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ANNOUNCEMENT:
I just wanna say that the info on this thread is now obsolete. All of it has been moved to an easier to edit and maintain Google document: Nenko Language
So this thread remains as just a concept.
So as some may know in chat I'm deep into making a constructed language. My amateur linguistics continue.
What I have here is a chart I made in Excel for a conlang I call Nenko /ɲɪŋˈkɔ/. It took me a lot of time to make a nice sounding name for it.
Though with a proper suffix the actual name of the conlang is Nenkyehiu /ˈɲɛŋˈkʲɪjeçŭ/.
Anyway this is the chart:
As you can probably tell, it's very much Slavic inspired. It has a full palatalization system and a stress system (no pitch accent, sorry), but for some originality it does not have retroflex consonants.
And also before someone burns me on a stake. Ë is gonna be controversial, but hear me out. This is for my conlang an equivalent to Yat in Serbo-Croatian. It has two different pronunciations: /ɪˈjɔː/ and /ˈjɔː/.
Think of it as a dead diphthong EO /ˈjɛo/, and that's how it is used. So for example loanwords like Cheongsam are becoming Cëngsam /ˈt͡ɕɔːŋksɑm/ as a result.
For those that dont't understand IPA. Here's a chart with (almost entirely) English approximation:
Consonants are split into categories. Voiced, Voiceless and Neutral:
Voiceless in this example are not sorted alphabetically, but rather paired with Voiced consonants above them.
What this means is that they alternate, you see all voiced consonants get devoiced before other voiceless consonants. In a same way voiceless consonants get voiced before voiced consonants. So S becomes Z before G for example as paired above. Additionally all voiced consonants are devoiced word finally, so if you see a Z at the end of the word it's gonna become S in pronunciation (not in writing). And assimilation goes across word boundary, so if in a following a consonant in the sentence is voiced, the final voiceless consonant in the word before it is gonna get voiced to assimilate and vice versa.
Neutral consonants are not affected by voicing assimilation rule and they do not trigger it. They are sonants.
Vowels come in pairs:
Vowels are paired as either soft or hard.
When soft vowel is after a hard consonant like C, that C is gonna be read soft as Cj in that chart. This is called palatalization.
Hard vowels do not palatalize preceding consonants, however there is an exception to this. Ḙ and Y palatalize preceding G, Ģ, H and K. So this means that there's no difference in pronunciation between example syllables Kḙ /ˈkʲɛ/ and Ke /ˈkʲɛ/, but there is between Nḙ /ˈnɛ/ and Ne /ˈɲɛ/.
Because of this it's not strange to confuse Ḙ and Y with E and I for G, Ģ, H and K in loanwords because it doesn't matter as long as it's not word final. Then it would matter for suffixes.
Paired vowels are used in suffixes accordingly.
And lastly "Ee" /jeje/ is not a digraph, it's just a soft equivalent of "Ɵ".
I is both a consonant and a vowel:
Like "Y" in English in my conlang "I" is both a consonant and a vowel that is equal in pronunciation to "I" ("Y" in my conlang's case). Here's what I mean: in "Yard" it's a consonant because another vowel is after it but in "By" it's a vowel because there's no other vowel after it.
What this means is that "I" in my conlang when paired with another vowel becomes /j/, the same happens if it's put after a vowel. When on its own it then becomes a vowel. Here's an example: In »Igia« /ˈigʲɑ/, first "I" is alone so it's a vowel and the one between "G" and "A" is a consonant because there's a vowel after it, plus because a consonant is before it, that consonant became palatalized. Here's another example »Iaz« /ˈjaːs/, again it's a consonant because a vowel is after it.
A thing to keep in mind though is that if "E" or "Ë" is after "I", it does not mean that that "I" is gonna turn into /j/. "E" and "Ë" are already complete syllables, with both a consonant and a vowel. So this means that the "I" is gonna remain a vowel when it's before one of these two.
J the Soft Sign:
This is the only letter in the alphabet that does not have a sound of its own, but for sake of simplicity it has a one-syllable name. So if it does not have a sound what is it used for? Well that's the thing it's purposefully left silent (unlike E in English language that is frequently left silent to mark "long" (diphthong) vowels. Like A in Ace, but in Axe it's a waste of space.
