PREVIEW: SymNES II

I sense strong similarities between your society and mine (matrilinearity, property given out by council after someone's death). Perhaps they only recently split?

Let's have it work out like that then. I hadn't noticed the striking similarities.
 
Dark: I'm pretty sure das came up with Proto-Asonic, not me.

Then apologies. I just spotted you coming up with the previous names, and since you did your little list again, I just communted it :).

I wrote it rather quickly, I was just hoping someone would adapt it and get the ball rolling on a nice list . Never intended it to be anywhere near complete.

Erh, I was adding to your list. Through you did put at the at the bottom of it 'And much, much more, add to the list and remove silly/anachronistic ones please'.

@Symphony, I'm not sure if you actually cut it off or not, but if possible I'd like to go ahead and start in the first turn. If not, I'll wait.
 
http://www.fantasist.net/wordmaker.shtml is probably the best method for generating root names. Just delete all the word patterns and put in CCC and CCCC (maybe CC as well), then just keep the consonants you want/add more.
 
While I have already posted the stats of my people, they are just the "facts". Every people should also have a "heart". A place where they dwell that is more than the farms and woods of their villages and towns. It is their nature that is expressed through language, ritual, custom and action. It is having the words and expressions that shape thinking and behavior in a particular way.

The Tonga will adopt the dominant language and writing of our region and shape them to our needs. We will, likewise, take the most useful of the rivers and sea and wood and grasslands and instill into our language and culture the roots of curiosity, exploration, and adaptability. Our language and customs will be infused with expressions, actions and rituals that value curiosity, physcial and intellectual exploration and the welcoming of change. Men will lead our people and hold the keys to power. Women will own the wealth of the people and control is use. And each will be beholden to the other.
 
But Proto-Anosic works for Origin 2.

Initially it was actually meant to be an isolate (or at least separate from whatever family the first two people wanted to use), but apparently not. Well, I don't insist on that, though at least a little variety would be nice, especially as I did already develop a certain pattern for the language I'm going to use here. Hmm, maybe I should switch to a different linguistic family? Or, better yet, chase everyone else out of my family. :p
 
Huh? Remove all the vowels? It seems pretty good with the default settings.
I'm talking about generating roots. Any list that is compiled of roots probably shouldn't include vowels, simply because they change too often from language to language and within the language to be useful.

If you want to, you can do what Arabic does and just stick a vowel between each consonant for ease of pronunciation.
 
Initially it was actually meant to be an isolate (or at least separate from whatever family the first two people wanted to use), but apparently not. Well, I don't insist on that, though at least a little variety would be nice, especially as I did already develop a certain pattern for the language I'm going to use here. Hmm, maybe I should switch to a different linguistic family? Or, better yet, chase everyone else out of my family. :p

Even isolate languages are interrelated to some degree; I think assuming that most members of the origin share the same 'family' would be fine, since there's vast room for diversity within that.

In other news, the lack of despotic slave states is troubling...we'll need some realistic, non-utopian hegemons eventuall, even if none of us are willing to claim the throne. :p
 
In other news, the lack of despotic slave states is troubling...

It's the 4th millennium BC, you silly person. These things take time. ;)
 
I'm talking about generating roots. Any list that is compiled of roots probably shouldn't include vowels, simply because they change too often from language to language and within the language to be useful.

If you want to, you can do what Arabic does and just stick a vowel between each consonant for ease of pronunciation.

Hrm I suppose... but the list would look kinda silly without basic roots. And plus, we are probably still using English spellings (since most of us lack the linguistic knowledge of the International Phonetic Alphabet :p). We can always just change the vowels from the roots ourselves, doing some basic changes like d-t and whatnot as we see fit for our languages. Doing fancy sounds and spellings can be optional for those really into the linguistics of their culture.

Anyone else want to weigh in? Should we leave out vowels, use only certain ones, or such to generate our basic roots?
 
Jalapeno is right, it is generally vowels that are added or changed when a word is switched between languages, or a slight shift in consonant sound. Roots should be just consonants, although this should probably not hold true for single syllable words, as that would be very strange. :p

Also, change of words is not the only thing that makes languages different. Remember to specify accenting rules and the way in which the language is spoken, as both are very important. And sentence structure as well, of course. I'm sure you get what I mean. Hopefully.
 
