Previously: Conlanging I: First Contact, Conlanging II: Contology, Hart's Nominex
Minor posts: Some affixes, mostly derivational, Evidentiality And Supposability
It's been a year since I've worked on my conlang for the Xenants and I think I'm ready to give them some words and bound morphemes. In the past, I worked on a lot on grammar and conceptual semantics, but now it's time to get this thing done. Lexicography. Lexiconning. Lexicoinage. Wordsmithing. Whatever.
:: Quick Review Of Language Features
: Speakers
The language doesn't have a name yet, but it's spoken by crystalline insectoid aliens called Xenants.
: Parts of Speech
The language of the Xenants has conjunctions, verbs, nouns, and lots of affixes (prefixes and suffixes). There are no stand-alone articles, adjectives, or adverbs.
: Phonology
Xenants bilaterally have two complex sound producing organs (we'll call them "mouths" here, but there's a different organ for ingestion that could also be called a mouth). They can produce sounds from mouths simultaneously, independently. Their sounds are highly percussive: Xenants don't have vowels or voicing, and they can't even whisper.
Xenants have the following sounds in their root vocabulary of affixes, nouns, verbs, and conjunctions:
A Xenant syllable consists of a consonant in one mouth, and silence or a consonant in the other mouth. Silence is transcribed with an underscore "_" in the short transcription and with an apostrophe "'" in the long romanization. Xenant syllables are called "half-syllables" if one mouth is silent, and "full-syllables" otherwise. Simultaneously produced syllables are written in sequence in both the short transcription scheme and the long romanization, so that "Xt" is a single syllable written short and "xitu" is the same syllable written long.
: Word Order
None. There is no required or suggested word order in the Xenant language. A given Xenants might have an artistic preference for a certain word order, perhaps introducing concepts in a given order for the sake of poetry or dramatic storytelling, but that's all. To be fair, there's a lot of synthetic morphologic structure within words, to the extent that it's more like Xenant words correspond to English phrases and the free Xenant word order is more like a free English phrasal order, but that's not unusual for natural synthetic languages either.
: Phonotactics
For the most part, the Xenant language is designed so that Xenants don't have to speak the same articulant in one mouth on two successive syllables ("stuttering"). This held true throughout the entire language until recently when I decided on words for phrasal conjunctions.
Let's have an example: we've already seen the syllable "xitu". If a Xenant were presented with this syllable twice in a row, it might say the first xi in its left mouth and the second xi in its right mouth, and likewise the consonant "tu" would alternate mouths. Almost every word and morphological construction pattern in the language is designed around giving Xenants options like that to swap sounds left and right to avoid stuttering. And maybe I should fix the conjunctions to avoid stuttering also. We'll see.
That's it for review. Now for some new words!
:: Phrasal Conjunctions
Conjunctions are the roots of Xenant discourse. They link together all the other simple sentences. They will be single syllable words, and the syllables will all have doubled consonants (i.e. shared articulants and shared height). There are twelve such syllables and here they are with their twelve corresponding conjunctions:
First, logical and causal conjunctions:
"oo": BUT
"II": AND-OR
"ii": EITHER-OR
"TT": IF-THEN
"tt": AS-SO
. Next, conjunctions of relative temporal reference (tensive and aspectual conjunctions):
"zz": AFTER
"XX": SINCE
"xx": UNTIL
"KK": WHILE
"kk": WHEN
.
By themselves, there's no phonotactic problem with these words as shown above, but conjunctions don't occur bare: they incorporate morphemes ("indexical proforms") that are used to reference the simple sentences over which the conjunctions operate. An indexical pro-form incorporated into a conjunction can point to a verb at the root of a simple sentence or to a conjunction with its own arguments. The sequence of syllables after this incorporation can violate the phonotactic constraint against stuttering. For example, if the incorporated morpheme has a Z, then you can't stick on the conjunction BEFORE ("ZZ") without stuttering. Not ideal.
I'm not super happy with that violation, but I wanted to do something important with the doubled consonant syllables and using them as function-words like conjunctions feels good. Also, I'm really happy with the set of 12 conjunctions here as a complete set that fits in the fixed space of 12 doubled syllables, so for now I'll shrug off the phonotactic violation and content myself with the knowledge that it doesn't happen more than once per word? Or I could add a new sound to the language just for conjunctions, maybe, to give an bilateral alternation option. Or .... I'll figure something out.
First thought: conjunctions are two syllables long now, and the second syllable has (a high alveolar tap and silence). I haven't used that syllables anywhere else in the language, and we'll see later together that it's a pretty logical way of announcing that indexical proforms are coming next in the word. So now the conjunction AND would look like "OO#_". Honestly, this only feels slightly better than violating the stutter rule. I'll keep thinking.
! How about a hyphen pronounced as a silent beat? Silence denotes word separation, except after conjunctions, where it denotes a hyphen. Yeah. I can deal with that. Problem solved.
:: Verbs
The Xenant language only has two root verbs. They're both half-silent syllables:
"I_": CAUSE
. I might get rid of CAUSE at some point, but it's here for now. And that's okay. It's good, even, maybe. Existence, the universe, is a great directed acyclic graph of causal interactions; the two verbs are both very ontologically fundamental. I don't feel bad about having both, even if the language might be more impressive with just one or the other. It wouldn't be better, I don't think, it would just be more constrained.
