronoun) + *-l (a now-extinct noun formative), and the /l/ (which is a fricative here) dissimilated to /x/ after /i/.

the genitive marker -(k)u comes from an original ablative marker, but that fact doesn't actually leave any evidence in the language yet.

qʼammi "body" comes from *qʼæ "body, self" + *nmi "body, shape." i really enjoy redundancy in my etymologies. also the first element *qʼæ, while no longer a stand-alone word, lives on in, for example, the reflexive pronoun uqqʼa.

for "big" words like "revolution," my go-to strategy is compound verbs. qəvəqtəpʼilqət is essentially two nominal verb stems (formed by the suffix -t) jammed together to mean more literally something like "overthrowing." the two verb roots are qvəq- "knock down" and pʼilq- "return, exchange," and the idea is that together they mean something like "topple and replace." both roots actually come from earlier intransitive forms qv- and pʼil- suffixed with a no-longer-productive causative suffix *-q.

2. tixjaku qʷiqət "love makes me who i am"

this one is way harder to explain, and it's actually way more complicated that i originally thought.

it breaks down like so:

tix-ja- ku qʷiqət 1P- TRANS-GEN love

again, syntactically it's not too complicated; it's just a noun phrase. it's analogous to how in Japanese you can say:

hēwa- e- no miti peace-ALL-GEN road

"the road to peace"

with tixjaku qʷiqət though, how we understand it really hinges on that translative marker -ja (translative is a term from Uralic linguistics, but i've chosen to label as TRANS instead of TRANSL).

take the English sentence "we painted the house red." "red" here refers to the resultant state of the house after the painting; "we painted the house, so that is was then red." we can then say that "red" here is in the translative case (though that's not a label applied to English afaik but let's go with it for now).

now imagine we wanted to use that word "red" appositionally in a noun phrase. you might say sure ofc, we can just say "red paint." but see, now the word "red" has lost its translative meaning. now it just means "paint that is red." imagine we could use the word "red" appositionally while retaining its translative meaning: "red-TRANS paint." this phrase might be understood to mean something like "red-making paint."

so the short story is that tixjaku qʷiqət means "me-making love." it's actually a bit more complicated than that, but i'll leave it there for now.

3. HONORABLE MENTION qʷiqtəs lətotmit "love is defiance"

not much to say about this one except on the etymology of ltotmit "defiance." it's another compound verb; the first element is lto- which is to- "stand" plus the preverb l- which adds a punctual aspect and an emphatic affect, and the second element is mi- "push back, stop," so together they mean something like "stand firmly against."

4. HONORABLE MENTION memevet katqinəkʷ "clothing prohibited"

me being silly.

memevet is a reduplication of the verb stem mevet which is vi- "pull" plus the "cover" preverb me-, thus "pull over, put on (clothes)."

katqinəkʷ is fun. it literally means "bolted house," made from katqi "lock, latch" from katq- "slide (tr.)," plus inkʷ- "house" (which in the modern language is supplanted by ona "house" which originally meant "mat" or "bed").

[ahleidreams]

i made a font

and i learned i hate making fonts. the kerning and line weights still could use some tweaking.

as for the writing system itself though, i'm pretty satisfied with it for the most part, but a few things are still bugging me. i really don't like the glyph for /qʼ/. the /o/ diacritic makes the whole consonant glyph shift to one side which can be a little awkward. and punctuation doesn't really interest me so i kinda just phoned it in.

the biggest issue though i think is that my approach to consonant sandhi kinda implies that labialized consonants /kʷ/, /qʷ/ and ejectives /kʼ/, /qʼ/ should assimilate to form labialized ejective consonants /kʷʼ/,/qʷʼ/ that don't otherwise exist in the sound system, but since consonant sandhi is reflected in writing, i'd need new signs for those sounds and i'm kinda out of creative juice in that regard. the easiest solution i think would be to hotfix the sandhi rules so that only the second consonant in a pair keeps its secondary articulation (i.e. /kʷkʼ/ → [kkʼ]), though that does add more ambiguity to the language. maybe that's not the end of the world.

anyway here's a breakdown of the system so far. also i took a stab at the north wind and the sun which was fun.

