mmruszemogaikus

It's that time again: I've completed another monthly language imitation project, and am preparing to share it with you all. Excited? I know I am.

You've probably noticed that its actually been over a month since I created Vertèn: Germanic was my July language. Thus, I must now report to you that my August language, which I announced last time around was supposed to be a Celtic language, never reached a stage which I felt comfortable sharing. The Celtic languages, fascinating and beautiful as they are, are also extremely complex, and renowned for their irregularity. When it comes to conlanging, there's very little that is more difficult to create than irregularity; it just eats up time and creativity to work out five different conjugations, all highly irregular, which is a feature of Irish Gaelic. The rules that I laid for myself when I started this project allow me to return to a language family, continuing my work from another month, so long as I allow at least a three month period in between. The idea of this is to make sure that I keep moving, drop my perfectionist habits, but still allow myself to bring any particular language to it's natural endpoint. I'll be returning to my Celtic language as soon as my time limit is up; now, however, I have moved on to and (to a large extent) completed my September language, which is drawn from the Athabaskan family.

If you've never heard of the Athabaskan languages, don't worry; the family is unfortunately close to extinct in most regions, and doesn't get so much everyday discussion. I promise, however, that you have heard of the most famous language of the group: Dine, better known as Navajo, is the primary example of the South Athabaskan group, and was my primary model for this project.

Instead of launching into a discussion of what makes the Athabaskan languages so interesting, I'm instead going to simply going to start describing my own work, hoping that it will illustrate the fascinating possibilities of the Athabaskan group. And so, without further adieu, I present: Mmruszemogaikus.

Pronunciation and Premises -- (aka, “Say what?!”)

Mmruszemogaikus. Yes, that is a single word. Yes, it is the name of a language; it's also a verb.

I'll give a short introduction to the pronunciation. First, almost everything is the same as English; except for some oddities, if you follow your instincts, you'll be alright.

First off, consonants come in sets of three, rather than two as in English. I'll use the set of “p” as an example: “P” is the unvoiced form, “b” is the voiced form (just as in English), and “pb” is the aspirated form. Basically, pronounce this as a “p”, but with an extra puff of air. The same is true for every group of consonants: There's an unvoiced version, a voiced version, and then the two together which represents an aspirated version.

The only letter that doesn't look like it should is “y,” which represents a velar fricative like the “ch” in German “Bach.” This is very non-standard, but I'm trying to keep it easy to type, so... For the “y” series, “yy” is the voiced version (which sounds a little like a French “r”), and “y'” is the aspirated version.

This doesn't apply to nasals, like “m” or “n”. There are four nasals: “M”, “n”, “ñ”, and “ŋ”. “Ñ” is pronounced as though followed by a quick “ee” sound, a little like the same symbol in Spanish. “Ŋ” is my usual favorite single-letter symbol for the “ng” sound in English. When nasals are doubled, hold them a little bit longer.

See? That wasn't so bad, was it? Now you can actually pronounce the wonderful monstrosity that is Mmruszemogaikus.

Perhaps the most important feature of Mmruszemogaikus is that it is what linguists would call highly polysynthetic. This means, in essence, that it has the ability to take many different morphemes (suffixes, prefixes, infixes, whole words, etc.) and combine them into a single word, producing words with the meanings of an entire English sentence. Another highly important feature, borrowed from Navajo, is that it is highly verb-focused: There are far more verbs than nouns, and most ideas which would take at least one noun in English are expressed by verbs.

And with this covered, I'm going to dive into...

Verbal Morphology (aka, “To Be Describing A Language in Your Direction”)

Mmruszemogaikus verbal morphology is based upon what certain linguists call a nucleus-template model. Think of it this way: A verb is not actually a word, but a series of positions, each intended to hold (or not hold) a morpheme of a specific category. The most important of these, around which the rest of the word is organized, is the nucleus, and generally occurs more or less in the middle. The nucleus is what we English speakers would like to think of as the verb itself, a small morpheme which carries the actual semantic content specific to that particular event. However, it is important to note that the nucleus can never stand alone. Without the various other morphemes which fit into the template, it is, to a Mmruszemogaikus speaker, wholly meaningless.

