World Languages

[Colombina]

This is awesome! I like what I see fo sho!

[Sefra]

I think I'll have something by tuesday.... Have some physics hw to do, then it's spring break!

[Colombina]

Oh and if you all weren't in chat the other day, if you have any swear words, send them to me. I started a swears page way back and have been dying for submissions from other races. Atm, the races that have swears are ones I've worked on

[Sefra]

Some notes before you look at the rest:
It's been a while since I've written up a phoneme inventory, so I might have gotten the slashes and brackets mixed up. For those who don't know what I'm talking about, 1) You'll see when you scroll down, 2) The slashes (I think) mean the letters in between are the 'sounds' and the brackets mean those in between are the 'graphemes' (letters) used to represent those sounds. Where I've used a comma and show two letters, my meaning is that either of those graphemes can represent the corresponding phoneme. I imagine most of us here are not exactly fluent in IPA or X-Sampa, so here's a link to a place where you can hear all of the sounds: http://www.paulmeier.com/ipa/charts.html . I included the X-Sampa symbolization for those whose computers cannot display Unicode or IPA, but I don't know of a similar chart where you can click and get the sounds.

Sounds of Nader-canoch

Vowels: /ɑ ɜ y ʌ ɵ/ {X-Sampa: / A 3 y V 8/ }

[a e i o u]

Consonants: /b s χ d ʤ f g ɭ m n p k ɰ t v j z/ {X-Sampa: / b s X d dZ) f g l` m n p k M\ t v j z/ }

[b c,s ch d dj f g l m n p q,k r t v y z]

Tones:
à (falling)
á (rising)
â (peaking)
ä (stressed)
ã (double-rising [doubles length])
ā (high)
ă (dipping)
ą (low)
a (flat, mid-level)

Development note:
The wiki page which describes this language was very non-specific about which sounds were intended by some of the letters (alas, the draw back of the Roman Alphabet), so I took a couple of liberties. Specifically, the l sound is more similar to that heard in some Mexican dialects of Spanish and the r sound is that heard in French. The "fricative k" sound described on the wiki was really hard to place, but I did my best. Other than those, I kept it pretty straightforward (in the eyes of the average English speaker).

Thoughts, comments, and suggestions?

[Sefra]

I've done a quick write-up for Common, for your perusal.

Common:
{{Infobox Language
|image:
|image_caption:
|Name: Common
|Spoken by: Humans, second language to most races
|Syntax: Variable
|Alignment: Ergative-Dative
|Type: Left branching, inflecting/agglutinating
}}

Common is the most widely spoken language in Mizahar. Nearly every member of every race can speak this lingua franca for the necessity made by its being the language spoken by the largest race, [[Humans]].

==History==
Common is a descendant of Nader-canoch, the [[Ancient Tongue]] spoken by the proto-humans who originally arrived in [[Mizahar]].

When Humans reemerged after the [[Valterrian]], Common was the language spoken by the largest group of them, who went on to found [[Sylira]].

As it is a Human language descended from Nader-canoch, it is related, at least by genealogy, to other Human languages such as [[Pavi]] ([[Drykas]]).

===Distribution, Speakers, etc.===
Common is the unofficial lingua franca of Mizahar and is spoken nearly everywhere, even if only when humans are around.

The number of speakers of Common is difficult to judge, but it is safe to assume that more than 80% of Mizaharans have some degree of fluency.

==Structure==

===Syntax===
Common follows no concrete syntax, though the most preferable arrangement is Subject-Verb-Object. Nuance is the thing which typically determines the syntax of a given utterance. For instance, a speaker who wishes to emphasize an action may place the verb at the beginning, where a speaker who wishes to emphasize who receives an action may put the object at the beginning.

Since word placement holds no value on the meaning of the words within a sentence, Common must rely on grammatical particles to indicate what word serves what role. These particles are most often prepositions, as Common is a mostly left-branching language. The sentence “The dog chewed the rope” may be rendered thus:

“[Obj]Rope [Verb]Chewed the [Subj]Dog.”

