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!
