Now that I’ve thoroughly embarrassed myself by showing you the first (and worst) conlang
I’ve ever made, I think it’s only appropriate for me to demonstrate that I have, in fact,
improved since then (at least slightly).
Today we’re looking at Oqolaawak, a language I first began work on in 2015, and that went
through three different iterations before I got it to a place I like.
Of all my conlangs, it’s the oldest one that I feel still lives up to standards I
hold myself to today.
Now, there are many languages within the Oqolaawak family, but we’ll be focusing on the classical
dialect for simplicity.
Classical Oqolaawak is a predominantly fusional, strongly head-initial and consistently head-marking
language, featuring object-marking, noun classes, and a love of idiomatic and figurative language.
Or to put it a different way: Ao Oqolaawak etew Oqolaayok ezooa Imaqaayu
she maweilomanko makipiiyamanku hlakhamak tsulikhim.
Qumi ache kikwi fakhiiyu peypeytek mafi hamaat shikhawanna, shache palquuaw pe essooao she
mihlaawi, imi niya tsaaquy maatete niya etew tsotsonwa, qoyteewa, ihlatunwa, tatajwe.
As you might have been able to tell from that sample, Classical Oqolaawak’s phonetic inventory
includes the uvular stop, the lateral fricative, and no phonemic voiced obstruents, although
sibilant fricatives are voiced when occurring between voiced segments.
While Proto-Oqolaawak had an exclusively open syllable structure, Classical Oqolaawak allows
the occasional consonant cluster, geminates, and word final codas.
Of all of Oqolaawak’s phonotactic rules, the most notable are its two concomitant harmony systems.
Oqolaawak features a pretty simple vowel harmony system based on height: High and low vowels
cannot co-occur within the same word, with a couple of exceptions.
This means that most affixes have two forms, one for stems that contain high vowels, and
one for those with low vowels.
However, the vowel [a] is considered neutral and can coexist with either set.
Oqolaawak also features Sibilant harmony, meaning that, among sibilants, alveolars and
palato-alveolars cannot appear within the same word, and so, just like with the vowels,
the realization of any sibilants in a given affix will depend on the phonology of the stem.
Stress in Classical Oqolaawak is based on vowel mora.
An open syllable with a short vowel is treated as a single mora, while a syllable is considered
two mora if it contains a long vowel or diphthong OR is closed, and is considered
three mora if it contains a long vowel or diphthong AND is closed.
Stress always falls on the third mora from the end of the word.
Oqolaawak uses the iilwa script, which is most often written in ink with an animal-hair
brush on parchment.
In terms of system, its probably easiest to think of it as an alphabet with an inherent
vowel, and the simplest way to wrap your head around that is with a little history.
Back in the days of Proto-Oqolaawak, The Oqolaayo first learned to write from the K’ama peoples,
who had already had their own writing system for quite a while.
Their script had started out as a logography written by carving glyphs into trees with
obsidian knives, but eventually it simplified into an abjad using logographs to represent
the first sound of the word they depicted.
When the Oqolaayo first borrowed the abjad, they already had access to ink, dyes, and
other pigments, so it wasn’t long before the script was adapted for being written on
papyrus scrolls, which resulted in the distinctive orthogonal shapes of the Ts’ap’u-K’ama
abjad becoming more curvilinear.
However, in adapting the Ts’ap’u-K’ama system to their own language, the Oqolaayo
faced a number of technical challenges.
First and foremost, Oqolaawak and Ts’ap’u-K’ama are entirely unrelated languages and thus
have very, very different phonologies.
Ts’ap’u-K’ama has only three vowels, which its abjad had no difficulty representing,
since [i] could also be written with [j], and [u] could be written [w].
And since Ts’ap’u-K’ama doesn’t allow consonant clusters, the speakers know that
whenever two consonants are written next to each other, there must be an unwritten [a]
vowel in there.
Oqolaawak, however, has five vowels, so when it borrowed the Ts’ap’u-K’ama system,
it had no way of representing [e] and [o].
However, Ts’ap’u-K’ama’s consonant inventory is much larger than Oqolaawak’s,
and includes some much more exotic sounds.
Since the Oqolaayo had no need to represent these sounds in their script, they decided
to repurpose these characters for the few sounds in Oqolaawak that Ts’ap’u-K’ama
doesn’t provide symbols for, like using the /t’/ glyph for /hl/, /hh/ for [o] and
/q’/ for [e].
However, they still kept the character for the [a] vowel implicit, as was done in Ts’ap’u-K’ama,
which they could afford to do since Proto-Oqolaawak was also exclusively CV.
The only exception to this is if the word begins with an [a].