This emphasizes to the listener that it was the rope which was chewed on, and also shows that it is assumed the listener already knows that they are talking about the dog (by its placement as last in the sentence).

===Morphology===
Morphological alignment, in contrast with most other human languages (including Nader-canoch) is Ergative-Dative, rather than Nominative-Accusative.

Common is a language which utilizes inflection and agglutination to change the mood, aspect, number, and tense of a verb. Verbs inflect to show mood and tense, where aspect is shown using a “helper verb,” and number is shown using an agglutinated suffix.

Nouns also undergo declension (via inflection) for number in concordance with the verb. Number in Common includes: Singular, Dual, and Multiple.

==Grammar==
==Vocabulary==

[Gossamer]

The largest group of humans didn't re-emerge to found Sylira. Instead, in Sylira, there were pockets that survived pretty much intact and came out afterwards. I think most flocked go Syliras and Sunberth (depending on their alignment) after the fact and quite a while after the fact at that. Once Syliras was founded, a great many humans migrated there from elsewhere which is why its a melting pot.

Every PC in Mizahar should have some grasp of common. So 80% is probably a bit too low... by a long shot.

Since word placement holds no value on the meaning of the words within a sentence, Common must rely on grammatical particles to indicate what word serves what role. These particles are most often prepositions, as Common is a mostly left-branching language. The sentence “The dog chewed the rope” may be rendered thus:

“[Obj]Rope [Verb]Chewed the [Subj]Dog.”

This doesn't make much sense to me. For all intent and purpose, Common should be English. Lets not make this more confusing than it needs to be.

[Jilitse]

I'd have to agree with Goss. Common tongue in Mizahar is common English, and it does not use a syntax like that. I think you confused it with the Ancient tongue there. :3 Let's stick with Subject-verb-object is preferred. Period. Yoda talk is not Common anymore.

It's really nice that you're helping with the Ancient Tongue, but why are we talking about phonemes already? This kind of development is waaay beyond my abilities - but I'm a normally daft person, so maybe it's just me. I mean, I don't really think I'd be too concerned about the pronunciation of the words just yet. In my opinion what the Ancient tongue needs is an increase in its vocabulary words. (Or that's at least what I need from it)

[Sefra]

@ Goss:

Thanks for the clarification on where the humans all ended up. I was focusing on the language pretty tightly, so I kinda went from memory on that detail ^.^; .

@ Both:

I understand that we're rendering Common into English for the purposes of being able to play, but that shouldn't stop us from having some fun with the language, is it? Tolkien, also, used English to render the language that his hobbits spoke. The reader doesn't even need to know that English is covering a fictitious language, and frankly, neither does the writer. We just keep on writing in English, as if we're writing the words of the perfect interpreter, I suppose.

But if it's agreed that Common really is English, we can just copy/paste from Wikipedia's English article and use the writeup I did for a different language like Pavi or something.

@ Jilitse:

I went to phonemes and tones because a fairly clear grammar was already there. The description of the sounds seemed vague to me, though, so I attacked that first.

Maybe I didn't quite clarify what I meant by "work on the languages of Mizahar" in the beginning of the thread. My goal is to write up authentic-looking linguistic descriptions of each language. Like what I wrote up and posted last night. That took me all of two hours. There's still a lot more to be done to it (need sections on morphology, phonotactics, phonological constraints, scripts, subordinate clauses, adverbs and adjectives and the list goes on), but it's enough that someone can get the main idea.

Building a lexicon, on the other hand.... phew, that could take years to complete. I encourage everyone to add words, and I probably will myself, but the goal I had in this thread was to get people to help me build structure.

Am I too into the whole Conworlding idea, maybe? Goss, you're the voice of the Founders in this thread: do you guys even care about having this level of detail?

[Miharu Mindi]

Yeah, I meant making vocabulary. Like swears. I like making swears.

[Sefra]

Swear words have their own Wiki (which has a talk page). This thread is for structure ^.^ .