Caryatic

"Sanakas" Upā-a pid âdi-ra???

Caryatic was dreamed up by Iustinus in between taking notes for Andrew Sihler's "Comparative Grammar: Indo-European Phonology," in fall of 1997. It was first committed to computer on Dec. 11 of that year. Work continued on and off until late 2003. The language remained largely dormant until 2013, when work resumed, albeit at an absurdly glacial pace.

Inspiration

The original inspiration was to "reverse engineer" the reconstruction of Indo-European from its daughter languages—which felt like an amazing new idea at the time, but which I now know as one of the most common sorts of conlang. I had actually attempted this a couple times before (ðɛ̃ʃwa ɛ̃nɛ̃nõta, "Indo-Tonal), but never with the depth of knowledge I had acquired from my graduate-level Historical Linguistics classes.

Like most of my conlangs, it draws much inspiration from the classical languages, but has broader influence from the rest of the Indo-European family. The three-vowel system was at least partially inspired by Sanskrit's propensity for the phoneme /a/.

Goals

Tai Kāriātās τὰς Καρυάτιδας sasaihant-ra?

Caryatic is a deliberate break from my previous conlanging work. Seeking to go in the opposite direction, I gave it a small phonetic inventory, few cases, and a name right from the start. In the real world, the name "Caryatic" was certainly inspired by the word caryatid, but its in-story etymology is unclear. The speakers of the language are sometimes referred to by the Pseudo-Latin name "Caryates" (implying Caryatic *kāriātās). It is likely that caryatids exist in-story, and quite plausible that they were invented by the Caryates. Perhaps this is a coincidence. (Note as well that the Greek word contains plain stops, while the name of Caryatic uses aspirated ones.)

Involvement of other conlangers

Among other conlangers, the following have been involved in some way:

• David Salo was probably the first conlanger ever to see the language. He was the earliest fan and critic of the language, and, furthermore, enjoyed proposing material for it. He submitted two proposals for the writing system, and at least one map. None of these ever became official, though I had intended to use them as a basis for whatever did.
• Eric Christopherson was another early fan. He received a letter (snail-mail, if I remember right) containing a number of my language files with a cover-letter describing them all. This seems to have been around fall 1998. After various system upgrades and harddrive crashes resulted in barely legible files he even created his own version of the Caryatic file, which corrects some errors and gathers some materials that I had missed.
• Nicomega probably first learned of the language in the mid 20-aughts, but never got to see all the materials. He was enjoying trying to piece things together from the fragments I gave him, and as of April 2014 was even working on a "Caryatic Report," writing up a description of the language, like some sort of scholar working from limited ancient materials. He therefore is simultaneously excited and disappointed to see me posting a fullish description here.

Evaluation

Unlike many conlangers, I do not like to revise my languages. So if there are problems, I tend to be stuck with them. Here are some issues with Caryatic:

• I may have overdone the small case system.
• The tense/aspect system is a bit confused.
• A lot of the sound changes seem wildly implausible.
• I was not very careful about the ordering of the soundlaws, resulting in many contradictions.
• David Salo has suggested that it is unrealistic that the stops are never voiced under any conditions. (Perhaps I should make a rule that the unaspirated stops retain voicing when adjacent to a sonorant? In any case this is not the rule as things stand.)

Setting

Caryatic is from a thus-far still unnamed conworld, based loosely on the ancient Mediterranean. The premise is that this world has the same language families as earth, but different daughter languages. The following languages are known to exist:

• Indo-European
  • Samasian
    • • Caryatic (Detailed)
      • Bataic (sketched)
    • • Aduric (roughly sketched)
      • Melavian (roughly sketched)
  • • Elerain (sketched)

• Afro-Asiatic
  • Semitic
    • Safuntic (named only)
  • Timuric (pretty much identical to Ancient Egyptian, since reconstructing the vowels makes it something of a conlang in itself)

In the context of this world, Caryatic roughly takes the place of Greek and Latin, Elerain that of Latin and Germanic. Safuntic takes the place of Phoenician, Timuric that of Egyptian.

Phonology

Orthography

Caryatic is believed to be written in an alphabetical system, which indicates vowel quantities. Two proposals for this system were submitted by David Salo, but both have been lost. There is some hope they might some day be recovered (perhaps with the proposed maps he drew).

