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Rówok: Difference between revisions
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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. | 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|copula]]). | 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|copula]], [[#Partitive|partitive]]). | ||
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. | 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=== | ===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. | The main motive behind creating Rówok was to explore [[#Agency|patient and agent]] relationships, and to employ and self-indulgently tweak and torture a complex and fully productive [[#Middle voice|middle voice]] system. | ||
Other motivating (syntactical) considerations were: | Other motivating (syntactical) considerations were: | ||
* trying a set of uniform case endings (barring vowel harmony and | * trying a set of uniform [[#Ratio casuum|case endings]] (barring vowel harmony and allophony) instead of the typical IE several declension patterns, so that all the case endings are recognizable throughout all grammatical [[#Number|numbers]] | ||
* a vague attempt at trying vowel harmony in a conlang | * a vague attempt at trying [[#Vowel harmony|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 | * blurring the lines between [[#Adjectives|adjective]]/[[#Nouns|substantive]]/[[#Verbs|verb]], so the same [[#Roots and principle parts|root]] can easily be used in any of those categories, and implicitly an extensive [[#Participles|participial]] system | ||
* having a strict and productive dual in all applicable grammatical categories | * having a strict and productive [[#Dual|dual]] in all applicable grammatical categories | ||
===Inspiration=== | ===Inspiration=== | ||
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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. | 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== | ==Phonology== | ||
Rówok's phonology is fairly conservative, a result primarily of the author's desire to be able to actually speak it. | Rówok's phonology is fairly conservative, a result primarily of the author's desire to be able to actually speak it. | ||