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Common (na Xafen): Difference between revisions
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The structure of Common is very pro-drop with many elements in specific roles being able to be dropped very readily. Verbs are unique for declaring their core argument structure without agreeing with any of their arguments. Old Common had an abstract/concrete gender distinction, but this was lost in the transition to modern High Common. | The structure of Common is very pro-drop with many elements in specific roles being able to be dropped very readily. Verbs are unique for declaring their core argument structure without agreeing with any of their arguments. Old Common had an abstract/concrete gender distinction, but this was lost in the transition to modern High Common. | ||
Common is notable for a very specific phrase structure with both head first and head last qualities. Every phrase has a left head that carries all of the grammatical information and a right head that carries the most salient semantic information. | |||
Common defines its own linguistic concepts and forces people to deal with them. Trafalgar is often at pains when to point out where Common is making up its own categories and terminology that they regard as nonstandard or incorrect. This is seen particularly with parts of speech. The parts of speech of Common as determiners (mandatory articles that introduce noun phrases and mandatory auxiliary verbs that introduce verb phrases), terms (a collapsed class of nouns and verbs that get their "noun-ness" or "verb-ness" from the determiner they are used with), modifiers (adjectives and adverbs), conjunctions, and interjections. | Common defines its own linguistic concepts and forces people to deal with them. Trafalgar is often at pains when to point out where Common is making up its own categories and terminology that they regard as nonstandard or incorrect. This is seen particularly with parts of speech. The parts of speech of Common as determiners (mandatory articles that introduce noun phrases and mandatory auxiliary verbs that introduce verb phrases), terms (a collapsed class of nouns and verbs that get their "noun-ness" or "verb-ness" from the determiner they are used with), modifiers (adjectives and adverbs), conjunctions, and interjections. | ||
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Peter K. Davidson claims to have followed a naturalistic process to create the Common language, but Trafalgar, for one, clearly doubts this was actually the case. They seem to think that Davidson gave Common some attributes designed to make it look like it was created in a naturalistic fashion (i.e., evolved from a constructed protolanguage following the principles of historical linguistics to create a language that looks like the product of normal linguistic evolution). Davidson died during civil unrest in 2031 at the age of 44 and his husband followed not long after, and it appears few of his personal notes survived. Davidson's death marks the end of the fan- and creator-driven growth of the language and the transition into Common being more the possession of young, radical Globalists who had significant overlap with the ''Hillbillies'' fan base and who used it as a kind of code speech. | Peter K. Davidson claims to have followed a naturalistic process to create the Common language, but Trafalgar, for one, clearly doubts this was actually the case. They seem to think that Davidson gave Common some attributes designed to make it look like it was created in a naturalistic fashion (i.e., evolved from a constructed protolanguage following the principles of historical linguistics to create a language that looks like the product of normal linguistic evolution). Davidson died during civil unrest in 2031 at the age of 44 and his husband followed not long after, and it appears few of his personal notes survived. Davidson's death marks the end of the fan- and creator-driven growth of the language and the transition into Common being more the possession of young, radical Globalists who had significant overlap with the ''Hillbillies'' fan base and who used it as a kind of code speech. | ||
The language underwent extensive evolution between its creation in ca. 2021 and its adoption as the official language of the New World Order in 2043. It underwent phonological and grammatical changes, especially the loss of gender and the re-purposing of the gender agreement morphology to mark a definite/indefinite distinction on nouns and to take over the realis/irrealis marking on verbs. | The language underwent extensive evolution between its creation in ca. 2021 and its adoption as the official language of the New World Order in 2043. It underwent phonological and grammatical changes, especially the loss of gender and the re-purposing of the gender agreement morphology to mark a definite/indefinite distinction on nouns and to take over the realis/irrealis marking on verbs. It also coined and borrowed a large amount of new vocabulary. | ||
''Na Akkatemi na Xafen Zisse'', the "Common Language Academy," or "AXZ," was created in 2043 to codify the Common language.[https://webconlang.infiniterecursion.ca/article/common/102/] Under the leadership of David Chang, the formal language today known as "High Common" was codified in a way that attempted to both make it standard and universal, but within that to keep it as close to the actual speech of elite speakers as possible. This had the effect of formalizing the changes away from Old Common, the language of ''Hillbillies''. The AXZ was tasked with hiring an army of experts in every field imaginable coining a huge amount of new vocabulary and terminology to make Common a fully competent replacement for English. | |||
Since roughly the 2060s, changes to official High Common have slowed down, and at the same time, adoption of the language has grown exponentially. Common is the language of education and public life, and parents who are speakers of other languages will often speak only Common to their children, so their children will grow up as native speakers and obtain social and economic advantages. At the same time, the status of other languages has cratered, and English has fallen particularly far outside the protective oasis of Britain.[https://webconlang.infiniterecursion.ca/article/common/108/] | |||
===Sociolinguistics=== | |||
Common has one main official form, High Common, which is regulated by the AXZ and which has only minor global variation among educated speakers. The is the form of Common used in the media and in writing and taught in school. In addition, every locality has a dialect of Low Common. Low Common has huge geographic variation in phonology, vocabulary and grammar, and typically strong substratum language influences. | |||
The elites are all native Common-speakers and speak High Common. Below them, the professional classes have become mostly Common-speaking - those who aren't native speakers all speak it fluently as a second language, as this is an absolute necessity to occupy the higher socioeconomic strata. They also speak High Common with more local Low Common accents and influences. | |||
The lower classes are less likely to speak Common natively and more likely to speak it as a second language, and are more likely to speak Low Common. | |||
Low Common and High Common are actually a dialect continuum, where High Common is completely identifiable, but shading into innumerable Low Common varieties all over the world. Absolutely all Common speakers understand both High Common and the local variety of Low Common, and even elites may slip into some local Low Common in unguarded moments. Typically everyone simply speaks to everyone else in the form of Common they are most comfortable with. People attempting to climb socially will often try to affect a more High Common form of speech, and a Low Common speaker when traveling to an area with a different variety of Low Common may have trouble being understood and may try to speak better High Common in an attempt to bridge the gap. | |||
==Phonology== | |||
== | |||
===Consonants=== | ===Consonants=== | ||
===Vowels=== | ===Vowels=== | ||
=== | ===Orthography=== | ||
===Phonotactics=== | ===Phonotactics=== | ||
====Stress==== | |||
====Prosody and Intonation==== | |||
===Morphophonology=== | ===Morphophonology=== | ||
==Morphology== | ==Morphology== | ||