The standard transcription works as follows:

Transcription	IPA
a	[a]
ā, â	[ɑː]
b	[p]
d	[t]
f	[f ~ v]
g	[k]
h	[x ~ ɣ]
i	[i], [j]
ī, î	[iː]
k	[kʰ]
l	[ɫ]
m	[m]
n	[n]
p	[pʰ]
r	[rʲ], [ʀʲ]
s	[s ~ z]
t	[tʰ]
u	[u], [w]
ū, û	[uː]
v, ϕ	[ϕ ~ β]
y	[j]

Consonants

	Bilabial	Labiodental	Alveolar	Palatal	Velar
Stops	p [pʰ] b [p]		t [tʰ] d [t]		k [kʰ] g [k]
Fricatives	v, ϕ [ϕ ~ β]	f [f ~ v]	s [s ~ z]		h [x ~ ɣ]
Nasal	m [m]		n [n]
Glide	u [w]			i, y [j]

Allophonic variation

• Voicing:
  1. Vowels are always voiced. Stops are always voiceless. Resonants default to voiced, and fricatives to voiceless.
  2. Resonants lose their voicing when adjacent to stops.
  3. Fricatives are voiced between voiced sounds.

• S-Assimilation:
  • Alveolars and nasals are dropped before an /s/, usually without compensatory lengthening. Note, however, that when an s is removed [see Sigmatization below] these segments normally reappear.

• Sigmatization:
  • An aspirate stop preceded by an /s/ deaspirates, and the /s/ drops with compensatory lengthening of the preceding vowel. (The transcription sometimes—albeit inconsistently—marks this by using a circumflex instead of a macron on the lengthened vowel. However, more often than not, circumflex is used ubiquitously)
  • While this process does occur across word boundaries, note that if a word begins with /s/ followed immediately by a stop, it is often lexicalized in the asigmatic form, and compensatory lengthening is unlikely to occur. Furthermore, the dropping of the s at the end of a word often allows elements which had dropped [i.e. alveolars and nasals] to reassert themselves.

• Nasal assimilation: [Note that these sound laws are, for the most part, not reflected in the standard orthography]
  1. Nasals drop before homoörganic sounds, with nasalization of the previous vowel. (For the purpose of this rule, /n/ counts as homoörganic to both alveolar and velar sounds)
  2. Nasals assimilate to the place of the following sound.

Vowels

	Front	Central	Back
High	ī, î [iː] i [i]		ū, û [uː] u [u]
Low		ā, â [ɑː] a [a]

Allophonic variation

• Hiatus
  • Two vowels in hiatus (i.e. ones that are adjacent, but do not form a diphthong) are separated by an epenthetic [ɦ]. This is not reflected in the standard orthography.

Accent

The accent is probably pitch-based, rather than stress-based, but this is uncertain. It is assigned as follows:

1. Accent falls on the long vowel nearest the beginning of the word (not counting clitics).
2. If there are no long vowels, accent falls on the first syllable.

Morphology

Nouns

Nouns have three cases: nominative, genitive, and accusative (or, more accurately, "oblique.) In addition to the radical reduction of cases, case endings tend to undergo irregular sound changes that greatly shorten them. This causes nouns to behave in a fairly unpredictable manner—it can be very difficult indeed to guess a noun's declension class from the nominative alone, far more so than in, say, Latin.

o-stems

This is the most common declension class.

Masculine

		ups "wolf"	ākus "horse"	anitus "breath	nis "nest"
Singular	Nominative	ups	ākus	anitus	nis
	Genitive	upah	ākuah	anitlah	nisdah
	Oblique	up	āku	anitu	nisd
Plural	Nominative	upās	ākuās	anitlās	nisdās
	Genitive	upam	ākuam	anitlam	nisdam
	Oblique	upas	ākuas	anitlas	nisdas

dīus subtype

Dīus "god" declines somewhat irregularly and is marked by its genitive in -uh:

		dīus "god"
Singular	Nominative	dīus
	Genitive	dīuh
	Oblique	dīu
Plural	Nominative	dīūs
	Genitive	dīūm
	Oblique	dīvas

The neuter noun pāpu "wheel" has, for unknown reasons, the genitive pāpluh. It is unknown if it shares the other irregularities of dīus.

