Conlang Year: Week 6
Six weeks! The links are here.
Day 36 - Write a section on phonotactics for modern forms
Well, the sound changes I made added ø and o when we lower y and u, so I've plopped them onto the IPA chart that I'm using to keep track of Thekkish's phoneme library. I didn't remove any sounds, so there's no need to take anything off the chart. Rather than having a separate chart for pre- and post-change, I've simply put the added vowels on in parentheses to reflect where they come from.
I've also added the sound changes and a note about application of stress to the document. I think I'm good to go here!
Day 37 - Explore Romanization strategies
I listed my Romanization back on Day 18 and I've yet to make any changes. I'm still determined to avoid digraphs and I want to use a consistent Romanization scheme for the other languages of the Jewelsea (such as Archipelagan, Riverlander, and Tradelander), so I am using diacritics so as to leave open the base letters for sounds that appear in English even though they're not in Thekkish. Hopefully, this will the pronunciations of both this language and future conlangs a bit more intuitive for someone coming in with no experience with the language.
Day 38 - Start your official dictionary
I've been keeping a spreadsheet dictionary with tabs for words both pre- and post-sound changes as I went along in the project, so there's not much work to do here!
Day 39 - Explore options for word order and syntactic alignment
I read through the Wikipedia articles on both nominative-accusative alignment and ergative-absolutive alignment. Some parts of it make sense to me right now and others don't. I'm curious about the appearance of ergative-absolutive in Urdu as that's the mother tongue of my fiancée's family, but I don't speak a lick of it and she doesn't have much.
Day 40 - Select word order and syntactic alignment
Ultimately, I'm deciding to go with nominative/accusative syntactic alignment here, because as a speaker of English whose other languages are restricted to high school French and the Spanish I've picked up through the osmosis of being around Spanish speakers, it's what I'm familiar with. I don't want to get too far out over my skis.
I will be going with VSO word order. I like head-initial and it makes the language feel dynamic to me by starting sentences with a verb, emphasizing the action.
Day 41 - Decide on a more synthetic or analytic approach
To be honest, analytic seems a bit easier to work with for me, but I also like the idea of big compound words. I want something more synthetic here, but I don't plan to push over to the fully synthetic end of the spectrum.
Affixes will generally be added in the step between lowering vowels and fortifying terminal consonants.
Day 42 - Start a basic introduction to your conlang’s grammar
Once again, I've been keeping this all in my document the whole time, so fortunately, I have no more work to do for this prompt.