Root verbs get lots of affixes to become complex words that basically correspond to simple sentences in English, so you'll often see me calling affixed verbs "phrases" or "simple sentences", but such a sentence is really just one word for the Xenants. Also, if you read my previous posts, you'll see me called affixed nouns "verb phrases", because they're like English phrases and they're verbs to the Xenants, but they're not verb phrases in the sense that they don't have a subject. Oops. Misleading. I might go back and edit that out.
:: Numbers and indexical proforms
Xenant numbers were described and spelled in "Conlanging I", but let's review them here. Xenants use base 12. The integers 0 through 11 are: "O#", "I#", "T#", "Z#", "X#", "K#", "o#", "i#", "t#", "z#", "x#", "k#", where the sharp sign represents a high aspirated voiceless alveolar tap.
The duodecimals 0/12 through 11/12 are: "O.", "I.", "T.", "Z.", "X.", "K.", "o.", "i.", "t.", "z.", "x.", "k.", where the period represents a low aspirated voiceless alveolar tap.
The Xenants have a positional number system just like ours, but they use #-numerals ahead of the duodecimal point and .-numerals after the duodecimal point. Also, they don't have a duodecimal point. So, e.g., "O#I#T.Z." looks like
(1) (2) (3/12) (4/12)
in sequence, but positionally it means
, better known as
. I haven't figured out how to represent negative numbers yet or anything more exotic, but we'll get there in time.
Positive integers are really important in the Xenant language, which has a completely free word order. Integers are used pronomially (referring to nouns) and pro-verbally (referring to simple sentences that are semantically-headed by verbs) and pro-conjunctively (referring to conjunctions) and these integers are incorporated into verbs and conjunctions, and that's how the Xenants show relationships between words, instead of using sequential syntax. These integer proforms are also indexical: a number 1 incorporated into a verb references the 1st noun in the sentence. A number 3 incorporated into a conjunction references the 3rd verb or conjunction mentioned in the sentence. In total, conjunctions reference verbs and other conjunctions, and verbs reference nouns.
Incorporation is just concatenation, if that sounded complicated. A conjunction IF-THEN that references verb 1 and verb 2 might just look like: IF-1-THEN-2. Easy peasy. Except they would write it short as "I#-TT-T#", maybe, I'm still not sure about the morpheme order, and also there wouldn't be dashes, I just thought you might like some help with parsing.
If you're having trouble pronouncing that, try the romanization: ciri-titi-tiri. If possible, try splitting it up as a Xenant would do; say ci-ti-ti in your dominant mouth and ri-ti-ri in your non-dominant mouth. I believe in you.
:: TAME Verbal affixes (Tense, Aspect, Mood, Evidentiality)
I haven't said much about how verbal affixes are spelled. In previous posts, I decided that nominal affixes would be two syllables long, and in particular, nominal prefixes would be a half syllable followed by a full syllable (-hf), and nominal suffixes would be a full syllable followed by a half syllable (-fh). Furthermore, those full syllables should have distinct articulants, i.e. they should come from the set ["OI", "OT", "OZ", "OX", "OK", "Oi", "Ot", "Oz", "Ox", "Ok", "IT", "IZ", "IX", "IK", "Io", "It", "Iz", "Ix", "Ik", "TZ", "TX", "TK", "To", "Ti", "Tz", "Tx", "Tk", "ZX", "ZK", "Zo", "Zi", "Zt", "Zx", "Zk", "XK", "Xo", "Xi", "Xt", "Xz", "Xk", "Ko", "Ki", "Kt", "Kz", "Kx", "oi", "ot", "oz", "ox", "ok", "it", "iz", "ix", "ik", "tz", "tx", "tk", "zx", "zk", "xk"]. I'll often refer to these as "boundary syllables". This is a huge space of affix morphemes and there's definitely room to fit all the verbal and nominal affixes I could want in it. But also, as I'm imagining what Xenant sentences will look like, I'm seeing that the verbs, when fully affixed and incorporated, are really really long in comparison to the nouns and conjunctions, and I'd like to try shortening them a little, if possible. So maybe I'll make the TAME verbal affixes be half syllables, and all other verbal affixes (i.e., adverbial and adpositional affixes) will look like the two-syllable nominal affixes.
Picking half-syllables for the TAME affixes would be a lot easier if I felt confident in which ones I wanted, and easier still if I were sure about how many (half-syllable) verbs the language should have. Here's my first stab at it:
: Tense suffixes for verbs:
(present): "x_" (default, usually unmarked)
(future): "z_"
: Aspect suffixes for verbs:
(continuous): "i_
(inceptive): o_
(terminative): K_
: Mood suffixes for verbs:
(counterfactual): "Z_"
.
And I guess I'll skip the evidential affixes for lack of space, even though my evidential affix system was so fucking good:
Weak perceptive: seemingly
Ductive (Deductive/Inductive): logically/reasonably
Weak ductive: theoretically, speculatively, hypothetically
Quotative: reportedly
Weak quotative: allegedly, anecdotally
. Maybe those will be two-syllable affixes. Yeah. Maybe. ... Nah, I'll put it in another language.
Let's try an example!
