So you may have noticed that there was a gap of over two months between the last actual conlanging post and this one. I wish that was an error. But schoolwork, personal projects, and the sheer time and energy that I used in this step of the process combined to make this take forever.See, the personal affixes in protolang 1 had to accomplish these things:
- Hit the phonaesthetic of language 1a
- Sound somewhat euphonous in language 1b
- Not get boring in either language even when used multiple times in every sentence
- Feel vaguely naturalistic
This, unsurprisingly, turned out to be very hard. It didn’t help that my primary reference, Ojibwe, has an incredibly confusing verb conjugation system, where it looks like each combination of focus, non-focus and direct/inverse affix is fused together into its own circumfix with only a tangential relationship to its component parts. However, after three failed drafts and much hair-pulling, I somehow stumbled upon this draft, which I ended up liking:
| Singular | Plural | |
| 1st | si-, -s | si-…-k, -sik |
| 2nd | ɕu-, -ɕ | ɕu-…-k, -ɕuk |
| 3rd prox | ∅-, -∅ | xi-, -x |
|
3rd obv |
da-, -d | diː-, -di |
| 3rd inan | dʑu-, -dʑ | |
| indefinite |
na-, -n |
|
Some notable features:
- The first and second person plural prefixes are actually circumfixes. This was based off what I could understand from the Ojibwe system for intransitive verbs.
- In the third person prefixes, you can kind of see a potential -i plural affix that might have been in play.
- The suffixes don’t have vowels on them (except for the suffix whose corresponding prefix is long). Perhaps some word-final vowel deletion happened after protolanguage 0.
The relativiser prefixes are also done:
|
Relative singular |
va- | |
| Relative plural | vax- | |
| Relative inanimate | vadʑ- | |
These forms came fairly transparently from a relative pronoun, va-, + the original prefixes.
So, those are the affixes. This was shorter than usual, because this was the last logical breaking point before I get into a bunch of detail which would have made this far too long. To make up for that, the next installment will be part 8.5 – a continuation of this one where I’ll show what these will look like in the descendant languages, as well as laying out how I’ll write the phonemes for vowel harmony.