I've realized that in nearly all videos talking about Arabic grammar (root system), the root KTB is used as a demonstration. Meanwhile, in nearly all videos about Mandarin tones, the syllables mā mà má mâ ma are demonstrated. Fascinating stuff!
Even as a native Hebrew speaker, I learned a lot from this video! Thank you! Also, sometimes a loanword can become a new root. Hebrew deals with roots with more than three consonants by just clustering them, so even some very long roots from loanwords, like ʔ-nfr-nd (unfriend) can be conjugated as if they're triliterals, making words like le'anfrend (to unfriend), infrund (the act of unfriending), et cetera.
Same thing in Arabic (Lebanese Dialect). For instance, telephone is assimilated as t-lf-n. Talfan(m)/it(f) = He/She called Talfano = They called Talfanna = We called
@@il967 I don't think it's widely used, could've been in the past, idk tho, but other borrowed roots like "k-n-s-l" from "cancel" and "sh-y-r" from "share" are very common
@@89Awww Well, yes, agglutination can be very regular, but you can sneak in some irregularity, either through historical affix choices, sound changes, or both. Languages like Inuktitut and Iñupiaq are very agglutinating, but they have some irregularity with their sound-changing affix interactions. However, for an example with plenty of agglutination and seemingly irregular surface forms, look at Navajo.
@@Sovairu I understand that, the Georgian language is also pretty irregular with its verb conjugations despite being an an agglutinative language. However, cross linguistically, many agglutinative languages have a pretty regular grammar, like most of the turkic/uralic languages. New speak from 1984 is kind of like English but with an agglutinative structure: better = gooder best = goodest bad = ungood This agglutinative system is more regular than having to memorize irregular adjectives of proper English.
@@konq9779 Agglutination and polysynthesis are not, necessarily, mutually exclusive concepts. Inuit languages such as Inuktitut are usually described as polysynthetic, but are also agglutinating.
Something I just figured out: Proto-Indo-Euroopean had an ablaut system that was kind of similar to the consonantal root system of Semitic languages in that vowels would completetely change and dissappear and appear between consonants and stuff, but the consonants stayed the same and had consistent places in the template. The main difference was that PIE's system only involved a couple of different forms for any given word (the rest being done by suffixes, and occasionally prefixes and prefixed consonant reduplication) and mostly applied to "athematic" stems (i.e., stems that don't end in -o/-e, but rather in a consonant or -i/-u). Another difference is that Indo-European ablaut is described in terms of root-derivationalSuffix-inflexionalSuffix, with each potentially being a syllable, rather than in terms of consonants.
Actually you can analyze semitic languages root system as zero-full grade alternation too, and PIE as consonant root system, the difference is that PIE is a late stage of the reconstructed language when affixes became more common, also as described in the video, kloekhorst in a paper on the origin of ablaut says that it's caused by a syncope "vowel loss" in pre-pie in all unstressed positions, most of reconstructed PIE affixes are late stage developments.
A couple things I thought of that aren't mentioned in the video: 1) Affixes can change stress pattern of words. If the the language later undergoes vowel reduction or other vowel changes that depend on stress, then this can lead to very different vowel patterns in different forms. 2) Lost vowels (or maybe consonants) can become secondary articulations (or other changes) on adjecent consonants. They can then affect the vowels on the other side of them, giving a slightly different flavor to umlaut. (The result may end up seeming more concatenative though, as traces of the consonant change would likely still be present in the consonant.) 3) Similar to stress and other vowel characteristics, tones of affixes can affect the tones in the stem, which can lead to tonal morphology. 4) If some charactersics of vowels, such as length or quality, are dependant on the number of consonants after them, suffixes that were reduced to single consonants could easily cause vowel changes and then be completely lost due to consonant cluster reduction or coda consonant loss. For instance, imagine if the following sort of change wasn't stopped by regularization: /sle:p/ /sle:ped/ /sle:p/ /sle:pt/ /sle:p/ /slept/ /slip/ /slept/ /slip/ /slep/ 5) Vowel changes, which I guess are generally easier to get into the stem than consonant changes, can cause consonant changes or even create consonants. For 1 example, if consonants undergoe palatization next to front vowels. For another, if a vowel change causes certain vowels to dipthongize, elements of the dipthong may become glides, which then fortify into other consonants.
Ha ha, yes, and he has discussed many times that he unfortunately made a complete mockery of the system with his lack of knowledge at the time. I think that he had tried again much later with his commissioned work on Sondiv for Star Crossed, but I'm probably misremembering.
This is video I have been waiting for! I have been very slowly developing an arabesque conlang and this is EXACTLY what I wanted help with. Thanks for the awesome content!
I just discovered this channel a few days ago and it's already one of my favorite. Your videos are super informative and I can't wait for what you plan to do next.
Hey that's the book I'm currently reading. Btw analogy, although its mechanism tries to make things more regular, often causes irregular verb forms: The 3rd person singular form of "fassen" (=take, touch) is and has always been "fasst" but because of analogy with the 3rd person singular form "lässt" from "lassen" (=let, set free) it changes to "fässt" in some dialects of German making "fassen" a newly irregular verb in those dialects.
True, it's the same with "dive" --> "dove" in English (used to be "dived"). The important thing about analogy is that it spreads a pre-existing pattern, even if that pattern is irregular.
It may not always be straightforward what's "regular" and what's "irregular". I recently read about Germanic strong verbs. They were more common in Proto-Germanic, and even today, strong verbs aren't always regarded as irregular. In Dutch, my native language, we usually only consider really unpredictable verbs, like the copula and preterite-present verbs, to be irregular. Class 1 verbs (the "drive" class) are pretty common in most modern Germanic languages, even in English, which is probably why "dive" could partially become a class 1 verb. In Dutch we have several class 1 verbs that used to be weak.
In German there is a tendency of analogy as well. In more common words vowel change is used to form preterite and past participle. As the perfect is being used ever more often people have changed the conjugation pattern of the verb "winken" from "winken, winkte, gewinkt" to "winken, winkte, gewunken". This analogy actually removes the regularity and forms irregularity because the common form changes and the in speech uncommon preterite stays the same.
I'm making a conlang, but instead of triconsonantal, it's quadroconsonantal. Here's an example: "s-r-n-t (serenet)" means earth, as in soil, not as in the planet. Here's a list of sample words: ásrenat = plant (n.) sûrant = plant (v.) sairinêtū = salt ósronet = natural esernâti = wheat (a is an unstressed short vowel, á is a stressed short vowel, ā is an unstressed long vowel, â is a stressed long vowel.) All words derive from noun roots, including other nouns, as demonstrated above. However, if a word is grammatical, it has a 2 consonant root. Do you think this probable for word invention? Also, at 1:14, it "çocuk" and "çocuklar", not "coçuk" and "coçuklar". Just thought I'd point that out.
I'm also making a conlang and it's quadroconsonantal. But, since I made it based on Arabic, I used the Arabic version of quadroconsonantal form. As example, "to rule" is "malkara". And "the king" is "malkiar", and "the queen" is "malkaria".