Ts’ap’u-K’ama simply didn’t bother writing an initial [a], but the Oqolaayo felt
this was necessary to transcribe, so they used the character for the glottal stop, which
in Proto-Oqolaawak wasn’t phonemic word-initially, and later on in history it was lost entirely,
so this character represents [a], but only at the beginning of words, everywhere
else, [a] is unwritten.
This system worked fine… for a while, but then, in the transition to Classical Oqolaawak,
the language went through a period of vowel loss, so now, when two consonants are written
next to each other, it’s unclear whether they form a cluster or if there’s an unwritten
/a/ between them.
To resolve this ambiguity, the scribes decided to introduce a diacritic that tells the reader
that the consonant does not, in fact, have a vowel following it.
So the result of all this is a system where an individual consonant is assumed to be followed
by an [a] unless overtly followed by another vowel character or unless it’s marked with
the diacritic.
The system also has some additional punctuation, mostly derived from poetic notation.
Rather than using separate numerals, numbers are transcribed using the first sound in the
word for the number and preceded by this symbol.
In proto-Oqolaawak, this character represented the /h/ sound, borrowed directly from the
Ts’ap’u-K’ama character of the same pronunciation.
However, in the transition to Classical Oqolaawak, a cascade of sound changes took place that
threw everything out of whack: first of all, [h] was lost in all environments, lengthening
any sound that came before it.
Then, to fill the void, the velar fricative [x] weakened to [h] in all environments, and
then the aspirated velar stop /kh/ replaced [x].
This meant the characters for all these sounds shifted, but now, the old character for [h]
no longer makes any sound at all, but rather, since the loss of /h/ lengthened the preceding
sound, this soundless character was later reanalyzed as an iteration marker, and is
now used to transcribe both geminates and long vowels, even in words that historically
didn’t have an /h/.
And, as a final note, when later dialects developed phonemic voiced obstruents, they
invented another diacritic to mark them.
So, as you can probably tell, the Oqolaayo have been pretty good at keeping their spelling
up to date, so most words will be pronounced how you’d expect them to be from their spelling,
though, again, there are a couple of exceptions.
When discussing Oqolaawak grammar, the first and most important thing to do is to familiarize
yourself with its noun class system.
Way back in Proto-Oqolaawak, there was a system of classifiers that could also be used as
indefinite articles and pronouns.
Over time, though, these classifiers got inextricably linked with the words they cooccurred with,
becoming class suffixes on nouns, and agreement markers on verbs and prepositions.
In the time of Classical Oqolaawak, all nouns are sorted into one of five noun classes that
form a loose animacy hierarchy.
So going from lowest animacy to highest, we start with the Ethereal class, which includes
abstractions, concepts, emotions, and verbal nouns.
Elemental nouns are mostly inanimate naturally-occurring objects, like rocks, plants, and places.
Material nouns constitute a whole grab-bag of different nouns, including but not limited to:
animate natural phenomena, body parts, instruments, and certain very-low animacy animals.
Almost all Kinetic Nouns are animals, but not all animals are Kinetic nouns.
Finally, the Exalted Class comprises humans, deities, spirits, and certain culturally important animals.
The most obvious reification of the class system comes in the form of an obligatory
suffix on all nouns that also encodes plurality.
Depending on the noun class, Oqolaawak distinguishes up to 4 different grammatical numbers;
singular, dual, paucal, and plural.
Nouns are also marked for definiteness by way of a simple word-final suffix derived
from an old demonstrative.
Possessed nouns are appended with a prefix that agrees with their possessor in person,
number, and class.
There are two forms of possessive prefix, one for alienable possession and one for inalienable possession.
The alienable set are also used for prepositions, which agree with their objects in person,
number and class.
In proto-Oqolaawak, almost all prepositions were derived from nouns forming genitival constructions.
When the possessive pronouns became nominal prefixes, the nouns being used as prepositions
inherited them as agreement morphology.
And in fact, the inalienable prefixes evolved from a separate inflecting preposition that later
got glommed onto its object.
Since Oqolaawak has no case marking, it uses these inflecting prepositions for the majority
of non-core role marking, but also for things like comparatives and superlatives.
Verbs take a suffix that frames it in one of three tenses: Perfect, Imperfect, and Future.
This same tense suffix also agrees with the subject in person, number, and class.
In a transitive sentence, the verb takes an additional suffix to mark the direct object.
However, if the direct object is overtly stated within the clause, then the suffix is omitted.
For more complex tense/aspect encodings, Oqolaawak makes frequent use of three auxiliary verbs;
the copula, the locative copula, and an old verb that can no longer be used as an independent
word, but used to mean something like “to leave”.
And, as you might expect, all three of these auxiliaries are irregular, mainly due to them
preserving defunct conjugations.
For example, In proto-Oqolaawak, the standard way of forming the Perfect was by reduplicating
the first syllable of the unmarked verb, which was interpreted as the imperfect.