A schematic diagram of the template would look something like this:

TA – Subj# -- Tense – (T.incorp) – Gradient – NUC – (SVincorp) – (IOincorp) – Dir – Grade – Dyn – (COMPincorp) – Obj#

Where the abbreviations stand for the following things:

• TA – Topic Agreement

• Subj# – Subject Plurality Marking

• Tense – Tense :)

• (T.incorp) – Time Word Incorporation

• Gradient – Action Gradient Agreement

• NUC – Nucleus

• (SVincorp) – Serial Verb Incorporation

• (IOincorp) – Indirect Object Incorporation

• Dir – Directionality

• Grade – Action Gradient Indicator

• Dyn – Dynamic Verb Marker

• (COMPincorp) – Verbal Complement Incorporation

• Obj# – Object Plurality Marking

Yes, I know that's a lot. I don't expect very much of that to make sense, and I'm not going to go through everything in detail. Hopefully, I'm just going to present enough of the main ideas for it to at least be parsible.

I'm going to start near the end, with the slot for the dynamic verb marker. This position can take only one thing: -(a)pb, the marker for dynamic verbs. The “a” is in parenthesis because it is conditioned by what comes before it: In most cases, if this marker is preceded by a vowel, the “a” disappears. The idea of a dynamic verb is a very simple one, as we make this distinction in English, too. A dynamic verb is simply any verb which indicates that an action actually took place; “to walk” is a dynamic verb, while “to exist” is a stative one. In Mmruszemogaikus, all verb nuclei are stative by nature; it takes a special marker to get a version with dynamic meaning. An example of this is the nucleus -su-, which means either “to speak” in the sense of “I speak English and Chinese” or “to be speaking.” It takes the -(a)pb marker to get this nucleus to actually mean “to speak” as in “I speak to the crowd.”

Another big idea in Mmruszemogaikus is the action gradient; you probably figured this out from the fact that it is mentioned twice in the template. This is an interesting concept I stumbled upon a while ago, and is not necessarily typical of the Athabaskan languages. The basic idea is this: According to this language, action typically flows in one direction in terms of the grammatical persons. It is inherently more likely for “you” (the second person) to be acting upon “me” (the first), according to Mmruszemogaikus. It is also more likely for the second person to act upon the third, for the first to act upon the third, and for the third to act upon another third. Instead of conjugating, verbs in this language take a marker which puts them into one of those four categories, effectively marking them for subject and object with a single morpheme.

Combined, these four statements create an action gradient:

2>1>3>3'

Any time the subject of the verb is farther to the left on that diagram than the direct object, the verb is in the normal grade, meaning that the “grade” position of the template is left blank. If action needs to flow the other direction, one uses the inverse grade, marked by -(i)m. If one needs to show reflexivity (something acting upon itself), one uses the so-called geminate grade, marked by -ñ, which indicates that the subject of the verb is also the object. Simple, huh? In practice, this is both a much more powerful system than standard conjugation (measuring power in terms of meaning-per-morpheme), but also much more elegantly representative of the language's view of the world.

Directionality, in the template, is exactly that: a morpheme which marks the general direction in which the action is occurring (or metaphorical direction in which the inaction could be said to occur, in the case of a stative verb). The directionality markers are listed here:

-e – towards, in the direction of the listener/topic of conversation

-e'a – away, in the direction opposite the listener/topic of conversation

-ai – around, about

-iu – upwards

-ata – down

The last thing I'm going to talk about covers many of the template positions: Incorporation. Incorporation is a common morphological process in which other words are assimilated into one larger word. Much of English compounding follows a pattern like this. For instance, we can go “watching birds” or go “birdwatching”. In the later case, the direct object has been incorporated into the verb, creating a single word. This same process occurs in Mmruszemogaikus, except much more extensively. There are specific positions in which various parts of the sentence can be incorporated into any verb. The only one which really needs explaining is the serial verb incorporation slot: Here, verbs which follow each other in action can be incorporated: Take the sentence “I bought and then read the book”: In this language, that sentence could be encompassed in a single verb, even though it technically involves two different verbs.

Ok, I lied: A brief note about verbal nuclei before I move on. All verbal nuclei belong to one of three categories: Personal, impersonal, and motional. These, in the end, are pretty much arbitrary: think about genders in the romance languages. But at least you can hazard a guess, in most cases! Also, all nuclei come in two “phases”, known as bound and unbound, having in many cases a completely different form for each. The bound form represents the imperfect aspect (such as “I go”), while the bound indicates the perfect aspect (like “I went”).