W and Y in hollow verbs are *not* place holders, it's just that sounds changes happened that changed the middle of the conjugations, but they still appear in other conjugations: qawl = speech, saying. From the root Q-W-L But qayl = nap. From the root Q-Y-L Two consonant roots in Arabic are really rare and include things like the word for father and mother, and they seem to be left-overs from Proto-Afroasiatic that had predominantly Two consonant roots according to some reconstructions
Infixation and nonconcatenative morphology are such a fascinating topic to me. I've always adored languages, but now that I actually study linguistics I can appreciate such little linguistic oddities so much more. Keep em coming, your videos are a wonderful and very helpful addition to my study material.
7:01 Note that another way it was delt with in Tagalog was to add a vowel in the middle. And so, two forms of the same word were born. "Inisulat" and "Sinulat" (the former being "archaic" or "regional [used in non-tagalog regions in Luzon], the latter being "colloquial" [in the case of Metro Manila] or "formal" [in the case of certain regions where "inisulat" is more commonly used]). And then eventually in certain places, the initial 'i' was dropped ("inisulat" -> "nisulat"). In some cases, "nasulat" (was written) is used, tacking the word _na_ (roughly meaning "now"/"already" depending on context) onto the word _sulat._ Whether or not it's actually the 'i' in _nisulat_ morphing into an 'a' when the word was reintroduced into Metro Manila in that form after the major influx of people to find work, I'm not sure... Also, that "inisulat" becoming "nisulat" by losing the initial 'i' might be wrong. For all I know, they just flipped the 'n' and the 'i' in the "in-" suffix in the first place.
I agree with much of this, although I think that 'nasulat' is not interchangeable with either 'inisulat' or 'sinulat'. 'Nasulat' is the perfective form of 'masulat' (be able to write, come to write something), where the 'ma-/na-' prefix is normally used for actions that only happen because of chance or when the agent is able to do the action. Although this might just be my own Manila bent and lack of awareness of how some dialects work...
@@brianocampo7981 Yeah. I'm honestly not sure whether I didn't realize it right away or forgot to point out the difference. Another form I forgot to mention is "isinulat", which seems to be the form more often used in Filipino when translating the word "written" in the phrase "written by". Also, the "ni-" version of the suffix seems to be more common in Northern Luzon, so perhaps it was an adaptation of a perfective suffix from one of the local languages onto Tagalog (I'm not fluent in either, so I'm questioning whether the language is Ibanag or Ilocano), although it's likely that Tagalog "ini-" and North Luzon "ni-" have a common ancestor.
Thank you very much for the video! I want to create a conlang heavily based on semitic languages (mostly classical Arabic) and you realy hekped me to do it realisticly.
Not sure if it was intentional, but it's perfect that the word "clusters" in the bottom-left at 6:13 has the "us" switched while talking about metathesis
Im glad i checked this video out cuz it's helping me develop some new words and challenging my old ways of coming up with words cuz i chose to opt out of the structural way of forming words so now it's like i have to redevelop my conlang and in this simple exercise you show the root words of arabic k-t-b and breaking it down and stuff it seems like im having a hard time applying and replacing my roots to conjugate them like the natural languages would. I also love arabic roots and want to incorporate some of them into my conlang but i'm loving this...thanks for sharing!!!
I remember the "appeal to Cockney" when teaching people how to pronounce Arabic words that contain the glottal stop. In the Arabic word 'afwan (reply to "shukran" = 'thankyou'), I remember people saying bʌ'ǝ (= 'butter'), then 'ǝ , then 'ǝfwan , then 'afwan .
Hebrew has binyanim, or buildings of words. For example, there is pa'al and nif'al, pa'al is active, whereas nif'al is passive. Words such as can-as fit into pa'al, as they follow the a'a pattern, and they are conjugated as such. canas (third person male past): canas canas (third person female past): cansa canas (first person past): canasti canas (first person future): echnes However, for nicnas, which is part of nif'al, the conjugation goes as such: nicnas (tpmp): nicnas nicnas (tpfp): nicnasa It goes on. We have 7 of these binyanim, pa'al, pi'el, nif'al, and 4 others.
6:39 Note: Neither _"seksek"_ nor _"saleksek"_ exist as words in Modern Informal/Formal Manileño Tagalog. The closest words to them in said dialect of Tagalog would be "siksik" (to congest [verb]; basically "seksek" but vowel shifted in reverse compared to other words which started with 'i' but in Modern Informal Tagalog have shifted to 'e's) and "saliksik" (research [noun]). Also, "sulat" has three meanings ("write", "writing" [as a noun; alternatively written as "sulatin"], or "letter" [as in pieces of paper with writing sent in a envelope or as a scroll]). Same goes for "sumulat" ("to write" [usually as an "order"], "wrote" ["write" in the perfective aspect, in general], and "wrote/sent a letter"/"letter-ed").
I think Biblaridion made the error of choosing the reconstructed proto-Austronesian form of this word *s(al)əksək, where *ə is the proto-Austronesian schwa and is often represented on a standard keyboard as , since *i, *u, *a are the only other vowels in the proto-language. Only a few Philippine languages like Ilokano and Kankanaey retain this *ə (though the exact sound value may vary), but most other languages have removed *ə from its vowel inventory by merging it usually with *u/*o. Tagalog itself is rather unique among the Central Philippine languages by merging *ə with *i, so the proto-word *s(al)əksək comes out as but in Cebuano, Bikol, etc as .
I have a language I'm working on that has two forms, the formal and informal, with grammar and spelling so divorced from one another that they can pretty much be classified as entirely different languages that share a common ancestor (to the point where they even use different alphabets). The formal has been pretty easy to design, as it was cultivated by the aristocracy of that nation to be as rigid and precise as possible, so everything adheres _very_ strictly to affix rules, and changing words and how they're pronounced is a huge taboo. But the process you went through with the development of these words is something I really want to try with the informal. I'm still working out exactly how I want to proceed with the informal and this is really, really helpful.
Hey, Bib. Probably the most famous triconsonantal conlang is Tolkien's Dwarvish language. Do you know about it? How do you think he handled what you mentioned?
I don't think we know enough about Khuzdul to know what his process was, but knowing Tolkein, I'd be willing to bet he thought it through pretty thoroughly.
@@Biblaridion Tolkien also invented Adûnaic (the language of those Men who were descended from Hador's tribe) , where a root is 3 consonants and a Characteristic Vowel (CV). The CV may occur in various places in the triliteral root.
9:52 Another fun example of this pops up in french. A handful of modern french words are derived from a diminutive form in old french, usually when the original old french word was pretty short. My guess is the old french word probably got eroded over time and so something that was originally longer was needed.
Thank you so much for this video, it's super helpful! I'd love to see more Feature Focus videos like this in the future. Maybe one about how to develop a vowel harmony system from a proto-language that doesn't have it? I've been wanting to do that for a while but tbh I don't have a clue how to do it naturalisticly, or even if any kind of proto-language could reasonably go in that direction. If you ever get a Patreon page you have a supporter right here!