However, later on, a verb with the meaning of “to finish” got used as an auxiliary
to encode the cessative aspect, then got suffixed onto the lexical verb and became the standard
perfect tense suffix.
The reduplicated perfect was lost in all verbs except the copula and locative copula, which
were used frequently enough to resist adopting the new pattern.
Meanwhile, for the future copula, a different root, meaning “to become” was used, which
then became incorporated into the same paradigm by suppletion.
By the way, the auxiliary constructions are split-headed, so the subject marker gets suffixed
to the auxiliary and the direct object goes on the lexical verb.
There are a couple of other frequently used auxiliaries that convey modal information,
while verbs are negated by way of a following particle.
Adjectives are very transparently derived from verbs.
When used predicatively, they behave exactly like verbs, while when used attributively,
the tense suffix is removed to form the what’s called the “simple” stem, to which subject
markers are suffixed.
The simple stem is also used when nominalizing verbs, which can be achieved by applying a
class suffix to the simple stem, with the meaning depending on which noun class the
verb stem is rendered in.
On the subject of derivation, although Oqolaawak doesn’t compound too often, it is very fond
of dvandvas, creating compounds by combining two nouns with opposite meanings.
And, while it’s not as productive these days as it was in proto-Oqolaawak, reduplication
is used for a variety of purposes, particularly for intensives and eventitives.
While the grammar is quite straightforward in many ways, the hardest elements of Oqolaawak
for a non-native speaker to master are in the way it handles discourse, mainly stemming
from its animacy-dependent syntax.
If we were to literally translate a sentence like “The coconut hit the warrior in the
face” it would technically be grammatical, but it would sound a bit strange.
Unless you’re trying to emphasize a particular element, the nouns in a standard sentence
are expected to come in order of animacy as delineated by the noun classes, so we’d
need to rearrange the nouns accordingly.
However, the sentence still needs to fit the default VSO word order, so to ensure nouns
can fulfil these roles and simultaneously maintain the order of animacy, Oqolaawak uses
a series of voicing tricks and valency-changing operations.
Firstly, as an exalted noun, “The Warrior” needs to come first, and must therefore be
the subject, which we can achieve by passivizing the verb.
Then comes the material noun “face”, which we could render as part of a prepositional
phrase, but actually it would probably be more intuitive to a native speaker to use
an applicative construction.
Oqolaawak has a series of applicative suffixes that promote the object of a particular type
of prepositional phrase to a direct object.
These applicatives are actually derived from old inflecting prepositions that got suffixed
onto the verb stem.
In this case, we can use the locative applicative to modify the verb to mean “to strike against”,
and then use the noun “face” as what is functionally a direct object.
Finally, “the coconut” is placed last and preceded by an instrumental preposition,
so the whole sentence more literally translates to “The warrior was struck-against their
face with the coconut.”
This might seem a bit clunky, but in fact, this would actually be the most natural way
for a native Oqolaawak speaker to say a sentence like this.
Finally, lets talk about one of the trickiest, but also funnest things about Oqolaawak: register
and figurative language.
Oqolaawak is very sensitive to formality, which is primarily indicated by a whole bevy
of 2nd person pronouns, but more indirectly by what are known as animal registers.
Without getting too much into cultural stuff, the Oqolaayo have a mythology largely centered
around animal worship.
In their folk stories, there’s a recurring cast of animals that each have their own personality
archetype, as well as a characteristic way of speaking.
So to imply someone has a specific personality trait, one uses the speech pattern of the
animal that exemplifies that trait.
It’s kind of like how in English, we might, however unfair it may be, put on a particular
accent when impersonating someone to emphasize a certain attribute.
Similarly, Oqolaawak makes ample use of proverbs and cultural expressions.
Since the Oqolaayo are a predominantly sea-faring culture, many of their idioms and conceptual
metaphors have to do with sailing or navigation.
The Oqolaawak lexicon is also chock full of ideophones, many of which are tied to specific
registers.
There are also a host of discourse particles that I like to think of as “verbal punctuation”,
including a sentence-initial word that turns any statement into a yes or no question.
Mastering the subtle shades of meaning supplied by all these components of discourse is notoriously
tricky for non-native speakers, which may be part of the reason why Classical Oqolaawak
maintained such a strong reputation of exoticism and mystery as it was spread across the ocean
and mingled with the far-flung languages of other lands, producing the innumerable dialects
and creoles that came to exist in later eras.
So, those are some of the main points worth mentioning about Oqolaawak, at least as many
as can fit in one video of reasonable length.
I hope you got something out of it, and let me know if you want to see more videos like
this, because there’s plenty more where that came from.
Until then...
Quujwa liti lumallu wataan lepeypeywa!