Conlanging Case Study: Part 18 - First Phrases

[@keras_saryan]

"Sleep" is sometimes interesting for what is an otherwise ostensibly boring intransitive verb because in some languages it can take on a cognate object and act "pseudo-transitively". Like, in Portuguese, you can say "vou dormir uma sesta" literally "I'm going to sleep a nap" similar to how in English you can say things like "he died a good death" or "he grinned an enormous grin".

[@rowancampbell864]

Something similar happens with mandarin. 睡觉 really means "to sleep a sleep".

[@jacob_and_william]

@@rowancampbell864 IIRC a lot of intransitive verbs in Mandarin have this pseudo-transitivity because Mandarin ended up with so many homophones that it needed a way to distinguish them (ex: 'eat' and 'sleep' might be homophones, but 'eat a food' and 'sleep a sleep' are not)

[@pwnmeisterage]

How does this usage of "sleep" differ from "sleeping"?

[@omerosmanaksu5128]

@@rowancampbell864 We have that in Turkish too, "uyku uyumak" to sleep a sleep.

[@justakathings]

@@pwnmeisterage it doesn’t lol but some languages say it “twice” eg in Korean “to dream” is “to dream a dream”

[@im3635]

I really love biblaridion's videos,they're like my comforting monthly series,never disappointed by it and always worth waiting 👍

[@calculatenat4180]

You watch someone who studies language but, you don't know that you have to add a space after commas.

[@jamesmartin6750]

@@calculatenat4180 lol

[@im3635]

@@calculatenat4180 well i don't really care. I mean if I don't want to add a space after a coma I won't be arrested .-. plus if I apply your logic to it if you're into languages you should have more chances to be into things like rhetorics,though you don't know that attacking something about its form and not its content isn't a strategy to go

[@watson-disambiguation]

Remember there is no mid vowels in the proto-lang, unless you've changed that

[@Biblaridion]

Very good point. I'll fix that next time.

[@Alice-gr1kb]

oh yeah i noticed that too on my rewatch

[@valyriantime910]

I've just realized there is not really a word for the verb "to sleep" in my mother tongue, Fang, a Bantu language from Gabon. To sleep is "áke óyo" , which litterally means "to go in THE sleep"; and to say " he sleeps/he is sleeping", we say " ane óyo", which litteraly means "he is in THE sleep". So we have a word for "sleep" as a noun, but not as a verb. Which is quite uncummon for such a basic notion, right? Languages are really fascinating!

[@thibistharkuk2929]

Don't mind me, I'm just stealing this idea for my own conlang.

[@valyriantime910]

@@thibistharkuk2929 As you wish!😃

[@thibistharkuk2929]

@@valyriantime910 Thanks x) ! I may look more into Fang (I generally like Niger-Congo languages), do you know any palace where I can find more informations about it ?

[@valyriantime910]

@@thibistharkuk2929 Actually, I'm not in my homeland now ( currently live in Morocco ), so I can't really find well enough good marerials right now. All I find on the internet are extracts, and not very well explained moreover, in terms of grammar. Sorry! But here a little consolation, if I may :-). You know how duplication (repeating a word) conveys a plural some languages? Well, in Fang we use duplication preceded by an honorifique "O" to convey diminutives. Examples: "Ndè" is house "o'ndnèndè" is a little house; "Mong" is kid/youngster, "o'momong" is a little kid... and "Mvé" is saucepan/pot and "obébé" (yes, obviously a sound change here for euphonic reasons) is a little pot. Of course, in all these instances, you can use the adjectif for little/small (which is "Moane") and literally say: little X, little Y... but, as in every language, the use of a diminutive is more endearing. I hope that can inspire you, mate :-) And lemme know if you would fancy some more features like this.

[@valyriantime910]

@@thibistharkuk2929 As a subtilty, please note that "to go in the sleep" is only used in the infinitive form, like "I want to go in the sleep" (I want to sleep). But when someone is performing the action, we don't use "to go" anymore, but "to be" instead, since the person is actually in the state of sleeping. Thus the: "He is in the sleep" for "He sleeps/he is sleeping ".

