conlangs (++)
I've finally come up with a name for the conlang I've been working on:
jō ɓǫ wúgų dān
(Or "Yobo wugu dan", for how I'd expect English speakers to end up pronouncing it)
the diacritics represent tones - a line above means a high tone, an ogonek below means a low tone, and the upwards-rising diacritic represents a rising (low to high) tone
All other sounds are as per the IPA, so j is the sound at the start of the word "yellow", and ɓ is the bilabial implosive (sound not in English)
re: conlangs (++)
jō ɓǫ is a combination of the words for river and moon - the language's speakers live alongside a large river and have a sacred connection to the moon, resulting in them calling themselves jō ɓǫ ōŋwe ("river moon people")
wúgų is the verb meaning "to speak", and dān is the nominalizer (that is, it makes the verb into a noun) - so together it means "speech" or "language"
conlang | yobo wugu dan [04]
This essentially means that some switch reference markers can convert ergative nouns into absolutive ones, and visa versa.
There's still a lot of details to work out (significantly, what these markers actually sound like, and how they behave morphologically), but I definitely feel like I'm heading into new (to me) linguistic territory and exploring things
conlang | yobo wugu dan [05]
Some other fun things wugu dan has:
• Reduplication
tā kerō
1sg sing[IPFV]
"I sing/am singing/was singing/..."
tā kerōro
1sg sing~PFV
"I sung"
• four noun classes:
I - people, birds
II - aquatic creatures
III - other animate
IV - inanimate
With agreement for these classes showing on possessor marking, measure words, and possibly some adjectives?
• measure words
You can't say "6 dogs", you must say "6 <measure word> dogs".
conlang | yobo wugu dan [03]
Today I was working on the problem of wugu being both ergative and having switch reference.
(Both these concepts would take several posts to explain, so I recommend looking them up for an overview)
The solution I came up with (and found precedent for in natural langs) is to keep the Different Subject marker the same, but to split the Same Subject marker into multiple different types, depending on the valency of both the SR phrase and the main phrase.