User:Soap

Hi, I'm Soap and I have a 7½ year gap between my first and second edits  : )

UPDATE: I now (as of Oct 3, 2015) have crossed over 1000 edits here. Again, thank you to everyone keeping this site up.

Okay WOW. As of Feb 2020, I now have over 10,000 edits on this account plus nearly 9,000 on my other account. Right now I'm, judging by the diff ID numbers, almost one fifth of the total edit count here and probably therefore also about one fifth of the content (but not one fifth of the pages, as I tend to make very large articles.) However, I'm slowing down lately, both because I've run out of things to write on some projects and because some other projects are better suited to an HTML website rather than a wiki.

I work on conlangs that exist on the planet Teppala, and although I'm not very active I try to devote a small amount of time to conlanging each week. Right now I've got huge plans for a timeline stretching from 21000BC to 12850 AD, so 34000 years of sound changes, although only the middle is well developed. My conlangs are notable for various strong tendencies reuslting fromm y personal preferences:

• An abundance of bilabial consonants, especially /p/. Sometimes mixed with abundance of other consonants, as in Khulls, sometimes left on their own to rule the entire phonology, as in the extreme examples of Poswa and Pabappa.
• Plenty of words for soap.
• Kinship terms are generally monosyllables, even in languages that have no other monosyllabic nouns.
• Very strong noun inflection, based on fusion and infixation, and moderately strong verb inflection as well.
• Extremely conservative grammars, retaining traits for over 10000 years with little change. For example, Poswa has retained six of the seven major noun cases of its ancestor from 8700 years ago, and added no new cases. However, some languages, such as Moonshine, have in fact rapidly changed their grammars and retain little resemblance to their ancestors.

"U verbs"

Poswa could use verb affixes such as -mpibabo "I use my arm", and give them widely divergent semantic definitions. For example the /mp/ comes from a word meaning thorn, which followed the semantic path

thorn ---> pointed object ---> elbow ---> arm

And then stayed with the meaning "arm" because that was the most useful.

All U verbs use bisyllabic forms for the intransitives, and therefore trisyllabic forms for the transitives. These morphemes are -ibo -ube -oba for the ordinary verbs' -o -e -a. Thus it is not a simple infix; it is conjugated.

NOTE: I came up with this idea after 4 months of not working on Poswa, however, so I may be overlooking a reason why I didnt try this before.

These are called U-stem verbs or U verbs because in Play the stems typically ended with /u/ or /ū/. They are bipersonal verbs, but both person markers must be the same. Thus, forms like *-ubo -obe -iba do not occur even though diachronically they would be just as legitimate as the forms that do occur.

If they exist, they would be theoretically an open class, since the derivation of each U affix from a given content word is formulaic and cannot produce an ungrammatical form. However, many forms would collide, and it is likely that only a small number of such forms would be used outside of poetry and perhaps some specialized fields. (For example, the same morpheme that for humans could mean "by arm" could for some animals mean "by claw" since the original morpheme is in fact a word for thorn.)

Most U morphemes would be short ones, such as -š- "by key", which could take either a literal use (e.g. opening a door) or a metaphorical one (performing an action that others cannot do). A possible polysemic affix would be -p-, which could mean "by finger/hand", "by water", "by womb", "by eye", and up to 32 other lesser used meanings (that is, anything whose C-stem is a bare /p/).

Some further potential examples, with generous translations:

INTRANSITIVES

Tampišibi.

I drank wine (because I can).

Lappotavibi.

I fell down. (By accident; this derives from tane "rump, tail" and thus means literally "i fell down with my bottom")

Tipopožibi.

I traveled by animal. (/re/ "animal for riding" ---> /rož/ > /ož/) If this verb came into common use it could theoretically contract to /tipʷp-/ through regular syncope, but note that there are no other examples^{that i can remember} of this contraction in the language.

If the affix "by animal" gets grammaticalized, it could shift its meaning widely as have the others, and

These are all etymologically repetitious, and could be replaced by "normal" forms with the shorter verb suffix, since the U form occupies one extra syllable while adding no new meaning. Thus the entire category of U verbs survives through idiomatic use only.

Unbalanced gender setups

1. 1 man + 999 women = 1000 men (IE)
   • pregnant women addressed with male pronouns if baby is known to be a boy.
     • Pregnant women addressed in the plural, which is epicene. (some Languages of Teppala)
2. Genders take different positions on an animacy hierarchy. (Many Languages of Teppala if babies are considered a separate gender)
   • nom-acc for males, erg-abs for females (some conlangs; proposed for pre-PIE plural feminine)
   • Accusative case of males is the same as the nominative case of females, though this is a superficial resemblance only; they behave as normal nominatives and accusatives. (Late Andanese)
3. Males cannot be the agent of certain verbs without a morpheme showing which woman gave them persmission to do so; or the opposite. (Resembles Poswa and Pabappa 's treatment of sentient animals)
4. Genders behave differently with respect to some other grammatical function. (Many Languages of Teppala)
   • Many semantically inanimate objects (umbrella, purse, dishes) are assigned to either the masculine or feminine gender, with a great imbalance in who gets what; men and women need extra morphemes to possess objects not of the "proper" gender, even if these are very common. (Moonshine)
   • certain verbs automatically take on a more violent of forceful meaning if subject is male, unless an extra morpheme is added. (Late Andanese)
5. Deities are always grammatically masculine, even if female in form (claimed for Tamil, apparently false)
6. male gender associated with broken objects or unpleasant things. (Jmo; some English feminists sarcastic use of male- as a variant form of mal-)
7. masculine has to be indicated with a suffix; unmarked form is usually feminine (Láadan; with is defined both as "woman" and "human", rather like the inverse of English man)
   • Feminine has to be indicated with a suffix; unmarked form is usually masculine unless the descriptor is syntactically associated with females , as with nursing, menial labor, etc (IE)