Let's say that some object (indexed with the number 1) really existed in the past, and we want to talk about it's existence at the time as an ongoing state or process, not an event. All together that's [exist] [#1] [tense=past] [aspect=continuous] [mood=realis]. We have words and/or morphemes for all of those parts! In particular, they correspond to [O_] [I#] [k_] [i_] [∅]. So "it was existing'" is rendered as "O_I#k_i_". I'm not sure about the morpheme order, and I'm especially unsure where the indexical pronoun numbers will incorporate, but still, we have the parts! Yay!
Here's the same word spelled long: pi'-ciri-ku'-cu'.
:: Nouns
In the Xenant language, root nouns with no affixes will start and end with boundary syllables, i.e. full syllables that don't have the same articulant. If I use just one boundary syllable for very general nouns, then it's still starting and ending with a boundary syllable, so that's how I'll start. Here are some general nouns paired up completely randomly with different boundary syllables.
The general noun "organism part" was "tz". Let's now introduce:
Xenant mouths are for talking and Xenant maws are for ingesting.
No, I'm better than that. Here are some silicate minerals that Xenants have words for (which are also likely to occur in the upper or lower mantle of the earth):
I'd really like to include some more nickel minerals. These are all rare on the surface of the earth and I'm not sure about their existence/abundance at greater depths:
Finally there are some iron-nickel alloys commonly found in chondrite meteorites with definite crystal structure but indefinite or non-integral stoichiometry. I'm going to pretend that the stoichiometry is one-to-one and call these ones minerals also:
There are lots of other minerals that are familiar to me from the surface of earth, but I don't know if they're likely to be prevalent within a rocky planet, so by default I'll make them 3 syllables long. Honestly, the very first one on this list, acanthite, is a very good theoretical candidate for something the Xenants might know; it contains silver, which is a dense metal, and sulfur, which must be present in some significant quantity in the mantle or it wouldn't be so strongly associated with volcanism. But I've never read about acanthite in a source on mantle geochemistry, so for now, it gets three syllables.
I've mentioned that I prefer to use end-member minerals in preference to solution-series, but here are are some famous minerals with substitutions that the Xenants might also have names for:
Let's speciate material forms next. Xenants have 18 short words for them.
:: Sentences and conversations:
Here's a cute idea. I've said that Xenants use lexical indices as an infinite family of incorporated proforms, and that the indices count from the start of a sentence, but I've never defined where a sentence ends or how the Xenants mark it. Maybe the indices should instead be specific to the conversation, so that a second Xenant can use the same proforms as the first one to refer to the same concepts. And then if you want to start over counting, you say something like "Zero!" and the conversation starts fresh. Even more Xenantishly, they could say, "Every word exists as zero suddenly.".
:: Adverbial, adpositional, and derivational, verbal affixes
Affixes are prefixes and suffixes and infixes. I think all my verb affixes are going to be suffixes, but we'll take them one at a time.
: Adverbial suffixes
I've cleaned up my set adverbial suffixes from Conlanging I. They are now:
* Telicity: (intentionally | unwillingly | stupidly | unintentionally)
The affix with the English gloss "repeatedly" that contrasts with "once" can be used for a single repetition or many, so another possible gloss for the affix would be "again".
The Xenants think of the adverbial suffixes of telicity as lying in a two dimensional space:
* Forethought (+), Choice (-): Unwillingly
* Forethought (-), Choice (+): Stupidly
* Forethought (-), Choice (-): Unintentionally
. They don't have a word "accidentally" that can be used just as well for things you did stupidly as for things that you did unintentionally. "Stupidly" might sound a little jarring to you; it certainly does to me. You might wonder if instead, maybe we could give the suffix a polite English gloss like "imprudently"? But no. The Xenants are jarring. They call each other stupid and they mean it.
I guess I need to make morphemes for these suffixes now! Suffixes in the language usually have the two-syllable form (-fh), where "f" is a full syllable with sounds in both mouths, followed by "h", a half syllable for which one mouth is silent. The full syllable is also a "mixed" or "boundary" syllable, i.e. the two mouths aren't saying the same consonant, since those syllables with shared consonants are only used for conjunctions. This lets the Xenants avoid stuttering.
The suffixes of Progress and Speed will all have OZ for their full syllables:
OZK_: Decreasingly
OZz_: Suddenly
OZT_: Gradually
Frequency suffixes will have "IZ" for the full syllable:
IZX_: Constantly
IZi_: Once
IZx_: Repeatedly
IZZ_: Rarely
IZo_: Frequently
. And the telic adverbial suffixes will start with "TZ'":
TZi_: Unwillingly
TZz_: Stupidly
TZK_: Unintentionally
. Cool. None of these suffixes are required to be present and none of them take arguments. You just slap them on to the end of verbs, as many as you want, in whatever order you want, though the order of application might change the meaning, especially when composed with other suffixes. Semantically, they modify everything that's come before them. So in comparing, "exist-suddenly-as-a-child" and "exist-as-a-child-suddenly", the first one might mean to come into existence knock-kneed and upright but immature, while the second one might mean to become a child after having previously been an adult. Those are both weird impossible situations, but sometimes Xenants need to write about weird impossible situations, like in literature.
Fair warning: if you add on antonymic suffixes in a contradictory way, like to say that something happens at once both gradually and suddenly, a Xenant listener might attack you, unless you're very young and very close kin.
: Adpositional verbal affixes
Xenants have two kinds of adpositional verbal suffixes: spatial and thematic. And the spatial affixes also come in two types: locative or directive. And I'm not sure about any of them.