The waw and yaa are not placeholders for supposedly "missing" second radicals. They are actually part of the root and were elided thus producing hollow verbs like qaala "he said" which if it were to be as we expect qawala. baa'a "he sold" and if that were to be as we expect it would be baya'a. And the way we know whether it's a waw or yaa is because it appears in other forms of the word with that root. In the case of qaala "he said" its imperfect form is yaquulu "he says/is saying/will say" and the verbal noun is qawl "speech/saying" whereas baa'a "he sold" is yabii'u "he sells/is selling/will sell" and its verbal noun is bay' "sale/selling". So we can always tell what the elided root is because it appears in other forms of that word. There is another category of defective verbs called naaqis "deficient". These verbs have a waw or yay as their third radical and if it's a waw then it always gets elided but if it's a yaa then it depends on the paradigm of that verb. rajaa "he hoped" its root is r-j-w and we would expect it to be rajawa and its imperfect form is yarjuu "he hopes/is hoping/will hope" and it happens a lot of verbal nouns: rajw, rajaa', rajaawah, marjaa'ah, and rajaah which mean "hope/hoping" Paradigm 1: ramaa "he threw" its root is r-m-y and we would expect it to be ramaya and its imperfect form is yarmii "he throws/is throwing/will throw" and its verbal noun is ramy "throw/throwing". In some dialects of Classical Arabic and Old Arabic ramaa was pronounced ramee (with a long 'e' vowel not 'i') and this is a colouration of the yaa which was elided. Paradigm 2: baqiya "he stayed" its root is b-q-y. Notice here that the yaa actually remains because the vowel before it is 'i'. Its imperfect form is yabqaa (yabqee in the other dialects) "he stays/is staying/will stay" and its verbals nouns are: baqaa' and baqy. There is actually a third paradigm for roots which have yaa as their third root but I feel that's not relevant for this specfic point I'm making. The point here is that the waws and yaas are not just random fillers we place just to make words look like three consonants. They are actual roots which are established and simply undergo certian changes (e.g. awa and aya collapsing into aa; if waw occurs after an 'i' vowel and is itself not followed by a vowel, it changes to a yaa. i.e. iw becoming iy to make the long monothong ii) due to the nature of those two consonants (they're glides). The glottal stop is also a weak consonant and undergoes changes in some situations.
Likely in prehistoric times these "weak" Arabic verbs were pronounced regularly: kawuna (he was) kawuntu (I was), now kāna kuntu. Then Common Semitic went through a wave of dropping single Y and W between vowels.
Yes. In the video, regular sound change in steps 1 and 2 is supposed to make so many perfect examples of the template that the few words that don't turn out that way will be completely overwhelmed by analogy in step 3. But what if the words that don't turn out that way aren't so few, or are few but some are very common, and they form a minor pattern of their own? For example, if the eventitive vocabulary is mostly those sha-prefixed words, but there are some very important words in it that don't start with a fricative and so don't metathesize, they will support each other against the 1-uk-V-2-V-3 template for verbal nouns and establish their own ku-1-V-2-V-3 template. In Hebrew, when the consonants of the original word were all oral obstruents, stem derivation and agreement inflection plus sound change created many, many outcomes that were consistent with each other, that looked like a triconsonantal root and a template. Analogy had no problem regularizing the occasional exception. But just as in Arabic, the semivowels (yod, waw), uvulars, laryngeals, etc. *frequently* led to very different outcomes. So, verbs with yod as their second consonant did not develop all of their forms consistent with most verbs. But because sound change is regular, they did develop all of their forms consistent with each other -- and there were enough of them to form a stable exception to the standard verb templates. This exception is named Gizrah Ayin Yod (Ayin meaning 'second consonant'; the consonant positions are named Pe, Ayin, Lamed which are the consonants of the generic root 'to do'). Almost all the gzarot are named the same way: Verbs that ended up with h for their third consonant (whether they had it originally, they had something else that debuccalized to it, they had nothing and it was epenthetic, doesn't matter) form Gizrah Lamed He, etc. Verbs with first consonant n (Gizrah Pe Nun) are an interesting one because the force that created their exceptional outcomes wasn't regular sound change, but dissimilation to prevent paradigm collapse. The passive paradigm (binyan "Niphal") developed from a "ni-" prefix. For a non-passive verb that starts with n, regular development would have made its imperfect stem in active and causative paradigms (binyanim "Qal," "Hiphil," and "Huphal") look exactly like a passive. To prevent confusion, in those paradigms the imperfect stem loses the n of the root (or actually, replaces it with a yod, I think). Disfixation is not a normal process in Hebrew morphology, but you have to do what you have to do!
These are fascinating processes (and this kind of demonstration a legit use of conlangs) but how frustrating that for most if not all language families on Earth the interesting stuff happened before the languages started leaving written evidence. Akkadian is the oldest Semitic language for which we have written records and the whole system has already fully come into being.
Ive read about the syriac language. It had a very formal rule: The Perfect of the Simple (G) Verb. The basic lexical form of the perfect verb consists of the verbal root, usually triconsonantal, with an appropriate vowel pattern, either CCaC, as in . ktab 'he wrote, he has written,' or CCeC, as in sleq 'he went forth, he has gone forth.' This form (ktab, sleq) is the third-person masculine singular ('he') of the perfect, which usually translates into English as the simple past ('he wrote') or, according to context, the present perfect ('he has written'). It represents the unaugmented base, or ground, form of the verb and has the Semitic designation G (for Grundstamm). The third-person feminine singular adds an ending -at to the verbal root. Concurrently all verbs undergo a pattern change from CCaC or CCeC to CeCC-, giving the invariable 3rd-pers. fem. form CeCCat, e.g., in ketbat 'she wrote, she has written' and selqat 'she went out, she has gone out.'
In German, the suffix -chen triggers i-mutation because it is derived from an earlier -kin, so NOT because final -e- causes i-mutation. The i-umlaut became a normal derivation rule for diminutives with -kin, and then suffix changed from /kin/ to /çən/ through vowel reduction and second germanic consonant shift.
What about fossilized prefixes? In Navajo, the verb "I am playing" (naashné) has the structure na-sh-né. The "sh" is in fact the subject prefix, and the "na" is required in all forms of the verb (it shows atelicity). So there you've got infixing morphology with no switching required, or at least something that looks like an infix on the surface. Also, I don't speak Navajo- I'd be curious to know, if you do, whether you think of your verbs as having infixes or many prefixes.
@Nazik Adam There are loads of mistakes in just about every single one of my videos, and I always appreciate people pointing them out (I don't want to spread misinformation). The ones in Turkish are particular embarrassing because I've been learning Turkish about for 4 years now.
At 5:18 The Hungarian example is off. The consonant written as "ly" isn't an l. In spoken Hungarian, there's no distinction between the letters "ly" and "j". In modern usage, they are always pronounced [j].
It makes me wonder why "animal" hasn't metathesised to "aminal" after so many generations getting it wrong at first as children and it being such a common word.
For Dulu > Dahulu, It may not an infixation But may as prefix Da-hulu, as hulu is upstream or head. The 'ah' kinda drop is pretty regularize as; Bahaya > baya Bahagia > bagia So it may not a true infix.
if your gonna do more of these types of videos, could you make a video about consonant mutation like in Irish? I want to add this feature my conlang but I'm not sure how it actually works.
William Annis of the Conlangery podcast had once described the Celtic consonant mutations as "the ghost of sandhi." And sandhi is a phonological phenomenon regarding sound changes, especially those at word or morpheme boundaries.
I try to make a system like this for verbs plus a fixed -(anyconsonant)era ending ,for my conlang tinsy suaro-nui nitramnui (I am thinking about change the name) also aim to let nouns be difrent and not too dependent on the roots althoug there should be derrivation.