[@UnderTrack_]

I mean you are getting at a point in the biosphere serie were stuff starts to get quite complicated because of the sheer amount of new elements (spiecies, niches, environments, details to keep everything organised) that you have following the continental break up so I'm not surprised it's taking quite a while to go through, altho don't overdo yourself, burnout is the last thing we want you to have ;P

[@tomrogue13]

Bib makes 17 parts to create grammar. Comes up with words on the spot

[@samuelmarger9031]

If I'm correct, /o/ is not in the proto-lang, is it? If so, *nor- might not be a possible proto-form. Also, you might want to start and stop at a certain step in the evolution using the area below. That might help in making changes during the language's path. Other than that, have a nice day!

[@IanRomErv]

We need to think of how the fronting would happen.

[@ichbinben.]

I just worked on my newest conlang for hours, translating a religious text I had written for my worldbuilding project into the language of that culture, called Émazhainga. I was just done with the first page when I realized that I had been using the wrong person markers on verbs. Émazhainga is an ergative-absolutive language and marks both agent and object on transitive verbs, but I had only marked them for agent and didn't even use the agent-marker for that, but instead looked at the noun class of the agent and used the corresponding person-marker for objects, while not marking the object at all. I don't know if that sentence is even understandable, but bottom line is the whole text makes no sense now and I'm too frustrated to fix it, so I'm watching this video instead.

[@The-ix5tb]

I really love to see this conlang growing

[@hansmorktopphol901]

Have you ever tried to make a creole or mixed language?

[@AgmaSchwa]

You sure made those charts look cool and linguisticy, good stuff

[@kevincsellak296]

Great video! I can't believe we've actually gotten to phrase building already. Anyway, Lexurgy added a way to have two words merge together. It's at the very bottom of the documentation as "affixation." That also fixes the problem with the qasa stress. The lh-epenthesis should be fixable by (and I'm speculating as to what the rule is here) using "[obstruent !glottal]" instead of "[obstruent]" in the epenthesis rule. By the way, the new update adds binary and state Features, which are useful for stress and length marking, by having a +stress state and -stress state; nothing else. To finish, you can make the stress diacritic appear before the vowel in question by writing "(before)" next to the "(floating)" thing. So the stress thing would look like "Feature +stress Diacritic ˈ (floating) (before) [+stress]" Keep on making these outstanding videos and doing these amazing projects, Biblaridion. You're doing great.

[@LawrencePeralta]

I was just scrolling his channel to find videos that may help me improve my conlang...how fortunate am I to stumble upon this... this early(atleast for me)

[@iratami]

1: if you think somethings going to be quick and easy it almost never is. So many rabbit holes to fall down. it's not world-building PTSD I swear 2: loving these conlang vides, they help a lot with the one I'm working on

[@kelanshelley2797]

To cut down on the amount of work on alien biospheres you could do a mass extinction event, the end Permian was due, in part, to the splitting of Pangaea so it could fit

[@korzenpl]

Yesterday I was thinking to myself about this series: 'Damn, there wasn't any of this recently'

[@randomperson288]

I signed up for you because I think you have a lot of subscribers for those who don't have a video

[@hansmorktopphol901]

Question: have you thought about the cultures and languages of the people who lived in the central regions before the arrival of the Thirēans?

[@voidify3]

This language isn’t in the refugium

[@hansmorktopphol901]

@@voidify3 i know

[@lilalampenschirm3203]

I somehow knew that he would be taking "sleep" as his first intransitive verb. It seems to be a popular choice among conlangers as a typical intransitive verb. Or it's a psychological thing, and "sleep" just comes to mind first because it describes an activity that is (1) very common and (2) very passive (not the voice, but the state of the sleeper)?

[@arsenixkikokoro]

lol exactly the same here, though i think i was primed by having been looking up ergative-absolutive alignment recently

[@arsenixkikokoro]

(with "sleep" being used as an example, i forgot to add)

[@Mr.Nichan]

2:42 You could call the pospositional case the oblique case (OBL).