This is a soft sign and what it marks is that a preceding consonant is soft (like how vowels E, Ë and I do), but the catch is that it has no vowel sound following it after it's done with the softening. Grammatically it alternates with soft vowels if it's word final, for example: Kocj /ˈkɔt͡ɕ/ (singular) = Koci /ˈkɔt͡ɕɪ/ (plural). No soft sign means that the hard vowels are gonna be used in this manner.
Reduced L:
This was inspired by Serbian reduction of L into an O. But some history on that, this sound change happened somewhere in middle ages and it still persists today. Basically all word final Ls in Serbian are reduced into a sorta non-syllabic O, this O alternates with L in pronunciation. Now it was still spelled with L till our reform, since then it's written as O.
Also keep in mind that after O the reduced L is deleted.
Now on L in my conlang. In my conlang L is reduced to /u̯/ (short non-syllabic U) anywhere in the word as long as it's after a vowel. This cannot happen if it's between vowels! It's not spelled with an U (like how in Serbian it's with O). instead it remains being spelled as L.
If L is after U it won't be reduced. Take a look at this to see this in action:
- Olga ḙ buldozer /ˈɔu̯gɑ ˈɛ buɫˈdɔʑɪr/ (Olga is a bulldozer).
This reduced L does not have a status of a vowel!
Stress and non-phonemic vowel length:
In Nenko stress is marked with an acute accent like: Á, É, Ḙ́, Í, Ó, Ú, Ṷ́ & Ý.
- Secondary stress is marked with a grave accent: À, È, Ḙ̀, Ì, Ò, Ù, Ṷ̀ & Ỳ.
- Ë is never marked because it's always stressed and Ɵ is never marked because it is always reduced.
- And finally reduced vowels are left unmarked like: A, E, Ḙ, I, O, U, Ṷ & Y.
What isn't marked however is vowel length...
In Nenko almost everything comes in pairs, and this is no exception. Vowels come in two pairs: Soft and Hard. Then these determine if consonants are soft or hard. Below there is another layer: Stressed and Reduced which we just discussed above, and to top it off those two also come in their own pairs. Stressed can be either Normal or Long and Reduced can either be Normal or Short! This however is never marked, there is no mark for vowel length in Nenko and even the stress accents are avoided. Stress along with length has to be memorized for each word.
And the reason for this is because very few words are differentiated by stress or length, so the stress marks are redundant and useful only for a dictionary.
Also a disclaimer, or rather an explanation. Breve 〈˘〉 in IPA marks ultra short vowels and Nenko does not have those, but I'm using these marks for some precision in transliteration because there is no other way of marking short vowels in IPA.
Oh and the allophone vowels /æ e o/ also have their pairs /æː ĕ ŏ/. But this isn't on the chart since they are allophones.
Letters that cannot start words:
The letters J, Ɵ and Y cannot start words and for each there's a reason.
- J is a sign, and you can't mark nothing.
- Ɵ can (similarly to Greek ς and unlike every other letter in the alphabet) only appear word finally (in suffixes only), at which point it reads /ə/. If it occurs anywhere else in the word it's spelled out as OE and will then read /ɑje/.
- Y can only occur after hard consonants, reason for this is because it was pronounced /ɨ/ and now it isn't anymore.
The upper case forms of these letters can only appear when writing in full caps or when discussing them.
Status of digraphs and trigraphs:
The sequences "Ia" /jɑ/ and "Iu" /ju/ like the digraph "Dz" /d̪͡z̪/ (and similarly all the soft consonants) are treated as sounds on their own right, but for sake of alphabetization these digraphs do not count as letters.
Soft consonants on the other hand (while treated as sounds on their own right to a degree) never had their own letters, but were always written as a combination of letters. Usually some mark that it's a soft after an otherwise hard consonant which is unlike: Dz, Ia and Iu because these three in same order have a treatment in cyrillic as: Ѕ, Я and Ю.
But you have to think with me here, this conlang was designed as a language heavily influenced by Soviet Union used in some imaginary country that now after the USSR collapsed switched to using latin alphabet. So to simulate this even better, some compromises had to be made for certain sounds. And yeah I also have the cyrillic alphabet for this thing but I prefer using latin for it.
Plus it has to sound like it's slavic related to a bit high degree (similar to Baltic languages), but not 100% historically accurate and 100% slavic. I have to have some liberties!