Everything about his show exudes the message 'lazy and proud'. His aesthetic, his fairly condensed and (often) shallow approach to each conlang never satisfies. Take his most recent episode on Interslavic, which came out after half a year of hiatus and is one of the most insipid videos I've ever seen on conlanging. If he stopped making the show, I don't think many would miss it, and I don't think it would take long to fill the void. Anyone can do what he does, and most could do it better; without the abyssal soundwork; without marinating most episodes with his irrelevant narrow-minded condescending societal opinions; and without months-long dry-streaks between four minute videos with nothing to say. P.S. Esperanto sucks, don't prod for my disapproval of his Esperanto video. No I don't care if there are radio channels spoken in it.
After watching this video, I caught a couple typos. You misspelled clusters. Prior to the sound changes, you wrote the wrong letter in the perfect tense of "sepeto" and let out letters in the perfect and imperfect tense of "masore" and the progressive tense of "shakemu". Update: I think you applied the sound changes wrong for the imperfect tense for sepeto", "masore", and "shakemu" and the future tense for "shakemu".
5:19 the hungarian example isn’t TOO relevant here, that was an example of ʎ turning into j, like spanish yeísmo, not coda l vocalising. Great video tho
Great video! Only one nitpick: the Hungarian example at 5:19 does not have a coda. The 'ly' is strictly a digraph representing a historic palatal lateral approximant that has already merged with [j]. Otherwise great work.
1. 7:11 Eating is obviously a verbal noun, but what is "feed" in terms of verb forms? 2. In terms of nonconcatenative morphology, how do you handle a suffix that starts with a nasal?
Are you aware of whether an umlaut can be caused by a prefix? That is to say, the vowel in the root drifting towards the vowel in the prefix? Or would vowels only (naturalistically) shift in preparation of an upcoming vowel, rather than in recovery of a preceding one?
Note on Hungarian: "ly" is not a unique pronunciation for "folyó," we always pronounce it /j/ because it used to make a slightly different sound. "ly" is a common digraph.
Ok, so here are the rules for forming verbal nouns in this test language: If the first letter of the root is a fricative, put “-uke-“ between 1 and 2. If it’s not, prefix “ka-.” If the last letter of the root is r, the end becomes “-aa.” If it’s y, the end becomes “-ii.” Otherwise the ending has to be memorized.
I think the discussion here conflates infixation and metathesis a little too much. While most modern phonologists argue they have similar phonological explanations, the units that they operate over are different, with metathesis reordering phonological segments and infixation moving morphological units. I don't know that there have been any rigorous cross-linguistic studies examining the relative frequency of the two phenomena, but my sense is that infixation is more common (and in many languages, productive) than metathesis, so it's not clear to me that the relative rarity of infixation compared to concatenative affixation can be explained by appeal to rarity of metathesis (see the point at 6:17). Also, re. Austronesian: There is the interesting example [gradwet] in Tagalog (from English 'graduate') discussed in the literature. Infixing -um- into this word can result in either [grumadwet] or [gumradet]. The issue here is that -um- infixation might not be about avoiding consonant clusters (at least for some speakers) -- it might have to do with avoiding coda consonants.
I've realized that in nearly all videos talking about Arabic grammar (root system), the root KTB is used as a demonstration.
Meanwhile, in nearly all videos about Mandarin tones, the syllables mā mà má mâ ma are demonstrated.
Fascinating stuff!
long ass name you have!!
"rz" is just one sound?
Just like Latin, where declensions are almost always explained with the word "rosa, rosae" (rose) ahah
true lol. Just goes to show how human nature shapes the idioms of our languages and memes of our cultures.
@@dvrocha yes. It's like the Russian ж.
It's from here: ruclips.net/video/t-fcrn1Edik/видео.html
And nearly every lesson I've seen on the Finnish case system uses the word 'talo'/house.
That was the most hilarious thing to me when you said “Coda aaaa sounds are often deleted. Much like in my variety of English.” It made me so happy!!
Even as a native Hebrew speaker, I learned a lot from this video! Thank you!
Also, sometimes a loanword can become a new root. Hebrew deals with roots with more than three consonants by just clustering them, so even some very long roots from loanwords, like ʔ-nfr-nd (unfriend) can be conjugated as if they're triliterals, making words like le'anfrend (to unfriend), infrund (the act of unfriending), et cetera.
Same thing in Arabic (Lebanese Dialect). For instance, telephone is assimilated as t-lf-n.
Talfan(m)/it(f) = He/She called
Talfano = They called
Talfanna = We called
@@il967 In Hebrew t-lp-n was also a thing, but it's less common today.
very cool!
@@il967 I don't think it's widely used, could've been in the past, idk tho,
but other borrowed roots like "k-n-s-l" from "cancel" and "sh-y-r" from "share" are very common
@@gal749 Whats the longest clustered borrowing you know of in Hebrew?
This is honestly mind-blowing. THIS is the kind of stuff that got me into linguistics
Nonconcatenative morphology scares me. I'm an agglutination boi through and through
Agglutination be-it good-er because be-it regular-er. Hope-I that example-this be-ed-not cringey-too.
@@89Awww Well, yes, agglutination can be very regular, but you can sneak in some irregularity, either through historical affix choices, sound changes, or both. Languages like Inuktitut and Iñupiaq are very agglutinating, but they have some irregularity with their sound-changing affix interactions. However, for an example with plenty of agglutination and seemingly irregular surface forms, look at Navajo.
@@Sovairu I understand that, the Georgian language is also pretty irregular with its verb conjugations despite being an an agglutinative language. However, cross linguistically, many agglutinative languages have a pretty regular grammar, like most of the turkic/uralic languages. New speak from 1984 is kind of like English but with an agglutinative structure:
better = gooder
best = goodest
bad = ungood
This agglutinative system is more regular than having to memorize irregular adjectives of proper English.
@@Sovairu isn't Inuktitut polysynthetic?
@@konq9779 Agglutination and polysynthesis are not, necessarily, mutually exclusive concepts. Inuit languages such as Inuktitut are usually described as polysynthetic, but are also agglutinating.
Something I just figured out: Proto-Indo-Euroopean had an ablaut system that was kind of similar to the consonantal root system of Semitic languages in that vowels would completetely change and dissappear and appear between consonants and stuff, but the consonants stayed the same and had consistent places in the template. The main difference was that PIE's system only involved a couple of different forms for any given word (the rest being done by suffixes, and occasionally prefixes and prefixed consonant reduplication) and mostly applied to "athematic" stems (i.e., stems that don't end in -o/-e, but rather in a consonant or -i/-u). Another difference is that Indo-European ablaut is described in terms of root-derivationalSuffix-inflexionalSuffix, with each potentially being a syllable, rather than in terms of consonants.
That's the reason for Vowel alternation in strong verbs in English and German like sing-sang-sung-song or fliegen-flog-geflogen-Flug...
Actually you can analyze semitic languages root system as zero-full grade alternation too, and PIE as consonant root system, the difference is that PIE is a late stage of the reconstructed language when affixes became more common, also as described in the video, kloekhorst in a paper on the origin of ablaut says that it's caused by a syncope "vowel loss" in pre-pie in all unstressed positions, most of reconstructed PIE affixes are late stage developments.
heck, you could create u- and i- grade if you wanted, by umlauting, then merging unstressed e and i and o and u.
hukres hukre, hukres, hikres...
