2024/10/01 - Initial Ideas

Welcome to my new conlanging project which I'll be documenting here on my site. This is not the first project to be made on this website, but I'm going to commit to this one.

Firstly, I want to set out my goals for this conlang project:

• I intend to create a writeup for the next issue of the conlanging journal, Segments, which will be due on the 27th of October 2024. This writeup will concern verbal constructions; that means the language should at be developed enough to write about that topic at that point in time.
• The conlang will be naturalistic, with a history behind its development (in world), meaning that I have to consider phonological, grammatical, and semantic changes that will occur over the sourse of this language.
• This conlang, despite its intended depth, is not necessarily intended to fit into some kind of greater worldbuilding project. However, I will probably develop some lore around the language for the purposes of providing rationale for certain developments in semantics and vocabulary.

Now, besides these goals, I have a list of ideas that I want to incorporate into this language. Each post I make about the conlang on this site should concern progress towards one of these ideas being developed.

• Complex agreement/conjugation patterns: I want to develop a complex system of agreement, which combines with various TAM categories, which I propose will arise from the reduction of auxiliaries.
• A very specific sound change: I like the idea of splitting nasal consonants, wherein nasal consonants become prenasalised stops when in onset position and not followed by a nasal vowel (nasalisation spreads, so coda nasals will precipitate onset nasals). This becomes phonemicised by mergers and loss of coda nasals and nasal vowels.
• Apophony: simply, vowel alternations cause some difference in meaning. I want to incorporate this somewhere, potentially in multiple contexts.
• Pitch accent: a pitch accent will be present in the modern stage of the language. My idea for this at present is that the accent will develop from glottal codas, and via tone spreading, a single pitch drop will become apparent in any given word, or a word will be accentless. How this plays with compounds and the accretion of grammatical morphemes, we'll have to see.

Historical Phonology

The following list gives an order of sound changes that will be required to develop the features I have just discussed.

1. Vowel nasalisation: Oral vowels become nasal when followed by nasal consonants. It may be that certain consonants are allowed to intercede, such as glides, but most should block nasalisation.
2. Nasal split: When not followed by a nasal vowel, onset nasals become prenasalised stops.
3. Nasal split phonemicisation: This may be multiple changes, such as the glottal stop loss later discussed, final nasal loss, and assimilation of various nasal/non-nasal clusters.
4. Glottalisation: All final stops become a glottal stop. This causes the preceding syllable to be pronounced with a high tone.
5. Glottal stop loss: Glottal stops are dropped, causing tone to become unpredictable, thus phonemic.
6. Vowel assimilation: High vowels cause the raising of non-high vowels leftward. This becomes unpredictable due to the merger of word final mid/high vowel pairs.
7. Tone spreading: High tone spreads leftward, causing there to be only a single pitch drop in a word. As words lacking a high tone do not have a pitch drop, the pitch at which they are pronounced is non-contrastive, causing them to become fully high tone, with no pitch drop.
8. Tokyo-accent syle shift: All syllables preceding the pitch drop lower in height. In accentless words, the last syllable remains high.

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