[@asloii_1749]

I stopped Sibelius' violin concerto for this

[@kitdubhran2968]

So excited. I just caught up on these case study videos, just in time for the video last month. And I was like, aww, I gotta wait a whole month for a new episode. Turns out a month of doing vaccines and conlanging will make time fly right by.

[@adamguthrey6160]

Lexurgy recently updated to allow you to track a word's evolution btw :)

[@randomperson288]

Love conlanging case study

[@merrymerryjerry6736]

ǘ ë́ could be used for the accented vowels (vowel + combining diaresis + combining acute)

[@Mr.Nichan]

The way that looks in the KZbin font is very interesting. It looks like one dot on the left and and an acute accent on the right replacing the second dot.

[@wtc5198]

Őr the way Hűngáríán cőmbínés áćúté and ümläüt Dïäërësïs, whatever

[@nayardrish4598]

Take things easy you deserve it

[@Mr.Nichan]

I really don't have trouble coming up with phonological forms - I'm perfectly capable of making words up on the spot - but I program generators in python because I like to and I like the way they allow me to explore all the details of my phonology that I might not have completely thought of. I also just kind of like the way they surprise me and I can read through all of them and see what my favorites are. It may also be helpful the way they allow you to mathematically control and balance the relative commonness of different phonemes and phonological structures.

[@thefacethatstares]

BTW your patreon link is broken in this video's description, there is some extra chars added to the end of the URL when you follow it -- "Civclassics helper"

[@gts1676]

Please make some short video with a short example text pronounced by you, so I can see how turkish this ends up sounding. Also, make a conlang showcase when you're done.

[@jan_Masewin]

I’d use circumflexes to mark stress for vowels with diareses (uhh is that the plural?). It has a similar thing going as double acutes and is a much more widely-available symbol.

[@Mr.Nichan]

A little less intuitive though (noting that double acute accents were specifically designed to be acute accents on umlauted vowels - in Hungarian starting in the 15th century).

[@Mr.Nichan]

@Bryson Sanger I think it's just that you're right that it's a more common symbol. For example, I can type circumflexes on the English keyboard on my phone (êûîôâ), and I have a keyboard shortcut for it on my desktop computor, but I can't get any double accents on my phone without a Hungarian keyboard and if I have a shortcut for it on my desktop computer I don't know it.

[@ArturoStojanoff]

Is the sound change applicator pointing out the wrong stressed vowel? Because it is different from what you're saying in the video. For example at 13:26 you have i'LHIIN, but you say 'Ilhiin.

[@AzrgExplorers]

Lexurgy doesn't currently have a built-in way of putting a diacritic on an entire syllable, so it's usually easier to write the stress marker right after the vowel it applies to. This looks weird if you're used to reading standard IPA, but it carries the same information.

[@ФеликсАрефьев]

I saw some german dictionaries, those mark stress with underline. for the same reasons of big nomber of diphthongs and diacritics

[@hansmorktopphol901]

Are you planning on having a new q&a anytime soon?

[@KaitlynFedrick]

have most of a whole sentence now and it's only been 17 months!

[@jessezeller-davis7699]

For the stress marking on a diaeresis the is also the option of using the combined diaeresis and acute like ëlhǘǘr

[@cjrecord]

27:23 the protoform for 'to love' should be switched back to 'muri'?

[@ArturoStojanoff]

Is the language V2 with subject dropping? Does that mean it is often V1? All the sample sentences have the auxiliary as the first word, not the second. None of the V2 languages I know of are prodrop, so I don't know how that would work.

[@8Hshan]

With the information about the subject encoded in the auxiliary verbs I don't see why that couldn't work.

[@ArturoStojanoff]

@@8Hshan then what would you routinely have in the first position so that the auxiliary is in the second position?

[@8Hshan]

@@ArturoStojanoff Well, seems like the auxiliary, so in fact it would turn V1, at least that seems logical to me.

[@Sovairu]

I assume that a noun, overt pronoun, or clause as subject would all precede the auxiliary verb, but we'll see as he continues the series.

[@TarkTheConlanger]

Nice video!

