From Aeruyo to Malviz: A little morphology

Since my last post on deriving Malviz from my existing Malviz language, I've worked a little on the morphology of the language.  Aeruyo had a complex inflectional system on both nouns and verbs, so in order to work out the morphology of Malviz, I simply ran several fully declined nouns and several fully conjugated verbs through the sound changes to see what irregularities and mergers occurred naturally.  Then, based on this work, I made the following morphology changes:

• I got rid of the vocative case.  In most cases it was merging with either nominative or instrumental, and I had planned on getting rid of it anyway, so it seemed like a good opportunity.
• I merged the plural and collective for spirit nouns, since apocope had essentially done that for me right out of the gate.  In cases where the collective form causes o>u mutation (particularly in oral ~ uro > oral ~ urz), I kept the mutated form as the plural/collective form, though analogical flattening in some roots isn't ruled out.
• All verbs had the non-past positive and negative forms mergina, while the past forms remained distinct, so I extended the past tense negative forms to cover non-past as well (essentially creating a tenseless negative form and avoiding the need to create a negative particle.

There are still a few cases where forms are identical, but for the most part those are quite regular.  One issue I have with verbs is that they are merging in different and interesting ways depending on the root, which is making it hard for me to decide what forms to keep.  For instance, often the potential and optative moods are merging in both positive forms but not the negative:



	Indicative	Potential	Subjunctive	Optative	Necessitive
Past	khon	khonrz	khonm	khonrz	khoŋrz
Non-Past	khonv	khonrz	khonai	khonrz	khoŋrz
Negative	khongui	khonrui	khonmmoi	khonzui	khoŋgrui

However, there are cases where it does not merge:

	Indicative	Potential	Subjunctive	Optative	Necessitive
Past	adeh	adez	adem	aderz	adegrz
Non-Past	adev	adez	adei	aderz	adegrz
Negative	adekui	aderui	ademoi	adezui	adegrui

And there is one rare case where the necessitive also merges in with potential and optative (again, only in positive forms):

	Indicative	Potential	Subjunctive	Optative	Necessitive
Past	per	perrz	perm	perrz	perrz
Non-Past	perv	perrz	peroi	perrz	perrz
Negative	pergui	perrui	permoi	perzui	pergrui

I probably will apply some sort of analogical flattening for the last case, since it requires such a specific initial configuration (an Aeruyo verb root CVrV-), though the more common merger of potential and optative is quite interesting.  Should I just completely merge one to the other (the pronunciations are quite close, after all), or should I say, keep the distinct optative negative form for some vestigial usage?

From Aeruyo to Malviz: Starting with Sound Changes

It's been a while since I did any significant conlanging, so I thought I'd share some of my most recent efforts.  Some people may be familiar with Aeruyo, which has a grammar posted on this site.  Within the same world that Aeruyo and its speakers, the etherial Aeruro, exist, there are also the Malviz.  The Malviz are another group of spiritual beings who split off from the Aeruyo in time immemorial and cover and are essentially the "dark" version of the air spirits.

Malviz speak a decendant of Aeruyo, the conceit being that Aeruyo did not actually change much because its primary speakers are immortal and have separated themselves more from the physical realm, whereas the language of the Malviz has changed slowly but surely due to their constant interaction with the changing world through possession of undead.  This may be a very flimsy hand-wave (and may need beefed up in my stories), but it allows me a nice sandbox to play with historical changes before I get serious about working out the human languages of my world.

My process for making the sound changes to Aeruyo to Malviz went somewhat backward.  I had a couple of names that I wanted to fit into the ending Malviz language -- namely Kavrz [kʰavʐ]* "Malviz incarnate of wrath" < kafira "anger" and Malviz [malvɪz] < malefiri.  After building the sound changes that would result in those two forms, I built out a couple more changes.  Here's what I came up with:

• V > 0 / _#
• stress shift to first syllable
• a, e, o, u > ə / [-stress]
• i > ɪ / [-stress]
• [-aspirated] > [+voice] / V_
• j, w > 0 / [-continuant]_
• ɾ > ɻ
• V > 0 / [+stress]._
• ɻ > ʐ / _#
• [+aspirated] > [-aspirated] / ._[-stress]
• w̥ > ɸ

There are no strict time frames here -- again, I am building these languages kind of in a sandbox, taking advantage of the conceit that they are spoken by immortal spirits who reject influence of mortals, etc etc.  I may add a few sound canges (I'm looking at diphthongization) or rejigger the order, but so far this seems to be a good start for me.  I feel the next step is to use these and run my inflectional paradigms through Zounds and then work out what additional morphology changes follow from that.  I already know that I'll be losing the negative verb forms to that very first apocope, so I'll need to make a negative particle -- I plan on using men "never".