Neuter

yug yugah yoke miti mitrah murder kavi kaulah staff pātās pātnah winged creature

		yug "yoke"	miti "murder"	kavi "staff	pātās "winged creature"
Singular	Nominative	yug	miti	kavi	pātās
	Genitive	yugah	mitrah	kaulah	pātnah
	Oblique	yug	miti	kavi	pātās
Plural	Nominative	yugā	mitrā	kaulā	pātnā
	Genitive	yugam	mitram	kaulam	pātnam
	Oblique	yugā	mitrā	kaulā	pātnā

Verbs

Regular verbs have three principal parts:

1. The present indicative stem
2. The perfect indicative stem
3. The perfect participle stem

Four tenses have been described at this point: the present, the imperfect the perfect and the aorist. Formally, the present and imperfect are formed off the present stem (though the imperfect has the "augment" prefix a-), and the perfect and aorist off the perfect stem. Conversely the present and perfect use the Indo-European "primary" endings, and the imperfect and aorist the "secondary" endings. Functionally, this allegedly reflects the combination of time and aspect, as follows:

	Imperfective aspect	Perfective aspect
Present time	"Present" tense	"Perfect" tense
Past time	"Imperfect" tense	"Aorist" tense

However, it is not clear that this theory holds up when compared to the existing corpus.

To Carry
Present stem		Present		Imperfect
		Singular	Plural	Singular	Plural
	1	fāru	fārāms	afāram	afārama	1
	2	fārasi	fāratis	afāras	afārata	2
	3	fārī	fāranti	afāra	afārant	3
Perfect stem		Perfect		Aorist
		Singular	Plural	Singular	Plural
	1	fafāru	fafārāms	fafāram	fafārama	1
	2	fafārasi	fafāratis	fafāras	fafārata	2
	3	fafārī	fafāranti	fafāra	fafārant	3
	Primary endings			Secondary endings

Enclitic Verbs

A couple verbs have enclitic forms in the present tense, which are used in subordinate clauses. Thus: kūs āsi-ga "you are a fish," but kūs âtti "that you are a fish." Thus far, only two such verbs are known, both of which are basic irregular verbs.

To Be
	Singular		Plural
	Tonic	Enclitic	Tonic	Enclitic
1	ā́smi-	-āmmi	ismā́s-	-ānnas
2	ā́si-	-ātta	idā́-	-ādus
3	ā́di-	-ādi	isā́nti-	-ādi

To Want
	Singular		Plural
	Tonic	Enclitic	Tonic	Enclitic
1	vā́l(i)mi-	-vāmma	vū́mās-	-vūnnas
2	vā́l(i)si-	-vālta	vū́tā-	-vūltus
3	vā́l(i)ti-	-vālti	vū́lānti-	-vūti

Syntax

Constituent order

Caryatic is strongly, nearly relentlessly, head-final. Basic word order is, therefor, SOV.

Noun phrase

Noun phrases go in the following order:

({Article}) ({Adective Phrase} or {genitive Noun Phrase}) Noun

Verb phrase

Verb phrases go in the following order

({indirect object} or {Prepositional Phrase}) ({direct object} or {dependent clause}) Verb

Sentence phrase

Main clauses end in sentence determiner, of which the following are known:

-ga		declarative
-ra		interrogative
-ya		imperative
-dā		exclamative

Thus:

• Kūs āsi-ga "You are a fish."
• Kūs āsi-ra? "Are you a fish?"
• Kūs āsi-ya! "Be a fish!"
• Kūs āsi-dā! "You are a fish!"

There appears to be a particle -an for hypotheticals, but its usage is at present unclear.

Dependent clauses

Dependent clauses do not use sentence determiners, and are marked by the clitic form of the verb, if it has one.

Example texts

Letter to The Salos

Sent to David and Dorothea Salo, this letter s actually a slightly modified version of one originally written for Andrew Sihler. Both versions were likely sent in early January 1998.

Yūdīs Masfīus^[SIC] tās Salūnas-ad

Ti taisam Kaimānam Pirâda-an āsmi. Sas vaiks anāï “Hell” nāma-sānt ādi-ga. Au sī pirâdā a “upānā” au kavānā âdi-ga. Ti mama dimba-sa garfu-ga. Tād āh nāma “Kāriātikā” âdi-ga. Igu tua ī-sa, tāssānt ī “Indaurupayā” âdi, garfu-ga. Tū pid hāsi-ra? Tū tī dimba gankasi-ra?

Justin Mansfield to the Salos

I am in the Cayman Islands. There is a town here named "Hell." But this island is not infernal but heavenly. I am writing you in my language. Its name is "Caryatic." I am writing you in it, because it is Indo-European. What do you think? Do you understand this language?

Pronunciation:

Yūdīs Masfīus tās Salūnas-ad

[ˈjuːtiːz masˈfiːws tʰɑːssaˈłuːnazat]

Ti taisam Kaimānam Pirâda-an āsmi.

[tʰitʰajzãŋ̊kʰajˈmɑːnã pʰiˈrʲɑːtahan ˈazmika]

Sas vaiks anāï “Hell" nāma-sānt âdi-ga.

