Tabby's Non-Project Specific Blog

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Which region should my conspeakers come from?

Region 1

Region 2

Region 3

Region 4

Region 5

Region 6

Voting ended onMay 15

Region 1

Region 1 is an island chain of four significant islands located between 15°N and 10°S off the west coast of the eastern continent. It is an active subduction zone and the first part of the southern island continent will shortly be subducted. 

The climate consists of Tropical Monsoon interspersed with tropical rainforests and highland temperate zones. With average temperatures between 26-20°C year round. 

Region 2

Region 2 is the northern part of the eastern continent located between 80-0°N. It is the most tectonically stable part of the world but the north is covered in Ice Fields and Tundra while the east is dominated by Desert and Steppe, both hot and cold. The south west is a combination of Tropical Monsoon and Savannah and Humid Subtropical climates.

Region 3

Region 3 is the southern part of the eastern continent and associated island chain located between 30°N and 35°S. Most of the southern coast and the island chain are on an active subduction zone with the rifted portion of the western continent being on the verge of subduction. The north of the region is dominated by Steppe and Desert and Tropical Savannah which gives way to a large Tropical Rainforest along the south east and island arcs and Temperate Humid and Mediterranean climates on the south west.

Region 4

Region 4 is an island chain of four significant islands located between 10-35°S. off the west coast of the eastern continent. It is an active subduction zone. The climate is a mix of Temperate and Continental climates with the south coasts being Humid and the north coasts Mediterranean.

Region 5

Region 5 is three small continents/large islands located between 5-85°S. The western most island is part of the island chain associated with the western continent’s subduction zone and the eastern island is actively being torn between the two major continents’s subduction zone’s. The southernmost island is exclusively Ice Field which gives way to tundra on the eastern island before becoming Humid Continental and Temperate climates interspersed with Cold Steppe. The western island is a mix of Mediterranean and Humid Temperate and Continental climates with a small amount of Cold Steppe.

Region 6

Region 6 is the western continent located between 65°N and 55°S. The southern most portion of the continent is rifting from the main continent as a consequence of the eastern continent’s subduction zone while the eastern edge of the continent has it’s own active subduction zone. The continent is dominated by Desert and Tropical Savannah with small bands of Temperate and Continental climates on the coastward side of the Andean mountain range, Tropical rainforest on the western rifted fragments and Temperate climates giving way to Continental then Tundra at the north.

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Sophonts B

Sophonts B are medium sized, nocturnal, quadruped omnivores. They are able to stand for short times on their back legs to use their dexterous front paws for tool use but are not capable of sustained bipedal movement.

The sophonts evolved in the arid centre of the western continent where they relied on burrows to store food in the rare moments of abundance and to protect them from the heat of the day. They descended from a creature reminiscent of a European badger with the diet of reminiscent of a wild boar - omnivorous when meat is easily available but capable of surviving on a herbivorous diet without supplementation. They are most active at dawn and dusk but are generally classed as nocturnal. They have large wide paws for their size equipped with sharp claws for digging both the burrows they sleep and raise their young in and for digging up roots in the tropical savannah, hot steppe and desert regions they live in.

Their ancestors lived in small all female groups of related year mates raising their young together before ejecting them from the burrow together at adolescence. The ejected female adolescents travelled together to find a territory to establish their own den. The males were solitary and constantly moving between different females territories, but as adolescents often began travelling with a group of related male year mates. Meeting between other males inevitably led to fights often to the death.

The sophonts remain nocturnal. They are obligate omnivores becoming scavengers before developing an ambush and trap focused form of hunting on the pathway to obligate sapience. The transition to obligate omnivores began with the nomadic males becoming more and more dependent on carrion without the stored caches of the sedentary females until they lost ability to self combine some amino acids not found in plants. This dependence on meat is more pronounced in males.

The sophonts still communally raise their young with a group of related females and still recognise year mates as a more important relationship than other children of your mother who are not year mates. While in sophont communities, adolescent males are not forcibly ejected from their community there is a strong taboo about having relations with your year mates or other children of your mother or her year mates which pushes young males to leave in smaller communities where all the females are related to your mother.

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Sophonts A

Sophonts A are medium sized, crepuscular, bipedal, omnivores. They have short fine fur covering most of their bodies which provides some protection from abrasion and the sun but not enough for more extreme temperatures than the tropical rainforests they evolved in.