[@Alice-gr1kb]

this lang reminds me a bit of English in the grammar, and of Georgian

[@pierreabbat6157]

Not everything has to come from the proto-lang! I browse Wiktionary's words with unknown etymologies, and in the Latin list there are some very familiar words: femur (an r/n noun, a type that goes back to PIE, but with no known cognates), finis, focus, forma, allo, ando (two words for go/walk widespread in Romance), cicada, obliviscor, etc...

[@koppelia]

Dude, if English vocabulary is 70% loanwords, it doesn't mean that all languages must be like that.

[@Mr.Nichan]

It kind of depends on how long ago the "proto-lang" is, but he's probably focusing on proto-lang roots partially because he's trying to just put some core vocabulary in. I did think about later borrowing as a solution for getting phonological forms that are hard to get from the proto-lang, like I think nöryö might be once he realizes that his proto-lang has no /o/.

[@mgreen2541]

@@koppelia He never said it HAD to be that way.

[@lazlo306]

Do you plan on evolving the creatures on the alien world series to use the conlang that you have created in this series?

[@senorsiro3748]

I doubt it, considering their mouth structure.

[@howdoienteraname464]

Hey, may be an unrelated question, but how do you make the creature models in Alien Biospheres? They’re really good.

[@koppelia]

He answered in 50.000 subscribers Q&A

[@howdoienteraname464]

@@koppelia Ah, thanks.

[@MrRyanroberson1]

10:08 literally the epenthesis solves the instability XD

[@user-ft3jq5vi2l]

Hey, do you think something like a "respiratory tract" could evolve in a flying animal in Alien Biospheres? Like, fresh air comes in on one end and exhausted air goes out through the other? This could maybe lead to a breathing system made more efficient by opening both and powering the gas exchange through flight speed alone.

[@EndreaiYT]

If we’ve seen anything in Bib’s channel, is that after 2 episodes of conlang case studies, comes 1, very long, alien biospheres episode

[@KaitlynFedrick]

nah they normally alternate with another video in that slot on every other month - like a showcase or feature focus

[@plant5875]

stop commenting alien biospheres stuff on the conlanging videos we can see your history

[@EndreaiYT]

@@plant5875 what’s the last video on my watch history then?

[@mgreen2541]

@@EndreaiYT He was talking about your comment history, not your watch history. We can see every comment you've made on this channel.

[@choealley8105]

I have always compounded "to sleep" as something like "to little-die" or "to die"-DIM

[@DaniilDankovsilly]

Why did you make up a word in the modern language and see what would produce it in the proto-language. Is there some reasoning behind it or is it just personal preference?

[@1theGECKO]

can someone explain why we do a protolanguage if we just decide the modern langauge words and and work backwards?

[@Nicbudd]

27:28 Lol, I'm making a language where the pronouns take number, person, gender, class, case, and then merges with the auxiliary verb (which agree with the pronouns) so that the pronouns mark some tense aspect and mood info about the verb, so the pronouns in my language are basically everything

[@koppelia]

You came here just to brag?

[@Mr.Nichan]

@@koppelia It's more interesting than a lot of other comments.

[@soton4010]

i realized your genitive could still keep its genitiveness and look similar to copula sentences

[@diiselix]

How do you make your maps (The Refugium)?

[@Mr.Nichan]

25:46 That's so mushy.

[@senorsiro3748]

Someone posted another conlanging video: “Nan ëlhüür.” It’s biblaridion: “real shit?”

[@liliasinchetru1483]

refugium?

[@-emir5484]

Today is a good day

[@jeremiahstevens5259]

Is there a reason he can't just run his sound changes in reverse to get proto-lang forms from modern lang forms? Besides not having /o/ in the proto-lang?

[@cupcakkeisaslayqueen]

This could work if it was a whole family and he used the comparative method, but with an isolate and a sound change applier wouldn't work, because some things cannot be predicted that way, like some consonants get lost in evolution without trace

[@ppenmudera4687]

27:37 you know, you don't always have to use all pronouns in every sentence. I think that's mostly European bias. Many languages are perfectly fine to drop pronouns and still have understandable sentences. It may seem weird and vague at first, but you'll get used to it surpisingly quickly. So if you don't want polypersonal agreement in this lang nor (many) pronouns in each sentence, try experimenting with (some degree of) pro-dropping

[@bri1085]

Don't romance languages have this because of how their verbs work?