Notes:
- It's supposed to be an agglutinative language. No particles and extremely heavy on suffixes.
- There's no hard sign, you can't glide /j/ after a hard consonant in this conlang. But you can't glide it after a soft one either. Consonants can be either soft or hard, and that's it.
- Ṷ is directly inspired by Ъ in Bulgarian which is a vowel with the same sound when reduced but in Bulgarian it stresses into an A sound which is different from mine.
- Ḙ is barely used.
- No word begins with A.
- There are no diphthongs! Reduction of L is an exception to this, but generally diphthongs are avoided.
- I /i/ always becomes /j/ after a vowel, and it cannot appear after another I/Y.
- There's no F at all. V must be used in loanwords instead.
- Stress is totally unpredictable, but a usual pattern is either on the first or second syllable.
- Length is phonemic only for Ë. Otherwise stressed vowels CAN be long, but they don't have to be.
In a similar way, reduced vowels can be short sometimes. This all depends on the word too! And again this is completely unpredictable and left to the "speaker" and his "accent." And I do hope is to create accents and even dialects for this thing, but who knows.
- There is no consonant gemination.
- Digraphs and trigraphs do not count as letters. That's stupid.
- No silent letters. Now you're gonna say "But J is silent in your conlang." Yeah it is because it's a sign. What I mean by no silent letters is that you won't see stuff like in English in a word such as: Corps. The "ps" is silent. Or Queue. OR another example: Rendezvous. And don't even start me on French! French is worst when it comes to silent letters.
- The conlang does not use apostrophes in spelling at all! Yay! And I mean it, there's no apostrophes or standard quotes. You see instead of "..." this »...« is used for quotes in my conlang. When missing it can be easily emulated with >...<.
Thoughts, criticism, suggestions! All welcome!
If you want to help me build a lexicon of words using this system, that is welcome as well because making words can become boring sometimes.
I just wanna say that the info on this thread is now obsolete. All of it has been moved to an easier to edit and maintain Google document: Nenko Language
So this thread remains as just a concept.
So as some may know in chat I'm deep into making a constructed language. My amateur linguistics continue.
What I have here is a chart I made in Excel for a conlang I call Nenko /ɲɪŋˈkɔ/. It took me a lot of time to make a nice sounding name for it.
Though with a proper suffix the actual name of the conlang is Nenkyehiu /ˈɲɛŋˈkʲɪjeçŭ/.
Anyway this is the chart:
As you can probably tell, it's very much Slavic inspired. It has a full palatalization system and a stress system (no pitch accent, sorry), but for some originality it does not have retroflex consonants.
And also before someone burns me on a stake. Ë is gonna be controversial, but hear me out. This is for my conlang an equivalent to Yat in Serbo-Croatian. It has two different pronunciations: /ɪˈjɔː/ and /ˈjɔː/.
Think of it as a dead diphthong EO /ˈjɛo/, and that's how it is used. So for example loanwords like Cheongsam are becoming Cëngsam /ˈt͡ɕɔːŋksɑm/ as a result.
For those that dont't understand IPA. Here's a chart with (almost entirely) English approximation:
Consonants are split into categories. Voiced, Voiceless and Neutral:
| B | Bj | D | Dj | Dz | Dzj | G | Gj | Ģ | Ģj | Z | Zj | These are Voiced |
P | Pj | T | Tj | C | Cj | K | Kj | H | Hj | S | Sj | These are Voiceless |
Voiceless in this example are not sorted alphabetically, but rather paired with Voiced consonants above them.
What this means is that they alternate, you see all voiced consonants get devoiced before other voiceless consonants. In a same way voiceless consonants get voiced before voiced consonants. So S becomes Z before G for example as paired above. Additionally all voiced consonants are devoiced word finally, so if you see a Z at the end of the word it's gonna become S in pronunciation (not in writing). And assimilation goes across word boundary, so if in a following a consonant in the sentence is voiced, the final voiceless consonant in the word before it is gonna get voiced to assimilate and vice versa.
| L | Lj | M | Mj | N | Nj | R | Rj | V | Vj | These are Neutral |
Neutral consonants are not affected by voicing assimilation rule and they do not trigger it. They are sonants.