They descended from a lemur like creature native to the tropical rainforests of the south eastern tip of the eastern continent. Their ancestor is crepuscular, arboreal and primarily a frugivore. 

The sophonts tend towards crepuscular but have become more diurnal as farming has become a more important part of their lives with a rest period in the hottest and brightest part of the day being standard. Their diets have expanded to include insects and fungi with insect farming being a core part of their pathway to obligate sapience. As such they have never had a nomadic hunter-gatherer period instead expanding ever outward as communities with too many adolescents expel a group of youths.

Their ancestors were highly sociable living in large troops with both males and females. These troops were not purely familial with small travelling groups entering and others leaving frequently nor were they domain of a single dominant male with monogamous couples and loose alliances being common and a high rate of homosexual interactions observed in surviving relatives. This is reflected in the sophont culture, who are far less cliquey than humans.

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Sophonts

There are two distinct sophont species on the conworld.

Pic credit:- Broadwell : Cotswold Wildlife Park - Lemursby Lewis Clarke CC2.0 Share alike - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Broadwell_,Cotswold_Wildlife_Park-Lemurs-geograph.org.uk-_8013524.jpg, Tropical rainforest, Koh Chang, Thailand CCA4.0 - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tropical_rainforest,_Koh_Chang,_Thailand.jpg, A Very Wet Badger CC2.0 - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:A_Very_Wet_Badger_(51283095909).jpg

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World Map

Messing around with a new world.

It started off as a Mappa Imperium play through creating six regions. Which I converted from the very rough sketch to this.

I’m not convinced my temperature mapping is right. It feels like that big desert on the western continent should getting hotter.

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Coining nouns

From Qamonté llaḷ (*lʲälˤ) meaning sibling, brother in arms, long term close friend is going to come the Tépeçás word for family, offspring.

Qamonté can form a plural of llaḷ in two ways with zhi as a collective or with ni as a plural so there are three forms that could be brought into Tépeçás which resolve as ya̋rö, ziya̋rö, and ya̋röny respectively.

What should the word for family be

ya̋rö from friend (sg)

ziya̋rö from friends (collective)

ya̋röny from friends (pl)

Voting ended onFeb 18

[nonprojectspecific]

Definite marking

Because creoles tend to take grammar from the substrate and the definite article is really important to Bu Dituy-I we’re going to have two things happen.

The Bu Dituy-I definite article hi/-i is going to surface as a vocative particle hi and a definite article dwim is going to emerge from a contraction of kedwím, the proximal determiner, which in turn comes form qetqwím, the Qamonté nearer speaker proximal determiner.

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Number

Doing something interesting but optional.

Bu Dituy-I has a suffix, *pʰäj, to mark plurals in the protolanguage but this reduced to -ä early and was lost by the time the Pidgin formed while the modern number marking, mu NOUN mu/fa, is both optional and was still in flux when the Pidgin formed.

Qamonté’s number marking is the core of its class system and was already a complex series of affixes when Pidgin formed.

So leaning into Tépeçás’s history of as a trade language, there are four ways number can be indicated:

Unspecified - The bare noun can be used for a singular, plural or undefined number

shis = a fish, fishes, fish

2. Small number (specified) - For a small number of the noun (<6), the noun can be followed by the number.

Steg mibí = Three dragons

3. Large number (specified) - For a large number of the noun (>6), the noun can be preceded by a classifier and the followed by the number.

Ke shis fyiç fa̋ngwim = Nine fishes

4. Classifier - For an unspecified plural the noun can be preceded by a classifier.

Ke hugú äkí = eggs

This comes from specifying a bare noun followed by a number until the amount purchased became large enough to be placed in a container automatically. Originally they were counted by container once the number was large enough to require a container but it has since been reanalysed as a way to mark a plural and the number doesn’t restart.

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Noun Class

Qamonté had five classes in its protolanguage which collapsed to three in the modern language. Bu Dituy-I has no noun classes.

Based this and the overall trend of creoles to simplify the systems of their parent languages, Tépeçás is not going to have noun classes.

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Word Order and Alignment

Late again… and I even did the research and decided this when prompts were sound changes.

SVO

For two reasons, a) all the research I did suggested creoles are more likely to be SVO regardless of the original language and b) the superstrate’s basic word order is SVO.