[@ppenmudera4687]

@@bri1085 Yeah, most Romance languages inherented the subject-marking on verbs from Latin, so when the pronoun is the subject, it can often be ommited

[@laurencefraser]

Heck, English can happily drop subject pronouns with no loss of intelligibility in some contexts.

[@plant5875]

is there like any non-european pro-drop language

[@bri1085]

@@plant5875 Think Bantu languages drop pronouns, to the point of almost being useless if I'm right. It's just that I'm not sure if the suffixes to verbs count as pronouns. For example in Zulu, "I am going," would be "Mina ngiyahamba." The "Mina" which is the personal pronoun can be dropped, and the sentence wouldn't lose formality or anything.

[@coffeebeans7480]

only veterans will remember 5 seconds ago when this video was titled "phrases"

[@ancientswordrage]

😱

[@ancientswordrage]

I wasn't expecting one of these for a long time!

[@chio5185]

Hello you should remake a very old alien planet series called drake 4 you should search it up on KZbin to find more information about drake 4

[@matej_grega]

He is back, the legend hath returned!

[@tolkiendil4806]

Guess who's in love with cattle now?

[@rayelgatubelo]

India approves.

[@gaxamillion_]

San noryos mürűűr

[@joshuascott7641]

theres always ǘ, which i think a real language uses?

[@tompatterson1548]

Why don't you go and watch your old video when you forget something?

[@deadmanomegagaming4061]

Will this language be going in the refugium?

[@ppenmudera4687]

I believe this is a separate project and not a new Refugium language

[@garrettancel]

This video isnt long enough!!

[@Mr.Nichan]

It's good that he stops sometimes so that, between episodes, he can realize things like that he spent 6 minutes being confused because he tried to use /o/ in a proto-root, which it isn't a phoneme in his proto-language, which is why the program couldn't handle it properly.

[@KRYMauL]

Couldn't you carrot over a vowel like "û" and maybe a an apostrophe to break up the double vowel clusters.

[@Sovairu]

What do you mean about the double vowel clusters? If you mean two vowels of the same quality, that's just how he marks the long vowels. However, I do think that your suggestion of the circumflex to mark stress on an umlauted vowel is good.

[@Schody_lol]

noryooor xD

[@saraxum9773]

Finally, a conlanging videos

[@daki2223]

HE UPLOADED

[@randomperson288]

Vordaki! You there!

[@daki2223]

@@randomperson288 heyy how is the conlang going

[@randomperson288]

I think it's going well

[@daki2223]

@@randomperson288 good to hear

[@anonomasper5003]

yay

[@simonetiberi75]

Wow, new video!!!!

[@juliusnepos6013]

Oh yes

[@mrhtank547]

Neat

[@jedaorose]

ty

[@ancientswordrage]

You could record the pronouns.... And share it unlisted? I'd love to see it

[@matthewjohnson320]

Maybe I’m biased by the English word, but a three-syllable word for ox seems excessive.

[@matthewjohnson320]

Also, I like the multiplicity of loves in Greek, so specifying which kind of love you mean will help differentiate your language.

[@olster1612]

new vid! :)

[@pekka1903]

Noiceeee

[@s4d4ppl36]

FINALLYYYYYYY!!!!!!!!!

[@vde1846]

Yey

[@kg7518]

Is it okay that I don't stop thinking about alien life ( alien biospheres or not ) .

[@bri1085]

Not it's not, get some help

[@myrinsk]

ok

[@sauskar3308]

First 200 views!!

[@dallor714]

m

[@Lumberjack_king]

Forget what I said

[@seveneves7129]

Man this is a very petty comment

[@scptime1188]

may the comment section have mercy on you

[@Lumberjack_king]

@@seveneves7129 sorry

[@Lumberjack_king]

@@scptime1188 well I’m dead

[@scptime1188]

@@Lumberjack_king Lmao why did you change it to "banner ads"