Paul B.

Incidentally, these words are the few objects that remain in-situ, even when taking indirect object case, and lack postpositional usage for the most part.

E.G. Dokc rem? (Where's the toilet?) -> Dokc pem/bem. (The toilet is here/there.)

This results in a lot of minimal triplets in the language, as the hidden third proximity indication, "r-", is usually indicating wh-words.

A simple example would be [pɛ] "here", [bɛ] "there", and [ɾɛ] "where".

#linguistics #conlanging #phori

Another feature present in Phori that is actually one I adapted somewhat from Japanese is Proximity.

Namely, most terms that indicate things that are close to the speaker begin with "p", while those that are not usually begin with "b".

Whatever the case, I believe I will keep the r-snarl symbol as-is for now until a more conclusive alternative is determined.

This makes me wonder if it remains a voiceless uvular trill albeit further retracted ([ʀ̠̥] or is simply a retracted voiceless alveolar trill ([r̠̥]).

Additionally, the sound chart I pinned yesterday also suggests coarticulation of a voiceless alveolar trill and a retroflex flap.

However, the concept of harsh voice has come to my attention recently. Despite there being no "official" diacritic in the IPA as of this moment, the wikipedia article suggests using a back/retracted diacritic, or an underlined character.

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As I have alluded to before, the R-snarl sound is a bit of a tricky rhotic in Phori to pin down.

For a while, I've used creaky voice applied to a voiceless uvular trill to emulate the extra distortion present in the pronunciation. e.g. [ʀ̰̊]

Interestingly, this "feeds" the word-final schwa deletion of the locative particle, -mu (~mə), which occurs if the marked word ends in a vowel.

E.G. Kiyaal "willow tree" → Kiyaal-ore-m "willow-INANIM-LOC"

For animate objects (that are not pronouns), the suffix -uuri is used (~ʊɾi), with /w/ epenthesis after vowels.

Inanimate non-pronoun objects use -ore (~ɔɾə), with /j/ epenthesis.

Ex.: Phoriiwuuri [ɸʰɔɾiːwʊɾi], Ideyore [ɪdɛjɔɾə]

For example, "dream", "sun", and "moon", as well as associated nouns, are all considered animate objects due to being seen as major conduits of willpower within Phori mythos.

On the other hand, those considered bereft of independent thought/will are inanimate unless speaker chooses otherwise.

This results in their animacy system functioning similarly to gendered nouns in some Romance languages. Most people are animate by default, and most mindless entities are inanimate by default, but there are exceptions.

#linguistics #conlanging #phori

After some thought, I realized that Phori may actually distinguish in terms of animacy beyond simply pronouns. This goes beyond simply "personhood" for them; rather, it is more a 'sapience', or conduit of willpower, distinction.

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This site was brought to my attention the other day, and I have found it somewhat useful in distinguishing what certain tricky sounds might be. That said, given the notation for the sound resembling R-Snarl is less official, I may keep my notation for now.

jbdowse.com/ipa/

There are not really any lengthening rules, however, as lengthening in Phori tends to be more rooted and less flexible than nuanced shortening.

Additionally, Pre-Long Shortening, or shortening a vowel if it precedes another long vowel, is mostly there to allow for better flow in cases of verb hiatuses between syllables.

Penultimate Shortening basically shortens the second-to-last vowel if it is long. This is mostly to preserve the natural flow towards the coda of a word.

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Regarding [ɔ]~[ɔː] (long and short alternation), I have two main rules to apply: Penultimate Shortening and Pre-Long Shortening.

Thus, the latter case is usually employed with texts of the creative variety, such as novels, poetry, and songs, which already lend themselves to the use of metaphor to designate meaning.

Thus, a second approach is also entertained: metaphorical approximation. Basically, replace a gendered word with another word that approximates the semantic intentions in the text as best as possible. This, of course, relies mostly on the translator's creativity and discretion.

The first is the most practical and direct: just use gender-neutral pronouns as applicable and ignore cases of gendered words in the input. While this seems easy enough, it can often leave semantic gaps that are difficult to accommodate for.

#phori #linguistics #conlanging

As I've mentioned before, Phori tends to be "gender neutral" in that there is no male/female/etc. expressed directly in its lexicon.

Thus, when translating texts that used gendered speech, there are often two approaches...

One last shift concerns the "r-snarl" which shifts back into alveolar in modern casual speech, while keeping a bit of creakiness. Due to the truncation of the sound, however, it also turns into a proper liquid approximant rather than remaining as a trill.

Next, a couple cases of neutralized free variation.

[ɫ] ~ [ɬ] -> [ɫ] is favored
Fric./AF: Postalveolar ~ Alveolo-Palatal -> PA is favored

Generally, the non-favored variants are used by older speakers, who are exceedingly rare.

But that isn't always the case -- [uː] generally will approximate to [ʊ] instead.

It is also worth noting there's also change in the orthography unlike the origin form that often just uses a diagraph.

#phori #linguistics #conlanging

A couple more key sound changes...

First, most cases of lengthened vowels are either geminated (duplicated phoneme) or diphthongized.

The result being that conlangs seem more intentional while natural languages seem more "random". In reality, both have degrees of intentionality and randomness, as both are integral to the very fabric of language in equal measure.

The main difference is that natural languages inherently possess more varied and contradicting implicit decisions made over generations of speakers. In contrast, constructed languages, possessing a smaller pool of users, tend to be more constrained in how they evolve.

#linguistics

I believe that every aspect of language, whether natural or constructed, has some degree of reason behind it, even if it is otherwise not apparent based on provided data. What may be perceived as "randomness" is merely the result of the overall pool of speakers.

I will likely tweak my lexicon accordingly to mark modern and archaic forms clearly. But, this will require a bit of rumination to best express where this change would likely occur (or not) and where others may or may not manifest as well.

This has also resulted in certain morphosyntactic shifts, such as the instrumental and comitative cases merging into one marker: -ik.