[ahleidreams]

my lexicon apparatus

one of my main priorities in conlanging from the start is creating a sense of a rich etymological history. that kind of fractal complexity is fiendishly hard to keep track of though (especially for me), and the lexicon apps i've tried in the past haven't really served my purposes, so i've been working on this ridiculous tool in Sheets to keep track of my etymologies without regard to the actual word forms. this would be so much easier if i knew how to do software design but eh. anyway i thought i'd share a bit on how it works.

first i have a basic sheet just for inputting proto roots. i'm very non-committal about my word forms at this stage; many are still blank and most that aren't were auto-generated by Monke (which is great btw). most important is the keyword, which is how i look up entries.

under the hood i have a sheet sorted by keyword which is where the actual lookup happens.

here's where the magic happens. on this sheet i can just build forms using up to three etymon (haven't needed a fourth yet). i just enter the keyword for each etymon into the dropdowns and it looks up the rest of the form, then auto generates a new form that just concatenates the three morphs. this auto-generated form will be the output unless i override it, as we'll see next.

moving right to left, we see how the output is generated: by default, it just outputs the entry data of etymon 1, since in most cases we're only dealing with one morph. however i can use the checkboxes here to enable manual input for the new form. in this image we have a few compound words being created which naturally have new meanings, so we input them manually. it will use the auto-concatenated form unless i need direct control over how the concatenation happens, or in the case of reduplication (i'm not gonna try to automate reduplication). i haven't used the "intermediate forms" columns so much, but it's there just to write notes for irregular sound changes. the "export" columns are the final forms that get sent to their own sheet, again, sorted by keyword. also, this whole time, we've been building up (in hidden columns) a string of text that lets me visually see a summary of the etymology. this gets exported to the sorted sheet as well.

and this process is recursive, i have copies of this sheet for the other stages of my language that take in the data from the previous one.

. . .UNFORTUNATELY . . .

even when using only native Sheets functions, this process can be INCREDIBLY slow. i've split my data into five documents so far, but it only helps so much. it also means i have to manually copy/paste the export data from one document to another all down the line which is more than a little tiresome.

but i think what i have to show for it is more than worth it so far. the modern lexicon has some 200+ entries right now (nowhere near the ~10,000 it would need to be, like, a real language, but a good start). what's more, the forms retain the memory of their etymological history, so i can have forms like this:

that final column is the summary string that's been automatically built up over each stage of the language (though it's less complicated than it looks and the parentheses don't nest properly yet), but i can just look at it and see that this word is the imperfective stem of a transitive verb that means "return" (which is made using a no-longer productive causative suffix on an intransitive root), all with a dative suffix. and i don't have to remember that, and i can change the word forms whenever i please.

this is my most recent addition, which is just a little sheet where i can make sentences and visually see how it breaks up. i've been writing a little fable (which is something i *highly* recommend trying btw, i've made *so* much progress on my lang this way), but i sometimes make mistakes and sometimes forget how the sentence is put together, so having a visual aid like this i think will help me a lot.

it's not a perfect system. the hardest part i think is how slow it is, but it also sucks that when i change a form it can't exactly notify me about everything that will be affected by doing that, especially if i've manually entered a form at some point in that chain. the summary columns make these glitches easy to catch though.

overall this tool has been serving me well, and likely will continue to, so long as it runs at a tolerable speed.

[ahleidreams]

anhedonia

an- hedonia can't-fucking.do.shit

it's from the Greek

[ahleidreams]

(let's say) my lang officially has a name

Agmuliqʼ

['aɰmuˌɬiqʼ] or ['aŋmuˌɬiqʼ]

agmuli- iqʼ dreamer-language "language of the dreamer(s)"

"agmuli" breaks down into "agmu" ("dream") and "li" ("one who departs")

"li" is an archaic word; the modern equivalent is "lat," giving us the more modern version "Agmulatiqʼ," which is ironically marked as more antiquated (there's also the abbreviated version "Amliqʼ.")

"iqʼ" is literally just "mouth"

the worldbuilding idea i had for this was that marginalized people around the world and throughout history have access to this shared dream world where this language developed. i'd imagine a signed language would exist alongside this spoken one.

really though, i think i'm like Tolkien in that my world is more designed for the language than the language designed for the world.

[ahleidreams]

not happy with my *proto roots

like, are there languages where basically all roots have a long vowel?

[ahleidreams]

preverbs and number (part 4)

preverbs continued.

this is the one that breaks me.

take the preverb un-. most basically, it expresses a spatial "fit" that is sparse and spread out, where the elements are separated from each other.

ji~ jivən ləgan-rəkʷ un- ivə-n RED~tree earth-LOC SPREAD-be- PRED "[lone] trees are scattered over the land."

it can also mean that one element is separated from a larger whole. and with dynamic verbs, it can mean something like "away."

kam-qʷot on- kala-ga 3pl-ABL SPREAD-go- PERF "[i] went away from them." = "[i] left them."