- Thematic Adpositions
Let's start with the thematic adpositions. When I say "thematic" I'm gesturing at thematic roles, like "agent", "patient", "instrument", "recipient", which live in the realm of semantics, and they're closely related to syntactic nominal cases, like the "nominative" and the "ergative". In practice, I don't know much about thematic roles or syntactic nominal cases, but it seems to me that they're often introduced with prepositions in languages that don't mark nouns for case, and that's basically how Xenants introduce them also. The difference is that the prepositions are suffixes on verbs that take arguments, and the arguments are numerical references to nouns, counted from their position in the sentence. My thematic affixes are suffixes (postpositional rather than prepositional), but I don't yet feel confident in what they will be. In decreasing order of usefulness, I've mainly considered:
* Possessive: "with"
To say that a given book is old, a Xenant would say "the-book an-old-thing exists-1-as-2", or any rearrangement of those three words, with the numbers changing to match, e.g. "exists-2-as-1 an-old-thing the-book".
In practice, I think the first three thematic affixes ("as", "with", "about") will usually go on the EXIST verb and the other two ("by", "for") will mostly go on the CAUSE verb, but doing otherwise wouldn't necessarily be ungrammatical.
I've given the pertinitive suffix a one word English gloss of "about". Originally I used it in situations where an English speaker would say "pertaining to", and "about" is pretty close to that and shorter. I also find myself using it in cases where an English speaker would say "w.r.t." / "with respect to" or "in the context of". I'm not super positive that all four of those quoted glosses are close synonyms. Maybe one of the meanings should be factored out for semantic regularity.
I'd considered some other (pro | anti)-benefactive thematic suffixes, with glosses like "in spite of", "so that", "in order to", "lest", but I'm leaning against including them now. They don't seem all that useful, and when I want to express things like that, I'd rather do it with multiple verbs linked by conjunctions.
I'd really like to use "that" as a thematic affix, in sentences like "he existed with a belief that (x)" or "the article existed with a claim that (x) " or "I exited with a desire that (x)". But its not clear to me that "that" is being used as a preposition there. Linguistics call it it a "complementizer" for introducing a sentential complement, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's not a preposition. I think it probably isn't a preposition, but the fact that linguistics have another name for it doesn't contribute to that. The best alternative I'd come up with to using "that" as a thematic affix was using uncommon nouns like "positive information" and "positive desire". "He existed with positive information about (x) (being the case)" or "He existed with positive desire about (x) (being the case)". Not great, right?'
Another problem with using "positive X" constructions that I've just noticed, besides that I'm resorting to using new weird nouns to say normal things, is that the sequential application of affixes doesn't correspond to sequential modification of meaning. In "he existed with positive desire about x", we're reading the "about x" like it's is modifying "positive desire", because that makes sense, but if affixes modify everything that came before them, then it should be modifying "he existed with positive desire". His positive desire wasn't about x, but rather his existence with positive desire was about (x). Does that ....change anything? I'm so tired. Maybe expressing this should be done using two existence simple sentence, like "A positive desire existed about X (being the case)" and "he existed with 1".
This is super important. The ability to make sentential complements is basically equivalent to the ability to quote language within language. And quotation, the ability to talk about language, is almost as basic as the existence of language. I need this.
Okay, new idea, which might actually be an old idea from Conlanging I, as I can't remember everything I've written. I've talked in other posts about derivational affixes that can turn sentences into perdurants, like "the dog exists with a tail" becomes "the state of the dog existing with a tail". With this derivational affix, we could start with the English sentence "He believed that the dog had a tail." and transform it to something more Xenantish like "He existed with a belief and the belief existed as (the state of the dog existing with a tail)." But we can do better! Let's have a derivational affix that turns sentences of the language into quoted sentences. Then we can say "He existed with a belief and the belief existed as (the dog exist with a tail)-sentence". I like that way more. Beliefs exist as sentences. I stand by that. And desires, on the other hand, they exist "for" perdurants, benefactively. "He desired to be free." becomes "He existed with a desire" for the first part and "the desired existed for (he would-exist-as a-free-thing)-state". This is good. I feel like I've brought out semantic features that would have been hidden if I'd just used "that" willy-nilly.
So let's create some morphemes for the for thematic/adpositional suffixes. They seem pretty adequate now that I've got an idea of how to combine them with derivational affixes to compose sentences where English would use sentential complements. I'm still not super confident that I'll stick with the exact five suffixes that I mentioned above, but I doubt the final set will have more than six members.
Let's use "iz" for the full syllable. Also, the gloss "by" for the Instrumental thematic suffix always sounds wrong without tacking on the parenthetical, in oder to give us "by (means of)", so let's use a different gloss. "Through" sounds okay. "He caused the storm to exist through machinery." Stuff like that.
izt_: Possessive suffix, "with"
izx_: Pertinitive suffix, "about"
izi_: Instrumental suffix, "through"
izO_: Benefactive suffix, "for"
The Xenants really like organizing things into opposites and these aren't organized like that, which is sad, but maybe I'll have an insight down the line that will let me redo this Xenantishly. In the mean time, they're too useful not to use.
- Spatial Adpositions
We've had thematic adpositinal verbal suffixes, which look like prepositions. There are lots of other prepositions, and a lot of them look like the conjunctions we've already covered, the logical, the causal, and the temporal. The remainder of the prepositions are pretty much spatial (orientating and/or directive). Also the word "of" is a big important remaining preposition. We'll get to "of" later. There will be a whole section on genitive nominal relations.