Retroactive deletion.
 
Jalapeno is right, it is generally vowels that are added or changed when a word is switched between languages, or a slight shift in consonant sound. Roots should be just consonants, although this should probably not hold true for single syllable words, as that would be very strange. :p

Also, change of words is not the only thing that makes languages different. Remember to specify accenting rules and the way in which the language is spoken, as both are very important. And sentence structure as well, of course. I'm sure you get what I mean. Hopefully.

Accenting rules are a whole other story, let's get started with basic root words first :p. So how should one format the list; generate a bunch of random consonant only words, and put dashes where vowels would go? Just leave them as bunches of consonants for the players to fiddle with?
 
by the maps I fit more into area 1. but your choice where I start eventually really :)
 
Accenting rules are a whole other story, let's get started with basic root words first . So how should one format the list; generate a bunch of random consonant only words, and put dashes where vowels would go? Just leave them as bunches of consonants for the players to fiddle with?

Just leave them as consonants. Maybe any one syllable words should have vowels as well, but it doesn't really matter much to me.

As for accenting and such, these are what make a language truly unique in the way it sounds, which is at least as important as having different words. :)

EDIT: I would prefer to start out in some forest without any nearby large bodies of water. Just a preference though, as it fits more into the sort of society I wish to create.
 
I would leave dashes where vowels would be to preserve the general sound of the word, as opposed to bunches of consonants, due to the following example.

Following Example said:
ghst vs. gh-st

Possible words from root "ghst": gehusit, ogohosoto, gh'stai, aghsat, etc.

Possible words from root "gh-st": ghast, ghest, ghaist, ghost, etc.

Dashes in the place of vowels preserve the general sound of the word, while allowing variation. For individual languages, standard variations of consonants might also be worth laying out. For instance, aspiration on vowels (rough breathing, i.e. the letter H) in Greek typically appear as the letter S in Latin (example: Sex vs. Hexa, Septim vs. Hepta), or the aforementioned correlation between q, d, t, and p. (example: quinque vs. pente, de vs. que, quis vs. tis, etc). Obviously all the "rules" would be more akin to general guidelines and tendencies than hard and fast rules, with random things like cum (Latin: "with") vs. sum (Greek: "with," typically a prefix modified to "sun") which makes sense when you look at it, but doesn't necessarily follow a rule.

Now, in 3000 years, variations as wide as is possible with ghst will become much more widespread, considering some words are related to their Indoeuropean root only by a grouping of letters as small as "gn."
 
I suppose that makes sense, although adding vowels in different places might make sense in different languages. It really depends on how unique the language created by a society is; for instance, one that heavily emphasizes the use of vowel sounds might ignore this rule entirely, while others might follow it strictly, and others might add or modify consonants because they lack certain of them. I suppose adding the dashes as guidelines would work, but treating them as a rule would be highly restricting and, I believe, unrealistic.
 
I suppose what I mean is that the sounds "gh" and "st" are almost (and in the case of "gh," actually is) one consonant. Therefore, if you are going to bother making root consonants, its best to keep them together. If the sound "ps" is native to your language, it might be a little silly to allow someone to slap a vowel between it, especially if they come from the same root language and therefore shouldn't have difficulty pronouncing the root.

For instance, when the Romans adopted the Greek word "Philosophia," they took the PH together on purpose. Originally, this did not sound like an F, it sounded like an aspirated P, which, if you produce it properly, can morph into an F rather easily. Anyway, despite the fact that the Romans did not have a single letter for the sound "ph" (the Greek letter phi), they took the consonants together, without adding a vowel in the middle. Coincidentally, "ps" is also, by itself, a letter in Greek and begins some words. This has come into English (i.e., Psalms, psychology, etc) in a written form, although no one pronounces the initial P.

All this is a roundabout way of getting at the fact that this is not the convergence of two separate languages. It is the divergence of languages from common roots. We should be thinking more along the lines of one language morphing into many. Therefore, the idea is that they will have very similar starting consonants, etc, and so the drift will, especially initially, not be massive, and the emphasis on vowels vs. the emphasis on consonants is likely to be very similar.
 
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