"coqʷot tʼe- ko kalaj uqqʼa-ku- nqʼaq- qʷot why this-GEN deer REFL- GEN-family-ABL un- ivʔ-al?" SPREAD-be- JUSS "why is this deer away from their herd?"

but when a singular subject is in scope, and without an ablative noun to be "away from," what does this preverb mean?

kalaj fəsal-qʷot-o- nel- e esa- kʷat deer river-ABL- GEN-water-ACC drink-CONJ on- tosʔa-gen SPREAD-stand-P.IMPF "a deer stood [alone] drinking water from the river."

so uhh i guess this preverb can indicate the singular???

to be clear though, i don't think this is a grammatical singular, and this preverb certainly isn't necessary to indicate a singular noun.

also in a natlang, i'd imagine (based on some amateur research on Chukchi i did a while back) this would mainly happen with "natural plurals," i.e. things that are conceived of as usually coming in groups like trees. there would also likely be a kind of animacy hierarchy in play, where this singular marking would be less likely to happen with nouns that are higher on the hierarchy.

i'd like to eschew animacy hierarchies as much an possible in my lang though, particularly where it comes to animals, but it's hard to overcome my brain's own animacy hierarchy; whether i like it or not, it does feel like "deer" is somehow more naturally plural than "human" (not just because it doesn't have a separate plural form).

[ahleidreams]

preverbs and aspect (part 3)

more stuff about my preverbs..

as i conceive them, these preverbs most basically express information about spatial "fitting."

məji~mji alq- o- ttʼi- rəkʷ rə- pp- ivə-n nut~ RED bowl-GEN-inside-LOC LOOSE-SCATTER-be- PRED

"there are some nuts [loose] in the bowl."

but they can also express information about spatial motion:

ca~cʼaqʷ ləganə-ksə rə- voka-gan RED~stone earth- ALL LOOSE-fall-PERF

"some stones rolled onto the ground"

the LOOSE preverb here expresses the nature of the stones falling, not the nature of the stones "fitting" on the ground, i.e. this sentence cannot mean "some stones are loose on the ground having fallen."

the reason for this fact seems to be that the verb lacks a stative meaning. changing the verb's aspect to one with, for example, resultative meaning, makes the "fit" meaning possible.

ca~cʼaqʷ ləganə-ksə rə- voka-kʷat-cʼatə- q RED~stone earth- ALL LOOSE-fall-CONJ-PROG- PRED

"some stones have rolled onto the ground"

OR

"some stones are loose on the ground having fallen"

[ahleidreams]

preverbs and transitivity (part 2)

posting more ramifications of my preverb system as i discover them.

take a simple sentence:

ji~ jivən ləgan-rəkʷ kəvtə-q RED~tree land- LOC grow- PRED

"trees grow in the land"

we can elaborate on this with preverbs to express more nuance:

ji~ jivən ləgan-rəkʷ lə- ppə- kvətə-q RED~tree land- LOC STICK-SCATTER-grow- PRED

"trees grow [here and there] throughout the land"

ji~ jivən ləgan-rəkʷ lə- mo- kvətə-q RED~tree land- LOC STICK-COVER-grow- PRED

"trees grow all over the land"

[the STICK preverb expresses the nature of the spatial "fit" (i.e. that of the trees "piercing" through the earth), and the SCATTER and COVER preverbs express the distribution of the fit (i.e. scattered and completely covering respectively).]

however, the presence of the preverbs now allows the intransitive verb kv- "grow" to be used as a transitive verb.

ji~ jivən ləgan-e lə- ppə- kvətə-q RED~tree land- ACC STICK-SCATTER-grow- PRED

"trees dot the land"

ji~ jivən ləgan-e lə- mo- kvətə-q RED~tree land- ACC STICK-COVER-grow- PRED

"trees cover the land"

i don't really know how to make sense of this though. the head verb is still kv- "grow" which is intransitive.

[ahleidreams]

preverb stuff

so i've had sketches of this preverb system for my lang just kinda lying around and i'm returning to it now. most basically these preverbs express certain spatial relationships:

alq- o-  ttʼi-  rəkʷ məji-mji rə-   pp-     evə-n bowl-GEN-inside-LOC  nut~ RED LOOSE-SCATTER-be-PRED

“There are some nuts in the bowl”

alq- o-  ttʼi-  rəkʷ məji-mji n-   ikv- evə-n bowl-GEN-inside-LOC  nut~ RED FILL-PILE-be-PRED

“The bowl is filled with nuts.”