There's a commonly drawn distinction in linguistics wherein languages are said to have verb-framing versus satellite-framing based on whether the location/path of a motion verb is directly encoded in the verb or whether it get stuck into a separate particle, like a preposition. Germanic languages generally have satellite framing using prepositions (go in, go out). Romance languages generally have verb-framing, with different verbs for different motions and no preposition needed (enter, exit). English has a mixture of both due borrowings of Norman French into Old English. Romance languages have a habit of using a second gerund of a verb in an adverbial manner after a directive verb to specify a manner ("he exited running").
The Xenant language, of course, encodes both the path and the manner separately from the root verb (CAUSE or EXIST), when it encodes them at all. Slobin calls languages like this "equipollently-framed", which is a delicious word and almost as much fun to say as "Slobin". What affixes do the Xenants use for location and direction?
Xenant spatial suffixes come in two sets of six suffixes. All of them take an argument, which we'll call a reference object. Members from the first set are used when we're not considering any boundary of the reference object,
(parallel-to | perpendicular-to)
(with | opposite)
The second set of six suffixes basically share their semantics with the fist set element-wise, except that they're used when the reference object is a boundary or has a boundary, and also they suggest but don't require contact with the boundary.
(around/along | through/across)
(astride | against)
. In the second pair of antonyms, "(along | across)" are my English glosses for the suffixes when the reference boundary is long/linear and "(around | through)" are glosses for the suffixes when the reference boundary is not, but the Xenants use the same suffix in either case.
Those two sets are used by Xenants to talk about fixed position and orientation. To talk about motion, Xenants usually just tack on the verbal modifiers "(increasingly | decreasingly)", so that e.g. motion (toward | away from) a reference object is expressed as being (near to | far from) it -increasingly. Likewise entrance and exit can be expressed as being (within | outside of) something -increasingly.
Time to invent some great new morphemes! It's mighty morpheme time.
tkt_: parallel-to
tkz_: perpendicular-to
tkZ_: with
tkk_: opposite
IoK_: within
Ioi_: outside-of
Iot_: around/along
Ioz_: through/across
IoZ_: astride
Iok_: against
The half syllables are the same element-wise between the unbounded frame and the boundary-contact frame. Also, the unbounded frames have the same full syllable (tk) and the bounded frames have the same full syllable (Io). Other than that, there's no structure, i.e. (with | opposite) are antonyms but their half syllables were chosen semi-independently / randomly without replacement.
I could have given all 12 spatial affixes the same first syllable, since there are 12 half syllables available to distinguish them, but I like this better. It shows more structure and it gives me space in case I want to add more spatial affixes.
: Derivational verbal affixes
Derivation changes a word in a deeper way that inflection, often by changing the word's part of speech. I've already talked about two (verbal to nominals) derivational affixes in this post: one that makes affixed verbs / simple sentences into perdurants (i.e. nouns X about which we can say "it happened during X) and one that quotes an affixed verb / simple sentence so that language can reference composed language, e.g. when talking about what someone said. Those two are all I care to make at the moment. Here they are in the Xenant language:
zxO_: (quotes an affixed verb)
I think that's it for verb affixes! They were all suffixes! Surprise! What should we do next? Speciate more verbs? Nah, not just yet. Let's dive into nominal affixes! I hardly touched on that in previous posts. This will be new ground.
I'd like to pause for a second and say that it was just within this post that I solved conjunctions, adverbial affixes, and spatial adpositions, and I did an amazing job. They are really Xenanty now. It's entirely possible that "Xenanty" will enter the English language just because I did such a good job on these, and I am to be commended.
:: Nominal affixes
: Determiners
Determiners will be nominal prefixes. We haven't done any prefixes yet, so the choice of sounds is completely free. They'll have the "hf-" syllable pattern, with a half syllable followed by a full syllable.
- Articles, Quantifiers, Distributive Determiners
Xenants don't have possessive determiners for now. Maybe they don't have a concept of possession. Someone is in control of things at a moment and that's as close to ownership as they get. They do have articles and quantifiers, which I'm presenting at once because I've never really understood the difference. The same articles and quantifiers are used on mass nouns, singular count nouns, and plural nouns. I've gotten a few so far, grouped them into pairs, and given them functional titles as best as I can:
Large existential indefinite quantifier: Most/Most-of/All-but-some
Small median indefinite quantifier: Little/Few/Little-of
Large median indefinite quantifier: Much/Many/Much-of
I think "little/few" allows for the possibility of referencing zero things, but "a/some" doesn't. "Some" means at least one. The (few | many) pair is more confusing to me than than the other quantifiers. I don't know that it guarantees anything definite about the number or proportion of referenced items. I think they're relative to an expected/typical or perhaps adequate quantity, so I've called them "median" quantifiers.
Let's make up some morphemes. Let's stick all of these on the same full syllable "Oi".
k_Oi: All
X_Oi: Some
o_Oi: Most
z_Oi: Few/Little
Z_Oi: Many/Much
The Xenants don't have a word for "the". They also don't have dedicated prefixes that correspond to the English distributive determiners "Any" or "Each/Every". To say "I don't like any of these dogs", you just say "I like none of these dogs.". To say "I want to hug each of these dogs.", you just say "I want to hug all of these dogs.". Speaking of "these" dogs, ...