Nom-Acc

The substrate is Nom-Acc and while the superstrate was strongly split-erg when the pidgin formed, a) bringing split ergativity into a pidgin feels unrealistically complicated and b) in the modern language the vernacular is losing that feature and speakers of Tépeçás will be either speak vernacular Qamonté or primarily be interacting with people who speak vernacular Qamonté, so even if the feature made it into the pidgin it would be lost by the modern creole.

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Romanisation

Within the set of languages that need to have coherent romanisation systems with the Creole I have 3 phonemes, /ɹ/, /r/ and /ʀ/, that could be glossed as <r>. Currently, I have <r> = /ɹ/ or /r/ and <ṛ> = /ʀ/, which I hate.

Generally I would romanise /ɹ/ as <l>, leaving <r> for r, but Qamonté also has /l/ ruling that out. So I now have two choices:

Reromanise Qamonté with r = /ɹ/, rr = /r/ and <ṛṛ> = /ʀ/

Redo Bu Dituy-I, Bu Dituy-ii and Put Digi with /l/ instead of ɹ/

Both of these are effort but one is considerably less effort and has a lot less effect on the language.

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I’ve sound changes which what the actual conlang year program is currently doing and one of my test phrases was possible options for the language name. These both come from options from the Qamonté exonym for the language:

What should the name of the language be?

kááyastéh /ˌkäː.jä.ˈsteh/ from *qe-*ħɨlħ-*jäs *tɨħ (money’s language)

kaayás teh /käː.ˈjäs ˈteh/ from *qe-*ħɨlħ-*jäs *tɨħ (money’s language)

tépeçás /ˌte.pe.ˈçäs/ from *tɨħ + *pejs + *ħɨlħ-*jäs (language of money)

teh pe ças /ˈteh ˈpe ˈçäs/ from *tɨħ + *pejs + *ħɨlħ-*jäs (language of money)

Voting ended onFeb 5

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Basic verbs part two. Here I’m looking at which of the Qamonté’s basic verbs come into the language and what misunderstandings are brought with them. I’m enjoying the perfective and habitual markers being interpreted as part of the word but my favourite is the noun ṛúmnö (*ʀum-*noäħ), flavour, coming in as a verb phrase.

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I’m doing something slightly different for verbs because I already have generated a list of transitive and intransitive verbs for both Bu Dituy-I and Qamonté and they overlap. Instead I’m looking at which of the verbs entered the pidgin and how.

For Bu Dituy-I, you have a lot basic terms especially surrounding animal husbandry.

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Some interesting collapses but otherwise fairly logical. The native farmed animals take Bu Dituy-I words while fish far more important to the Qimzhotléimy take Qamontè words.

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Vowels

Trying to align these two vowel inventories

to a mid ground where speakers of both backgrounds can clearly hear and replicate each sound. I get to here:

Where black vowels are in both languages, fuchsia vowels are only in Qamonté while cyan vowels Bu Dituy-I.

The obvious choice is to collapse o to u and ɔ to ɒ but what do next leaves me conflicted:

Option 1: Height from back vowels

/ɘ, o/ raise to /ɨ, u/

/ɛ, ɜ, ɔ/ lower to /a, ä, ɒ/

/a/ centralises to /ä/

Logical but feels so wrong

Option 2: Vibes

/o/ and /ɔ/ go to /u/ and /ɒ/ respectively

the central vowels /ɘ/ and /ɜ/ do what they tend to in Qamonté and collapse to /ə/

the front vowels /ɛ/ and /a/ go to /e/ and /ä/ respectively

feels better but not quite right and results in a lot of /ə/

Option 3: Vibes plus differentiation

Differentiating /a/, /ä/ and /ɒ/ isn't easy and Bu Dituy-I has a lot of free back space for the realisation to be more like [æ, ä, ɔ]

the central vowels /ɘ/ and /ɜ/ do what they tend to in Qamonté and collapse to /ə/

the back vowel /ɒ/ goes to /ɔ/ and the front vowels /ɛ/ and /a/ go to /æ/

This results in

It feels right but leaves me torn on /o/. It isn’t a distinction Bu Dituy-I speakers are going to be able to make but as a core vowel of the Qamonté system I’m not sure whether it’s more important to the speakers to mark it as different from /u/ another core vowel or /ɔ/ which has already absorbed /ɒ/ and now combines to mark a uvularised back vowel.

What happens to /o/?

/o/ => /u/

/o/ => /ɔ/

Voting ended onJan 26

[nonprojectspecific]

A not surprising amount of vocabulary from the substrate language given the speakers were native to the area and are the labourers in modern society.