(the first preverb slot generally indicates the nature of the spatial "fit"; the second preverb slot indicates the distribution of the fit.)

and by extension, these preverbs can be used to express temporal relationships:

kal-xʷa tʼe- ni  lə-    sej-  aptə-q 3sg-DAT this-ACC PIERCE-ALIGN-say- PRED

“[I] say this to them regularly/repeatedly.” 

kal-xʷa tʼe- ni  rə-   pp-     aptə-q 3sg-DAT this-ACC LOOSE-SCATTER-say- PRED

“[I] mention this to them occasionally.”

finally, these preverbs can be extended even further in specific lexicalized constructions.

kalaj latlan-xʷa r-    apa-gat deer  horse- DAT LOOSE-say-PF

“The deer mentioned it to the horse.”

kalaj latlan-xʷa n-      apa-gat deer  horse-DAT  POUR.IN-say-PF

“The deer explained/taught it to the horse.”

kalaj latlan-xʷa ov-      m- apa-gat deer  horse-DAT  POUR.OUT-COVER-say-PF

“The deer told all/vented to the horse.”

but this system might be, like, too powerful. it's a combinatorial explosion upon combinatorial explosion of complexity and possibility, and i don't really want it to take over my lang, i want it to be just one layer that i can put more recent linguistic developments on top of.

also, like, i think there are natlangs out there that have similar systems? but i haven't been able to track any down.

[ahleidreams]

writing system progress

just a peek of the work i've been doing on the writing system for my lang. wish i had better handwriting.

[ahleidreams]

my lang is designing itself on its own

i had a stray thought that genitive constructions in my lang would form one phonological word, which is significant because it affects syllabification, e.g.

jakʼaq-u cətʼi → jakʼaq-u-ttʼi forest-GEN inside "inside the forest"

but completely unintentionally this immediately led to the possibility of non-contrived monstrosities of prosodic units without much effort, e.g.

qari- ku- ktik- u- jakʼaq-u- ttʼi- rəkʷ mountain-GEN-bottom-GEN-forest-GEN-inside-LOC "inside the forest at the foot of the mountain"

i'm not sure what the limits on this (if any) should end up being, but i always think it's cool when art develops a mind of its own.

[ahleidreams]

can we just appreciate a great melody

FFXIV Dawntrail SPOILERS (KINDA??)

so im kinda coping with my ffxiv burnout atm.

i started transcribing "Bygone Serenity" very shortly after beating Dawntrail because (ignoring my, lol, opinions about the ffxiv storyline generally) it really moved me. there's alot about it that makes it moving, but can we just admire the melody?

i'd like to talk about the harmony too but uhh this kind of harmony is not my wheelhouse and i cant even really make it out within all that reverb. again, coping.

the melodies are really the focus anyway. they're so colorful on their own. like i could try to explain what makes the melodies just wash over me, like "oh look at all the structure" and "it repeats and elaborates on simple motivic fragments," "chromatic embellishment," "theme and variation," blah blah blah, but honestly, most melodies do those things, and i've never heard a satisfying theoretic account that explains why certain melodies feel so good to me. maybe there's one out there. but in the meantime, can we just admire it? there are certainly things to learn from analyzing it, but let's not forget to spend equal time just enjoying this bygone music.

my favorite part i think is the diminished 7th in bar 22, especially the way the flautist almost seems to choke up while making that tough leap downward.

[ahleidreams]

thinking aloud: conlang darlings

i'd appreciate any input from any seasoned conlangers

so working on my lang i end up with this word:

jakʼaq-rəkʷ ("forest"-LOC)

and for the life of me, i just cannot pronounce it. there's just to many things i have to do with the back of my tongue in such a short time, and what's more, i'm learning that i hold to long on the medial ejectives so they have the rhythm of a consonant cluster when they shouldn't. the ejective may actually be causing most of the problem (though the coda /q/ is not at all easy for me either).

i'd like to be able to pronounce this lang... i don't need to like, speak it fluently, but i'd like to be able to say the words and it not be too difficult.

it looks like my options are:

leave it the way it is

design roots specifically to be easier to pronounce

come up with complicated ruki rule-style sound changes to make words like these easier

get rid of the ejectives

leaving it the way it is sacrifices my ability to pronounce it, and i do care about that (should i?).

manually changing roots might sacrifice naturalism but maybe not?

i definitely don't want to do the sound changes.

but i really don't want to get rid of the ejective. i even simplified things by only including /kʼ/, but apparently even then i struggle with it in medial position

idk

what do