- Demonstrative Determiners
Xenant demonstrative determiners come in (proximal, medial, distal varieties) and also (singular, plural) varieties. The full-syllable for them is "Ik".
No, that's not good either. To say "the man killed himself", Xenants just reference the man twice, they don't mention a man and then mention him reflexively. So ... So screw it. Let's remove number information from the demonstrative determiners, add in three possessive determiners and then have number be expressed separately.
k_Ik: medial (that/those)
Z_Ik: distal (yon thing(s))
X_Ik: proximal (my / our)
x_Ik: medial (your)
o_Ik: distal (their)
.
Actually, this still isn't better. To talk about yourself, "this agent" still sounds better than "my agent", so to talk about other people, it seems regular to keep saying "that agent" instead of "your agent" to talk about the listener in a conversation.
...
Oh, hey, whoa, Xenants wouldn't mark nouns for grammatical number (e.g. using affixes), because changes of grammatical number will change a noun's ontological type, and Xenantish nouns tell you their ontological type with the first prefix of the root. "One dog" is an organism, "two dogs" is a set of organisms. I need an ontological type for collectives, and then a genitive construction to say "collective the members of which are type dog". That sounds a little unwieldy, but it's what the Xenants would do. There isn't any point having ontological phonesthemics if we're not going to respect it.
Unless if when they say something that sounds to us like "one dog" they mean "a set containing one dog"?
...
New idea. All Xenant nouns are uncountable mass nouns, like furniture and luggage and fauna. When they write something we translate as "one animal" it's semantically more like "one piece of fauna". Um..... To sick to think things.
- Interrogative Determiners
Xenants don't have interrogative determiners like "what", "which", "whose". They also don't ask questions. They're good at making threats though. That's one way they get information out of each other.
- Cardinal Numerals
If I'm putting quantifiers like ("no", "all", "some") on nouns as affixes, it makes sense to also put on numbers like (1, 12, 144). The Xenant's way to say "144 dogs" is "144-dogs".
What if you want to talk about multiple dogs, without specifying the exact number or their (proximal, media, distal) relation to you. How do Xenants do that? I don't think they do. If you want to talk about dogs generically, like "Dogs are loyal.", that's what the generic/gnomic mood in the TAME verbal suffixes is for; "Dog(s) exist-generically as a loyal thing". Ah, but what if you want to say "half of the dogs" and not "half of the dog"? Then you have to specify how close it is to you. Sorry, bod. I know it's not very English, but this language isn't English.
: Genitive Suffixes
The word "of" in English has lots of functions. Even when we just talk about it linking nouns, it does so in many different ways. "Book of gold" is made of gold, "Book of Mormon" is written by Mormon, "book of the month", et. cetera. I'll call them all genitives. When other people are talking, I usually think of ownership, composition, and parthood as the prototypical genitive relations, but there are tons of noun-to-noun relationships, and I'll call them all genitive here
Here are some noun-to-noun relationships of common importance that I'd like the Xenants to be able to express.
Origin, Family, and Composition:
* X that was made by or by means of Y.
* X that is a part or member of Y
* X that is made of Y.
Function and Purpose:
* X that makes Y.
* X that destroys Y.
* X that seeks or collects Y.
Situational association:
* X that belongs at Y.
* X that affects Y.
* X that contains or is laden with Y.
I keep on going back and fourth as to whether it's okay to have two variables X and Y like above. The other option is to just have X be "thing" and Y is the only variable. A little more concretely, I'm waffling between genitive affixes of the form "X that has Y" versus "Thing that has Y". Even more concretely, I'm wondering whether I want affixed nouns to look more like "Box that has holes" versus "Thing that has holes".
Let me explain a little bit. If the genitive suffixes have one variable, Y, then I can turn "gold" into "a thing made of gold" and express "gold book" with a sentence like "a-book exists-as a-thing-made-of-gold". If the genitive modifies a base noun X and incorporates a reference to a noun Y, then I can say "some-gold a-book-made-of-1", which is like a compound noun, sort of.
With two variables, it feels like I'm sneaking in verbs, like "affects" and "seeks" and "makes", and I don't want nouns to relate to each other through those. Nouns relate to nouns through verbs, and the language's verbs are "exist" and "cause".
On the other hand, indexical numerals already incorporate into conjunctions and verbs. It's symmetrical/regular for them to also incorporate into nouns. Also also, I wanted the base noun's first syllable to tell you the word's ontological category, like how the Xenant words for "parent", IZx_Kx, and "grandchild", IZx_ot, both start out with the organism phonostheme, IZ. If I use the one variable version of the genitives, then gold, a substance beings "thing made of gold", an artefact, which breaks the ontological phonosthemics. So at the moment, I'm leaning toward two variable genitives, even though they feel a little impure.
I'm going to give each of the three sets of genitive affixes their own full consonant, but I've rearranged them like twelve times and nothing every feels very systematic, so the current groups probably aren't right and will hopefully change in the future when I figure out a better organization scheme.
