1. index

• 1. index

Links to sections of the page.

• 2. introduction: what is corvish?

Background and overview of corvish.

• 3. phonology

Descriptions of sounds and phonological processes of Corvish. Sound charts are presented in the International Phoenetic Alphabet (IPA); most unfamiliar characters can be found on ipachart.com, or by copy-pasting it into a serach bar.

• 4. orthography

Unfinished section: description of the corvish writing system.

• 5. morphosyntax

Descriptions of how words and sentences are formed in Corvish. Combined 'morphology' and 'syntax' since Corvish is polysynthetic & the two are closely related.

• 6. lexicon

Essentially a dictionary, sometimes including etymology.

2. introduction: what is corvish?

Corvish is a language i constructed for a D&D race of anthropomorphic crow people called the Kenku. In-game they speak a language known as 'Auran' which is the language of the 'Astral Plane'. When i decided to play a Kenku i looked up the Auran language just because i was interested in what kind of documentation there was on it, but all i found was a fan-made cypher (just made-up characters that represented the 26 english letters). I was not satisfied with this, specifically because the English alphabet includes some sounds that would be hard for someone with a beak to make (p,b,f,v). Over time it took shape enough that i now feel it's distinct from the in-game origins of Auran enough to deserve its own name, hence 'Corvish'.

If you are new to conlanging, there will be a number of terms and characters you're unfamiliar with. Most terms can be found by searching the Glossary of Linguistic Terms while pronunciations of most IPA symbols used in this document can be found on ipachart.com.

3. phonology

Corvish has twenty-two consonants and five vowels which i tried to make a little more palatable (ha) to a beak. The consonants are split into ten pairs of voiced and unvoiced consonants (k/g, s/z, etc). I imagine that native speakers of Corvish would perhaps not consider these pairs different sounds, but different types of the same sound, similar to how in English we do not differentiate voiced/unvoiced 'th'.

3a. consonants

Consonants are presented in unvoiced / voiced pairs

	alveolar	postalveolar	palatal	velar	glottal
stop	t/d			k/g
fricative	s/z	ʃ/ʒ (ɕ)/(ʑ)	x/ɣ (ç)/(ʝ)		h
affricate	ts/dz			ks/gz
approximant	ɬ/l		j	(ʎ̥)/(ʎ)
retroflex/tap	ɾ̥/ɾ or r̥/r

While Corvish has its own orthography, for the purposes of this document, the IPA symbols will be represented by the following digraphs:

• ɬ as /lh/
• ʃ as /sh/
• ʒ as /zh/
• ɣ as /gh/
• r̥ as /rh/

all other consonants are written as in IPA. h/j are still considered a consonant voice pair despite appearing in different categories.

Note for sticklers: "ɬ" is technically considered a fricative but here it appears in the approximant manor. This is for both aesthetic reasons and local linguistic categorization reasons.

3b. vowels

	front	central	back
closed	y,yː
mid			ɔ,ɔː
open	i,iː	ɛ,ɛː	a,aː

Long vowels are written with an acute accent, though the long forms of /i/ and /y/ are rare. For this document, vowels will be written as:

• ɛ as e
• ɔ as o

all other vowels will be written as in IPA

3c. phonotactics

• The onset of a syllable may be any single allowed sound, as well as any arrangement of a liquid, sibiliant, and stop, so long as the stop is either the first or final phoneme in the cluster.
• The nucleus of a syllable may be any single allowed sound other than stops, h, or j.

disallowed sounds:

• A consonant must not follow another consonant in the same articulation place, except for l/lh, t/d.
• diphthongs; vowels next to each other are pronounced in separate syllables

3d. phonological processes

• if a fricative appears after a stop, it inherits the voicing of the stop, except for l/lh which retain their original voicing.
• /j/ following another consonant may palatilize it:

/shj/ → /çj/ and /zhj/ → /ʝ/

/lj/ → /ʎ/ and /lhj/ or /lhh/ → /ʎ̥/

/xj/ → /çj/ and /ghj/ → /ʝ/

/kj/ → /ɕj/ and /gj/ → /ʑj/

/tsj/ → /tɕj/ and /dzj/ → /dʑj/

/ksj/ → /kɕj/ and /gzj/ → /gʑj/

• /r/ and /rh/ are pronounced as a tap when appearing at the onset or coda of a syllable unless at the end of a word. /r/ and /rh/ are trilled only when it is the nucleus of a syllable
• if /rh/ follows a stop at the end of a word, it may be pronounced as an aspiration of the stop instead (i.e. tʰ , dʰ)
• intervocalic g and k are lenited to gh and kh respectively. This applies to word-final pronunciations as well, but not "utterance" final (i.e. the end of a sentence or a clause).