[sas ϕajkʰs aˈnɑːɦi] “Hell” [ˈnɑːmazɑ̃ːt ˈɑːtika]

Au sī pirâdā a “upānā” au kavānā âdi-ga.

[aw ˈziː pʰiˈrʲɑːta ɦa ɦuˈpʰɑːnaː ɦaw kʰaˈβɑːnɑː ˈɦɑːtika]

Ti mama dimba-sa garfu-ga.

[tʰiˈmama ˈtĩpaza ˈkarʲvuka]

Tād āh nāma “Kāriātikā” âdi-ga.

[tʰɑːˈtɑːɣ ˈnɑːma ˈkʰɑːrʲjɑːtʰiˌkʰɑː ˈɦɑːtika]

Igu tua ī-sa, tāssānt ī “Indaurupayā” âdi, garfu-ga.

[ˈiku tʰwa ˈɦiːza tʰɑːssɑ̃t iː ɦĩtawrʲupʰaˈjɑːɦaːti ˈkarʲvuka]

Tū pid hāsi-ra?

[tʰuː pʰit ˈxɑːzirʲa]

Tū tī dimba gankasi-ra?

[tʰuː tʰiː ˈtĩpa ˈkãkʰazirʲa]

The above text, read by David Salo: File:David Salo reads the Epistle to Sihler.wav

On Dragons

The original file notes that this is "[f]rom a manuscript found in the Dîvakunis Archives at Bâtavaiks," which implies that this is an elementary text for Bataic speakers learning Caryatic. This may explain the inconsistent marking of sigmatization.

Dikântam-anā
[tiˈkʰɑ̃ːtʰamaˌnɑː]

1. Ti taisâm tâmasram dikântam gânâsâ pâmpâ isânti-ga.
   [tʰitʰajzɑːn̥tʰɑːmazrʲan̥ tʰiˈkʰɑ̃ːtʰaŋ̊ ˈkɑːnɑːzɑː ˈpʰɑ̃ːpʰɑː ɦiˈzɑ̃ːtʰika]
2. Sâ âh anitus^[SIC] pâtâkâ praûs âdi-ga.
   [sɑːˈɦɑːɣ ˈanitʰuː ˈpɑːtʰɑːkʰɑː pʰr̥ʲaˈɦuːz ˈɑːtika]
3. Sâ âlfs dikâs^[SIC] ti snaiva-a dâmâî-ga.
   [sɑːˈɦɑːɫfs tiˈkʰɑ̃ː tiˈznajβaɦa ˈtɑːmɑːɦiːka]
4. Sâ nâks dikâs^[SIC] tis guarkan bântias-a raudî-ga,
   [sɑːˈnɑːkʰs tiˈkʰɑ̃ː tisˈkwar̥ʲkam ˈpɑːn̥tʰjaza rʲawˈtiːka]
5. Is sama siyinkâ akuarin âghârfî-pâ, [............] pâpi-ga.
   [is sama zijĩ'kʰɑː ɦakʰwarʲin ˈakʰwarʲin ˈɑːkxɑːrʲviːpɑː] ...... [ˈpʰɑːpʰika]
6. Â, Tâ dârva-ân dâmâî dikânta, tâ hâl dikânta pîrîbâkyu-ya!
   [ɑː tʰɑːˈtɑːrʲvaɦɑ̃ː ˈtɑːmɑːɦiː tiˈkʰɑ̃ːtʰa tʰɑːˈɣɑːɫ̥ tiˈkʰɑ̃ːtʰa ˈpʰiːrʲiːpɑːkʰjuja]
7. Sâ âh anitû di-ta numanâ, tân-da âpa bâaisî.
   [sɑːˈɦaːɣ aniˈtʰuː titʰa numaˈnɑː tɑ̃ːta 'ɦɑːpʰa 'pɑːɦajziː]
8. Au sâ flaus dikâs^[SIC] tis savas sinktuas^[SIC] tâtikas-ân dâmâî-ga.
   [aw zɑː'vlaws tikɑ̃ː tisˈsaβas 'sĩkʰtʰwɑː 'tʰɑːtʰikʰazɑ̃ː 'tɑːmɑːɦiːka]
9. ...............................

On Dragons

1. There are five kinds of evil dragons.
2. The white dragon lives in the snow
3. Its breath is deadly frost.
4. The black dragon lurks in muddy swamps.
5. It spits out a slick black acid, and eats [............].
6. Beware the dragon that lives in the forest, the green dragon!
7. Its breath burns the eyes and the lungs.
8. But the blue dragon dwells in the hot sandy deserts.
9. [It shoots a bolt of lightning from its mouth.]

External Links

• Caryatic on CALS