There's no reason not to use the same boundary syllables in an affix that we've used in root nouns, and with these ones, I'm going to be a little cute. I'm going to use "xk" to start morphemes for the members the Origin/Family/Composition set, which is also the Xenant word for "place". I'll use "it" to start the morphemes from the Function/Purpose set, and "it" is also the Xenant word for "artefact". I'll use "ox" as the full syllable for the genitives of situational association, and "ox" is also the Xenant word for "event". I feel like I might be inviting people/Xenants to make nominal interpretations of the other affixes by doing this, which is bad, and also it's it of character for the language since it's cute and Xenants aren't cute .... buuuuut I'm still doing it.
And here we are: 12 genitive affixes for making compound nouns:
xkO_: that was made by or by means of
xkk_: that is a part or member of
xko_: that is made of
itI_: that is used on
itO_: that makes
itK_: that destroys
itk_: that seeks or collects
oxI_: that is used by
oxZ_: that is found at or belongs at
oxK_: that affects
oxt_: that is laden with
. Cool.
I'm having a little trouble remembering which full syllables I've used for suffixes and prefixes. Let's take stock:
It's totally fine for a suffix and a prefix to have the same full syllable, it just hasn't happened yet. The morphemes "hf-" and "-fh" simply don't have the same meaning, for any values of "f" and "h".
:: Adjectival nouns
The language of the Xenants doesn't have adjectives, but it has lots of nouns for binary/antonymic dimensions. I think the binary dimensions come in eight families. I'm not sure if they have multiple words for the dimension, coming both from the high end of the scale and the low end of the scale, e.g. whether they have words for both "emptiness" and "fullness" or just one of the two. Here are the eight families with some common/important members listed, but not their antonyms.
There is no nominal genitive affix for linking regular nouns with the properties/dimensions they exemplify. If you want to say that a person produces a lot of art, you say "person productivity art 1-exists-with-2-pertaining-to-3". For the absolute adjective classes, you can just say things like "1-exists-with-2". For the relative adjective classes, Xenants expect another verbal argument, like "-pertaining-to-3"
...
You can talk about things happening during activity and during inactivity, so those are perdurants. They were also polar dimensions, so that's easy:
activity-(perdurant) := some-entity activity-(dimension) exist -continuously 1 -with 2
And here it is spelled out:
activity-(perdurant) := X_Oiot KtOk O_i_I#izt_T#zxk_
. I get a little sad when see the language spelled out with the short transcription. It just looks like line noise. The long romanization is much better:
activity-(perdurant) := xi'picuputu kitupiku pi'cu'ciricuzutu'tiri
It looks, you know, vaguely Austronesian or something.
...
I don't want to write them all out. Expansion/growth means existing increasingly with size. Taking means causing something to start not existing with a processed object. (Burying | excavation) mean causing something to start existing (within | outside of) the ground. Xenants can talk about restraining versus unbinding in terms of causing something to exist with (mobility | immobility), and they can talk abut (capture | release) in terms of causing something to exist with (autonomy | heteronomy). The perdurants of (introduction | phaseout) might just be expressed as (cause to exist -inceptive-aspect | cause to exist -terminative-aspect). There are just tons and tons of perdurants that can be expressed with the verbal affixes and the polar dimensions - so many that it might be more interesting to talk about the ones that can't.
The pairs of (hostility | hospitality/pleasantry), (assistance | attack), (cooperation | competition) are all quite social and I think the first two pairs might be worth combining completely, but I don't know how to express them. We have "with | against" among the verbal affixes, but those were spatial/directive frames and using them here would be metaphorical, which isn't like the Xenants. We do have a benefactive thematic affix, and also in the past I've contemplating using a negating verbal operator or an anti-benefactive thematic affix. If we use the anti-benefactive, then maybe "competition" means existing against someone's interest within the context of a contest, and "hostility/attack" means existing against someone's interest through / (by means of) force, and just plain old isting against someone's interest could get a gloss like "interference". I'm quite happy with that.
Um...speaking of the negating verbal operator, I don't think I ever talked about it in this post. I talked about it a lot in Conlanging I and Conlanging II. The verb CAUSE was also a verbal operator for a while. But I've only used it once in this post implicitly, so maybe it's not all that important - the implicit use was saying that taking mean "to cause something to start not existing with a processed object" which in my head looked like [CAUSE "not(EXIST 1 -with 2)"] or something like that, where the quotes are making the enclosed part a perdurant noun, like "loss". Now, however, I'm wondering if I can do without the NOT operator. Like, we could add in opposites for all the thematic suffixes: Anti-benefactive, Anti-possessive, Anti-instrumental, Anti-similative, Anti-pertinitive. They don't sound very useful, but the first two have already showed up so who knows? I had said before that I wasn't super happy with how the thematic suffixes weren't nicely organized, e.g. into antonymic pairs. Maybe adding in the antonyms is exactly what a Xenant would do. Let's think about when they would/could be useful.
Competition := exist 1 -versus 2 -about/w.r.t. a contest.
Loss =: exist -initially 1 -without 2.
* Anti-instrumental: To exist without the use of X. To perform through means other than X. One word gloss: "excepting". This isn't great. I don't want adverbial affixes to be glossed with verbs. What else is there? "Notwithstanding", ..."lacking", ...."without" works fine, but I've already used it ...
Coping =: exist -continuously 1 -with pride -excepting success.
Floating = exist -continuously 1 -over 2 -excepting contact.
* Anti-similative: To exist as something other than X. To be unlike X.
...
...