As a native Arabic speaker, it's very interesting to see my language analysed from the perspective of someone who is it, I also still learned a lot!
A couple things I thought of that aren't mentioned in the video:
1) Affixes can change stress pattern of words. If the the language later undergoes vowel reduction or other vowel changes that depend on stress, then this can lead to very different vowel patterns in different forms.
2) Lost vowels (or maybe consonants) can become secondary articulations (or other changes) on adjecent consonants. They can then affect the vowels on the other side of them, giving a slightly different flavor to umlaut. (The result may end up seeming more concatenative though, as traces of the consonant change would likely still be present in the consonant.)
3) Similar to stress and other vowel characteristics, tones of affixes can affect the tones in the stem, which can lead to tonal morphology.
4) If some charactersics of vowels, such as length or quality, are dependant on the number of consonants after them, suffixes that were reduced to single consonants could easily cause vowel changes and then be completely lost due to consonant cluster reduction or coda consonant loss. For instance, imagine if the following sort of change wasn't stopped by regularization:
/sle:p/ /sle:ped/
/sle:p/ /sle:pt/
/sle:p/ /slept/
/slip/ /slept/
/slip/ /slep/
5) Vowel changes, which I guess are generally easier to get into the stem than consonant changes, can cause consonant changes or even create consonants. For 1 example, if consonants undergoe palatization next to front vowels. For another, if a vowel change causes certain vowels to dipthongize, elements of the dipthong may become glides, which then fortify into other consonants.
2) happened in NW Caucasian, and it kiiind of happened with the proto Slavic soft sign which used to be a vowel
@@linkinparahybana9634 It happened extensively in French!
Your name was an example of metathesis for me for a while. I kept wanting to pronounce it as if it were Bilbaridion.
I guess that makes him seem more like a hobbit than a library.
@@Mr.Nichan Not a sentence I thought I'd read today!
At 6:04, it says "clsuters". You metathesized "clusters" XD
Likeliest a typo.
Likeliest indeed, but a fascinatingly self-exemplifying typo nonetheless, imho
@@anthonyappleyard5688 quite but things like formage -> fromage are typos of the tongue
@@DrWhom French seems to have a predilection for metathesis; es. mosquito > fr. moustique for example!
I think David J Peterson used triconsonantal roots in his first and infamous language, Megdevi.
Ha ha, yes, and he has discussed many times that he unfortunately made a complete mockery of the system with his lack of knowledge at the time. I think that he had tried again much later with his commissioned work on Sondiv for Star Crossed, but I'm probably misremembering.
@@baptistefaussat Well, then I remembered correctly, excellent. Thank you.
Megdevi is DJP's Thandian
This is video I have been waiting for!
I have been very slowly developing an arabesque conlang and this is EXACTLY what I wanted help with. Thanks for the awesome content!
I just discovered this channel a few days ago and it's already one of my favorite. Your videos are super informative and I can't wait for what you plan to do next.
Hey that's the book I'm currently reading.
Btw analogy, although its mechanism tries to make things more regular, often causes irregular verb forms:
The 3rd person singular form of "fassen" (=take, touch) is and has always been "fasst" but because of analogy with the 3rd person singular form "lässt" from "lassen" (=let, set free) it changes to "fässt" in some dialects of German making "fassen" a newly irregular verb in those dialects.
True, it's the same with "dive" --> "dove" in English (used to be "dived"). The important thing about analogy is that it spreads a pre-existing pattern, even if that pattern is irregular.
It may not always be straightforward what's "regular" and what's "irregular". I recently read about Germanic strong verbs. They were more common in Proto-Germanic, and even today, strong verbs aren't always regarded as irregular.
In Dutch, my native language, we usually only consider really unpredictable verbs, like the copula and preterite-present verbs, to be irregular. Class 1 verbs (the "drive" class) are pretty common in most modern Germanic languages, even in English, which is probably why "dive" could partially become a class 1 verb. In Dutch we have several class 1 verbs that used to be weak.
In German there is a tendency of analogy as well. In more common words vowel change is used to form preterite and past participle. As the perfect is being used ever more often people have changed the conjugation pattern of the verb "winken" from "winken, winkte, gewinkt" to "winken, winkte, gewunken". This analogy actually removes the regularity and forms irregularity because the common form changes and the in speech uncommon preterite stays the same.
I'm making a conlang, but instead of triconsonantal, it's quadroconsonantal. Here's an example:
"s-r-n-t (serenet)" means earth, as in soil, not as in the planet. Here's a list of sample words:
ásrenat = plant (n.)
sûrant
= plant (v.)
sairinêtū
= salt
ósronet = natural
esernâti
= wheat
(a is an unstressed short vowel, á is a stressed short vowel, ā is an unstressed long vowel, â is a stressed long vowel.)
All words derive from noun roots, including other nouns, as demonstrated above. However, if a word is grammatical, it has a 2 consonant root. Do you think this probable for word invention?
Also, at 1:14, it "çocuk" and "çocuklar", not "coçuk" and "coçuklar". Just thought I'd point that out.
Far as I can tell, the con-system passes muster!
@@Seraholethysie Thank you!
@@fyorr No prob!
I'm also making a conlang and it's quadroconsonantal. But, since I made it based on Arabic, I used the Arabic version of quadroconsonantal form.
As example, "to rule" is "malkara". And "the king" is "malkiar", and "the queen" is "malkaria".
W and Y in hollow verbs are *not* place holders, it's just that sounds changes happened that changed the middle of the conjugations, but they still appear in other conjugations:
qawl = speech, saying. From the root Q-W-L
But
qayl = nap. From the root Q-Y-L
Two consonant roots in Arabic are really rare and include things like the word for father and mother, and they seem to be left-overs from Proto-Afroasiatic that had predominantly Two consonant roots according to some reconstructions
Infixation and nonconcatenative morphology are such a fascinating topic to me. I've always adored languages, but now that I actually study linguistics I can appreciate such little linguistic oddities so much more. Keep em coming, your videos are a wonderful and very helpful addition to my study material.
Initial consonant mutation here
I always thought that Slavic liquid metathesis was fascinating, this video reminds me of it.
I mixed it up by using a tri-vowel root instead.
The English examples you used are literally some of my greatest pet peeves when I hear them out loud.
7:01 Note that another way it was delt with in Tagalog was to add a vowel in the middle. And so, two forms of the same word were born. "Inisulat" and "Sinulat" (the former being "archaic" or "regional [used in non-tagalog regions in Luzon], the latter being "colloquial" [in the case of Metro Manila] or "formal" [in the case of certain regions where "inisulat" is more commonly used]). And then eventually in certain places, the initial 'i' was dropped ("inisulat" -> "nisulat"). In some cases, "nasulat" (was written) is used, tacking the word _na_ (roughly meaning "now"/"already" depending on context) onto the word _sulat._ Whether or not it's actually the 'i' in _nisulat_ morphing into an 'a' when the word was reintroduced into Metro Manila in that form after the major influx of people to find work, I'm not sure...
Also, that "inisulat" becoming "nisulat" by losing the initial 'i' might be wrong. For all I know, they just flipped the 'n' and the 'i' in the "in-" suffix in the first place.
