Rówok

Nota bene, care lector, this is a work in progress

Rówok is an artlang created by Ioscius.

It is the only known daughter language of the as yet presumed language isolate Ruk.

Introduction

Setting

A typical day for a Rówok speaker.

Spoken by a rather reclusive community that lived high in the preindustrial Ural range, Ruk was an extremely isolating language, with largely monosyllabic words and next to no inflection of any sort. Rówok on the other hand is morphologically complex. This is the result of the Ruk speakers, after centuries of living mostly on their own, having underwent a period of dispersion and travel through lands inhabited by Finnic and Slavic speakers. This resulted in both a cultural explosion and a rapid evolution of the language, as affected by analogy with speakers picking up the languages of the peoples they mingled with.

Armed with new knowledge and now speaking a radically altered language, the nation moved back up to the hills, and Rówok represents a stage of the language's evolution in about the 3rd generation of leveling after their return to the homeland. It is mostly stable, but there are some forms still competing for widespread acceptance (cf., e.g., copula).

Rówok speakers live in a mountainous, forest environment with snow-cover nearly year round, with just a tiny bit of summer of which to speak. They are intimately dependent and symbiotic with their dogs, and there are thus many, many semantic elements of or relating to canines and canine/human interaction, not to mention a huge amount of idioms containing references to dogs. Lastly they are extremely mathematically, if not technically, advanced and utterly areligious.

Design goals

The main motive behind creating Rówok was to explore patient and agent relationships, and to employ and self-indulgently tweak and torture a complex and fully productive middle voice system.

Other motivating (syntactical) considerations were:

• trying a set of uniform case endings (barring vowel harmony and reduction) instead of the typical IE several declension patterns, so that all the case endings are recognizable throughout all grammatical numbers
• a vague attempt at trying vowel harmony in a conlang
• blurring the lines between adjective/substantive/verb, so the same root can easily be used in any of those categories, and implicitly an extensive participial system
• having a strict and productive dual in all applicable grammatical categories

Inspiration

Rówok’s creator placed the speech community where he did, wanting to steal liberally from both Finnic and Slavic semantics and grammar without having to justify himself to anyone. You could say the natlangs that had the greatest impact on the author’s aesthetics and inspirations were Latin, Ancient Greek, Pan-Slavic, Finnic and Sami, just a tiny bit of Basque, and enormous inspiration from the author’s absolute favorite, simply darling language that he’s never learned: Guarani.

Phonology

Orthography

Rówok is written using largely the Latin alphabet as extended for South Slavic, with the addition of <ŧ> for the voiceless interdental fricative [θ], and <đ> is used for the voiced interdental fricative [ð], instead of for [dʑ] in South Slavic.

There is also <ř> to indicate the same sound as in its inspiration in Czech, namely [r̝].

That gives us in Latin order:

a b d đ č e g i k l m n o p r ř s š t ŧ u v w y z ž

Or featurally grouped:

a, e, i, o, u

b, p, w, v

d, đ, t, ŧ

g, k, č

l, r, ř,

m, n

z, ž, s, š

y

Consonants

	Labial	Interdental	Alveolar	Postalveolar	Velar
Stops	p /p/ b /b/		t /t/ d /d/		k /k/ g /g/
Nasals	m /m/		n /n/		ng /ŋ/
Affricates				č /tʃ/
Fricatives	v /v/	ŧ /θ/ đ /ð/	s /s/ z /z/	š /ʃ/ ž /ʒ/
Liquids	w /w/		r /r/ l /l/	y /j/
Trill			ř /r̝/

Prosody

Stress

Every word has a primary stress accent, which tends toward the penult or antepenult, and the language is stabilizing to a system like the Latin one, just that the length of the syllable determining the penult or antepenult is based solely on position, as there are no phonemic long vowels in Rówok.

After the primary stress all successive vowels are reduced to schwa.