Kind of dumb. Anothe pair of perdurants I hadn't categorized was (victory | defeat). Things can happen during those, and they're kind of opposites, yeah? Using the anti-benefactive, we could say something like
exist -terminatively 1 -versus 2 about/w.r.t a contest.
exist -terminatively 2 -versus 1 about/w.r.t a contest.
. In the first affixed verb, party 1 has a victory and party 2 has a defeat; in the second verb, party 2 has a victory and party 1 has a defeat. It's kind of tricky, because the English perdurants happen together/dependently, rather than exclusively, but the ambiguity of who the perdurant is happening to clears up in the Xenants version - they would instead have opposite words like (a victory(-for-the-self) | a defeat(-for-the-self), which are exclusive.
I had a little trouble categorizing (leisure | work), which seem kind of antonymic. I think leisure is for yourself while work can be for yourself or for someone else or for a project, et cetera, so the antonymy isn't perfect. Also, it's tempting to say that leisure involves pleasure while work involves pain, maybe as the instrumental means, but the feeling that goes with work isn't exactly, pain. We could say that leisure means causing yourself to exist with inactivity for your own sake while work means causing yourself to exist with activity for the sake of something unspecified? But sometimes people do work or leisure compulsively, and "CAUSE" kind of seems like it's suggestive of the telic -Intentionally affix, while compulsive action is should be marked with the -Unwillingly affix. Hm...... Okay, so I don't know exactly how to define leisure and work, but so far the language is capable expressing all the candidates I've come up with, so my failure to categorize (leisure | work) doesn't indicate that the language is lacking, just that my concepts are vague and not perfectly antonymic
There's another pair of perdurants I had trouble with expressing, but again I don't think it's due to a expressive shortcoming of the language. Forgetting is a perdurant. And the opposite of forgetting is remembering, yeah? But also forgetting is the opposite of learning, isn't it? And if we code forgetting as losing information ,then perceiving is a third way to gain information, so that's kind of antonymic. I think the Xenants would jut have words for the event of "gaining information | losing information)", and then perceiving, learning, and remembering will be manners of gaining information, perhaps expressed as something like (through sense organ | gain through sense organ and thought | gain through memory).
There were some perdurants pairs that didn't confuse me, like
(disconnection/detachment | connection/attachment)
. but then when I got to categorizing the perdurant "multiplication", I saw that "division" had already been used. And the thing is, when objects multiply, they number of objects increases, but when two numbers multiply, the number of numbers decreases. So there are two different multiplication concepts. Xenants should have one pair of perdurants that expresses "become (more | less) numerous", and also a pair for numerical multiplication. And here's the thing! I think the (division/separation | unification/fusion/merger) pair is suitable for numerical multiplication! Five times three is a unification/fusion/merger of five and three! And I'm also fine with some kind of (addition | subtraction) pair that works on sets and also works on numbers. That doesn't feel metaphorical to me, like I'm using one domain to describe another - it just feels right, like the underlying logic/dynamic is common. So the Xenants have words for (multiplication | division) and (addition | subtraction) that can be used on numbers as well as non-numbers. We're still missing two famous elementary arithmetic operators - (exponentiation | log-taking/logarithmization). It seems like those two only work on numbers, which is a little sad, but I can deal with it.
In previous posts I thought I might express arithmetic with the simulative affix, like "cause 3 and 5 to exist as a product". I think that's still a good option, but the act of doing so is now called a (whatever word Xenants use for the perdurant of ) unification/fusion/merger. Brilliant!
The last pair of polar perdurants I had trouble expressing was (encryption | decryption). I think we can express that by ....
...
:: Categorical Perdurants
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:: Nominal affixes for systematic names
I've said that the Xenants have ontological phonosthemes for elements and chemicals, but I haven't given any words for elements or chemicals. One way to write elements that I'd considered in the past is to put an affix on a number, like 1-ium is hydrogen and 12-ium is magnesium. This isn't Xenantish because it puts the ontological type in an affix instead of in the root. If we use genitive affixes, we can say "twelve element -of-atomic-number(1)" for magnesium. This is also convenient for naming nuclides/isotopes, which the Xenants need to be able to talk about since they're radiotrophs. For example, "ninety-two two-hundred-thirty-five element -atomic-number(1) -mass-number(2)" is a systematic way of naming the primordial uranium nuclide on their planet. The Xenants can also have short non-systematic names for elements, which speciate the element phonostheme in the usual way, just like how English calls element 8 "acid maker" and element 19 "pot ash element" and element 77 "purple element" because of its color in a flame test.
I don't have any strong opinions about how to name chemicals systematically yet. Maybe Xenants use something not so dissimilar from SMILES, the simplified molecular-input line-entry system, but less abbreviated and more regular.
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:: Hard Words and Soft Roles
There are a few hundred more words that I want to include in the language, and some of them are quite hard to categorize ontologically, maybe because they're roles rather than sortal concepts. Not all, maybe not even most, but some. The page response for me is really latent as I right this, maybe because this post is too large? I think I'll make a new post because the lag is kind of unbearable. See you in the next one, sweetness.
:: Writing System
Maybe Xenants burrow into rock and write in spirals around the tunnels that they dig. To read more of a story, you have to dig deeper. Also, a reader can anticipate plot changes by smelling the pheromones left by previous readers. There's a surprising part up ahead!
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:: Definitional Aphorisms
:: Babel Story