Vowels come in pairs:
Vowels are paired as either soft or hard.
| E | Ee | Ë | Ia | I | Iu | There are Soft | ||
O | Ɵ | A | Y | U | Ṷ | Ḙ | These are Hard |
When soft vowel is after a hard consonant like C, that C is gonna be read soft as Cj in that chart. This is called palatalization.
Hard vowels do not palatalize preceding consonants, however there is an exception to this. Ḙ and Y palatalize preceding G, Ģ, H and K. So this means that there's no difference in pronunciation between example syllables Kḙ /ˈkʲɛ/ and Ke /ˈkʲɛ/, but there is between Nḙ /ˈnɛ/ and Ne /ˈɲɛ/.
Because of this it's not strange to confuse Ḙ and Y with E and I for G, Ģ, H and K in loanwords because it doesn't matter as long as it's not word final. Then it would matter for suffixes.
Paired vowels are used in suffixes accordingly.
And lastly "Ee" /jeje/ is not a digraph, it's just a soft equivalent of "Ɵ".
I is both a consonant and a vowel:
Like "Y" in English in my conlang "I" is both a consonant and a vowel that is equal in pronunciation to "I" ("Y" in my conlang's case). Here's what I mean: in "Yard" it's a consonant because another vowel is after it but in "By" it's a vowel because there's no other vowel after it.
What this means is that "I" in my conlang when paired with another vowel becomes /j/, the same happens if it's put after a vowel. When on its own it then becomes a vowel. Here's an example: In »Igia« /ˈigʲɑ/, first "I" is alone so it's a vowel and the one between "G" and "A" is a consonant because there's a vowel after it, plus because a consonant is before it, that consonant became palatalized. Here's another example »Iaz« /ˈjaːs/, again it's a consonant because a vowel is after it.
A thing to keep in mind though is that if "E" or "Ë" is after "I", it does not mean that that "I" is gonna turn into /j/. "E" and "Ë" are already complete syllables, with both a consonant and a vowel. So this means that the "I" is gonna remain a vowel when it's before one of these two.
J the Soft Sign:
This is the only letter in the alphabet that does not have a sound of its own, but for sake of simplicity it has a one-syllable name. So if it does not have a sound what is it used for? Well that's the thing it's purposefully left silent (unlike E in English language that is frequently left silent to mark "long" (diphthong) vowels. Like A in Ace, but in Axe it's a waste of space.
This is a soft sign and what it marks is that a preceding consonant is soft (like how vowels E, Ë and I do), but the catch is that it has no vowel sound following it after it's done with the softening. Grammatically it alternates with soft vowels if it's word final, for example: Kocj /ˈkɔt͡ɕ/ (singular) = Koci /ˈkɔt͡ɕɪ/ (plural). No soft sign means that the hard vowels are gonna be used in this manner.
Reduced L:
This was inspired by Serbian reduction of L into an O. But some history on that, this sound change happened somewhere in middle ages and it still persists today. Basically all word final Ls in Serbian are reduced into a sorta non-syllabic O, this O alternates with L in pronunciation. Now it was still spelled with L till our reform, since then it's written as O.
Also keep in mind that after O the reduced L is deleted.
Now on L in my conlang. In my conlang L is reduced to /u̯/ (short non-syllabic U) anywhere in the word as long as it's after a vowel. This cannot happen if it's between vowels! It's not spelled with an U (like how in Serbian it's with O). instead it remains being spelled as L.
If L is after U it won't be reduced. Take a look at this to see this in action:
- Olga ḙ buldozer /ˈɔu̯gɑ ˈɛ buɫˈdɔʑɪr/ (Olga is a bulldozer).
This reduced L does not have a status of a vowel!
Stress and non-phonemic vowel length:
In Nenko stress is marked with an acute accent like: Á, É, Ḙ́, Í, Ó, Ú, Ṷ́ & Ý.
- Secondary stress is marked with a grave accent: À, È, Ḙ̀, Ì, Ò, Ù, Ṷ̀ & Ỳ.
- Ë is never marked because it's always stressed and Ɵ is never marked because it is always reduced.
- And finally reduced vowels are left unmarked like: A, E, Ḙ, I, O, U, Ṷ & Y.
What isn't marked however is vowel length...