Example: Parsing Mmruszemogaikus

Like I mentioned off-handedly earlier, Mmruszemogaikus is actually a verb. Or, perhaps I should say “verbal”, in that it's a fully conjugated verb and thus practically a full sentence on its own. It may seem odd that the name of a language is a verb and not a noun; after all, a noun is a “person, place, or thing,” and a language is certainly a “thing,” right? Well, actually, this is a very common trait of Native American languages (and some African ones, too): expressing things which would seem to be “names” as states, instead. I've heard of groups of people who don't even have a name for their culture; rather, they have verbs which mean “to be of group X”. This is a similar case, and by the end of this section, you'll understand how this particular case works.

First, I'm going to parse Mmruszemogaikus for you in terms of the verbal template. If we separate it into its components and use 0 to indicate null values for places, it becomes:

0-mm-ru-0-sze-mog-0-0-ai-0-0-ku-0-s

Let's look at that morpheme by morpheme.

• 0 – (zero topic agreement – no other words in the sentence to agree with)

• mm – subject plurality marker, motion verb

• ru – habitual aspect, motion verb

• 0 – (no incorporated time word)

• sze – 2>3 action gradient

• mog – bound-phase nucleus for “to be speaking, communicating”

• 0 – (no serial verb incorporation)

• 0 – (no indirect object incorporation)

• ai – “around, about” directionality

• 0 – (no grade marker: normal grade)

• 0 – (no dynamic particle: stative meaning)

• ku – adverbial incorporation: the first person plural pronoun (“we, us”)

• 0 – (no number incorporation)

• s – object plurality agreement, motion verb

So! A smooth translation thus comes out as something like: “you have generally spoken to those around you like us.” More simply, it could be translated as “you speak like us,” but this leaves out a fair amount of meaning which is caught up in the verb itself.

There are a couple of things to notice. First, “to speak” is a verb of motion in Mmruszemogaikus, represented by the nucleus -su-/-mog- (the former being the unbound phase, the latter the bound one). That's why most of the other morphemes are listed as being for motion verbs, above. The tense morpheme, for instance, which here is -ru-, would be -ace- if this were either a personal or an impersonal verb.

Another thing to note is that this is a stative verb: it doesn't actually describe the action of speaking, but rather the state of being in communication.

A third and final thing to note is the use of incorporation: The pronoun ku, which means “we, us”, here is included in the body of the verb itself... as an adverb! The only thing that indicates that this is an adverb is that it comes in that particular space; one of the reasons that this verb uses the directionality marker -ai-, rather than leaving that space null, is that otherwise you wouldn't be able to tell from the word whether ku was functioning as the indirect object or an adverb: the word mmruszemogkus could be translated either as “you have generally spoken to us” or “you have generally spoken like us.”

Conclusions (aka, “What next?”)

Well, if you can't tell from what you just read, I'll tell you now: This language was a lot of fun to work on. At first, it was so mathematical as to be almost tedious, but when I put together my first group of example sentences, I got really excited about the whole polysynthetic thing. So much meaning! So few words! Such big words! You really have no idea. It reminds me of the first language I ever started work on, one of the very, very early versions of Toquay (before it was connected with the Quay, even), in which my entire goal was to be able to express at least three sentences of English in two words, a predicate and a nominal. It never got very far, but in some ways you could say that polysynthetic languages are my first love, when it comes to conlanging, a fact I had forgotten until I first said “mmremrangigimogiemapba”, meaning “They used to often see then approach then speak to us about it.”

I also have decided that directionality is about the coolest idea for verbal morphology I've ever attempted to use. At first, I was skeptical about how often it would get utilized in a language, but I soon realized that, taken metaphorically, directionality could become a permanent fixture of the verb; so long as it doesn't always have to be literal, its really every bit as useful as tense.

You will have noticed, of course, that nowhere have I mentioned nouns, or even multiple constituent sentences. Well, that's because I never got to them. At all. I had plans; topic agreement only functions when there are multiple words in the sentence. And yet, I never actually created that morphology, nor anything other than a simple outline, really. Which, of course, gives me an excuse to come back to this language, as soon as the three-month time limit is up! I wouldn't have it any other way.

What's next? Well, for my October family, I've picked an odd one: Visual/spatial. Languages in this family include ASL, JSL, RSL, and ISL... The American, Japanese, Russian, and International Sign Languages, respectively. Wish me luck!

-lelandpaul