#yo-ngot

[paizau]

inside me there are two wolves. one wants to create the most elaborate and overcrowded vowel system you've ever seen. the other thinks it's time to give a more conventional system a try.

[paizau]

Wow inspiration really struck today, I'm working on a document detailing the Kǫ̈uh (prev. Ngįout) script and orthography and I'm just breezing through it. Currently I have about 1400 word totaling almost 7 pages written out. Nice.

[paizau]

Documentation and Orthography

Made a lot of progress in the documentation part of things, the outline is basically done, and I only have one section to write out. After that it's gonna be time to add the examples, unfortunately I can't delay that forever, and then there's the question on how to do the dictionary now.

Yesterday I also reworked some parts of the orthography and changed how a diacritic worked, which meant I had to update the font and create a tonne of new characters, about 135 to be precise. all the highlighted ones:

The good thing is that I didn't need to create anything from scratch, it was just a tedious process of A Lot of copy and pasting. The sort of thing that is a pain to do in the moment, but after it's done you're glad you did it.

I might write up a post on the change I made, but basically, the diacritic that was previously used as a vowel deleter (the script is an abugida) is now used as the low tone marker. The logic behind it is that in the tonogenesis that happened, closed syllables remained plain level, while open syllables gained a falling/high tone. So it was (1) a very natural switch in use, and (2) meant that I didn't need to create any new elements lmao. Some might say that (2) is the primary reasoning and (1) is a later justification, but you didn't hear this from me.

I also tried writing some stuff in Kshafa, now that there's a way to mark tones, and I think it looks pretty good! In the picure the forms in IPA are the forms of the word at time of the setting of the spelling, because it's goona be a somewhat deep system. Though I might change how the vowels are written a bit, I'm not sure yet.

This is the paradigm of vòkshé, the dummy word I used in this post.

[paizau]

The Five Forms of a Dummy 2nd Conj. Verb

So I think I've settled on a final version of the rehauled phonology of Ngįout(?, this name is not possible anymore so I need to come up with a new one lol).

To showcase it, and the new spelling rules of the orthography to match this new phonological history and morphophonemics, here are the five forms of a dummy 2nd conjugation verb:

lǫpnhį [lɔ̃pˈɲĩ] (long 1st.sg)

lǫpnhot [lɔ̃pˈɲɔt] (long 2nd)

lǫuhm [lɔ̃̂ũm] (3rd, short 1st)

lǫuhm [lɔ̃̂ũm] (short 2)

lǫuhm [lɔ̃̂ũm] (combining form)

Forms 3-5 are homophonous, but are distinguished in writing. In the photo below you can see forms 1-5 from top to bottom respectively in the script.

[paizau]

in the sound change applier. straight up "tweeking it". and by "it", haha, well. let's jutsr say. Tonogenesis.

[paizau]

Rediscovering old words

Something fun that just happened is that I wanted to translate the sentence "have none of you ever broken a bone?", so naturally I check that I have a word for "bone", and what do I discover?

I literally already have an entire verb meaning "break a bone". huh. And it's a compound verb of "jump" + "hurt". Now why does "jump and hurt/jump hurtingly" turn to mean "break a bone"? and it's also a transitive verb! so "break (someone's) bone"? I have no idea. But I plan on keeping it that way. I feel like this gives the language some nice depth, being a nonsense compound like this.

[paizau]

Working on Ngįout Orthography

I'm working on Ngįout orthography and I'm debating between three ways of spelling long nasal vowels in the native orthography. The script is an abugida, with the first letter being the empty consonant with a vowel diacritic, and the second is a letter used not for its consonantal value, but to modify the previous vowel into a long nasal one. All three are equally valid, and this is a purely aesthetic choice. thoughts?

Which option is better?

column 1

column 2

column 3

Voting ended onMar 16

[paizau]

I want to get /f/ from some where but don't want to redo /p/ > /f/ because I already did that for Kshafa :(

Oh wait! it just so happens that I have this inconvenient /ts/ that really messes with how my consonant table looks, especially after adding the velarization contrast! so let me just-

/ts/ => /θ/ => /f/

ahh... much better :))