In Nenko almost everything comes in pairs, and this is no exception. Vowels come in two pairs: Soft and Hard. Then these determine if consonants are soft or hard. Below there is another layer: Stressed and Reduced which we just discussed above, and to top it off those two also come in their own pairs. Stressed can be either Normal or Long and Reduced can either be Normal or Short! This however is never marked, there is no mark for vowel length in Nenko and even the stress accents are avoided. Stress along with length has to be memorized for each word.
And the reason for this is because very few words are differentiated by stress or length, so the stress marks are redundant and useful only for a dictionary.
Also a disclaimer, or rather an explanation. Breve 〈˘〉 in IPA marks ultra short vowels and Nenko does not have those, but I'm using these marks for some precision in transliteration because there is no other way of marking short vowels in IPA.
Oh and the allophone vowels /æ e o/ also have their pairs /æː ĕ ŏ/. But this isn't on the chart since they are allophones.
Letters that cannot start words:
The letters J, Ɵ and Y cannot start words and for each there's a reason.
- J is a sign, and you can't mark nothing.
- Ɵ can (similarly to Greek ς and unlike every other letter in the alphabet) only appear word finally (in suffixes only), at which point it reads /ə/. If it occurs anywhere else in the word it's spelled out as OE and will then read /ɑje/.
- Y can only occur after hard consonants, reason for this is because it was pronounced /ɨ/ and now it isn't anymore.
The upper case forms of these letters can only appear when writing in full caps or when discussing them.
Status of digraphs and trigraphs:
The sequences "Ia" /jɑ/ and "Iu" /ju/ like the digraph "Dz" /d̪͡z̪/ (and similarly all the soft consonants) are treated as sounds on their own right, but for sake of alphabetization these digraphs do not count as letters.
Soft consonants on the other hand (while treated as sounds on their own right to a degree) never had their own letters, but were always written as a combination of letters. Usually some mark that it's a soft after an otherwise hard consonant which is unlike: Dz, Ia and Iu because these three in same order have a treatment in cyrillic as: Ѕ, Я and Ю.
But you have to think with me here, this conlang was designed as a language heavily influenced by Soviet Union used in some imaginary country that now after the USSR collapsed switched to using latin alphabet. So to simulate this even better, some compromises had to be made for certain sounds. And yeah I also have the cyrillic alphabet for this thing but I prefer using latin for it.
Plus it has to sound like it's slavic related to a bit high degree (similar to Baltic languages), but not 100% historically accurate and 100% slavic. I have to have some liberties!
Notes:
- It's supposed to be an agglutinative language. No particles and extremely heavy on suffixes.
- There's no hard sign, you can't glide /j/ after a hard consonant in this conlang. But you can't glide it after a soft one either. Consonants can be either soft or hard, and that's it.
- Ṷ is directly inspired by Ъ in Bulgarian which is a vowel with the same sound when reduced but in Bulgarian it stresses into an A sound which is different from mine.
- Ḙ is barely used.
- No word begins with A.
- There are no diphthongs! Reduction of L is an exception to this, but generally diphthongs are avoided.
- I /i/ always becomes /j/ after a vowel, and it cannot appear after another I/Y.
- There's no F at all. V must be used in loanwords instead.
- Stress is totally unpredictable, but a usual pattern is either on the first or second syllable.
- Length is phonemic only for Ë. Otherwise stressed vowels CAN be long, but they don't have to be.
In a similar way, reduced vowels can be short sometimes. This all depends on the word too! And again this is completely unpredictable and left to the "speaker" and his "accent." And I do hope is to create accents and even dialects for this thing, but who knows.
- There is no consonant gemination.
- Digraphs and trigraphs do not count as letters. That's stupid.
- No silent letters. Now you're gonna say "But J is silent in your conlang." Yeah it is because it's a sign. What I mean by no silent letters is that you won't see stuff like in English in a word such as: Corps. The "ps" is silent. Or Queue. OR another example: Rendezvous. And don't even start me on French! French is worst when it comes to silent letters.
- The conlang does not use apostrophes in spelling at all! Yay! And I mean it, there's no apostrophes or standard quotes. You see instead of "..." this »...« is used for quotes in my conlang. When missing it can be easily emulated with >...<.
Thoughts, criticism, suggestions! All welcome!
If you want to help me build a lexicon of words using this system, that is welcome as well because making words can become boring sometimes.
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