Morphology

Roots and principal parts

Nominal/verbal roots in Rowok are overwhelmingly triglyphs, with /a/ being the only vowel that can occur either initially in a root, or medially. All roots have an underlying "theme vowel" for lack of a better term in my attempt at vowel harmony, either /a/ or /o/, which shift to /e/ and /u/ in perfect verbal stems and many nouns derived from verbal stems. Additionally words with /w/ in any position have some stems where /w/ is reduced to [u]. The rules are simple for the majority of stems, and are as follows:

If /a/ appears in the root (by law only initially or medially), the theme vowel is automatically /a/. If the root is tri-consonantal and does not contain /w/, the theme vowel is also /a/. As a note, roots with medial /a/ are almost exclusively (specific) plants, and thus lack verbal roots, and thus have only two principal parts: nom/erg/voc, and oblique.

If /w/ appears medially or finally in a root, the theme vowel is /o/.

Exceptions:

• There are some rare, quad-consonantal roots. These are always of the the form C*XCC, where C* can only be /b/, /p/, /d/, /t/, /g/, /k/, /z/ and /s/, and X can be /w/, /l/, or /r/; ones with /w/ have /o/ as the theme vowel, and those with /l/ or /r/ have /a/.
• Roots with initial /w/ are very old stems and anything goes as far as theme vowels; this is the only word type whose vowel structure isn’t deducible from the form of the root and just need to be learned.

Principal parts

Principal parts; roots are listed in order of:

lemma - definition; finite verbal stem-, participial stem (de facto the nom/erg singular imperfect active participle), vocative stem+, ergative/nominative form, oblique stem-, adverbial form

+The similative and partitive cases are also based on the vocative stem, as well as adjectives.

As explained above in the phonology section, verbal stems tend to group in (C)VCC and participial stems in (C)V(C)C; nominative/ergative stems tend to be CVCVC, and oblique nominal stems CCVC if allowed by phonotactics (which I will have to elaborate on in a new post as a supplement to the first post on phonology). Unstressed epenthetics are inserted where needed, giving possible ^VCC(C/V) instead of expected CC(C/V), or CVCVC instead of expected CCVC.

Examples, starting with theme vowel [a]: medial /a/:

• pan - moss; pan, pna-

Triconsonantal roots with no /w/ and those with medial /w/ are the easiest. Both are very regular in their pattern.

With medial liquid:

• srn - claw; sarn-, srn, srna, sáran, srán-, sarná
• drb - fall/to fall/fallen; darb-, drb, drba, dárab, dráb-, darbá
• bls - snow; bals-, bls, blsa, bálas, blás-, balsá

non-liquid medial:

• bgs - bags-, bags, bágsa, bágas, bagás-+, bagsá
• zpt - zapt-, zapt, zápta, zápat, zpát-+, zaptá

+If the cluster is not allowed initially, like [bg], epenthetic /a/ is inserted. Further, /zp/ is definitely going to be realized as [zb]

• ddz - idle mischief/fiddling/to idle about; dadz-, dadz, dádza, dádaz, đaz-+, dadzá

+if a reduplicated letter can fricativize/affricatize, it will in the oblique nominal stem

• pps - imitation/to fake/artificial; paps-, paps, pápsa, pápas, pas-*, papsá
• if the reduplicated consonant cannot fricativize, it reduces so ppas=>pas (since /f/ is lacking in the inventory).

There are variations if the initial or medial consonant is /y/, where /y/=>/i/:

• dym - light/shine/bright; daym-, dim, díma, dáyam, dyamá-, dimá
• ryz - seed/to plant/incipient; rayz-, riz, ríza, ráyaz, ryazá-, rizá
• ygn - a cared for object/to rear/lovingly; yágn-, ígan, igána, yágan, igná-, yagná

Roots with initial /a/:

• azl - life; ázl-, zal, zála, azála, azalá-, zalá
• ayt - run; áyt-, yat, yáta, ayáta, ayatá-, yatá
• akb - count; ákb-, kab, kába, akába, akabá-, kabá

Now examples where /o/ is the theme vowel, starting with medial /w/:

• pwt - clearing/to clear/deobstructed; powt-, pot, put, pówot, pwót-, putú
• rwk - tongue/speak/of or relating to tongue or speech/language; rowk-, rok, ruk, rówok, orwók-, rukú+

+as a semantic tidbit, Rukú is how you would say "in Rowok", as opposed to rwógdo (tongue.inst) "(doing something) with your tongue", and Ruk is the name of Rowok's protolanguage.

final /w/:

• gdw - tool/to fashion/skillful; gódw-, gdo, gódu/gódw-+, gódow, gdów-, godú

+In roots with final /w/ the vocative is CóCu, while the similative and partitive are built off of CoCw

• lsw - running water/flow/fluent; lósw-, ólso, lósu/losw-, lósow, olswó-*, losú

A similar variation as above when a final /w/ root begins with /y/:

• ybw - still water; yóbw-, íbow, íbu, yóbow, ibwó-, ibú

Cw/r/lCC:

• p(w)zn - non potable water, to flow destructively, to pollute; powzn-, pozn, pwózno, powózon, pzón-, puznú
• brds - to lie, fib, in the middle to bullshit; bards-, bards, brádsa, barádas-, brdás-, bradsá

The occasional initial /w/, some a-stems, some o-stems, lots of /u/ even in imperfect stems and even in words that otherwise have /a/ as their theme vowel:

• wst - sky; wásta-, wast, ústa, awásata, áwsat-, ustá
• wkd - kill; úkdo-, úkod, úkud, wókod, úkod-, kudú

Derivational morphology

Rówok has quite a bit of derivational morphology.

Aspect and tense

There are 2 aspectual infixes and two tense infixes. The language shows main aspect differentiation by ablaut /a/=>/e/ and /o/=>/u/. In the following X represents a dummy vowel in infixes, determined by the vowel quality of the word.

The aspectual infixes are frequentative -ts- and inchoative -sp-. The tense aspects are future -kXy-, and past -rX-. They can theoretically all together be infixed onto a verb, or participle. Grouping the tense aspects gives a special meaning, depending on which comes

so an example with the imperfect active participle of the root ayt- (to run) "yát", meaning a running thing when used in apposition, or a runner when used alone:

• yát - a runner
• yáts - a frequent runner (yát+ts=>yáts)
• yátasp - a beginning runner
• yátkay - a future runner
• yátra - a former runner

now combining:

• yátsasp - a beginning frequent runner
• yatkáyra - a future ex runner (someone who will take it up and quit)
• yatrákay - an ex future runner (someone who showed talent, perhaps, but never lived up to potential)

most perverse:

• yatsaspakáyra - a person who will begin to frequently run but then stop
• yatsasparákay - a person who began to run frequently and then stopped

so the case endings are added to the ends of these forms, just as the verb endings would be added to the end as well, cf:

aytaín (they run, are running) => aytsaín (they frequently run), aytaspaín (they begin running), aytraín (they ran in the past), aytkayaín (they will be running in the future), and of course the possible but ungodly aytsasprakayaín (they were beginning to be about to be running frequently but then didn't)

Diminutives and augmentatives

Diminutives and augmentatives (one of which functions as the comparative as well) are formed through root mutation and suffixation, respectively. As with most all derivational morphology they can be applied to almost all lexical categories.

Diminutives

Diminutives are formed by changing the root’s rightmost possible consonant into its corresponding fricative or affricate according to the chart below. X indicates that the phoneme does not have a possible fricativized variant, e.g. p=>X, since /f/ is lacking in Rówok. In this event the next rightmost consonant is fricativized.

Additionally more than one consonant can be fricativized, for a sort of double diminutive effect, which indicates either extreme smallness or lends a cutesy feel. Cf. root bls-, bálas (snow) => bálaš (snowflake) => varašín (the finest snowflakes you ever saw; powder); or root mwk-, mówok (dog) => mówoč (puppy *one of maaaany words for puppy) => móvoč (cute little puppy doggie)

Augmentatives

Augmentatives are formed through infixes between the root and the case or conjugation endings. In the following /X/ is a dummy vowel determined by the quality of the verb.

The most common are:

• -yXš- = great, grand, noble, relatively large (also functions as a comparative)
• -nXč- = the biggest, greatest

Examples:

• -yXš-
  • root mwk, "dog" => mwókyoš, "a big dog"
  • root ayt, "run" => ayátyaš, "a long run"

• -nXč-
  • root mwk, "dog" => múknuč, "the greatest dog you ever had"
  • root ayt, "run" => áytnač, "a marathon"

Syntax

Constituent order

Word order in Rówok tends in normal circumstances toward SOV, but it's really whatevs.