_________

*Yes, these are phonetic transcriptions.  I will have to work out allophony after I have figured out precisely how the sound changes are affecting everything.

Conlang Language Options in Minecraft?

While looking over the patch notes for Minecraft 1.2.4, I noticed a section under the known bugs labelled "Translation Related".  There, in addition to a lot of notes about Spanish translations that mostly seemed to involve correcting names (including some interesting juggling of the terms castellano and español that might be deserving of its own post), I found this curious and rather amusing line:

The translation [Quenya (Arda)] has "Lever" labeled as "Mechanic Pen*s"

A quick check reveals that Minecraft is actually available in three constructed languages: Esperanto [listed as "Esperanto (Mondo)"], Quenya ["Quenya (Arda)"], Klingon ["tlhIngan Hol (US)"] ...  Why Klingon's listing is US and not some term for the Klingon Empire or their homeworld Kronos/Qo'noS I wouldn't know.

The trivia on Minepedia's Language* page does not redact the term, so I presume that some joker did indeed name the Lever element "Mechanical Penis" (Minecraft uses a crowdsourcing site for translations, and it has gotten them in bigger trouble than this.), however, the problem was apparently fixed, as when I jumped in the game using the Quenya UI and made a lever, the mouseover text read "Turolwen" as shown in the image below.

I can't vouch for the accuracy of any of these translations of course, though the Quenya is obviously incomplete, as a few English words and phrases are still being used.  Of course, I'm sure that many of the words Minecraft needs would not be in any canonical Tolkien source, and I think the Elven language people tend to be a little touchy about coinages -- it's just one of the things that can get them arguing.

In any case, it's cool to see people having fun with some conlangs.  In addition to the proper conlangs listed above, there is also a hilarious joke language called Pirate English in the options, and it's pretty much exactly what you would expect it to be.  And of course, there are a wide array of natural languages, too, which will of couse benefit Minecraft a bit more.

*Which, as I write this, does not list Esperanto, though I'm sure that will be corrected.

How is Huntsman's China experience a bad thing?

Have you seen this monstrosity?

This ad makes me angry.  It's not because I support Huntsman in any way, while to my mind he's a better candidate than the other Republican candidates, no one in that field interests me (and unfortunately, I only see Barak Obama as marginally better).  No, it's the fact that it takes a number of multicultural and international appeals of Huntsman: bilingualism, adopted children from China and India, a deep understanding of China -- and casts these qualities that I think would be great in a President, and presents them as bad or evil.

Know upfront that I won't scream at Ron Paul for this.  Though this is my first time seeing the actual ad, I had heard about the controversy and the story that it was a supporter of Paul's who created the ad, unknown to him, and that Paul disavowed him.  I have other reasons for being uninterested in Paul, but so far I have no information that would contradict those statements.

What I am angry about is that whoever created this ad apparently thinks that bilingualism and international experience are bad things to have in a president, and that same person would also exploit two little girls to prove his point.  In what world is that OK?  Really, in what world does that even make sense?

We live in a global economy, and in a world where interacting with people accross the globe is a necessity if we are to succeed.  I want the President of the United States to speak Chinese, Spanish, Arabic, Russian, French ... as many major and widely used languages as possible.  I want a president with a wide range of international experience, who has studied abroad, worked abroad, and lived abroad.  All of this will facilitate communication and understanding when the president is negotiating with foreign governments.  Yes, I want him to be furthering American interests, but I want him to have cultural and practical knowledge that will help him in doing that.

There is no reason that someone's ability to speak a foreign language or their experience in a foreign country (barring them working for that country, which Huntsman wasn't -- he was a student and then the US Ambassador -- working for our country) should be seen as anything other than a positive in terms of one's qualifications to be President of the United States.  We need skills and experience like that in our top offices.  And if we universally rejected people with those qualities in the highest positions in the country, we would not have risen as the most powerful country in the world.

EDIT: It's a good thing that Huntsman knows how his Mandarin skills should be viewed: Judging from how he used them on the debate floor.  Pull out a chengyu next time, sir!

Moving Domains

I have just moved gacorley.com from GoDaddy to Hover.com.  I realize I'm a little late in joining the boycott, but I finally found a time to get it all worked out.  I've been thinking about leaving GoDaddy for some time (conlangery.com was on Hover from the start, specifically because I was annoyed with GoDaddy), but their support of the Internet-breaking leglislation in SOPA and PIPA was the straw that broke the camel's back.

There shouldn't be any effect on visitors to the site from the change of registrar.  I just felt that the need to share my reasons.