I agree with much of this, although I think that 'nasulat' is not interchangeable with either 'inisulat' or 'sinulat'. 'Nasulat' is the perfective form of 'masulat' (be able to write, come to write something), where the 'ma-/na-' prefix is normally used for actions that only happen because of chance or when the agent is able to do the action.
Although this might just be my own Manila bent and lack of awareness of how some dialects work...
@@brianocampo7981 Yeah. I'm honestly not sure whether I didn't realize it right away or forgot to point out the difference. Another form I forgot to mention is "isinulat", which seems to be the form more often used in Filipino when translating the word "written" in the phrase "written by". Also, the "ni-" version of the suffix seems to be more common in Northern Luzon, so perhaps it was an adaptation of a perfective suffix from one of the local languages onto Tagalog (I'm not fluent in either, so I'm questioning whether the language is Ibanag or Ilocano), although it's likely that Tagalog "ini-" and North Luzon "ni-" have a common ancestor.
As a speaker of some languages from Indonesia, I was pretty surprised about the infixation part. Never thought it as a rare characteristic!
Love these videos
It's not just making up language, it's making up language history, and accidently getting a language.
Thank you very much for the video! I want to create a conlang heavily based on semitic languages (mostly classical Arabic) and you realy hekped me to do it realisticly.
I will have to watch it again and again in order to understand it perfectly, but thanks, I needed it
👍Always get excited to see a new video!
Not sure if it was intentional, but it's perfect that the word "clusters" in the bottom-left at 6:13 has the "us" switched while talking about metathesis
this is like what ive always wondered about but ive never been able to research
that was great, made me realise how stupid my original idea for my old conlang was; now I must redo everything from scratch!
*he has graced us once more*
You're a gem.
keep them coming!!!!!!!!!!!!
i love your channel
Thank you for this very explanatory thought experiment.
Im glad i checked this video out cuz it's helping me develop some new words and challenging my old ways of coming up with words cuz i chose to opt out of the structural way of forming words so now it's like i have to redevelop my conlang and in this simple exercise you show the root words of arabic k-t-b and breaking it down and stuff it seems like im having a hard time applying and replacing my roots to conjugate them like the natural languages would. I also love arabic roots and want to incorporate some of them into my conlang but i'm loving this...thanks for sharing!!!
I remember the "appeal to Cockney" when teaching people how to pronounce Arabic words that contain the glottal stop. In the Arabic word 'afwan (reply to "shukran" = 'thankyou'), I remember people saying bʌ'ǝ (= 'butter'), then 'ǝ , then 'ǝfwan , then 'afwan .
Next time, please, tonogenesis and grammatical vs. lexical tones.
Hebrew has binyanim, or buildings of words. For example, there is pa'al and nif'al, pa'al is active, whereas nif'al is passive. Words such as can-as fit into pa'al, as they follow the a'a pattern, and they are conjugated as such.
canas (third person male past): canas
canas (third person female past): cansa
canas (first person past): canasti
canas (first person future): echnes
However, for nicnas, which is part of nif'al, the conjugation goes as such:
nicnas (tpmp): nicnas
nicnas (tpfp): nicnasa
It goes on. We have 7 of these binyanim, pa'al, pi'el, nif'al, and 4 others.
8000th sub here. I love your videos so much man. Keep up the good work, you are the best conlanging channel I’ve ever found
6:39
Note: Neither _"seksek"_ nor _"saleksek"_ exist as words in Modern Informal/Formal Manileño Tagalog. The closest words to them in said dialect of Tagalog would be "siksik" (to congest [verb]; basically "seksek" but vowel shifted in reverse compared to other words which started with 'i' but in Modern Informal Tagalog have shifted to 'e's) and "saliksik" (research [noun]).
Also, "sulat" has three meanings ("write", "writing" [as a noun; alternatively written as "sulatin"], or "letter" [as in pieces of paper with writing sent in a envelope or as a scroll]). Same goes for "sumulat" ("to write" [usually as an "order"], "wrote" ["write" in the perfective aspect, in general], and "wrote/sent a letter"/"letter-ed").
I think Biblaridion made the error of choosing the reconstructed proto-Austronesian form of this word *s(al)əksək, where *ə is the proto-Austronesian schwa and is often represented on a standard keyboard as , since *i, *u, *a are the only other vowels in the proto-language. Only a few Philippine languages like Ilokano and Kankanaey retain this *ə (though the exact sound value may vary), but most other languages have removed *ə from its vowel inventory by merging it usually with *u/*o.
Tagalog itself is rather unique among the Central Philippine languages by merging *ə with *i, so the proto-word *s(al)əksək comes out as but in Cebuano, Bikol, etc as .
I have a language I'm working on that has two forms, the formal and informal, with grammar and spelling so divorced from one another that they can pretty much be classified as entirely different languages that share a common ancestor (to the point where they even use different alphabets). The formal has been pretty easy to design, as it was cultivated by the aristocracy of that nation to be as rigid and precise as possible, so everything adheres _very_ strictly to affix rules, and changing words and how they're pronounced is a huge taboo. But the process you went through with the development of these words is something I really want to try with the informal. I'm still working out exactly how I want to proceed with the informal and this is really, really helpful.
I was in a real estate class and the the teacher said "It is pronounced realtor not real u tor". My response was "Epenthesis is a thing"
omg I love this concept of feature focus please do more!!
Would love to see this kind of explanation about the origins of a system to explain vowel harmony systems.
I N S T A C L I C K
Same
S I N T A C I L K
I loved The Unfolding of Language! A great read for linguistics nerds and conlangers alike!
I can't comprehend anything at the moment, but I really like it!
I've always wondered how these came about
Hey, Bib. Probably the most famous triconsonantal conlang is Tolkien's Dwarvish language. Do you know about it? How do you think he handled what you mentioned?
rayelgatubelo Dwarvish is so poorly documented that is probably very hard to analyze it as a full language.
I don't think we know enough about Khuzdul to know what his process was, but knowing Tolkein, I'd be willing to bet he thought it through pretty thoroughly.
@@Biblaridion Tolkien also invented Adûnaic (the language of those Men who were descended from Hador's tribe) , where a root is 3 consonants and a Characteristic Vowel (CV). The CV may occur in various places in the triliteral root.
Good ol' KTB
That makes so much sense now that it got explained xD
This is such a great video!
1:22
In Turkish, child is Çocuk, not Coçuk
I'm gonna be honest, it took me a while to finally realize what the difference between the two was.
@@ccvcharger
coçuk = [d͡ʒo.t͡ʃuk]
çocuk = [t͡ʃo.d͡ʒuk]
@@turshullah using C for the voiced postalveolar affricate is trippy
@@wtc5198it makes a bit of sense, c represents the unvoiced postalveolar affricate in a lot of languages
Tolkien used triliteral roots in two of his languages: Khuzdul (for his dwarves) and Adunaic (for his western men).
I needed this! Thank you so much! Keep making videos pleaseeee!
9:52 Another fun example of this pops up in french. A handful of modern french words are derived from a diminutive form in old french, usually when the original old french word was pretty short. My guess is the old french word probably got eroded over time and so something that was originally longer was needed.
Amazing!
