Talk:Akachenti
Contents
9/25/18
Notes
Lianamir (talk) 14:00, 25 September 2018 (CDT)
Akachenti
Akachenti appears to be a register-tone language with breathy-low, glottalic-high, and normal-mid registers.
General
lost onset consonants:
voiced -> low tone murmured -> low tone aspirated -> high tone voiceless -> high tone nasal -> ? tone/raised vowel
lost coda consonants:
glottal stop -> high/rising fricative -> low/falling murmured -> high tone
It has long been recognized that only an extremely limited set of postvocalic consonants contribute directly to pitch generation, specifically the postvocalic consonants that involve a distinctive laryngeal adjustment—glottal stops and -h.
Comments on Conlang Group
So watched a vid yesterday here: David Peterson’s The Art of Language Invention, Episode 27: The Evolution of Tone.
It gave me some direction I think I can actually work with to figure out how Akachenti got it’s tonal accents and possibly enough to backtrack how those standalone pronouns reduced down to the pronominals. In short, breathiness leads to low tone and tense consonants (frequently including glottals) lead to high tone, which definitely correlates with what Akachenti has going.
Also potentially helpful was his video on vowel quality change, which should help me figure out how the high vs. low vowels figure into the tonal accent as well (because they do).
I might actually start conlanging again after a massive block on that front, so looking forward to revisiting Akachenti now.
Today's Reading/Resources
- [https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/3880/a6d440431413675afbdf2d37243e291a0f77.pdf Vietnamese and tonogenesis:
revising the model and the analysis]
Backreading
Vowel Raising/Lowering in Akachenti
Tbh, I haven't figured out whether vowel raising or lowering is involved because of stress being retracted and glottalized, which is likely to cause vowel-lowering (and i/e/a/u followed by lowering is attested in an excellent natlang example), but then i/e/a/o would let the e displace to let a rise and split and send e into the i region, which could explain ae / e / i showing weird overlaps in their histories. But I have figured out that it's one of them and that figuring out diachronic prosody is my answer to most problems pronoun.
Right now, I'm thinking those elided consonants were possibly uvular, as that's in keeping with the general phonology pattern, the k that shows up in the agentive suffix used with short-fixed-vowel-final verbs, and with vowel lowering, but if vowel-raising turns out the better analysis (in keeping with primary person markers being the lower versions, not the raised versions), then it's likely something else, like a palatal, which is also plausible with the phonology. I'm kind of stuck really digging into both possible avenues into the current vowel set because there's no way I can work with diphthongs in sister languages without nailing down the vowel shifts that led to "modern" Akachenti.
Conversation(s) with Alex Fink
>There's the complication of the associative first person ae / é / ae seeming to be tied to the original 3rd, as evidenced by the vestigial 3rd person e's floating around everywhere and it's continuing to be used as a third person generic when the speaker is "associating" themselves with the generic group referenced. "We should always bide our time." vs. "One should always bide their time."
Hm, the semantic distinctions 1 :: 1.assoc :: 3.generic are very fine, on the grounds of your examples. I think they're easily the sort of thing that could have an ex-nihilo origin. Suppose that for some reason (to be invented) the "associative first person pronoun" used to take third-person agreement, but also that there were two allomorphs of the third-person agreement markers bopping around. One of them might just by some chance (being used in a proverb? phonetic resemblance? etc.) become fixed as the first person associative marker, leaving the other to be the third person marker.
>Third person pronouns don't decline and the associative first pronoun has taken over the regular first altogether.
i.e. free rein to invent the form of the older "regular" first person pronoun. But do try to give it some reason to have been eliminated. Pernicious homophony? A difference of politeness or social connotation?
My suspect is that some other morph will be involved in the story. For example, if the patientive was marked by vowel raising, maybe the story is that there used to be a backgrounded agent suffix -C which appeared after the object morphs, which at this stage were identical with the subject morphs. Now assume a sound change that raises vowels before -C, and then lose the agent suffix.