4. orthography

i still have to figure out how to do this part in HTML

5. morphosyntax

5a.

corvish is a polysynthetic language: nouns are incorporated as part of the verb. for example, the word for the corvish language in corvish is aráix[corvish-to speak]. stood alone, this word is a complete sentence which also means "i speak corvish" or "to speak corvish." the verb becomes more complicated when case and person added. this is covered in section 4c.

an example grounded in less fantastical ideas, tghtetatljzhg: 'to eat/i eat a rotten apple', from morphemes -zhg 'to eat/i eat'; atlj- 'apple'; tghtet- 'rotten produce'. tghtet on its own acts as a noun, but in this word it is modifying apple to indicate that the apple itself is rotten and the speaker is eating it.

corvish is generally OSV, though the subject is part of the verb.

5b. noun-verb synthesis

a distinguishing feature of corvish is that nouns never appear on their own. typically a noun is doing something or something is being done to it, but if a noun must stand alone, say if one is just stating the existence of the noun or stating it as a topic, the noun will be fixed onto the verb -ka "is/be", e.g. atljka "the apple (is)". words modifying the noun (adjectives) precede the noun, while words modifying the verb (adverbs) follow the verb, e.g. "tghtetatljka "there is a rotten apple/(the)apple is rotten."

5c. verb inflection

person and case are indicated by suffixes to the verb which precede modifiers. these suffixes indicate person, clusivity, and case.

	static	dynamic
1p/inf	(none)	-zh
1p pl (i)	-sij	-zij
1p pl (x)	-(i)tsij	-(i)dzij
2p	-(o)x	-(o)gh
2p pl	-(o)xoj	-(o)ghoj
3p	-(y)ty	-(y)dy
3p pl.	-(a)taj	-(a)daj

1p, 2p, and 3p are first, second, and third person respectively. pl. indicates plurality. (i) and (x) indicate pronouns which include the listener and exclude the listener respectively.

the cases are static and dynamic; static describes a state while dynamic implies a change of state. tési (fly, 1p st.) is simply "i fly" or "to fly," while tésizh (fly, 1p d.) would be "to take flight."

5d. pronoun formation & direct/indirect object

corvish does not have pronouns in the traditional sense. if a clause refers to a previously referenced subject, the noun may be left off from the subject verb and retain the verb ending which would apply to that noun (though it may shift between static/dynamic depending on the context).

if a pronoun is the object or indirect object of a sentence, an object-verb may be placed with its own verb before the subject-verb of the sentence. if no other verb is useful, the verb ka 'is/to be' is often the default verb used for this purpose

note: the parenthetical vowels in the chart are only used when their absence would create a disallowed consonant cluster or if the morpheme ends with a vowel, in which case the verb ending vowel tends to replace the final vowel of the morpheme.

5e. question-answer form

the article kej is placed at the beginning of a sentence to indicate a question, or placed at the beginning and end to emphasize surprise or disbelief. the positive and negative particles gha and ghjil may follow the first question article to suggest a yes or no answer (like "is it not?" or "is it so?")

corvish does not specify words for yes and no, though informally the positive and negative particles are sometimes used. more commonly the verb of the question is repeated followed by a positive or negative particle.

5f. tense

tense is specified using a series of particles which follow the verb.

present	future	future conditional	past	habitual
(none)	lá	tsá	dl	ó

future, past, and present function similarly to English with the absence of perfect tenses. future conditional is a tense which indicates that the action being performed in the future is dependant on present actions or circumstances (i.e. it may or may not happen depending). the habitual sense functions gramatically similar to present tense but indicates that the speaker performs this task routinely or repeatedly.

completion can be communicated by reduplicating the verb, e.g. lá atljzghzgh "i will have eaten the apple"

5f. prepositions

prepositions may act as the verb on their own by following the noun in the absence of another verb ('-ka' is not necessary when describing the location of a noun, as the preposition acts as a verb in its place). if describing where a verb is happening, though, it precedes the subject verb of the sentence (between noun and verb morphemes).

lexical emphasis can be used to express that something is very much above, inside, below, etc.. something similarly to completion, by reduplication.

6. lexicon

i'll have a link here to a google doc or something so i can keep it up to date

As a polysynthetic language, it is difficult to categorize every possible combination of the many morphemes. It would also be somewhat of a waste of time to get stuck on the semantics of a language that nobody speaks. So in lieu of a proper dictionary, I'll just collect all the morphemes here, categorize them as either roots, particles, or prefix/suffixes. The category "root" is uselessly broad and can contain "nouns", verb roots, and modifiers, i.e. morphemes with distinct meanings separate from their grammatical use. Since a verb in Corvish is a complete sentence, it doesn't make much sense to try to write every word down. As a result, it will be up to you to interpret the meaning of a morpheme based on where it is in the sentence. Does the morpheme come right before a verb ending? It's probably acting as a verb; what could "Apple" mean as a verb? Maybe "to bear fruit?" Or is there another morpheme between atlj- and a verb ending? In that case, it's probably acting as an adjective; what could apple mean as an adjective? Et cetera.