I own another Guy Deutscher book (Through the Language Glass), and it's brilliant. I might try to get hold of that one.
Great video, very interesting topic, well researched. Got my sub! 👍
Thank you so much for this video, it's super helpful! I'd love to see more Feature Focus videos like this in the future. Maybe one about how to develop a vowel harmony system from a proto-language that doesn't have it? I've been wanting to do that for a while but tbh I don't have a clue how to do it naturalisticly, or even if any kind of proto-language could reasonably go in that direction.
If you ever get a Patreon page you have a supporter right here!
Vowel harmony is just an assimilation of vowels in the entire word in some feature like roundness or openness... etc..
The waw and yaa are not placeholders for supposedly "missing" second radicals. They are actually part of the root and were elided thus producing hollow verbs like qaala "he said" which if it were to be as we expect qawala. baa'a "he sold" and if that were to be as we expect it would be baya'a. And the way we know whether it's a waw or yaa is
because it appears in other forms of the word with that root. In the case of qaala "he said" its imperfect form is yaquulu "he says/is saying/will say" and the verbal noun is qawl "speech/saying" whereas baa'a "he sold" is yabii'u "he sells/is selling/will sell" and its verbal noun is bay' "sale/selling". So we can always tell what the elided root is because it appears in other forms of that word.
There is another category of defective verbs called naaqis "deficient". These verbs have a waw or yay as their third radical and if it's a waw then it always gets elided but if it's a yaa then it depends on the paradigm of that verb.
rajaa "he hoped" its root is r-j-w and we would expect it to be rajawa and its imperfect form is yarjuu "he hopes/is
hoping/will hope" and it happens a lot of verbal nouns: rajw, rajaa', rajaawah, marjaa'ah, and rajaah which mean "hope/hoping"
Paradigm
1: ramaa "he threw" its root is r-m-y and we would expect it to be ramaya and its imperfect form is yarmii "he throws/is throwing/will throw" and its verbal noun is ramy "throw/throwing". In some dialects of
Classical Arabic and Old Arabic ramaa was pronounced ramee (with a long
'e' vowel not 'i') and this is a colouration of the yaa which was elided.
Paradigm 2: baqiya "he stayed" its root is b-q-y. Notice here that the yaa actually remains because the vowel before it is 'i'. Its imperfect form is yabqaa (yabqee in the other dialects) "he stays/is
staying/will stay" and its verbals nouns are: baqaa' and baqy.
There is actually a third paradigm for roots which have yaa as their third root but I feel that's not relevant for this specfic point I'm making.
The point here is that the waws and yaas are not just random fillers we place just to make words look like three consonants. They are actual roots which are established and simply undergo certian changes (e.g. awa and aya collapsing into aa; if waw occurs after an 'i' vowel and is itself not followed by a vowel, it changes to a yaa. i.e. iw becoming iy to make the long monothong ii) due to the nature of those two consonants (they're glides). The glottal stop is also a weak consonant and undergoes changes in some situations.
Likely in prehistoric times these "weak" Arabic verbs were pronounced regularly: kawuna (he was) kawuntu (I was), now kāna kuntu. Then Common Semitic went through a wave of dropping single Y and W between vowels.
Yes. In the video, regular sound change in steps 1 and 2 is supposed to make so many perfect examples of the template that the few words that don't turn out that way will be completely overwhelmed by analogy in step 3. But what if the words that don't turn out that way aren't so few, or are few but some are very common, and they form a minor pattern of their own?
For example, if the eventitive vocabulary is mostly those sha-prefixed words, but there are some very important words in it that don't start with a fricative and so don't metathesize, they will support each other against the 1-uk-V-2-V-3 template for verbal nouns and establish their own ku-1-V-2-V-3 template.
In Hebrew, when the consonants of the original word were all oral obstruents, stem derivation and agreement inflection plus sound change created many, many outcomes that were consistent with each other, that looked like a triconsonantal root and a template. Analogy had no problem regularizing the occasional exception. But just as in Arabic, the semivowels (yod, waw), uvulars, laryngeals, etc. *frequently* led to very different outcomes.
So, verbs with yod as their second consonant did not develop all of their forms consistent with most verbs. But because sound change is regular, they did develop all of their forms consistent with each other -- and there were enough of them to form a stable exception to the standard verb templates. This exception is named Gizrah Ayin Yod (Ayin meaning 'second consonant'; the consonant positions are named Pe, Ayin, Lamed which are the consonants of the generic root 'to do'). Almost all the gzarot are named the same way: Verbs that ended up with h for their third consonant (whether they had it originally, they had something else that debuccalized to it, they had nothing and it was epenthetic, doesn't matter) form Gizrah Lamed He, etc.
Verbs with first consonant n (Gizrah Pe Nun) are an interesting one because the force that created their exceptional outcomes wasn't regular sound change, but dissimilation to prevent paradigm collapse. The passive paradigm (binyan "Niphal") developed from a "ni-" prefix. For a non-passive verb that starts with n, regular development would have made its imperfect stem in active and causative paradigms (binyanim "Qal," "Hiphil," and "Huphal") look exactly like a passive. To prevent confusion, in those paradigms the imperfect stem loses the n of the root (or actually, replaces it with a yod, I think). Disfixation is not a normal process in Hebrew morphology, but you have to do what you have to do!
These are fascinating processes (and this kind of demonstration a legit use of conlangs) but how frustrating that for most if not all language families on Earth the interesting stuff happened before the languages started leaving written evidence. Akkadian is the oldest Semitic language for which we have written records and the whole system has already fully come into being.
As a native tagalog speaker, I like it when someone talks about infixes
Ive read about the syriac language. It had a very formal rule:
The Perfect of the Simple (G) Verb. The basic lexical form of the perfect verb consists of the verbal root, usually triconsonantal, with an appropriate vowel pattern, either CCaC, as in . ktab 'he wrote, he has written,' or CCeC, as in sleq 'he went forth, he has gone forth.' This form (ktab, sleq) is the third-person masculine singular ('he') of the perfect, which usually translates into English as the simple past ('he wrote') or, according to context, the present perfect ('he has written'). It represents the unaugmented base, or ground, form of the verb and has the Semitic designation G (for Grundstamm).
The third-person feminine singular adds an ending -at to the verbal root. Concurrently all verbs undergo a pattern change from CCaC or CCeC to CeCC-, giving the invariable 3rd-pers. fem. form CeCCat, e.g., in ketbat 'she wrote, she has written' and selqat 'she went out, she has gone out.'
Funny note was the pronunciation of "Deutscher" as "Deu-d-sch-t-er" at the end.
Algeria in Spanish is Argelia, sounds similar to the metathesis you were talking about.
5:12 in the Hungarian word 'folyó', the 'l' isn't vocalised. It's the part of the digraph 'ly', which makes a "y" sound
In German, the suffix -chen triggers i-mutation because it is derived from an earlier -kin, so NOT because final -e- causes i-mutation. The i-umlaut became a normal derivation rule for diminutives with -kin, and then suffix changed from /kin/ to /çən/ through vowel reduction and second germanic consonant shift.
Requesting feature focus: Non-configurational Syntax!
Big I saw yesterday the dog.
Sovairu
Yesterday I saw the big dog?
Exactly, and there's so much more.
10:43 Sh-T-N "to walk" -> Shutiin, not "Shukiin"
Sepetaa (imperfect Sepeto) is Sepétaa or Sépetaa ?
What about fossilized prefixes? In Navajo, the verb "I am playing" (naashné) has the structure na-sh-né. The "sh" is in fact the subject prefix, and the "na" is required in all forms of the verb (it shows atelicity). So there you've got infixing morphology with no switching required, or at least something that looks like an infix on the surface. Also, I don't speak Navajo- I'd be curious to know, if you do, whether you think of your verbs as having infixes or many prefixes.
Every time I watch this video there's a "Rosen school of Hebrew" advertisement.
For me too
it's çocuk not coçuk :)
Wow, I can't believe I got that one wrong. I swear I knew it was çocuk, that was just a stupid typo.
Biblaridion Lang diacritics are always confusing :D
@Nazik Adam There are loads of mistakes in just about every single one of my videos, and I always appreciate people pointing them out (I don't want to spread misinformation). The ones in Turkish are particular embarrassing because I've been learning Turkish about for 4 years now.
Cançuk :)
Metathesis strikes again!
At 5:18
The Hungarian example is off. The consonant written as "ly" isn't an l. In spoken Hungarian, there's no distinction between the letters "ly" and "j". In modern usage, they are always pronounced [j].
Correct, that's why he used it as an example of the vocalisation of a consonant.
low i was just watching your videos one by one when this popped up
It makes me wonder why "animal" hasn't metathesised to "aminal" after so many generations getting it wrong at first as children and it being such a common word.
When you realize half of the future comments may be peoplr correcting your mistakes.
Make sure they don't overwhelm you!
For Dulu > Dahulu,
It may not an infixation
But may as prefix Da-hulu, as hulu is upstream or head. The 'ah' kinda drop is pretty regularize as;
Bahaya > baya
Bahagia > bagia
So it may not a true infix.
Sounds like h dropping in french can't recalled the term name now tho
if your gonna do more of these types of videos, could you make a video about consonant mutation like in Irish? I want to add this feature my conlang but I'm not sure how it actually works.
William Annis of the Conlangery podcast had once described the Celtic consonant mutations as "the ghost of sandhi." And sandhi is a phonological phenomenon regarding sound changes, especially those at word or morpheme boundaries.
I try to make a system like this for verbs plus a fixed -(anyconsonant)era ending ,for my conlang tinsy suaro-nui nitramnui (I am thinking about change the name) also aim to let nouns be difrent and not too dependent on the roots althoug there should be derrivation.
Now, what conjugation of the test language word for "to build" is "Misali"?
Msl
since my conlang is inspired by middle eastern languages this gives me a way to make words tho it's biconsonantal roots than triconsonantal roots
7:45 I think there's a typo here. Speti shouldn't turn into spiti until the fourth row down. Or am I missing something?
I liked this video
What do you think of conlang critic?
Personally I think he put to much emphasis on the sounds in a language and barely touches on the grammar.
It's enough to watch his rant about Esperanto to get the idea of how everything else will go (and learn the most about his world view as well).
Everything about his show exudes the message 'lazy and proud'. His aesthetic, his fairly condensed and (often) shallow approach to each conlang never satisfies. Take his most recent episode on Interslavic, which came out after half a year of hiatus and is one of the most insipid videos I've ever seen on conlanging. If he stopped making the show, I don't think many would miss it, and I don't think it would take long to fill the void. Anyone can do what he does, and most could do it better; without the abyssal soundwork; without marinating most episodes with his irrelevant narrow-minded condescending societal opinions; and without months-long dry-streaks between four minute videos with nothing to say.
P.S. Esperanto sucks, don't prod for my disapproval of his Esperanto video. No I don't care if there are radio channels spoken in it.
Ah, a pre-season 3 reply section.
After watching this video, I caught a couple typos. You misspelled clusters. Prior to the sound changes, you wrote the wrong letter in the perfect tense of "sepeto" and let out letters in the perfect and imperfect tense of "masore" and the progressive tense of "shakemu".
Update: I think you applied the sound changes wrong for the imperfect tense for sepeto", "masore", and "shakemu" and the future tense for "shakemu".
THIS VIDEO HELPED ME. SO MUCCHHH I DON'T KNOW HOW TO SAY IT BUT IT HELPED!!!!
5:19 the hungarian example isn’t TOO relevant here, that was an example of ʎ turning into j, like spanish yeísmo, not coda l vocalising. Great video tho
Great video! Only one nitpick: the Hungarian example at 5:19 does not have a coda. The 'ly' is strictly a digraph representing a historic palatal lateral approximant that has already merged with [j]. Otherwise great work.
He knows. That's why he used it as an example.
1. 7:11 Eating is obviously a verbal noun, but what is "feed" in terms of verb forms? 2. In terms of nonconcatenative morphology, how do you handle a suffix that starts with a nasal?
feed is obviously formed with the ancient causative f- prefix
Are you aware of whether an umlaut can be caused by a prefix? That is to say, the vowel in the root drifting towards the vowel in the prefix? Or would vowels only (naturalistically) shift in preparation of an upcoming vowel, rather than in recovery of a preceding one?
Wondering this myself too
Regressive voicing iirc vs progressive i forgor the terms in Wiktionary but it got progressive and regressive iirc in its name
Note on Hungarian: "ly" is not a unique pronunciation for "folyó," we always pronounce it /j/ because it used to make a slightly different sound. "ly" is a common digraph.
hmmm. it seems you implied at 5:20 that ukrainian is decended from russian, istead of the both of them from old east slavic
Ok, so here are the rules for forming verbal nouns in this test language:
If the first letter of the root is a fricative, put “-uke-“ between 1 and 2. If it’s not, prefix “ka-.”
If the last letter of the root is r, the end becomes “-aa.” If it’s y, the end becomes “-ii.” Otherwise the ending has to be memorized.
Could you do a Feature Focus on Consonant Mutations common in Celtic languages?
Hey man, I'd really love to see you create a discord server for your channel! That would be really awesome :D
He has one now
@@ALLHEART_ where's or what's the link?
“The most colorful form of non concatenative morphology is vowel alternation” maybe I’ve read too much on PIE but this is hilarious
I think the discussion here conflates infixation and metathesis a little too much. While most modern phonologists argue they have similar phonological explanations, the units that they operate over are different, with metathesis reordering phonological segments and infixation moving morphological units. I don't know that there have been any rigorous cross-linguistic studies examining the relative frequency of the two phenomena, but my sense is that infixation is more common (and in many languages, productive) than metathesis, so it's not clear to me that the relative rarity of infixation compared to concatenative affixation can be explained by appeal to rarity of metathesis (see the point at 6:17).
Also, re. Austronesian: There is the interesting example [gradwet] in Tagalog (from English 'graduate') discussed in the literature. Infixing -um- into this word can result in either [grumadwet] or [gumradet]. The issue here is that -um- infixation might not be about avoiding consonant clusters (at least for some speakers) -- it might have to do with avoiding coda consonants.
How would/could this work with Vowel Harmony?
I wonder if you’d be willing to look at my conlang. I feel I might’ve made it too regular, especially since it supposedly evolved from English.
you can try to tell him however there is a subreddit called r/conlangs and on thier you can also share your conlang to people and ask for feedback